The Next Phase: A new generation of environmentalism

With the clock ticking on our planet, civil disobedience is justified in the name of green causes. No more tree-hugging; it’s time to shout from the treetops.

I’m planning a series of posts on the state of play of environmentalism in Canada, in which I will work through the thorny questions over what environmental “leadership” (icky term, I know) means at this pivotal moment on Earth. I welcome your feedback and hope you will help me work out the answers to that most fundamental question: What should we be doing right now for our planet?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the infamous Cape Wind controversy in the U.S. – when Greenpeace took to the zodiacs to protest the Kennedy family’s opposition to the offshore Cape Wind farm, it seems to me that environmentalism in North America turned a symbolic corner.

The scientists’ warnings about global warming were becoming louder. There was a difficult internal struggle because of the Kennedy family’s long service to environmental issues, but in the end we decided it would no longer be acceptable to claim to heed the warnings while rejecting the solutions recommended by those same experts. It was a moment where we had to take stock and we decided our priorities had changed.

Today, the warnings are more urgent and dire. Global warming is accelerating much faster than predicted. The oceans are acidifying, ice is melting, forests are dying, and we are at the tipping point of releasing massive storehouses of polar carbon. We are already well beyond the “safe” threshold of heat-trapping gases and accelerating rapidly in the wrong direction.

As environmentalists, our job is to be constantly evaluating the threats and designing our responses accordingly. So, how do Canadians transition to the global warming era?

Let me say from the outset that I too came late to the recognition that times have changed and a true crisis is upon us. Global warming is enormous, its agents invisible, its schedule unaligned with daily human time frames. In a sense, we are all still sleepwalking, unable to grapple with the enormity of the problem and the massive scale of changes needed.

And so I am sympathetic to the difficulties in building a new generation of environmentalism. But the laws of physics have no such sympathy. Either we make the change or we are on the sidelines while half the world’s species and countless of our fellow humans are sentenced to oblivion (many of you will remember similar sentiments from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s in his opening speech in Bali).

Many environmentalists have been fighting hard on climate for years. More make the transition every day. And the youth movements certainly get it. But, in Canada, the jury is still out on whether the bulk of traditional environmentalists will join the new generation.

What will the next generation look like? I think one of our primary roles is to hold the climate imperative as the context for public dialogue. A common feature of jurisdictions that are having success is that civil society demanded it be done.

But we should be learning from the Van Jones/Obama playbook: we can do a much better job of leading with “green economy and green jobs.”

Green economy and climate policy are two sides of the same coin. People should know that combating global warming quickly enough will bring very significant economic gains. Obama has done this masterfully, never losing sight of the “planet in peril” while simultaneously jazzing Americans about jobs in clean American energy, clean-tech manufacturing, smart grids, etc.

Having set the context, we need to focus governments on stopping the bad (emissions of heat-trapping gases) and starting the good (efficiency and clean energy production). If phase one was getting attention, that phase is largely over – most jurisdictions have some kind of plan purporting to reduce carbon emissions, increase efficiency and ramp up green energy.

In phase two, we need to move these tepid plans to a scale commensurate with the crisis. And grapple with the backlash that comes even against the early steps in climate policy (oops, I mean the green economy). We knew we faced a long uphill struggle for stronger laws and we knew we would be fighting the deny-and-delay tobacco tactics of the climate deniers. But Cape Wind showed that we will also have to navigate backlash from friends and citizens’ groups – sometimes proxies in the fossil fuel industry’s tobacco strategy, sometimes simply well-meaning folks that have not yet come to terms with global warming. This backlash has arrived in Canada in a big way: public meetings are overflowing with vitriol as, for example, people protest wind farms and conservation pricing in Ontario or carbon taxes and green energy in B.C.

It is critical that rich countries like Canada move through this phase very quickly if there is to be any hope for a global deal incorporating the giants of the developing world. Those countries quite rightly point out that global warming is a function of accumulated concentrations in the atmosphere – for which we industrialized nations are responsible and for which they should not be penalized.

The science says our task is to reduce global warming emissions to zero. Eliminate them quickly and entirely. To do so we will need to push back against those forces which obstruct or delay the green economy whether those forces be foot-dragging politicians, Exxon muddying the science or “environmentalists” opposing wind farms. To be successful, we will need to vigorously support companies and governments doing the right thing even in halting and partial steps.

We now need to make a difficult transition from being primarily critics to being leaders. This means we need to be as vocal about what we’re for as what we’re against. Let there be no doubt that this phase will be extremely messy and difficult: there are no easy answers, no silver bullets, everything we build or refuse has impacts and consequences. But the stories of success from around the world are inspiring. People need to hear how elegantly simple and profitable many of the solutions are.

The retail politics of climate are turning out to be more difficult than anticipated. Quite understandably, people do not appreciate paying more for energy, they do not like their views altered or natural areas opened to clean energy production. It is our job to communicate the imperative – the crisis is upon us and we have to err on the side of carbon (reductions, that is).

The role for hard-edged protest is greater than ever. Transitioning from critic to leader doesn’t mean going soft – quite the opposite. As Cape Wind showed, we may have to protest the opponents of clean energy and green jobs. We certainly must protest coal plants and any expansion of the fossil fuel juggernaut. There’s an old saying in the forest conservation movement that the public doesn’t react as if there’s a crisis until the hippies are in the trees. People’s first reaction to a problem is to look around and see how everyone else is behaving. Global warming is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced, but it doesn’t look that way – yet. So if you are organizing civil disobedience against a coal plant in Canada, sign me up.

I am happy to report that the Cape Wind project is moving ahead and, in many important ways, cleared a trail for Barack Obama’s green jobs surge and battle against global warming. But it was bitter. A very public civil war among environmentalists, television ads slamming the opponents of green power, sign-on letters to the Kennedys; whole books have been written about the class and climate war that erupted.

The arguments against Cape Wind are becoming all too familiar to Canadians: we don’t need the power, it will raise electricity prices, it will privatize the commons, it is all a conspiracy for crony capitalists to make money. In that battle, as in ours, it was not acceptable to deny global warming outright. That was done through more coded insinuations in which viewscapes or fishing spots (and other things that are almost certainly doomed by climate change) were deemed of higher importance.

The Europeans have been through this battle, the Americans are now fending off only the most reactionary of the Republicans. One of the consequences of Canada being such a climate laggard is that the backlash is brewing later here than elsewhere. But right now, there is a great window of opportunity with Obama picking the best scientists in the world for his team and Ottawa promising to keep up. Will the Canadian environmental movement prove able to capitalize on the Obama moment?