Bryan Farrell

Calling themselves Sunrise Movement, this group — founded by a core team of eight organizers, most under the age of 30 — plan to recruit and train a nonviolent volunteer army, hundreds strong, that will shake up the 2018 midterm elections and make 2020 the first presidential election about climate change.

When it comes to divestment — be it the U.S. campaigns against tobacco and sweatshop labor in the 1990s or the current global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel — the anti-apartheid struggle is always cited as an influence.

Summer has been the season of climate action for the past two years.

You can’t build a movement without numbers. If anyone understands that, it’s 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. Standing in front of an estimated crowd of 50,000 people gathered for the Forward on Climate rally yesterday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. he said, “All I ever wanted to see was a movement of people to stop climate change, and now I’ve seen it.”

I recently spoke with Gee about his use of an old and largely forgotten term, whether the climate movement can win, and how true democracy exists within movements and the spaces they create.