Shadow-Boxing for the Climate

Lately, I’ve been taking a class on social movements; civil rights, farm workers unions, peaceful uprisings in the Middle East — you name it. And while I have learned that there is no way to explain these powerful events as a whole — each is unprecedented in its own way — some key components do emerge regarding the foundations of how people fight for what they want and believe in most.
Unearned suffering is one — images of peaceful protestors unflinchingly taking on police dogs and fire hoses will probably be forever ingrained upon the public consciousness. Catalysts are another — the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia will probably be forever credited with sparking revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Oman and Libya.

A clearly personified enemy is one key component that I am particularly fascinated with, regarding the problem of runaway climate change. The free India movement had the British Empire; farm workers had the growers; Hitler and the National Socialists had the idea of racial and ethnic impurity.

Climate change doesn’t have a go-to guy the way many movements have had in the past. The group of things we could blame — both inanimate and animate — is broad and deep: oil executives, third-world clear-cutting farmers, individualism, cement companies, cars, coal, overconsumption, the Koch brothers; the list goes on.

This lack of a clearly defined enemy is part of the reason why I believe the climate movement has been losing the fight thus far. It’s hard to rally around something that surrounds you without just shadow-boxing; carbon dioxide is in many ways the very foundation of existence in the 21st century.

The movement is however, waking up to this fact. 350.org — one of the world’s leading climate groups run by our very own Middlebury ’07 graduates and scholar in residence Bill McKibben — has just launched a campaign taking on the U.S Chamber of Commerce — a staunchly conservative interest group that claims to represent more than 3 million businesses but is almost entirely funded by 16 gigantic companies. The Chamber has taken every chance they can to fight climate and energy reform and protect big business — so much so that in disapproval of their climate platform several companies like Nike and Levi’s left their board of directors last year.

350.org is touring the country encouraging small businesses to speak out and tell the truth about how the U.S Chamber of Commerce doesn’t speak for them. I’m really excited about what they’re doing — by picking a specific target and vilifying them across the country, 350.org is putting us on the road to nailing down just who is responsible for this global problem.
But in the end, we will have to do more than take on big business. We will have to confront something that exists within all of us; a tendency for unbridled consumption, disregard for the importance of co-dependent communities and a powerful resistance to change. If anyone has any ideas about how we can take these on without making enemies out of ourselves, I’d love to hear it.