Sitting in a large circle, sixty people listened and shifted in their chairs. What he was saying was undeniable. Everyone has a right to a decent job. And energy workers are hurting badly.
But the people in the room knew too that the case for even one more pipeline was not a matter of bargaining with environmentalists; it was a doomed attempt to bargain with science and chemistry. It is impossible to both keep building new fossil fuel infrastructure and have a chance of keeping temperatures at anything like safe levels.
That’s when Arthur Manuel took the floor. A highly respected Indigenous intellectual and former chief from the Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, Manuel leaned forward, looked the union leader in the eye, and spoke just above a whisper. “Do you think you are the only people who have had to sacrifice? Do you know how much money, how many jobs, my people have turned down from oil and gas and mining companies? Tens of millions of dollars.
“We do it because there are things that are more important than money.”
It felt as if the whole room was holding its breath. It was one of several wrenchingly honest exchanges that happened over the course of a two-day gathering in Toronto in May 2015. In the room were leaders and organizers from Haida Gwaii on the west coast to Halifax on the east coast, representing movements across a huge spectrum of issues and identities.
We had come together to figure out what connects the crises facing us, and to try to chart a holistic vision for the future that would overcome many of the overlapping challenges at the same time. Just as in Standing Rock, more and more people are starting to see and speak about these connections—pointing out, for instance, that the economic interests pushing hardest for war, at home and abroad, are the very same forces most responsible for warming the planet. And that the economic precariousness that the union representative was speaking about, and the attacks on Indigenous land rights and on the earth itself that were referenced by Arthur Manuel (who died suddenly at the start of 2017), also flow from the same place: a corrosive values system that places profit above the well-being of people and the planet. The same system has allowed the pursuit of money to so corrode the political process in the United States that a gang of scandal-plagued plutocrats could seize control of the White House.
The connections between so many of the emergencies that compete for our time and care are clear. Glaring, even. And yet, for so many reasons—pressure from funders, a desire for “clickable” campaigns, a fear of seeming too radical and therefore doomed—many of us have learned to sever those natural connections, and work in terms of walled-off “issues” or silos. Anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change. Climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. Too seldom within the environmental movement are connections made between the guns that take Black lives on the streets of cities such as Ferguson and Ottawa and the rising seas and devastating droughts destroying the homelands of Black and brown people around the world. Rarely are the dots connected between the powerful men who think they have the right to use and abuse women’s bodies and the widespread notion that humans have the right to do the same thing to the earth.
So many of the crises we are facing are symptoms of the same underlying sickness: a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable. We came together out of a belief that the persistence of these disconnections, of this siloed thinking, is why progressives are losing ground on virtually every front, left fighting for scraps when we all know that our historical moment demands transformative change. These divisions and compa-rtmen-taliz-atio-ns—the hesitancy to identify the systems we are up against—are robbing us of our full potential, and have trained too many to believe that lasting solutions will always be out of reach.
We also came together out of a belief that overcoming those divisions—finding and strengthening the threads that run through our various issues and movements—is our most pressing task. That out of those connections would emerge a larger and more fired-up progressive coalition than we have seen in decades, one capable of taking on not only the symptoms of a failed system, but maybe even the system itself. Our goal, and it wasn’t modest, was to try to map not just the world we don’t want but the one we want instead.
The diversity in the room led to plenty of tough exchanges. But with long, painful histories of failed collaborations and too much broken trust, tough is what happens when people finally decide to make space to dream together. You’d think imagining the world we want would be fun and easy. In fact, it’s the hardest work of all. It also happens to be our only hope. As we have seen, Trump and his cohorts are intent on pushing the world backward on every front, all at once. Only a competing vision that is pushing us forward on multiple fronts has a chance against a force like that. Our experiment in mapping these intersectional agendas began in Canada, but it’s part of an international conversation—in the US, the UK, Australia, across Europe, and beyond—in which more and more people are arriving at the same conclusion: it’s time to unite around a common agenda that can directly battle the political poison spreading through our countries. No is not enough—it’s time for some big, bold yeses to rally around.
Time for a People’s Shock
Ever since the 2008 financial meltdown, I have been puzzling over the question of what it would take to pull off a truly progressive populist response to the crises we face.
I had thought, at one point, that the factual revelations of climate science—if we truly understood them—might be the catalyst. After all, there couldn’t be a clearer indication that our current system is failing: if business as usual is allowed to continue, ever-larger expanses of our planet will cease to be hospitable to human life. And as we’ve seen, responding effectively to climate change requires throwing out the entire pro-corporate economic playbook—which is one of the main reasons so many right-wing ideologues are determined to deny its reality. So it seemed to me that, just as the aftermath of the Great Crash and World War II became periods of massive social transformation, so could the climate crisis—an existential threat for humanity—become an opportunity for once-in-a-century social and economic change.