MAGAZINE MORE Account Subscribe Login Pages About Shop Photo: Allan Lissner Cultural shifts in the climate justice movement March 22, 2016 ENVIRONMENT & ECOLOGY The disruption following the Paris attacks made clear that the climate justice movement has to internalize its own motto: “system change not climate change!” AUTHOR Kevin Buckland A hundred days on, as the climate justice movement looks back to the COP21 Climate Summit to see what may be learned, we reflect on the context of the violent attacks of November 13, 2015 that foreshadowed the unstable and volatile world we will all inhabit for the rest of our lives. The ensuing crackdown on climate protesters sent shock waves through the Climate Coalition’s (CC21) plans for a series of mass climate mobilizations around the COP21 UN climate summit. This opened fissures at every weak point, revealing the political values dormant beneath and bringing to the front cultures of resistance that had the structural integrity and coherence to be able to thrive under the Parisian “State of Emergency”. Several underlying trends that characterized successful activism during COP21 indicate an emerging cultural shift in climate activism, especially in places where the call for “system change” was not just being demanded, but enacted by the movements themselves. Three trends in particular can be identified: The spread and increased role of creativity in activism; The deepened commitment to indigenous leadership; and The evolving tensions between rhetoric and form among different organizational models. What these trends may portend for the future of this growing movement as it begins to inhabit its politics, is that it is tilting from a protest movement towards being a truly revolutionary force. CULTURE OF RESISTANCE From the epic images of Ende Gelaende to the endlessly circulating photographs of the People’s Climate March; from the beauty of kayaktivists swarming to block oil tankers to coordinated global days of action: the climate justice movement is coming of age in a digital era where creativity is currency. The new tools for communication integrated by the climate justice movement decentralize storytelling and simultaneously provide space for the innovation of new forms of disruption and protest; both of which push the “culture” of activism into new grounds. Creativity is about how movements are redefining the boundaries of what activism is and what activism can be. It redefines the scope of how we resist, not only what we resist. In a globally connected culture innovative new forms can spread quickly; cross-pollinating, mutating and merging new tactics into the mainstream of the resistance cultures. In doing so, the climate justice movement is innovating new ways people can organize together in the context of collective crises, blurring the lines between tactics, resistance, prefiguration, and revolution. It is striking to see the conservative approach to maintaining centuries-old tactics despite being surrounded by technologies that could allow for new forms of activism. One notable example from the COP21 organizing was the emergence of the Climate Games — a decentralized, affinity-group based “online/offline disobedient action game” that is pushing mass activism into the digital age. The Games format, though adopted by very few larger organizations, provided a decentralized mass alternative to centralized collective organizing. During the two weeks of the Games more than two hundred actions were submitted including coalmine blockades, bank occupations, radio frequency takeovers, speech disruptions, and a quite bit of graffiti. As a decentralized, horizontal and self-organized project, it has a coherence between rhetoric and form that conventional forms of mass organizing lack.
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