Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow. ~ ALICE M. SWAIM

Dear friends,

You’ve probably heard us talking up the release of our new book, Re:Imagining Change – How to Use Story-Based Strategies to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World. We’re pretty psyched about the response we’re getting…

After the BP oil disaster (and subsequent PR blitz), our email box lit up with requests from the Gulf Coast to ship books to Louisiana for an organizers meeting.

As the nation’s attention turned to the racist anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona, we were boxing up books for activists offering training on the front lines in Phoenix.

After our book launch in New York City, one activist was so inspired he brought his new copy to a local environmental organizing meeting, but someone else got there first, and was already holding up a copy of the book, imploring the group to read it and firing off ideas for how they could use it to take effective action.

This is why we wrote Re:Imagining Change, and this is why we need your contribution this season.

In fact, we’ve already sold out of the first printing of the book, published by PM Press in April. With your support, smartMeme’s vision of spreading tools and inspiration for grassroots action is coming to fruition. We’ve been coast-to-coast offering training and collaborating with like-minded groups to build a stronger progressive narrative and develop media strategy across our movements.

Nevertheless, it is a dangerous and distracting time. We all know that the Tea Party doesn’t really represent the views of very many people, but they have something even more powerful than all that corporate cash — they have a powerful story! The right wing has hijacked populist anger at Wall Street bankers and is using it to sell the same old fear-mongering, race-baiting ideology.

So how can we tell a better story of ecological justice, community transformation, reconciliation and reform?

That’s why we founded smartMeme. Powerful storytelling is the rocket fuel of movement building. Grassroots activists need the skills to not only tell their stories but also to challenge the existing stories of fear, domination and greed. We’ve trained nearly 4,000 grassroots activists and partnered with over 100 organizations fighting for peace, social justice and the environment to design story-based strategies and win framing fights that matter. But the fight is far from over.

Your donation can write the next chapter of story-based strategy.

SmartMeme is offering ideas and innovation for 21^st century social change, and building stronger movements that can tell smarter stories. We do it for cents on the dollar of the corporate PR machines we fight with the generous contributions from our community of donors like you. With foundation support waning in the wake of the recession, we need your contribution now more than ever.

As you read this, we’re working on the front lines of the movement for climate justice, helping amplify the voices of grassroots leaders at the COP 16 talks in Cancun, Mexico and continuing to build momentum for the rights of Mother Earth.

With your support, we will convene the first ever “smartMeme Academy” in 2011 – an intensive training for a new generation of leaders who can carry smartMeme’s story-based strategy tools for framing back to the communities and movements who need it most.

Our goal is to raise $20,000 this holiday season. Will you chip in $500, $250, $100 or $50? Whatever amount you can give will directly support critical campaigns, training grassroots leaders, and wide-scale distribution of Re:Imagining Change. Your donation is an essential contribution to build the movement for ecological justice and progressive social change.

The demand for smartMeme’s tools and training is growing everyday: building the grassroots climate movement, fighting for migrant’s rights, challenging corporate dominance and supporting community resilience. Our modest operations can hardly keep pace with the demand for what we do. Only with your support can smartMeme continue to be a one-of-a-kind resource for progressive change makers.

Please, make a generous gift today to support smartMeme’s important mission, and change the story for a better future.

Thank you.

Onward,

Doyle Canning & Patrick Reinsborough, smartMeme Co-Directors

PS: Still haven’t got your copy of Re:Imagining Change? A holiday contribution of $50 or more gets you two signed copies: a gift for you, and one to give away!

As movements around the planet mobilize to counter the effects of climate destabilization on their communities, cultures, and ecosystems, a framing battle of global significance is underway.

In the climate fight, as with so many other struggles, the heart of the framing battle is naming the problem, since how we define the problem determines what solutions are possible. To varying degrees, governments and multinational corporations around the world have acknowledged the crisis and they claim they are working to address it. However, they present the climate crisis through a reductionist lens as merely a problem of too much carbon in the atmosphere while ignoring the underlying issues of justice, equity, and humanity’s relationship with the Earth. This framing allows exploitation of the crisis to justify escalating the very policies and practices that have pushed the planet to the brink. Essentially the world’s richest countries and companies are co-opting environmental rhetoric to put a PR friendly “green” face on the same old politics of unlimited economic growth, resource thefts and corporate exploitation.

Meanwhile the ‘official’ climate movement has been dominated by a loyal opposition of largely northern, policy, and access-oriented NGOs who, although (mostly) well intentioned, have failed to reframe the debate or address the root causes of the crisis. But increasingly as more global movements begin to unite under the banner of climate justice, there is a different story to tell. The terms of the debate are being reframed from seeing the climate crisis as an isolated issue, to understanding the disruption of the climate as merely the most visible symptom of a much larger problem: our global system of growth-addicted, fossil fuel-driven, corporate capitalism that is undermining all the life support systems of the planet.

When this deeper framing of the problem is accepted it becomes clear that we will never re-stabilize the climate without addressing the roots of the problem. This means acknowledging the Global North’s historic responsibility for the problem (“climate debt”) as the first step towards fundamental shifts to our economy, political systems, and cultural assumptions. This is why one of the over-arching and unifying messages coming out of global movements fighting for a just response to the climate crisis is “system change NOT climate change”.

However, as people’s movements around the world ramp up their organizing in the lead up to the next round of United Nations negotiations in Cancun there are a number of dangerous frames––control myths––that must be challenged.

Control Myth #1 Only The Market Can Save Us!

In this case a global carbon market that effectively privatizes the atmosphere, justifies massive land grabs and further commodification of forests, soils, and grasslands. Two hundred years of ideology have bestowed the “invisible hand” of the market with debate-shaping qualities of alleged efficiency, fairness and power. This is a familiar narrative to many of our movements fighting privatization and displacement but we still need better, shared strategies to reframe the myth of the market.

Control Myth #2 Technology Will Save Us!

Hand in hand with the story of the all-powerful market is the obsession with techno-fixes. Techno-fixes masquerade as solutions but just distract us from making the fundamental changes that are needed. The assumption that some benign “experts” will provide new, innovative technology to solve the problem justifies continuing unsustainable policies while removing people’s agency from the frame. More and more climate techno-fixes are being proposed: from overt lies like “clean coal” and “climate ready” genetically engineered crops to terrifyingly disruptive, untested new technologies like synthetic biology and geoengineering.[i] Beware!

Control Myth #3 Climate Is Too Big An Issue: Only Governments Can Save Us!

The debate has been overly focused on global and national policy while social movements and community-based responses are left out of the frame. Many mainstream environmentalists have even argued that any global emission reduction agreement (regardless of how weak or unfair) is better than no deal. Variations of this narrative have been used (particularly by the U.S.) to evade historic responsibility and blame China, India and other developing economies for blocking an international deal. Certainly a global agreement is important, but the reality of the scale of the climate crisis is that we need transformative action in all sectors of society.

Given the wide-ranging implications of the debate, climate is an essential arena for our movements to develop more holistic narratives and shared frames that mutually reinforce efforts across different sectors and struggles. At the heart of this framing battle is the emerging climate justice movement led by frontline impacted communities, indigenous movements and environmental justice organizers.

Climate justice framing is challenging the control myths above (and many more) by refocusing the issue on the core problems of fossil fuel addiction, the ongoing legacy of historic inequities and the need for systemic change. At the center of the evolving narrative is the role of community-based solutions in stewarding a just transition towards a society that is both sustainable and just. As different movements like migrants rights, reproductive justice and organized labor articulate the connections between their struggles and the climate crisis there are many opportunities to experiment with applying and broadening climate justice framing.

With the historic adoption of the Cochabamba People’s Agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April there is now a powerful new narrative emerging that unites ecology, justice and social movement action. This platform offers a potent counterpoint to the corporate driven, false solutions of the United Nations process. Most importantly it offers an invitation to organizers everywhere to connect their issues with this multi-faceted struggle to transform our world. In the words of one of the key slogans uniting movements in the lead up to the COP-16 meeting and beyond: “grassroots organizing cools the planet!”

[i] For a good summary of “false solutions” to the climate crisis check out Rising Tide North America’s Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: False Solutions to Climate Change. Other resources for tracking the rebranding of failed GMO seeds as “climate ready” can be found by following the ongoing work of Food First!/Institute for Food and Development Policy and the Organic Consumers Association. To learn more about the latest developments in the emerging fields of synthetic biology and geoengineering check out two recent reports by global technology watchdog ETC Group Geopiracy: The Case Against Geoengineering (Oct 2010) and The New Biomassters: Synthetic Biology and the Next Assault on Biodiversity and Livelihoods (Nov 2010) both of which are available at www.etcgroup.org. For updates on the ongoing resistance to geoengineering check out the international H.O.M.E. campaign.