Politics and the Pleasure Principle
Melissa Harris-Perry, The Nation
… I worry that our effectiveness wanes as our jaws tighten and our fists clench. In these bitter circumstances we need an environment of possibility that builds camaraderie, rewards outrageous ideas and encourages resilience. In short, we need a conscious strategy of serious play.
Many American businesses have discovered that great ideas aren’t necessarily generated 9-to-5 while sitting behind a standard-issue desk wearing a blue blazer. The most successful electoral campaigns often harness positive play by reminding us that democracy is both hard work and fun. In 2008 thousands of Americans visibly enjoyed the electoral process—waiting in line for hours to see their candidates, crafting innovative campaign materials online, shouting at the pundits on the nightly news. These were not the acts of a content electorate, lulled into democratic drowsiness by a ho-hum election cycle; these were examples of fully animated citizens who though often angry were also deeply involved. Successful campaigns are steeped in information and guided by expertise, but they also tend to nurture rule-breaking and encourage openness to innovation. In that sense, they are playful.
Governing rarely offers as many opportunities for drawing outside the lines. The solidarity and creativity of the Obama campaign was quickly replaced by the sober predictability and insularity of the Obama administration.
So it will be our job to nurture pleasurable, fun, creative and collective orientations toward political tasks. Even at its most frustrating, politics brings certain pleasures: the opportunity for fellowship, the excitement of competition, the spectacle of rituals. Rather than assuming that big money will win, let’s look around for inspiring, if unlikely, candidates for local races in 2012. Quixotic campaigns sometimes prove surprisingly viable and can elicit important concessions from incumbents. Let’s make music again and videos and fashion and art that express the pathos and possibility of this moment. Most of it will be forgettable, but some of it may prove iconic. Let’s tap into social media to crowd-source creative solutions to our pressing problems. Let’s dream big, not asking whether we think our ideas are viable but instead sketching what truly just outcomes would look like.
… Far from being irresponsible, it would be wise to engage in some serious play.
(27 January 2011)
Green giants: the eco power list
Lucy Siegle, The Observer
We all agree that the planet is in a perilous position. But what is the best way to save it? We name the 20 activists, filmmakers, writers, politicians and celebrities who will be setting the global environmental agenda in the coming year
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From David Attenborough to Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Town movement, the Observer Ethical Awards has honoured many movers and shakers in ecological and social justice. So it seems fitting to launch our sixth awards by profiling the 20 global figures who’ll exert influence in 2011. …
ECO ICON: DAVID TAKAYOSHI SUZUKI …
DEFENDER OF THE RURAL POOR: HENRY SARAGIH
There are grassroots organisations, and then there’s La Via Campesina. An alliance of small-scale farmers and rural workers in their millions, it has become their most vociferous champion as “peasant farmers” all over the world face down forced evictions because of the rise in agrofuels and monocultures backed by transglobal corporations. It is widely believed that the world is at a crucial crossroads and that without a struggle small-scale producers will disappear. Not if General Secretary Henry Saragih has anything to do with it – as head of the Indonesia Peasant Union, he has also fought the so-called “palm oil barons”. As the Guardian’s John Vidal puts it: “How this struggle plays out in the next 20 years will determine whether there is any rainforest left intact in southeast Asia in 50 years’ time, and possibly the political future of many developing countries.”
THE GREEN PRESIDENT: EVO MORALES
The leader of Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism has become a self-proclaimed defender of Mother Earth. His dramatic rhetoric was perhaps the highlight of a lacklustre Cancun conference: “We are familiar with the slogan ‘Country or Death’, but it is better now to talk about ‘Planet or Death’.” Bolivia’s radical position includes a proposal to the UN to make water a human right, and nationalising the oil industry. His critics point out that, while he talks the green fight, his country is dependent on hydrocarbon and extraction industries. Can he prove he’s more than hot air?
CLIMATE CHANGE-BUSTING MAYOR: MICHAEL BLOOMBERG …
“LUNATIC” FARMER: JOEL SALATIN
There’s a certain rock ‘n’ roll energy about Joel Salatin of Polyface – a “multi-generational, pasture-based, beyond organic, local-market farm” in Virginia. The “lunatic” prefix is one he applied to himself (just in case you thought us unspeakably rude), because he is apt to come out with statements such as: “Industrial food never asks whether the pig is happy. The pig-ness of the pig never enters the conversation.” But his surprisingly sane beliefs are finding plenty of traction internationally. The debate he has generated goes far beyond the usual “conventional versus organic” conversation (he deems “organic” irrelevant). Ultimately it’s all about the soil. “The soil is the only thread upon which civilisation can exist. If a person could ever realise that our existence depends on literally inches of active aerobic microbial life on terra firma, we might begin to appreciate the ecological umbilical to which we are all still attached,” Salatin told treehugger.com. “The food industry, I’m convinced, actually believes we don’t need soil to live.” Which is where the real lunacy lies.
(16 January 2011)
Eco power lists: Fatuous, invidious and misrepresentative
George Monbiot, Guardian
The fame, extreme wealth and disproportionate influence celebrated by such lists are completely at odds with the values of the green movement
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Much of the [the Observer’s list – see above] was a catalogue of rich and powerful people who have now added green – or some nebulous semblance of green – to their portfolios.
But I’m less concerned about the contents of these lists than the principle. To me, eco and power occupy different spheres. The environmentalism I recognise is a challenge to power. It confronts a system which allows a handful of people to dominate our lives and capture our resources. The fame, the extreme wealth, the disproportionate influence celebrated by power lists stand in opposition to the values and principles that green thinking espouses.
But that’s not the only problem with these lists. They are invidious. They extract a few characters from a vast collective effort: generally those who are skilled at taking credit for other people’s work.
An eco-power list is even worse. First, it reinforces the story, endlessly told by those who hate environmentalism, that it is the preserve of toffs and princes (Prince Charles, inevitably, features on the Observer’s list). It is true that some of its most prominent spokespeople are rich and famous. But they are prominent only because this tiny, unrepresentative sample is celebrated and fawned over by the media, while the millions of other people in the movement are ignored.
It also encourages the superman myth: that a few powerful people can save the planet. In reality, only big social movements, emphasising solidarity and collective effort, are likely to be effective.
(18 January 2011)
Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation: Young Green Activists for a Warming World
Jason Mark, Earth Island Journal
Can a new group of young environmental leaders reinvigorate greens’ grassroots spirit?
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The global headquarters of the international climate justice campaign 350.org is located on the fourteenth floor of a random building in downtown Oakland, California. Though “global headquarters” might be over-stating things: The offices consist of three rooms with worn carpeting and a collection of reclaimed desks arranged in a Tetris-like pattern. When I visited on a sunny afternoon in mid-September, the place was strangely silent given that the campaigners were just weeks from another worldwide demonstration demanding sharp greenhouse gas reductions. The organizers had already registered 2,700 events in 100 countries scheduled for 10-10-10; by the time the date arrived, they would clock in about 7,300 actions across the globe. Yet the office had none of the war-room frenzy one associates with a political operation in the lead-up to election day. The young and stylish – if rumpled – campaigners were at their desks quietly sending out emails, zipping instant messages, updating blogs, and posting Twitter updates. To my disappointment, there was no map on the wall full of pins marking confirmed actions. No one was on the phone shouting something like, “Get me Bogota!” The only sound was the click of keyboards.
“I wish we could still campaign like that,” Jamie Henn, one of the 350’s organizers said wryly as we sat down at the beat-up wood table that doubles as conference and lunch space. Henn has a disarrayed shock of red hair and dark-frame glasses, which makes him look like the lost member of some art-rock band. He is also, true to type, scary-smart. A second after joking about old-school campaigning, he was holding forth on the state of the environmental movement and theories of social change. “There’s been a sense that’s been missing from the movement about what we are really up against. People use the metaphor a lot of World War II and a World War II-like mobilization. That mobilization didn’t happen because people suddenly got really excited about manufacturing. That mobilization happened because there was a real threat that people felt very personally.”
Well said, I thought. And even more impressive given the fact that Henn, like the rest of the 350.org organizers, is 26 years old. With the exception of a couple contractors hired for the weeks before 10-10-10, the entire 350 staff is half the age of the campaign’s spokesman and (unpaid) figurehead, author-activist Bill McKibben. The folks who brought you what CNN called “the biggest demonstration in history” weren’t old enough to cast a vote in 2000.
The 350 campaigners’ age might make their accomplishments extraordinary, but among environmental organizations their youth isn’t unique. For the first time in a generation, a number of significant green groups are led by people under 40. …
The transfer in leadership away from the Baby Boomers who built today’s environmentalism comes at trying moment for US greens. Despite some minor victories, 2010 has been an annus horribilis for environmentalists. The Senate defeat of even weak legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions was a body blow. Perhaps more demoralizing was the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: The worst oil spill in US history occurred last summer and Washington, at least, just shrugged.
… “The strategic mistake was appealing to people in the middle,” said Tony Massaro, vice president of the League of Conservation voters. “We did a poor job of appealing to our base on the climate legislation. In trying to pass legislation, you need to have more passion, and we didn’t demonstrate we had more passion on our side.”
… Such feelings of discouragement have forced a rethinking of how much energy to keep putting into Washington-focused legislative strategies. The emerging consensus is that it’s time to take a step back from Capitol Hill and put more energy into long-term movement building. The younger leaders say they are focused on putting their organizations’ efforts into, well, organizing – working community by community to build the political muscle to eventually succeed at Washington maneuvering. It’s time, the young leaders agree, to get back to the grassroots ethic that characterized the early days of the environmental movement.
… “We do our best work when we bring our base along but we are finding new friends and speaking to them about the values that they care about,” he said later. “Fighting climate isn’t something that’s going to be resolved in a matter of months. We’re gonna be working on this all decade long. So our base has to grow with time, not wither away with time.”
… At the same time, there’s a feeling that the legal and regulatory tactics that have become the bread and butter for so many environmental groups may have reached the limits of their effectiveness.
“At some point in the late seventies, early eighties, we got really aggressive and successful at lobbying Capitol Hill and the White House, and that was a transition from being more of a grassroots environmental community,” Pica said. “And I think that the successes that we had … I think we took some of the wrong lessons away. That transformed the movement into this lawyerly, regulatory, DC Beltway-focused community. And we’ve kind of forgotten, neglected the power base that got us to that point.”
To be fair, lawsuits and lobbying have been useful for enforcing – and, when under threat, defending – the country’s landmark environmental laws. The attorney-centric NRDC, for example, has played an invaluable role in preventing rollbacks of earlier gains. But the insider strategy is unlikely to build the popular momentum needed to address the twenty-first-century threats to the environment. You’re not going to overhaul the foundation of industrial society with a relatively small group of lawyers and scientific experts.
“There’s a decreasing return on investment for this strategy of the dominant DC groups,” Radford said, “investing in smart policy people, but not investing in the grassroots.”
I heard some variation of “investing in the grassroots” from almost everyone I spoke with. To do that successfully, the new leaders must overcome challenges their predecessors didn’t face – most notably, a graying membership and the tricky terrain of the internet.
… Of all the environmental organizations, 350.org has probably been the most successful at translating online connections into real-world actions. The group has built a global activist community knit together by, of all things, a number referring to parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “When we set out with 350, we really were trying to spread it as a meme, and the day of action was a tool to do that,” said May Boeve, another 350 organizer. Boeve (rhymes with movie) is a California blonde who, like most of the 350 staff, started working with McKibben while a student at Middlebury College. The 350 staff is organized as a consensus-based collective, but with her executive focus and force of personality, Boeve operates as the de facto chief of staff. “I don’t know if there’s any campaign comparable to ours where all of these people all around the world who aren’t on the payroll and who we don’t even know send us 350 photos and set up their own 350 chapters. I think we were effective at trying all kinds of things just to get the number out there, and brand it as a symbol of climate safety and the science, but as something you could belong to.”
Another challenge of today’s political organizing is how to connect with the public in an era in which a certain sardonic attitude has become the default cultural language. Part of 350’s success comes from its knack for communicating in a tone that appeals to people under, say, 35. The earnest appeals of yesteryear are a poor match for the zeitgeist of Stephen Colbert and Sarah Silverman. But issues like climate change and mercury poisoning are big time serious. So how do you balance a sober point with a lighthearted message?
“Our generation, we are so used to a personal type of interaction,” Henn said. “We’ve tried to embody that in our emails and our communications. Our blog is not super polished, it’s written in an off-the-cuff sort of way. Our e-mails from Bill are infused with this long-format, writerly voice. It has to be fused with a real sense of personality, especially over email and especially on the Web. My theory on writing e-mail blasts is that if you wouldn’t write this way to your friends, you probably shouldn’t write that way to your members.”
“Strategic irreverence, I’ll call it,” Becky Tarbotton, the new executive director or Rainforest Action Network said to me. “The work has to be fun, inspiring, energizing, and sexy. We’re not going to attract people with a sign that says, ‘The End is Near’ – even if it is. Irreverence is about inviting people from all walks of life, rather than chastising them for not already being with us.”
If the new generation of leaders intuitively gets how to how to mix earnestness with humor and connect with a younger audience, it’s because, well, they’re them. And as Atari babies – or, “net natives” like Boeve and Henn – they aren’t flummoxed by technology. These generation-specific sensibilities mark a real culture shift for environmental activism. The willingness to be off-the-cuff is one of the big differences between the young leaders’ and their predecessors. The new leaders are confident they can ditch the focus-grouped, poll-tested language that many organizations depend on, and speak in a language that is more emotional. The overly scripted appeal, they feel, is no longer working. Today’s Millennial Generation – awash in marketing and hype – has an exquisitely attuned bullshit meter, and it isn’t swayed by spin.
… According to many people I spoke to, a lack of authenticity helped doom the Senate climate legislation. The environmental organizations that spearheaded the fight weren’t completely honest with people about whether the proposed solution matched the scale of the problem, and in the process they lost their supporters. The eco-base simply was not buying the proposition that a market-based cap-and-trade deal – agreed upon with corporate America and full of compromises – could head off catastrophic global climate change.
“We have to be able to call balls and strikes, as the champions of protecting the planet,” Pica said. “This is true up and down the generational board – you have to have some integrity in how you communicate. If you lose the battle of who is more trustworthy, then you lose your audience, whoever you are talking to.”
… In talking about the necessity of base building, the green leaders I spoke to often referred to the hard work (and ultimate victories) of the civil rights movement. It’s a useful analogy – until it’s not. Because there’s one major difference between the efforts of Ella Baker and Baynard Rustin and the environmental community as it exists today: passion.
The fact is, despite the best of efforts, environmental issues don’t strike a visceral chord with many Americans. Unlike the LGBT movement (in which people are demanding basic civil rights) or the labor movement (which combines enlightened self-interest with a broader call for social justice), environmentalism can seem detached. It’s often about saving far-off places or eliminating chemicals we can’t see, much less pronounce. There’s a lot of jargon. The result is a political movement that – aside from the tiny EarthFirst! contingent and the fever of animal rights activists – can often feel emotionless. Or like emotion without context, like screaming that the house is on fire when nobody can feel the heat.
“You have to go where people’s passion is, you have to,” Justin Reuben, the 37-year-old executive director of Moveon.org, said to me. “You have to be doing the stuff that when people look it they say, ‘Hell, yeah.'”
One of greens’ biggest hurdles in getting to that “hell yeah” moment is what I would call the problem of eco-empathy. The threats to our shared environment are so big that it’s hard to attach emotion to them. Global climate change is the best example. Green campaigners sometimes complain that global warming is “hard to understand.” True enough. But it’s not just that climate change boggles the mind – it also turns off the heart. Emotions depend on closeness. Yet the most worrisome of environmental threats is planetary in scale. We simply don’t know where to begin feeling.
“I think that with climate we’ve been talking about it on such a huge scale, and with such a sense of apocalypse that it’s hard for people to wrap their minds around it,” Henn said. “Not that they don’t care, but they can’t feel at that level.”
How do you get around this problem? Several people suggested that the answer is to internalize some of the wisdom of the old bumper sticker, Think Global Act Local. The best way to grow the movement for sustainability is by putting new emphasis on the threats – and the solutions – that are near to people’s homes … and close to their hearts.
… This, of course, is the great asset of a livability agenda: It attracts new people. The passion for working with unlikely bedfellows represents another distinguishing characteristic of the new generation of leaders. They may be resistant to compromise as it has come to be played in Washington, but they are eager to cinch unlikely coalitions.
(18 January 2011)
Also at Common Dreams. -BA
Film review: “The Economics of Happiness”
Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse — And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy
A new film explores how globalization has resulted in crises of the economy, the environment and the human spirit — and points the way to a new path.
To many of us, a society where no one goes hungry, where there is no unemployment, where people are happy and they have spacious homes and lots of leisure time seems like fantasy. But it’s not a fantasy for Helena Norberg-Hodge — she saw it firsthand in the tiny Himalayan region of Ladakh, a remote mountain community that borders Tibet.
During the course of 35 years there, she also saw what happened when Ladakh was suddenly thrown open to the outside world in the 1970s and subsidized roads brought subsidized goods to the region. The local economy was undermined, the cultural fabric was torn apart. Unemployment, pollution and divisiveness emerged for the first time.
“This was Ladakh’s introduction to globalization,” says Norberg-Hodge. The “story of Ladakh can shed light on the root causes of the crises now facing the planet.”
The account of Ladakh’s transformation opens the new film, The Economics of Happiness, created by Steven Gorelick, John Page and Norberg-Hodge, the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture. As Bill McKibben says early on in the film, according to a poll conducted every year since the end of World World II, happiness in the U.S. peaked in 1956. “It’s been slowly downhill ever since,” he says. “But in that time we’ve gotten immeasurably richer, we have three times as much stuff. Somehow it hasn’t worked because that same affluence tends to undermine community.”
(16 January 2011)
Beyond the Economic Treadmill and Toward True Well-being
Michael Abrams, CommonDreams.org
Life Satisfaction for Various Groups
-Forbes magazine’s ‘‘richest Americans” 5.8
-Pennsylvania Amish 5.8
-Inughuit (Inuit people in northern Greenland) 5.8
-African Maasai 5.7
-Swedish probability sample 5.6
-International college-student sample (47 nations in 2000) 4.9
-Illinois Amish 4.9
-Calcutta slum dwellers 4.6
-Fresno, California, homeless 2.9
-Calcutta pavement dwellers (homeless) 2.9
Note. Respondents indicated their agreement with the statement, “You are satisfied with your life” using a scale from 1 (complete disagreement) to 7 (complete agreement); 4 is a neutral rating.
Source: Diener, Ed & Martin E.P. Seligman, “Beyond money: Toward an economy of well-being,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Vol 5, Issue 1, 2004
* * * * *
By any conventional logic, the table above makes no sense. How can the Pennsylvania Amish–a group that generally aspires towards a relatively simple lifestyle–have, as a group, attained an average happiness level on par with that of the 400 wealthiest individuals in one of the richest and most technologically advanced nations on the planet? And how can a group of aboriginals in Greenland have managed to accomplish the same thing?
The unstated premise of our society is that all of us are born at some level on a socio-economic ladder. Our prime directive is that we must dedicate a substantial part of our waking hours and efforts to climb to higher and higher steps on that ladder. At any step on the ladder we can look down to the comparatively diminished lives we had on the lower steps. And at the very top we–or our descendants–will have attained that perfect Nirvana, the frictionless existence that comes in tandem with virtually limitless wealth.
Except it ain’t so. While America’s wealthiest certainly attain a high level of happiness, it can hardly be said to be off the chart. Further, it would appear that very different kinds of groups, such as the Amish and the Inughuit, manage to effortlessly reach the top of our “ladder”—and do so even without our relentless drive toward an ever higher material standard of living. What do they know that we don’t?
(29 January 2011)
