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.

Calling all our U.K. friends and allies!

We’re honored to be hosted by the venerable creative action, arts and campaigning organization PLATFORM for a brief presentation and interactive workshop about smartMeme’s tools and strategic approach as documented in our new book Re:Imagining Change.

How to win ‘the battle of the story’ in campaigning, movement organizing and changing the world!

An introduction to using story-based strategy

When: Saturday 31st of July, 3pm to 6pm

Where: The Stephen Lawrence Centre, 39 Brookmill Road, London, SE8 4HU

Cost: Suggested donation of £3 to cover the room hire. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Reserve a spot: Places are limited. To reserve your place, please email your confirmation to [email protected] with one sentence about what group/project/organisation you are involved with. We are trying to ensure that there is a diverse set of participants/groups represented on the day.

Workshop Description:
Storytelling has always been central to the work of activists, organizers and movement builders. Narrative is the lens through which humans process the information we encounter, be it cultural, emotional, experiential, or political. We make up stories about ourselves, our histories, our futures, and our hopes.
SmartMeme draws from many disciplines, integrating practices from organizing, broadcast media, advertising, strategic communications, education and systems thinking into their strategy and training work. Their experiments have evolved into a set of tools they call story-based strategy — a framework to link movement building with an analysis of narrative power by placing storytelling at the centre of social change strategy.

This workshop on the 31st of July, given by smartMeme co-founder Patrick Reinsborough will introduce some of the basic techniques in how to use story-based strategy as a tool in achieving social change. The workshop is aimed at people involved in social movements, community organizing, direct action groups, progressive NGOs and anyone who is interested in engaging with them.

Reflections on Cochabamba, Geoengineering, and Framing the Climate Crisis on the Road to Cancun…

The news this week from the climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany suggests that the world is on track for a catastrophic 4-degree increase in temperatures by 2100. (Four degrees Celsius in temperature rise renders our planet essentially unrecognizable and unlivable.) This is a frightening forecast for what’s in store on the road to COP 16, the next round of international climate negotiations slated for December 2010 in Cancun, Mexico.

But there is another road to Cancun, made by social movements who attended the historic Cochabamba Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April. The Cochabamba conference was convened by Bolivian President Evo Morales in the wake of the failure of the Copenhagen talks and the regressive agenda laid out by the United States and their allies in the so-called ‘Copenhagen Accord.’ (For my take on Copenhagen see the April/May issue of Left Turn Magazine). Cochabamba was an attempt to stake out another pole in the international climate discourse, led by Southern governments and social movements, that pins the responsibility for climate change directly on the over-consumptive northern countries and transnational corporations, and asserts the rights of Mother Earth.

From Copenhagen to Cochabamba

At the invitation of the Bolivia UN Mission in New York, I had the great honor of attending historic Cochabamba meeting, and accompanied the delegation of Grassroots Global Justice and the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN).

SmartMeme’s main piece of work at Cochabamba was to support IEN’s organizing around forest-offset schemes known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). Carbon offset schemes like REDD are opposed by peasant movements and Indigenous Peoples around the world on the grounds that these programs are designed to create a multi-billion dollar market for transnational corporations, while displacing forest-dependent communities and making no meaningful impact on slowing climate change. (For a great introduction to forest offset impacts in Brazil, see the new 20-minute film from Frontline, “The Carbon Hunters.”)

The REDD struggle is a critical front of the global Indigenous Peoples human rights struggle – this is ultimately a multi-billion dollar scheme to move Indigenous Peoples out of their traditional homelands and lease those forests to polluting industry to enable them to continue to pollute. At the heart, this is the struggle against the commodification of nature, and a struggle to assert that trees, air, and people’s homes and life ways cannot be traded in a marketplace to offset pollution.

Unlike Copenhagen, the Cochabamba conference elevated these kinds of concerns about the human rights impacts of both climate change and climate policy, and proposed strong negotiating positions (50% emission reduction under the Kyoto Protocol in the upcoming Cancun COP-16 talks, and targeting 1 – 1.5 degrees C of warming).

The good news is that the Cochabamba conference rejected REDDs and “market mechanisms that violate the rights of Indigenous Peoples, States, and Nature.” The conference adopted a Peoples’ Accord on the Rights of Mother Earth with strident, strong positions on the necessary actions to safeguard the future and build a just transition off of fossil fuels.

The bad news is Bonn, and that the United States has essentially committed to do nothing to fundamentally address the climate crisis in terms of transitioning off of fossil fuels. As we enter this next round of climate negotiations at COP 16 with the sunset on this edition of the Kyoto Protocol looming in 2012, now is the time for the climate justice movement to be rethinking our framing. We are losing critical ground while extreme proposals like geoengineering (i.e. planetary engineering) are gaining support using the narrative of government inaction and a quick fix.

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The Cochabamba conference was titled, “The World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth,” and this framing – The Rights of Mother Earth – was the most enticing and provocative aspect of this historic meeting for smartMeme. Indigenous Peoples and social movements gathered together under this banner, combining a rights-based frame with the affirmation of our sacred relationship with the planet, and the pan-Indigenous creed of respect for Mother Earth (or “Pachamama” in much of the Andes).

As we all know, global warming is happening at an alarming rate, and changes are inevitable. Weather patterns are changing, and countless ecosystems and communities are impacted directly – from the Arctic to Africa to the Amazon. Dramatic, comprehensive, collective action must be taken…the fight now is about What kind of action? Who decides? Who profits? And who pays?

From a framing perspective, how define the problem is inseparable from how we imagine the solution. As my colleague and design studio-mate Kenneth Bailey says, in a design process “description embeds prescription.” The way we cognitively pattern the problem determines what solutions are possible – and in the climate justice fight, this is at the heart of the battle for the story.

The Carbon Fundamentalist Narrative

To borrow a meme from my colleague (and smartMeme board member) Gopal Dayenenni at Movement Generation, the pervasive mindset in climate politics is steeped in “carbon fundamentalist” narrative. This story insists that the problem we are facing is merely a surplus of atmospheric carbon, and the way to deal with it is to effectively manage the amount of carbon being omitted, ideally by reduction, but if that proves politically infeasible, then through offsets. This problem-solution-action frame has given rise to the international carbon market – and the carbon-offset-industrial-complex. It also leads to obsession with charts, bright lines, and light bulbs, and the murky logic of techno-fix proposals that will magically save us without ever having to lift a finger to phase out fossil fuels.

An underlying assumption of this narrative is that carbon emissions are disconnected from place. This story says “We are in a global crisis, so pollution from a coal plant in Kentucky is the same as anywhere else, and carbon-eating trees in Brazil can make up for it.”

While the message that we have a surplus of carbon is not untrue, it is hardly meaningful for people, which limits its effectiveness on a narrative level. The carbon fundamentalist narrative is also inherently problematic as it focuses on emissions in the abstract, disconnected from the eco-systems, neighborhoods and nations where fossil fuels are mined and burned (most often poor communities and communities of color), and where offset projects displace people and disrupt communities (most often in the rural global South).

It also is carbon-blind – seeing all carbon as the same, weather it comes from Exxon-Mobil or a Brazilian farmer’s diesel tractor – which leads to policy solutions that are ahistorical and unjust, and do not address the roots of the problem: the fossil fuel industry. If we focus exclusively on carbon, we lose the focus on real places and real people, and on the real culprits.

This narrative is very dangerous, and is getting more so. As the international climate negotiations falter, and with four-degrees in the sightlines of Bonn, false-solutions and geoengineering mega-projects are gaining more and more traction.

The Urgency Frame & Geoengineering

The carbon-fundamentalist narrative has increasingly co-opted the “urgency frame.” As the crisis escalates and the window for meaningful action is closing, environmentalists and others are ringing the alarm bells ever louder. Campaigns like “TckTckTck” emphasize that time is running out, and frame around the lack of time and the severity of the crisis.

And there is no doubt, the situation is urgent. It is very urgent, especially in Alaska Native territories, in Sub-Saharan Africa, Tuvalu, or anywhere on the Gulf Coast. But what is of concern to me is that the urgency frame does nothing to explain the roots of the problem and is thus easily co-opted by any big, dramatic so-called “solution,” regardless if it is just, or even if it is a good idea.

The carbon fundamentalist narrative coupled with the urgency frame actually enables and promotes proposals like geoengineering, proposals that are gaining a lot of traction from philanthropists, venture-capitalists, and governments in the lead up to Cancun.

Now, what do we mean by “geoengineering”? Our friends at the ETC Group explain in their 2009 report “Retooling the Planet”:

Geoengineering is the intentional, large-scale intervention in the Earth’s oceans, soils and/or atmosphere, especially with the aim of combating climate change. Geoengineering can refer to a wide range of schemes, including: blasting sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s rays; dumping iron particles in the oceans to nurture CO2 -absorbing plankton; firing silver iodide into clouds to produce rain; genetically-engineering crops so their foliage can better reflect sunlight.

University of Calgary physicist and geoengineering advocate, David Keith, describes geoengineering as “an expedient solution that uses additional technology to counteract unwanted effects without eliminating their root cause.” In other words, geoengineering uses new technologies to try to rectify the problems created by the use of old technologies, a classic techno-fix.

The Geoengineers in Bolivia and Beyond

In addition to 17,000 people from social movements across the world, a bold trio of geoengineering proponents from a company called CloudWorld.co.uk also attended the Cochabamba conference, hoping to gain support for their plan to release sulfates into the atmosphere above the Arctic. We had a heated conversation about how to best address the climate crisis.

Their logic was straightforward, and chillingly compelling:

The climate crisis is reaching a point-of-no return.

We must save the Arctic, or before warming sets off an irreversible feedback loop that will push the planet over the edge.

The only way to save the Arctic, and the world, is to shield the ice from the sun.

The way to do that is to mimic a volcano, clouding the atmosphere to shade the ice.

At this point, geoengineering has to be part of the program in order to avert humanitarian catastrophe.

Their story fits right into the urgency frame, is mired in the carbon fundamentalist narrative, and is nestled in the underlying assumptions of the dominant culture:

• Earth is a machine,
• The hubris that humans can fix the machine, and
• No one else will act and so a smart (white) man must go rogue and save the world (a la a Hollywood movie.)

But this is a disaster movie.

And the scary thing is – it’s not too far from reality. The ETC group reports that In March 2010, 175 geoengineers met at Asilomar California to establish “voluntary guidelines” for real world geoengineering experiments. The meeting was convened by a body associated with a private geoenginering company called Climos Inc who aims to carry out ocean fertilization trials. Other companies and groups in attendance made it clear that they also hoped to see real-world field trials in the near future.

And the field trials are happening. On May 8^th, the Times of London revealed that a company called Silver Lining – backed by the world’s richest man Bill Gates – would be conducting field trials for their “cloud bleaching” project in the Pacific Ocean.

The Times story begins:

“The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.”

That framing is revealing of the narrative equation that is starting to define the climate landscape: government inaction + urgency = geoengineering.

Hands Off Mother Earth!

Fortunately there weren’t too many takers for geoegineering in Cochabamba. I attended a fantastic side event by the ETC Group, which launched their new campaign called Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME). This new campaign calls on the UN for a worldwide ban on geoengineering, and reframes away from carbon, and towards the larger living system of Mother Earth, on which we all depend.

The Hands Off Mother Earth campaign features an interactive website where individuals can ‘lend a hand’ to the campaign, leaving messages and uploading images of themselves. The site features a public portrait gallery of individuals with open palms calling a halt to geoengineering.

“With rich governments and industrial interests jockeying for open-air geoengineering tests it is time to draw a line that should not be crossed.” affirmed Silvia Ribeiro of ETC Group, Mexico. “Mother Earth is our common home whose integrity should never be violated by geoengineering experimentation - it should never be a laboratory for these risky and unjust schemes.”

HOME is already achieving success! Due to the great work by ETC and their allies, a proposal for a geoengineering moratorium will go to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at its next meeting in Nagoya, Japan this October.

I hope you will join me and smartMeme in this campaign by adding your hand to the photo-gallery, and lending your support to grassroots movements for climate justice that are addressing the root causes of climate change and building solutions from the ground up.

From Broken Machine to Mother Earth

If we are to succeed in debunking and halting dangerous false-solutions like REDDs and stop geoengineering, we must also fundamentally shift the framing of the climate crisis – away from the idea that the planet is an overheating machine, and towards the assertion that we are all interdependent on the living systems of Mother Earth.

The Cochabamba conference has helped the world to hear this message, but while the relationship with “Mother Earth” has always been central for Indigenous Peoples, can the “Mother Earth” meme reach the hearts and minds of the rest of the U.S. public? Perhaps with 50+ days of the tragic BP oil spill, consciousness is shifting – but we’ve got a long road beyond Cancun to make the necessary fundamental changes in the fossil fuel economy and the US culture of cheap oil dependence.

As COP 16 approaches, we must continue to resist carbon-fundamentalism and offer a new narrative of Climate Justice that can inspire transformative social change and protect the rights of Mother Earth, while blowing open the assumption – especially here in the US — that there will be a quick techno-fix that can save our planet.

The challenge for Climate Justice leaders now is to tell a better story of ecological justice and the real solutions that can transition us off fossil fuels for good. From Cochabamba to Cancun and beyond, we must change the story from techno-fix to fundamental change, and build the peoples’ movement for Mother Earth.

I landed in Cochabamba this morning to attend the World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, called by Bolivian President Evo Morales in the wake of the failed (and underwhelming) Copenhagen Climate talks last December.

From the cmpcc.org website:

• “On April 19-22, 2010, over 15,000 people and up to 70 governments from all over the world will gather to attend the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The event is in response to the failed COP15 in Copenhagen and aims to highlight the central role of peoples movements and social movements in the climate struggle and the critical alliance that must be forged between movements and progressive governments.”

I flew overnight from Miami with a delegation organized by the Bolivian UN Mission in NY. The flight was full of Climate Justice leaders. I had the opportunity to connect with new folks and touch base with peeps that I’d been with in Copenhagen. We joked that we were flying “Activist Air”!

I spent a groggy but gorgeous morning with friends from the Southwest Workers Union and the Indigenous Environmental Network, as I am also here to support the Grassroots Global Justice/IEN/Movement Generation delegation.

We traveled to the village of Tiquipaya where the meeting is taking place, and passed through older and newer neighborhoods. Our driver insisted that Cochabamba is “Tranquillo” (mellow/relaxed) and the most beautiful of all cities in Bolivia. I noticed graffiti resisting racism, women selling produce and prepared foods on the street, and many students hanging out (school is out for this summit!). I looked up and was awed by the beautiful mountains jutting up from the mesa.

We took some time getting our accreditations and getting oriented to what’s happening with the meetings. With over 15,000 people and 100 countries in attendance, there are hundreds of workshops and side events and a slew of high profile panels on issues such as the Structural Causes of Climate Change, Carbon Markets and Climate Debt. President Evo Morales Ayma will officially open the gathering tomorrow morning with a speech at the stadium!

There are also self organized side events I want to attend on behalf of smartMeme, such as a session on geoengineering with our friends from the ETC group, and a strategy discussion with members of Climate Justice Action on the next steps for street protest and climate justice strategy post COP 15. There are also meetings of the Climate Justice Now! Network and other formations.

The heart of the conference is really the “working groups.” I am in the Strategies for Action working group, and listening to people from across the world make proposals about how to move forward together: Mass demonstrations, media campaigns, international networks, and supporting Mexican organizations confronting COP 16 in Cancun later this year…This is one of 18 working groups that will develop a proposal to bring to the larger assembly of the conference. Other groups are focused on topics such as Forests, Water, Indigenous Peoples, a Climate Tribunal, A Global Referendum, and how to advance the Rights of Mother Earth.

There are many critical pieces to the Cochabamba conversation:

What is the role of the COP process in addressing climate change? How can advancing the idea of ‘climate debt’ serve to build more resiliencies in the face of climate crisis for the global south? What does a climate debt agenda mean for impacted Northern communities, such as Indigenous Alaskan Nations? Can a “Rights” framework for Mother Earth create a more robust legal recourse for big carbon polluters? Where are things going to land with REDDs? The fate of our worlds remaining forests and the homelands of Indigenous Peoples are hanging in the balance of carbon-offset schemes…Can we build a robust program to protect our climate commons as opposed to a privatization plan for the atmosphere? What about Kyoto, and what can be done to resist the Copenhagen Accord Agenda to kill it? What would Evo Morales’s Climate Criminal Tribunal look like? And what would happen next?

And I guess, the big question…Are we going to make it?

For all of you out there in Internet land, you can keep up with proceedings by tuning into http://www.oneclimate.net/bolivia

There are also community gatherings to participate virtually in the conference if you are in New York, Chicago, and Boston!

This is from the May First folks who are organizing this:

On April 20, 2010, at 7:00 pm Eastern time people in various cities of the United States will gather for a direct interaction via the Internet with participants in the Conferencia Mundial de los Pueblos sobre Cambio Climático y Derechos de la Madre Tierra. This multi-city event will be one of the first fully interactive convergences of its type, moving our hemispheric movement forward a step. Many events throughout the next year, including the US Social Forum in Detroit, World Education Forum in Palestine, and World Social Forum in Dakar all plan to use similar organizing strategy and technology.

People in several cities in the US will be able to speak directly with Conference participants and discuss what’s going on in Cochabamba, the issues being raised, the concerns we have, questions, and discussion. A group of people in Bolivia (including many from the US delegation to the conference) will make a short report about what’s going on. The US-based rooms and our participants in Bolivia will then begin a conversation: we will pose questions, suggestions, clarifications, opinions, etc. and discuss the ongoing conference with them Bolivia and between U.S. cities.

A New York-based delegation from the Bolivian Mission to the US is in attendance in Bolivia, which allows US-bound participants a direct link through which to raise issues or questions we might have with the rest of the Conference participants: they can bring us back those responses when they get back home. People from the US will also be joined by delegates from other countries, including Bolivia, to broaden the exchanges and discussions.

Please follow mayfirst.org for additional national locations as they are confirmed. The event will take place in all locations on:

April 20, 2010
7:00 pm

Boston:
encuentro 5 (encuentro5.org)
33 Harrison Ave, 5th floor
Boston, MA 02111

New York City:
The Brecht Forum (brechtforum.org)
451 West Street (between Bank and Bethune Streets)
April 20, 2010

Chicago:
Casa Michoacan
1638 S. Blue Island
Chicago IL 60608

A quick reflection on our 2009 convening on climate change, creative actions, social justice and the “Copenhagen Moment”…

I am so thrilled about the “Pause,” a restorative and rigorous retreat we convened last week. I am deeply grateful for all who attended, supported, and donated to make this event possible. It was truly a special occasion, gathering some amazing climate activists who are approaching the crisis from a justice perspective, and working to build movements at the intersections of ecology and social justice. We were also joined by our amazing video team (justinfrancese.com) and kitchen magicians (delicata catering). The beautiful Bluewater Farm in Andover, NH (traditional Pennacook Territory) was generously donated for this event. Check out pics…

The sessions involved narrative power analysis and discussions of the dominant frames on the climate crisis; climate justice principles; the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen later this year; and creative ideas for how to spread memes for climate justice.

We also had a celebration on Tuesday evening, and were blessed with local special guests from the Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions (dedicated to environmental justice, Abinaki indigenous rights and cultural practices), and local CSA organic farmer Katherine Darling, of Two Mountain Farm.

Fireside chats and formal sessions included discussions of the upcoming G20 meeting in Pittsburg, stories from past UNFCCC talks in Bali and Poznan, reflections on race and racism in the environmental field, and visioning for how to build an inclusive movement that addresses the root causes of the climate crisis.

As I write this blog, I am recalling this experience and simultanously struck by the stakes. Listening to this mornings news from the G8 Summit in Italy, I hear the voice of Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace USA:

“It’s almost diagnosing your child with cancer but not taking the kid to the doctor. It just doesn’t seem like good leadership, and I think people expect better of President Obama and other world leaders.”

Then, the sobering words of Ken Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution (?):

“I think it’s going to be very, very hard to avoid a catastrophe, so I think anyone who looks very seriously at this issue has to say that the future looks very, very sobering.”

Indeed.

The Road to Copenhagen is hot, long, and treacherous. But we make the road by walking…

Below is an excerpt of a report-back on the retreat by some of the participants…

Here is a report-back from a strategy retreat convened by smartMeme that I attended last week (called “The Pause”) to discuss climate justice issues & messaging. There were about 15 or so folks in attendance, all invited by smartMeme or other attendees. The folks who came were connected with various orgs with a major focus on either climate justice or environmental justice: Environmental Justice Climate Change Initiative (EJCC), Indigenous Environmental Network, Action Mill, Avaaz.org Climate Action, Katrina to Copenhagen, Global Justice Ecology Project, Rainforest Action Network, The Ruckus Society, Movement Generation, DS4SI and Northeast Action.

The retreat intended to focus on how to do more effective framing and messaging around climate justice, following the smartMeme model of challenging underlying cultural assumptions (you can download their new manual for free at smartmeme.org). On the first day we heard some presentations about smartMeme’s messaging strategy and ‘narrative power analysis’ (see the manual for a more in-depth explanation of this), as well as some strategies that have been used by Action Mill and Design Studio for Social Intervention, a community organizing group in Boston. There were some brainstorming sessions to “get the creative juices flowing,” and some short presentations about Environmental Justice/Climate Justice principles, the COP-15 process, the Mobilization for Climate Justice and other organizing underway.

The second day the group wanted to get deeper into concerns of numerous people present on the watering down of the term “climate justice” and its conflation with climate action, which is not necessarily based in justice (carbon offsetting, for example)…

All in all, while the retreat was not exactly what I expected, it was the unexpected conversations that I found most valuable and thought-provoking. And the facilitators did an excellent job of being flexible and serving the many changing needs of the group. Oh, and I forgot to mention the food was AMAZING. Mainly, it was great just to connect with so many awesome folks, and be able to have some of the hard (but
so necessary) conversations around how to build a movement across boundaries of race, class, and culture. Only by hearing each other and working through this stuff will we ever stand a chance of building the sort of broad-based movement that actually has the power to bring about systemic changes…

I always thought that science museums were supposed to be educational, but where is the line between educating, and promoting a risky new technology?

Welcome to NanoDays!

According to its organizers the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network, NanoDays is “a nationwide celebration of nanoscale science and technology” that just last week happened at over 200 museums and other educational institutions around the United States. SmartMeme has tracked the issue of nanoscale technologies for several years and worked with a number of environmental and social justice groups to ignite popular debate about this rapidly growing industry. So I thought I’d do a little cultural reconnaissance and check out the now annual NanoDays at my local children’s science museum San Francisco’s famous Exploratorium.

Our kids are learning about nanotechnology but how much do the rest of us know? Most media coverage of emerging technology is either business press about investment possibilities or an uncritical, “gee-whiz isn’t this neat?” story. The political, social, ecological and ethical implications of powerful new technologies like nanotech are largely unaddressed in the mainstream media.

Nano: a Quick Primer

Nanoscale refers to the mysterious world of atoms and molecules that are smaller than 100 nanometers. A nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter (for reference sake a human hair is about 80,000 nanometer wide and the head of a pin is comparatively gigantic at 1 million nanometers across) so we’re talking about things that are almost unimaginably small.

However, nanoscale technology is not just about making things really small. Its more about creating a different paradigm where our reality of Newtonian mechanics is replaced with the unexpected dynamics of quantum mechanics. Thus, nanoscale materials are fundamentally different than the same materials in larger scales and have different properties such as different colors, conductivity, strength or magnetism.

This has made nanoscale materials very exciting to industrialists but it also means that nanomaterials present unique risks to human health and the environment. Since they are so small, the human (or animal) organism’s natural defenses are largely useless in preventing potential toxic nanoparticles from entering our bodies. The fact is that there is no significant testing, regulation or even labeling currently required of nanomaterials, even though they are in hundreds of everyday consumer products such as sunscreen, make up, clothing and computers. The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nanotechnology Project has compiled a Consumer Product’s Inventory with over 800 consumer products containing nanoscale materials.
But beyond health and safety concerns, nanoscale technologies represent incredible new power to take apart and reconstruct nature at the molecular level. The critical questions are, “How will this power be used? By who? And to do what?”

The “Techno-Fix” Myth

Some of the world’s largest corporations (DuPont, Microsoft, major defense contractors, etc.), governments and militaries are already heavily investing in nanoscale technologies that have the potential to unleash massive changes in medicine, manufacturing, and energy production-as well as warfare, surveillance and social control. All of this is happening without any broader public discussion or democratic decision making.

Based on what I experienced at NanoDays, I don’t expect much critical discussion to emerge from the nation’s science museums. I picked up “Small Talk” a kids activity pamphlet created by PBS’s Dragonfly TV that promises “BIG nanofun.” It encourages you to make you’re own buckeyball (a well known nanoparticle) but fails to mention that studies have found them to cause brain damage to fish, kill water fleas and to be toxic to human liver cells.

I saw enthusiastic exhibits on how nanotechnology give us stain free pants and LED screens, but no mention of the extensive research into military applications. The most dramatic evangelism came at the special feature presentation on how nanotechnology and energy. According to NanoDays, it turns out that nanotechnology will provide the solution to all of our energy and global warming problems!

Does the hype sound familiar? Kind of like nuclear power or genetically engineered crops? To many people this is a familiar story. The common denominator is the larger TECHNO-FIX narrative that assumes that technological developments are inherently “neutral,” always beneficial and can magically solve our most pressing social and environmental problems. One of the most dangerous aspects of this pervasive cultural narrative is that is masks the reality that technological developments are shaped by social forces and are inevitably political. The direction of technological developments are not pre-ordained. Rather, they are shaped by the specific perspectives and agendas of those people and institutions driving them. We should always ask who is funding any new technology; Who will own and control it? Who will benefit from its use and who will lose? What unexpected (or under-publicized) consequences might it have?

Since profit-driven multinational corporations and the military are the main institutions driving technological development, from a social justice perspective, I believe its essential to look critically at new technologies.

The techno-fix narrative draws many of its operating assumptions from the ideology that humanity is separate from the natural world, and that we can and should dominate and manipulate nature to fufill human desires. This ideology is at odds with the wisdom of countless cultures, religious teachings (and increasingly, modern science) that point to the fundamental interconnectedness of all life. Likewise, its good to remember our humility when we’re assessing the degree to which modern science understands the incredible complexities of the life sustaining systems of our planet. After all, isn’t it blind faith in so-called “technological progress” and arrogant assumptions about humanity’s ability to remake the natural world that helped created the ecological crisis in the first place?

As Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” This is not to say that technology may not offer some important solutions. Nanotechnology, for instance, could have useful applications in creating a new generation of solar panels, more efficient electrical transmission, and who knows what else. But we can’t let hype or hysteria rush us into ignoring either the short term risks or long term implications of nanoscale technologies. That is why many environmental and social justice organizations, as well as governments-and even some multinational corporations-are promoting the Preacautionary Principle as a framework for addressing the questions raised by new technologies. Put simply, precautionary approaches remind us that it’s much better to have the foresight to prevent a disaster than to try to clean it up after its too late.

Techno-Fix Memes = Double Danger in the Climate Crisis

Perhaps the biggest battleground for challenging the techno-fix narrative is the debate around how to solve global warming. The sweeping actions that are needed to transition our society off fossil fuels and re-stabilize the atmosphere pose a challenge to powerful, profitable interests like oil and coal. They are increasingly dangling the carrot of easy techno-fixes to distract and derail proposals that would actually challenge the status quo.

From the propaganda on how carbon capture and sequestration technology will make coal “clean,” to Agribiz corporations promoting so-called “biofuels” as a way to keep us in our cars. Obama’s science advisor John Holdren (pictured at the left) is talking about geoengineering the planet by shooting sulphate nanoparticles into the atmosphere in order to reflect some of the sun’s light. (Um, scary…!) See Corporate Watch’s new Techno-fixes report for a more thorough analysis of various proposed techo-fixes for the climate crisis.)

The stakes are high and our movements to stop global warming have to also innoculate the public against the techno-fix narrative. Sophisticated PR and big marketing budgets are already selling the stories of techno-fix that require little sacrifice or transition. These memes could co-opt the growing cultural momentum to address the climate crisis into dead ends and false solutions. Not only could we lose valuable time to address the crisis, but these technologies could backfire. In the sheeps clothing of stopping climate change, untested, powerful new technologies deployed on a wide scale could potentially create major new threats to our environment, human health and the democratic process.

We need better story-based strategies that can frame the debate and direct collective action towards addressing the root causes of our climate crisis: rampant consumerism, alienation from nature, fossil fuel addiction, a profit-driven globalized economy and the outdated story of unlimited economic growth.

Sure some technological advances may play a role in helping solve our problems. But only if they don’t distract us from the real work: shifting our culture, economy and political system from trying to dominate and re-engineer nature, to operating in balance with the planet’s natural systems.

Let’s try teaching that to our kids at the science museums.

Further Resources on Social, Ecological and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology from some of the groups that smartMeme has worked with on the issue:

International Center for Technology Assessment’s NanoAction Project
International civil society technology watchdog The ETC Group
Friends of the Earth USA and Friends of the Earth Australia

Also check out a great overview article of different technology contraversies and battle grounds that ETC Group’s Jim Thomas wrote for the Ecologist magazine