U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont has made a video expressing his support for the Keystone XL sit-in in Washington:
Some pretty serious people are supporting this movement.
Sanders supporting the Keystone XL sit-in
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Category Archives: Civil disobedience
Climate scientists opposing the Keystone XL pipeline
A group of climate scientists have sent a letter to Barack Obama advising that building the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s oil sands would be against the public interest, largely because of how it would contribute to climate change:
The tar sands are a huge pool of carbon, but one that does not make sense to exploit. It takes a lot of energy to extract and refine this resource into useable fuel, and the mining is environmentally destructive. Adding this on top of conventional fossil fuels will leave our children and grandchildren a climate system with consequences that are out of their control. It makes no sense to build a pipeline system that would practically guarantee extensive exploitation of this resource.
The letter is part of a general campaign of opposition to the pipeline, culminating in a sit-in protest in Washington D.C. later this summer.
DePape’s stance
While I don’t agree with everything she says, I think Brigette DePape is brave, and her act of protest makes me feel a bit more hopeful about the future. The fact that there are young people who are intensely concerned with ethical questions and willing to take action is encouraging.
At the same time, I think she is wrong to hope that she can spark a popular uprising against the recently elected government. As the election shows, they maintain at least a plurality of support among Canadian voters.
On the issue of climate change, I think the central problem is the destructive logic I wrote about earlier today. People can enjoy the many benefits of burning fossil fuels, while forcing the costs of climate change on people in other places and in future generations. A such, it is very difficult for a democracy to adopt fair climate change policies. The people who are benefiting from burning fossil fuels are present and influential right now, while the victims of climate change are largely voiceless.
Taking the interests of climate change victims seriously requires that people think about more than their own immediate welfare. Beyond that, it requires that people voluntarily sacrifice some of the benefits they can derive from burning fossil fuels, because of the harm they are causing to other people by doing so.
Civil disobedience versus quiet non-compliance
When faced with a law they believe to be unjust, every individual has a choice to make. They can comply with the law, either for practical or moral reasons. In the first case, they comply to avoid the difficulty and punishment that could be associated with breaking the law. In the second case, they obey the law because they feel morally obliged to obey laws, even when they believe them to be unjust. That could be because they doubt their own judgment, or because they think it is necessary to have an orderly society.
Among those who choose not to obey, there is a second choice between doing so overtly and acting covertly. For example, a soldier who is ordered to fire on civilians could choose to deliberately miss, firing near them but not at them. Alternatively, the soldier could openly refuse to obey the order at all.
When it comes to protests, you are being overt from the outset. As such, when protestors are given a legal order to desist, their only choice is compliance or overt violation of the law. Overt violation of the law is one of the strongest affirmations of a moral belief a person can make. They are saying, at the very least, that they are prepared to take responsibility for their actions within the legal system. At the same time, such civil disobedience is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the state.
No wonder, then, that the state tends to respond forcefully – even violently – to such assertions. The person engaging in civil disobedience is asserting that their own moral code takes precedence over the laws of the land, and that it is important to assert that viewpoint, even in the face of personal danger.
Just being brave doesn’t make a person correct, however. Many people throughout history have put their freedom and lives on the line in defence of viewpoints that we now know to be based on factual errors, or which most people would now consider to be extremely morally dubious. That being said, civil disobedience is an unusually honest and direct form of participation in public policy discussion. It obliges the individual to take a stand from which they cannot retreat. In so doing, it challenges other members within the society to evaluate the basis for their own moral beliefs, and their own obedience to the law in question.
Learning about civil disobedience
Based on my limited understanding of the tactic, civil disobedience seems well suited to certain kinds of societal problems. Specifically, it seems to hold promise in cases where the problem being addressed is society-wide, such as racism, and where there is a very strong moral claim to be made. It also seems well suited to situations where, at the beginning at least, those upholding a sound moral principle are seriously outnumbered and outgunned by those who want to keep violating that principle.
All these things make me think civil disobedience could be well suited to responding to climate change. Does that seem plausible to others? NASA climatologist James Hansen has engaged in several acts of civil disobedience, resisting mountaintop removal coal mining.
What would be the best historical examples to consider, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of principled resistance to unjust laws? Also, which books, essays, and speeches would be most useful for developing a fuller comprehension.
Kumi Naidoo makes the moral case
In this video, Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo makes the moral case for fighting climate change: arguing that alliances must be formed, civil disobedience must be undertaken, and governments must be pushed into action.
While some people find it uncomfortable to discuss climate change in moral terms, the problem is fundamentally an ethical one. It turns on the question of how we ought to act toward our fellow human beings – alive now, and yet to come – as well as toward nature. The answer to that question is almost certainly: “Not as we have been acting so far”.
Report Back: CJM Workshop on “Landed Resistance: How Land Rights Struggles Fight Climate Change”
Today I had the privilege of attending a workshop put on by Climate Justice Montreal at McGill University on the issues of land, resistance, and climate change. The workshop facilitated active participation to draw out the participants own ideas of their own name, lineage and family history, and encouraged them to compare that history with the narrative structures “Canadian History” is given in the state school system. The power of narrative was stressed – the idea that society is not made up of matter or even institutions but primarily of stories which we tell ourselves, tell our children, and are told by those who have something to gain by our believing them. The framework of narrative power enabled the group to criticize their own ideas of their own history, and reclaim a more genuine grasp on the relationship between their personal history and the social narratives which structure the way that history is expressed in dominant social stories.
To give a specific example, the idea of the “hard working farmers who came here because they wanted to” was critiqued. The example of Irish immigration to make this case is particularly poignant: Ireland was depopulated in the 19th century through a purposeful genocide, in order to encourage immigration to North America. In other words – many Irish immigrants did not come “to seek a better life in a new land”, but because their old life had been strategically destroyed by a colonialist power. Ireland itself was a feudal state where the British had installed Ulster-Scots as the ruling people – to dominate and oppress the Irish while themselves being second-class compared to their English masters. The Irish who then arrived in Canada were largely directed towards the United States, because social darwinist theory of the time asserted that Eastern Europeans were harder workers – and Canadian colonial services preferred to install Polish and German immigrants as prairie farmers.
Zizek and the paradoxical position of activism today
Activism today seems caught in a stalemate with itself. While the Battle of Seattle founded a generation of direct-action, anti-organizational chaotic intervention against neo-liberal world government meetings, they’ve failed to gain mass public support. For reasons which have been understood for decades, the media is excellent at not getting messages through which are damaging to corporate power in general, media organizations themselves being private tyrannies. And since liberals are scared to death of any acts which might provoke disorder (they are followers of Burke rather than Rousseau), there is little hope in convincing them through rational argument (although I’ll continue to try). But on the other hand, purely peaceful protests seem increasingly ineffective, and geared towards the personal satisfaction of those involved, rather than social or political transformation. Zizek holds something like this position with regards the 2003 anti-war in Iraq rallies:
The massive demonstrations against the US attack on Iraq back in 2003 were exemplary of a strange symbiotic relationship, parasitism even, between power and the anti-war protesters. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protestors saved their beautiful souls – they had made it clear that they did not agree with the government’s policy on Iraq – while those in power could calmly accept it, even profit from it: not only did the protests do nothing to prevent the (already decided upon) attack on Iraq, paradoxically, they even provided additional legitimaization for it, best rendered by none of than George Bush, whose reaction to the mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London was: “You see, this is what we are fighting for: so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!”
Quite clearly, Bush had no interest in allowing the popular demonstration to affect his government’s policy. The public are allowed to have their say precisely because their say is meaningless. Compare this to a dictatorship – this kind of huge public display is not allowed (and is in fact violently suppressed), not because a dictator hates free speech, but because in that context free speech is actually a danger to his power. In the US, the overwhelming mores of civil obedience means the state does not have to worry that such a huge public demonstration will move towards the kind of insurrection which would enable actually changing the government’s policy.
Coal protest in Washington D.C.
Outside the White House today, over 100 people protesting mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia were arrested. Among them was climatologist James Hansen, who argues that the key to preventing dangerous climate change is to leave most of the world’s remaining coal unburned.
Given how the Obama administration has failed to prioritize action on climate change, determined non-violent resistance to continued reliance on climate-disrupting fossil fuels is surely justified.
Greenpeace in Greenland
Greenpeace campaigners have scaled Cairn Energy’s new drilling operation off the coast of Greenland and are calling for a world beyond oil:
The place we’re heading for – the world beyond oil – will be cleaner, healthier and more peaceful. We won’t get there overnight, but we’re already on the way. Many of the solutions are out there. Others need greater political support and investment to make them happen. Ultimately we need to transition to a zero carbon transport system where pretty much all our vehicles run on electricity, powered by the sun, sea and wind – energy that won’t run out. In the meantime we need to start reducing the oil we use.
We also need to stop our money – whether through our pension funds or our taxes – being used to keep us stuck in the oil age. Currently direct government subsidies to fossil fuel industries are 10 times the amount to clean energy – we need to reverse this trend and put clean energy technologies on a level playing field with fossil fuels so that clean energy can complete in the market place.
Coal may be the most worrisome fossil fuel, when it comes to the sheer quantity that exists on Earth, but there are also scary amounts of unconventional oil and gas out there. Rather than invest our talents and resources in pulling out the last desperate drops of fossil fuel, we should be working on building a sustainable, clean, zero-carbon global energy system.
Good on Greenpeace for seeing the big picture.