Naomi Klein is an internationally renowned Canadian author, researcher, and activist. In 2015, she and a Catholic Cardinal were chosen by Pope Francis to co-chair a high-level Vatican conference on the environment. In the conclusion of her ground-breaking and appropriately alarming book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” Klein reported that she’d recently been an observer at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which was attended by 24,000 earth and space scientists.
“Much of the buzz” afterwards, she observed, was focused on a presentation by a brilliant young complex-systems researcher “with pink hair and a serious expression” named Brad Werner, whose session was titled “Is the Earth F***ked?” After taking the crowd through an advanced computer model and various technical concepts unintelligible to most non-scientists, Werner was asked by a journalist what the answer was to his provocative session title. He replied, “More or less.”
However, Werner went on to say that there was one dynamic in his model that offered some hope. He described that dynamic as “resistance,” as in people’s protest movements, which he said represented the most likely source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that’s causing the Earth’s climate to careen out of control. And he added that the potential role of such “resistance” was not a matter of opinion, but a matter of geophysics.
Bill McKibben is probably this country’s most widely respected environmental writer and activist. His 1989 book, “The End of Nature,” is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. In his recent speech inaugurating the Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture Series, McKibben spoke of “physics” in a different but related way. Speaking of the growing climate crisis, he said, “The real contest here is not between Democrats and Republicans; it’s between human beings and physics.” And he added, “That’s a difficult negotiation, as physics is not prone to compromise. It also imposes a hard time limit on the bargaining; if we don’t move very, very quickly, then any progress will be pointless.”
According to McKibben, the key question is: “How do we spur much faster and more decisive action from institutions that wish to go slowly, or perhaps don’t wish to act at all?” Based on his personal experience helping to organizing opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and, more recently, the example of the massive Native American-led opposition to the DAPL pipeline in North Dakota, he strongly advocated nonviolent civil disobedience.
Quoting from Jonathan Schell’s 2003 book, “The Unconquerable World,” he said, “Violence is the method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few.” Which is what Brad Werner meant by the physics of “resistance.”
McKibben then put forward three reasons why resistance by means of nonviolent civil disobedience is a potent tool “in the activist toolkit.” First, he said that “volunteering for pain,” as in risking physical harm, arrest, and imprisonment, “is an unlikely event in a pleasure-based society, and hence it gets noticed.”
Second, he asserted that such actions, precisely because they are likely to be noticed, have the potential to attract larger numbers of people to become involved in some way, thus gaining the attention of the public at large.
And third, he insisted that the real point of large-scale protest, including nonviolent civil disobedience, “is less to pass specific legislation than it is to change the zeitgeist” – that is, the public attitude regarding a specific issue. “Once movements shift the zeitgeist,” said McKibben, “then legislative victory becomes the mopping-up phase.”
These three points, needless to say, are equally applicable to other areas of our common life where nonviolent resistance is, or may become, necessary, both strategically and morally — areas that involve current or imminent harm not just to the Earth itself but also to the Earth’s people, due to various forms of injustice and discrimination that are already occurring and may escalate.
As we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. this January, we would do well to remember his urgent plea of 50 years ago: “Nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis; it is an imperative for action.” Amen, I say.
Randy Kehler is a longtime peace activist who lives with his wife Betsy Corner in Colrain. To avoid paying for war, Randy and Betsy have regularly re-directed their and federal income tax payments to groups assisting victims of war, including veterans of U.S. wars.