The climate crisis needs a ground game
Aggressive climate policies won’t stick without a social climate of local, citizen-led, implementation, support, and culture change.
Responses to climate change haven’t come close to match the massive impact and relentless pace of climate change itself. But even if political will gets behind broader change, can it take root in time?
Not without local muscle. The climate crisis desperately needs a ground game. We need to invest in a citizen-led “Climate Corps.” Anyone, anywhere, should have an equipped, empowered, local place to join that manages real progress towards a zero-emission world.
And that can’t wait for the next Presidential election.
The climate crisis is overwhelming in complexity and scope. It is also emotionally overwhelming to contemplate and comprehend. It is hard for people to swallow, or know how to respond. But it is precisely all-hands-on-deck civic engagement and distributed, substantive ownership of this crisis that is required for broad policy solutions, including Green New Deal-level commitments, to actually stick.
Breaking down the complexity into actionable pieces, and emotionally building each other up to take them on, call for the same remedy: a robust commitment to community-led, participatory action. Practically speaking, the operational capacity to actually implement change will require more foot soldiers with deep roots in communities. With or without big top-down policy steps, putting solutions to work on the ground rests on the many smaller bottom-up steps that engineer large goals into credible local realities. It is face-to-face, neighborhood-level, work.
A Climate Corps network should be nationally aligned but locally led. It could steer mass voluntarism, and supply tools, methods, and support for community-tailored problem-solving, through local groups. A right-sized ground game support system calls for thousands of staff and a billion-dollar sized investment over several years (will the top 0.01% please stand up).
Research indicates people are more likely to engage and act on environmental threats when offered tangible solutions to put into practice,and familiar local identities and social ties to fall back on to do it. And there are growing examples from an array of environmental justice and local reliance groups across the country to scale from.
These include Holyoke, Massachusetts, where community groups and forums, labor, advocates, and utilities came together to close the local coal-fueled electric plant and plan for new jobs and economic development. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the Sunset Park Climate Justice Center and UPROSE used a “block by block” process to identify hyper-local climate mitigation and resilience opportunities- including a neighborhood solar power purchasing group.
These paths for local leadership and consensus-building are multiplying: from collaborating on sustainable food markets, to building public knowledge and brokering conflicting interests, attitudes, racial and economic disparities, to resident-led mapping of priorities and accountability against benchmarks.
A Climate Corps network could converge and super-size these emerging paths into the new normal in every county and neighborhood. It could also bolster and build on our country’s existing fabric of grassroots leadership and range of “place-based”, collective impact, and other empowering implementation tools, that have shepherded complex groundwork for other issues: economic security and development, race and social equity, affordable housing, public health, etc. These are all integral to achieving environmental sustainability.
Much of the mess we are in is a result of the limited role for this broadened ownership of the work. The way forward to a sustainable society and economy should rest, then, on different ground rules for participation and decision making. Those must also safeguard sorely needed social cohesion and emotional resilience to see this through.
Destructive weather and environmental changes cause marked increases in mental illness and suicide. More chronic and widespread environmental changes will mean more chronic and widespread emotional damage. Add to that a background of fatalism, fear, and grief in the expectation or experience of massive losses of life and land. The reality of both collapsing ecosystems and possibilities for the human future — perhaps for millennia — is starting to sink in, especially among youth. What is required to psychologically and humanely grasp and endure that?
The social climate and connections to help face all this are as critical to plan for and innovate, as are new energy grids. A virtuous cycle is possible where shared problem solving, collective efficacy, and participatory action through a Corps or similar platform(s), builds and also crucially relies upon, the mutual support, social ties, and resilience that buffer despair and trauma.
I am discovering a growing number of people deciding, as I have, to change their lives and their work to try to make that happen. The earth is screaming a last-minute warning to act now. To do that, the right social climate is a key asset. Let’s tighten life-affirming commitments to each other, each other’s children, and the places we live… and get to work.
