RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 347 Adam Aron Lessons of Climate Activism
Episode 347 of RevolutionZ asks why so many stay essentially silent when our world is burning? Adam Aron, climate activist and psychology professor at UC San Diego identifies barriers that keep most people from taking action despite acknowledging the twin crises of climate collapse and rising authoritarianism. We then discuss what to do about the disturbing situation.
Aron draws from his years of research and activism to identify what's holding us back: an atomized society that erodes our sense of solidarity, widespread feelings of powerlessness, and movements that fail to connect with people's material needs and identities. "Many cultural and psychological forces are pushing people to be isolated... not a lot of people have confidence in the concept of solidarity."
The discussion delves into why climate organizations remain relatively "minuscule" despite scientific consensus. While environmental and anti-fascist rallies draw thousands and even millions, why do they fail to translate momentary enthusiasm into sustained collective power? Aron argues this happens partly because movements focus too narrowly on moral appeals without connecting to people's economic concerns or creating appealing cultural identities.
We momentarily confront terrifying climate truths, perhaps weeping over extinction forecasts in a lecture, then step outside where everyone continues life as normal. This splitting makes sustained engagement nearly impossible for many. What are pathways forward? Do we make activism more desirable through aesthetics and community-building, do we target specific pressure points like the successful Tesla dealership protests against Elon Musk, do we link abstract climate concerns with tangible local benefits like public ownership of utilities? What is the psychology of social change? What would it take to create movements people actually want to join? How might we transform our atomized society into one capable of collective response? These are some questions this episode tackles.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 347th consecutive episode, and my guest this time is Adam Aron. Am I pronouncing that right?
Speaker 2:Aron.
Speaker 1:Aron Adam. Aron, aron Okay. Adam is a climate and ecological activist and professor of psychology at the University of California, san Diego. Adam's research and teaching focus on the social science of collective action on the climate and ecological crisis. His activism has been through the Green New Deal at UC San Diego, where he has worked on several campaigns such as Electrifying UC, and has also produced a documentary Coming Clean. He also volunteered and helped lead the Power San Diego campaign for not-for-profit public ownership of the local electric grid. Before switching to the climate and ecological crisis, adam had a successful career in cognitive neuroscience. His publications have been cited over 25,000 times.
Speaker 1:Adam attended high school at Waterford Kambala United World College of South Africa, of Southern Africa, earned a bachelor degree from the University of Cape Town, a master's from the University of Edinburgh, a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. So, adam, welcome to Revolution Z. Thanks for having me, michael. It's my pleasure. There are many things we could talk about, such as your recent article on ZMet, which caught my attention and was titled Is it strategic to refocus toward climate adaptation?
Speaker 1:But if it's okay with you, I would rather like to start in a closely related but somewhat different and less discussed place. You have asked and you study and I quote from your website how do people arrive at their beliefs? What is the basis of denial and delay? How does belief flow to action? So I would like to ask you with ecological disaster visibly threatening humanity and with Trumpian fascism visibly threatening to entrench itself for a long stay, I wonder about young people and their elders, on campus and off. Some have become active, but others have not, at least not yet. How do you think about the latter group? What do you think they are thinking and feeling? What do you think is holding them back from resisting? And then we can get on to. What might movements do to reach out more effectively? So, if it's okay, let's start with those issues.
Speaker 2:Just to clarify. You're asking me about the climate movement, getting to climate organizations and movements or more generally.
Speaker 1:More generally. I'm starting more generally, if that's okay with you, and then we'll get to. You know climate, global warming and those movements, but it sounds like you have ideas about what holds people back, what the obstacles are. What is it that on one side says no, don't act, while the world says act for God's sake. It's unraveling.
Speaker 2:Sure Well, so I take your question to be why is it that so many people in society are not engaging with social movements? We recognise that social movements and collective action is probably the only thing we have to really win the kinds of policy changes and societal changes we need. I'm used to answering this question, michael, in the context of climate organisations, but I can take a stab at sort of doing it a bit more broadly. You know, the climate thing is a bit different, right, because it's a global problem and it's far away and so forth. But to try and answer a bit more broadly, you know, I think there's a few things.
Speaker 2:So, if we think about people jumping into the current movements or the current organizations we have right now to oppose the authoritarian turn, or into climate organizations or into immigration related issues, a myriad of issues, you know a couple of things. One is we live in a time of sort of atomized, fragmented, late stage neoliberal capitalism. It's quite different from the 1960s in that regard, right. So many cultural psychological forces are pushing people to be isolated, whether they're glued to their phones or they're living alone or in very small family groups or in suburban areas where they're not part of a community. So there's a lot of forces and tendencies and even a psychology, a neoliberal psychology that you're on your own and you're a self-development, entrepreneurial project, and so not a lot of people have confidence in the ties that bind us, in the concept of solidarity, and so that's point A. Point B is, I think people don't have what's called efficacy, self-efficacy and collective efficacy. This is the idea that I can do something, I have the skills to deploy myself and make change if I want to, or I can be part of a group that can be deployed to make change change, you know.
Speaker 2:I think the third part is sort of misinformation, right? People don't have a good diagnosis of the problem. Whether it be the climate issue, which is often sort of misunderstood, many people feel like tech has got this. Either they feel fatalist or doomist and they don't need to do anything, or they feel that tech has got this and there's some solutions around the corner. Like Bill McKibben says, solar is so cheap now, so okay, I don't need to do anything.
Speaker 2:So one part of that is kind of not having a good diagnosis, and I think that same goes for a lot of the social movement stuff now around the authoritarian term. People will turn up in very large rallies like no kings for two hours and shake their fist and then go home and do nothing. I think that relates to a fourth issue, which is that it onuses upon us nothing. I think that that relates to a fourth issue, which is that it onuses upon us, or those of us who organize these organizations and movements, to make it easy for people to join, to make them feel they all joined up in something bigger, and that is a very, very big challenge.
Speaker 1:I have to say we're not going to have much differences between us. If I had listed my reasons, they would have been effectively the same thing. But the hard part comes, I guess, when we then think okay, if those are the factors, what are the things where we start to think outside the box, maybe a little, and we start to think not repeating the past, but doing something suited to those problems? What should the movements be doing? What should no Kings have done? That would be different than what it did?
Speaker 2:I don't know that I'm the best person to answer that, right. I mean, I think there are serious social movement scholars in the United States that you could turn to. I can answer narrower questions, I think, about climate organizations. Okay, I will just say, and you know this, and it's very obvious that we go to these no kings protests. The one in San Diego was enormous, I mean. I don't think we'd ever seen a, certainly substantial. I looked around and it had changed, from you know, several months prior right.
Speaker 2:And now it was much broader.
Speaker 2:Like everyone was there.
Speaker 2:That would be anything like far left, slightly left, center left, center and center right, the typical liberals, but the Palestine Solidarity Crowd, lgbtq+, all sorts of organizations and groups were united momentarily for a few hours in kind of railing against the authoritarian turn right and this tyranny, really.
Speaker 2:And then they go home and you sort of wish that someone would run around and give a flyer out to everybody and say let's get together. And of course that requires an ideology, and I don't think we have that ideology right. And I think it's quite a challenge because there are typical liberals who just think if Cory Booker or Kamala Harris would be in power, everything would be okay, and that's a long way away from those of us on the left who don't have that diagnosis. And there are much bigger problems here that go much bigger and much further than just the carbon problem or just the Trump problem. Right, there's fundamentally a problem here with modernity and the way our society is constituted, but that's the challenge. The challenge is there ought to be a way to bind people together and that's fundamentally, I think, an organizing problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and tell me if you'd agree. The efforts so far as important as they've been and as critical to continuing, as critical to developing some momentum have been more mobilizing than organizing, as in they've been more. Here's the place, here's the time. Come on down as compared to much more. Here's why we're going out.
Speaker 1:Here's what success looks like when we're doing a demonstration like this. It doesn't look like ending Trump. It doesn't look like ending climate problems. It does look like mobilizing more people as compared to the same number or less, and it does look like making those kinds of connections that you suggested. I mean, if you go to no Kings and you think this sucks, it didn't end Trump, and then you go home and somebody says, come on back a month later and you say, no, I'd rather do something else because that's worthless. If that's the way you're thinking, your decision is understandable. I mean, am I hearing you right? I think that's what maybe we're saying. On the other hand, if you understood what a demonstration can mean and how it can lead to another and another, and with larger and larger groups, and then with more and more connectivity and militants as well, then you see something entirely different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I mean the rallies, especially large ones like the no Kings one, have merit in that they make something very visible. They make it very visible that there's large numbers of people who don't agree. So there's some value in that. But of course it's diminishing returns to keep turning out like that and in fact it's like doing beach cleanups right, like people can go and pick up litter on the beach and think they're saving the planet and they're doing diddly squat. So going to these repeated protests and just turning up for two hours in a way as a displacement for, or could be seen as a displacement for, the hard organizing work that needs to happen.
Speaker 2:Look, I think in general apart from certain, you know, elites or people that are sort of upper middle class or university professors like myself, are doing quite well Many people are being immiserated and in the UK I was.
Speaker 2:In the UK I haven't been for a very long time, I don't travel very much, but I was there and there's an absolute crisis really, that affordability crisis, housing crisis, like we have here, and these movements need to start connecting, even in a progressive sense, with the fundamental material needs of people. They need to get mobilized around their material needs into a proper kind of outrage directed at corporates and elites, a kind of progressive populism, and that needs to be a real grassroots movement that gives us a new politics, not the other way around. We don't need a politician to jump up and say follow me. We need a movement to develop on the ground that gives us new politics. So I'm sure you probably agree with this diagnosis, michael, but, like, who's going to make that happen and how that's going to work, I don't know. You know, but I think the people that lead these things need to get together and start strategizing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, we certainly agree on that, and there's something I mean maybe there's one place that we could have a slight disagreement and maybe explore it a little bit. I actually think that the big demonstrations, they're not only not that much, but they're counterproductive if they get smaller. Because if they get smaller, they say to the elites wait it out, no problem, it's not going anywhere. If they get, if they're smaller, but they get larger, right, the first one doesn't have to be. So if they're steadily growing and if there's a steady drift of slogans and of uh, anger, of, of of commitment, and if there are people joining lasting movements, then it says to elites what the fuck Our activities are generating, something we don't want to face, and then you start to have an effect. Um, but it requires that extra dimension. It requires that the big meetings.
Speaker 1:What do you think about this? Okay, suppose the big gathering is about climate instead of Trump, for the sake of the discussion, and so there's a big turnout, and maybe the next time there's even a slightly bigger turnout or a significantly bigger turnout. So that's a good trajectory. A slightly bigger turnout or a significantly bigger. So that's a good trajectory. What do you think about the demonstration going to the gated community or the, even the house, the mansion in which the head of Exxon lives, or whatever. I was struck by the Tesla strikes or boycotts and their effectivity, not to change the whole world at once, but to rattle Musk and to even, you know, remove him from inside the government. Why not copy those? Why not expand those? What do you think?
Speaker 2:I agree with you. Well, we never really know how these things work, okay. But I agree with you.
Speaker 1:It appears to be the case.
Speaker 2:It appears to be the case that those smart and targeted protests at the Tesla dealerships in particular were effective. I think they were, that was my assessment and that really hurt Musk and probably led to him pulling out to some extent. So hats off to the people that did that. Now, that's a nice example. It's a good tactic. You find a target, in that case Musk, and you hurt him by focusing on the dealerships directly, and so that's the thing to do. Sometimes that's a very good tactic, but that's not so straightforward in other issues, I mean in the climate case. You know you could do that at the CEO of Exxon's house possibly, but it wouldn't have much effect, because the CEO of Exxon is under fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for shareholders, and if he has a moral qualm, they'll replace him, like he split with someone else. You know this was sort of David Graeber made this point a lot right. It's a kind of a misdiagnosis to expect that we've got to sway the elites on moral grounds.
Speaker 1:Nothing moral there, yeah.
Speaker 2:Are you raising costs for them? Going to the house of the CEO is not going to have any impact on the profitability of Exxon, but going to the Tesla dealerships deters people from buying Teslas and damages the brand, and that does affect right.
Speaker 1:So it's about tactics. What's the next test. What do you do instead for climate? To raise social costs for the people who have the power to say, uh-oh, we have to change our activity.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, so we're talking about climate now. Okay, well, this is a big challenge, right? I mean, andreas Malm wrote his book how to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is sort of an argument. It's not about blowing up pipelines, but it was an argument about property damage. He's not saying we should hurt anybody, but he's exhorting the movement, saying you know, this is the only movement in history that never picked up a stone, right? I mean, the suffragettes broke thousands of windows. I mean they smashed things. Right, they broke glass. So if we look at many movements in history, you know, the example he gives in how to Blob a Pipeline is the German group Ende Gelände, which is these very amazing people who go into the coal pits in Western Germany, near Cologne, wrapped in these kind of white sheets and they literally take over the coal pit and try and stop the coal mining, which they did for years very effectively. And I think he points out in his book at one point, there are hundreds of them standing on, thousands, tens of thousands of small rocks, stones, and the police come in and start hitting them with batons and spraying with water cannon, and nobody would ever pick up a stone. And this is a very strange situation he points out because if you look at what's at stake, you know that the forces of fossil extraction are literally making life unlivable for us, probably the century, within decades. Actually, it's happening, it's unfolding. So he has that kind of exhortation.
Speaker 2:Look, I think it's a big challenge to identify targets and I think it depends on the situation. It depends on the situation If it's an environmental justice issue. If you can link the fossil pollution to a local area, like extraction in LA where it's harming people's health, trucking at ports that harms people's health, and you're saying we're going to protest, we're going to get out there, we're going to block the road, we're going to bring all the pressure we can so that you electrify the port, that you stop the trucking, that you cancel those oil wells, you can win. And we have lots of great examples of that, including California right and all around the country. If it's narrowly focused on, for example, people's health and you make it concrete and you go up against the extraction that's happening right there, you can win. But outside of those examples it is very challenging to really hurt capital and to hurt extraction and in some countries in Europe it's being criminalized now. The kinds of protests that Just Stop Oil, and some of the German groups have been doing so. There's a real pushback.
Speaker 2:But I guess the takeaway here is it's quite hard to identify targets. You can try and block Chase Bank, which has financed fossil extraction, by I don't know what it is right now 600 billion or something since the Paris Accords 500 billion and that's a good idea. You get visibility. But to really amp that up at a societal level, to get people to shift their banking out of all of the main banks and go to credit unions, would be a blow to fossil capital. But that requires a huge orchestration of people. So this is a central issue. If I can elaborate this a little bit, the climate organizations are too tiny, Michael Right, and if my estimate is, they're about point zero01% or less, way less 0.001% perhaps of people actually organized, and so they can do things like try to draw attention to the banking, get people to shift their banking. But until they reach a wider sector of society and publics are much more engaged, you can't really make a dent in things like fossil finance.
Speaker 1:But there seems to be a kind of a catch-22, except that I don't think it, I don't agree that it's there. In other words, you're saying, okay, our movement, the number of people who are committed and who will think about things and be strategic, is too small right now. Agreed, but the road to it being bigger isn't to assume it's bigger. You have to do things that you can do when you're too, when you don't have that capacity. So that's why I'm suggesting that, affecting the discussion, affecting what's on people's minds, bringing the issues clearly, but also, I don't know how to we go back to that question of what stops people. So, in other words, right now in the US, you have to be in a coma to not see which way things are going.
Speaker 1:I mean, really, it's gotten to the point. For one thing, trump says which way things are going and there's no secrets about it. So people see it, people know everything's broken, people know everything's getting worse, much worse, but they hesitate. And the same thing is pretty much true of global warming. I think it's just that it's further down the rails. People got familiar, began to realize, holy shit, this could kill us all.
Speaker 2:And then something holds people back, and I'm not sure To talk about the climate thing, maybe more narrowly, which I feel more confident doing than everything broadly right, more confident doing than everything broadly right. Which is that? Look, I think we can look to the history of social movements, social organizations and social movement theory, and I think it's typically seen that there are three components that really get people going right. There's people's moral interests we see the enormous role of that, for example, in the Palestine Solidarity Movement now amongst the youth and others. Moral interests, material interests and your identity.
Speaker 2:And I think, you know, if we look at the climate organizations, which are absolutely minuscule and I think I've been very much part of those and I'll keep on but we have not succeeded, right, we have failed. I think in many ways we should recognize that and be honest about it. We're too tiny. Now, part of that is it's mostly being framed as a moral concern. What do we want? Climate justice? That's a moral concern. It's not framed around people's material interest, apart from a few examples of environmental justice struggles where it's local air pollution, and sometimes worker and union issues, although that's been very difficult, right.
Speaker 1:And then it's-. Let me just pause you for a second, because I'm having trouble. Why is survival just a moral issue?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, that's a good question. So you could say it isn't people's material interest to jump into climate organizations and push the elites to bring the policy yeah.
Speaker 2:So I see that and I agree, and I have young children and I think about impacts on the global South, and I'm attuned and alive to what is happening, and I feel I have enough of a read on the science to understand that it's really coming down and that damage is exponential, and so it is in my personal interest.
Speaker 2:Now that's an interesting issue, which is that I think that it flags that in some ways, people don't have enough knowledge and don't understand. Now this leads to a difficult conundrum, michael, which is that there's been this idea for a long time in climate communication, that we have an information deficit in our societies and we've got to open people's heads and pour in knowledge At some level. That has been misguided because it hasn't worked at all, because it's not sufficient. It may be necessary, but it's not sufficient, and I think about all the sort of liberal types I know in California, especially the university system. Everybody knows about global heating and some people know quite a lot about it, and very few will lift a finger beyond very minor changes, like they'll buy EVs and put solar panels.
Speaker 1:That's the question I'm asking you.
Speaker 2:Okay, they won't join action. Um, now, part of that is that it is. It is in our material interest, in a sense, that it's going to start impunging. You know, uh, uh, it'll start affecting your life, but that's also uncertain where and when and how. And if you're relatively well off and comfortable or, conversely, have no sort of social power, you're going to be focused on more bread and butter issues that are right in front of you. And if you are well off, you'll think that you can escape it.
Speaker 2:I mean, it has a kind of psychological distance to it. We get hit by LA wildfires that cost 250 billion and everyone talks about it. It's on your screens, everyone freaks out and a few months go by and it's like people forget about it. It moves on. The hurricanes hit enormous damage, people there are affected for a long time, but if you're not directly affected, it moves out of your consciousness. Winter comes, it rains, sun comes out, the sky is blue and people move on. So it has this kind of remote, even though it becomes more and more in our living rooms. That is not. Another way to say this is that the weather is not a good teacher of climate opinions. The weather is not a good, not a good teacher of opinions or people's opinions. There's other reasons. There's something called shifting baselines as things get worse and worse. People get accustomed to that. But okay, back to the thing moral interests, material interests and identity. So I think part of the answer and that's what I argued in the piece, or rather in the piece that you referred to in Z-Net I was responding to a proposal okay, and the proposal is that it's first of all starting from the recognition that our climate organizations are too tiny which also applies, by the way, to the organizations opposed to authoritarianism, right Starting from the realization that our organizations are too tiny, recognizing that most people are just not going to mobilize in a country like the UK, apart from a very small number of people, kind of an intersection of the environmentalists and the leftists Extinction Rebellion, just Stop Oil.
Speaker 2:People see them as too radical, they see them as too noisy, they see them as too noisy, they see them as having identity. They don't share All those reasons In order to get a bigger mobilization, the proposal the UK proposal that I kind of critiqued in that piece was to say we need to focus people now on preparing and defending their own lives. This is kind of a strategic adaptation idea. If people in local communities are in the struggle to retrofit their homes and to get insulation because they have heat waves in Europe that are frightening, to get flooding protections, to have heat pumps to save electricity you know electricity is too high, so they could right you get people to get involved in local struggles for local stuff that benefits them directly, then you could now get a lot more people mobilized for the kind of climate organizations to do other stuff. That's kind of the proposal and I kind of critique that. There are issues with how they're trying to do it, but I think generally approximately that's correct.
Speaker 2:I think when I look at University of California, ucsd, we have had an incredibly dramatic impact on the climate policy of the institution, of the 10-campus system and our campus. We have won amazing concessions and when I look at it, we had a core about 20 people in the organization out of a student population of 35,000. Even then we had successes right. We've won a general ed requirement for climate. We've forced the campus to make electrification plans. We kicked out Chase Bank. We've accomplished amazing things.
Speaker 2:But even after all these years we do a rally. You know we might have 100 people out of 35,000 students out of 60,000 on the campus. In fact, the size has gone down over time. So why? This is the crux of your question. I think it's too far away, it's too remote, it's too difficult. Taking on the chancellor for burning fossil fuel on the campus has not seemed to be a struggle that most people are going to get into, and one of the reasons for that is it doesn't connect directly to the material interest. So we have to start thinking about how to do that.
Speaker 1:I want to back up a little to something that you said, which is when you were describing people understanding the condition that we're in, so to speak, but not coming in. You said and I can't replicate it they see us as too noisy, they see us as annoying, they see us as inflexible, they see whatever an array of things, sort of getting to the identity thing. They see us in a way which they feel, if they slip into that, if they go down the slippery slope of taking the leaflet and then going to the demonstration and getting aroused, et cetera, they'll become like that, and they don't want to become like that, because they may lose some friends, they may have family problems, they may. You know, it seems like there's more to lose than to gain. I think for some people, some people see it that way, and I'm not talking about rich people, of course, but I'm talking about those 60,000 students on the campus and I wonder whether that says something about how I guess when it's 20, it's too few to register but how the 20,000 people in the streets of San Diego, or 30 or 40,000, appear, how they seem to. In other words, you got to give Trump one thing. I think the MAGA gave a set of people who were desperate a sense of something that you mentioned earlier efficacy, a sense of being on a team that was going to win or that could win, that might win right. It was more than enough that they were aroused by that and they identified with that and they related to that.
Speaker 1:Now I'm not saying we replicate MAGA. I'm saying is there a way for climate sanity, for ecological survival to be fought that will make it not only morally, ethically, materially right, but will make it a way of acting that appeals to people? It's the team you want to be on. That's one of the things that happened in the 60s. We went from being noisy, annoying, obnoxious to being where you wanted to be. It was not everybody, but lots and lots of people. So that part we don't. The hippies helped us, um, a whole lot and you don't have that now. The culture helped us a whole lot. That is the burgeoning youth culture and folk music and all of that. It's more difficult now because people you know people are operating without those aids. I suppose you could call them, but still, I'm wondering whether you think that, while climate sanity has reason on its side, it doesn't have I don't know what to call it? Desirability on its side, attractiveness on its side. I want to be there. I want to be on that team, right.
Speaker 2:Does that make any sense? It does make sense. You're making some good points there. Look, I think I'll refer back to try and address this.
Speaker 2:Think back to Extinction Rebellion in the UK 2018. Exactly, yeah, now apparently they were critiqued by the far left, marxists and such didn't really want to join them because they said you guys are woo-woo and you don't have a hard… Wait, you guys are what Woo-woo. Woo-woo is a kind of a British term, I suppose, for like spiritual and having fun, and you don't have a hard material analysis of the problem. So we'll stick this out. And so Extinction Rebellion, in a way, had good ideas at the start, which is that they combined grief loss with social excitement and mobilization and a kind of aesthetics and a culture and lots of art and music. It was very entertaining and I think there's something absolutely correct in that, and you're referring to that in the 60s, and we obviously don't have that kind of aesthetics at our no Kings protest. It's too discombobulated, it's too all over the place.
Speaker 2:Now back to Extinction Rebellion. Yes, they did something right there, and that shows us that when we and to your point, when we go forward, it can't just be about people's material interest. It also has to be about values, it has to be about identity, it has to be about having fun and having a kind of aesthetics, a culture, a wide spectrum saturation of a kind of art, art and culture that goes with it, culture that goes with it In the case of Extinction Rebellion. Although they did that well, it was too narrow right. They ended up being seen, I think, by the wider British public as a bunch of crunchy leftists from.
Speaker 2:Cornwall. They were exporiated in all sorts of ways and not everyone was going to go. And then, of course, they went in for the arrest strategy and they looked radical and they were radical and unapologetically.
Speaker 2:I think it's good, but it wasn't going to galvanize hundreds of thousands of Britons to go and join them. Now, of course, we don't need everybody to be in the streets. We need people to be organizing and organized, and that doesn't mean you have to go and shake your fist at the system. But I think you're absolutely right. Apart from finding a way to make this in people's material interest, so that they feel I have a stake in this, this matters. I'm going to join this movement in the university because it affects my family in the Central Valley of California. I'm going to learn how to get involved in campaigns because it's about me and my family and protection and defense against climate impacts and securing the investments we need in California. Maybe that will really mobilize people.
Speaker 2:But it also needs to be an identity. It also needs to be fun, it also needs to have a culture, and I think the same would go for this wider predicament we have now about how do we join up all the myriad organizations in a place like California that are opposed to what Trump is doing in so many different spaces, that are all doing their things simultaneously. And that is about having an ideology. It's about having a culture, about having aesthetics I think you're absolutely right about that and people need to have fun and they need to turn up and be part of it. So there are. I mean, I think we've hit on a few ingredients here, michael, but how this all gets put together, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, one thing seems sure it's not going to get put together if people don't want to put it together, that is to say, if people aren't. How do I put this? If the people who write and would that it was more. But if the people who write report how bad everything is and then report how bad everything is again and then do it again, but they don't try and build this kind of approach that you're proposing, then they're not going to build that approach, they're not going to contribute to building that approach. And if the organizations that are mobilizing the big demonstrations don't have this in mind or something like it, uh, then it won't arise either. But you know indivisible claims. I mean, you probably know more about this, I don't. I'm not sure. They claim to be trying to, to prepare, to empower a million organizers. Is this just noise or is it real? Do you know? I don't know about that.
Speaker 2:Look, I think the central problem in both the climate organizations because there isn't really a movement, but there should be a movement and the same thing here outside the climate organizations and the sort of social organizations we need a movement and a movement is everything joined up together. Yeah, I think the thing we're talking about here, michael, is how does it get joined up together? And I think you know there are people more knowledgeable about me that you could get to try and speak to that Longer term observers, people involved in the movements of the 60s scholars. We need people who are not only scholars but actually know something about the practice too, which is kind of rare. But that joining up is important and it's difficult, you know, when I even think about the students at the campus, you know the core students in our group were more radical. They are prepared to go with megaphones and shout at the system and they are seen by most students. I don't want to do that. I don't want to go to that rally. I don't want to be a shouty person.
Speaker 1:You're right.
Speaker 2:But there are lots of students involved in sort of quote unquote sustainability organizations. I don't think anything we're doing is sustainable, so I don't like that word, but you know, sustainability organizations like trying to do food, waste and plastic issues on campus, which are worthwhile things too, but ultimately they are in the same direction. How do you bridge those divides? And this is, of course, the problem. In the left, generally right, and I just think about the spaces I see here, there's so many local organizations doing very good things in all sorts of different areas, but they have lots of different points of view, disagreements about things, grievances with each other, but they share core values, they share a core orientation. They all understand what we're up against now, but they have to get joined together.
Speaker 2:And I think this question about joining together is a critical one, and the same in the climate space. There are hundreds of climate-related organizations in California hundreds and they are not organized together, they are not concerted, there isn't an overarching tent, they can't pull together, they don't connect with the wider public, and that's a general issue. Now. That's a thing we should start thinking about. How do you join?
Speaker 1:things up. So let's ask about that for a second, because I certainly agree. So let's ask about that for a second, because I certainly agree, you can't do it. I assume you'd agree where you're saying to people let's all get together, we have to be together, to win, we have to be together, etc. Let's do it behind the banner right when my banner might be.
Speaker 1:Smash racism, smash, misogyny, smash, whatever, but it's my, it's a banner. Let's do it behind. After all, global warming affects us all. Let's all get together to fight. For, you know, behind the banner of global warming, those whose banner it isn't will be suspicious, rightly, I think, that their focuses, that their priorities will be underplayed and that their agenda will tend to disappear and things will then dissipate. So how do you have a banner which is inclusive of everybody?
Speaker 2:have a banner which is inclusive of everybody, or not everybody, but all the. The key. Well, this is, this is the. This is a great question and this is a real struggle. I mean, I I think, for example, about the climate organizations, okay, and you know, there was recently a rally here and I went. Five people were wearing a keffiyeh, I I was one of them out of a thousand.
Speaker 2:It wasn't acceptable in that space to start shouting free, free Palestine. People would start frowning at you. This is the mainstream. So this is a group of people and I admire many of them and they're doing good work. But they sort of have a theory here that we're going to narrowly shout at the fossil fuel industry and advocate for wind and solar. And we're going to narrowly shout at the fossil fuel industry and advocate for wind and solar and we're going to have a nice clean, green technical transition. It's just around the corner, if we can just win it.
Speaker 2:And some of us are like, uh-uh, there's a much bigger problem here. It's bigger than carbon. We're superseding seven of nine planetary boundaries. There's something fundamentally awry with capitalism and with imperialism. Do you think a world in which we stand by while Gaza is absolutely trashed, whether it's death camps, annihilation, a complete trashing of international law, almost all European governments, except Spain and Ireland, cheering it on or at least doing nothing arming it. You think that world is one in which you're going to have international agreements to cut emissions? We have a more systemic problem here, and so now you have an issue because the mainstream movement is very narrowly focused on certain kinds of things. Now, it might be that the things they're focused on are good things. They are good things. We should stop with the fossil fuels. We should increase renewable energy. I think it depends who owns the renewable energy, under what terms, for whose purpose, for whose benefit, what any renewable energy will do. So maybe it's okay. Okay, but you're right. Like this is very hard. Like what is the overall banner?
Speaker 2:And this is the question, I suppose, about ideology we have to articulate in the progressive space, a broad ideology that can get broad buy-in and we're going to have to put differences aside and put different theories of change aside and kind of come behind this thing, and that needs to get articulated.
Speaker 2:I think a kind of progressive populism that turns people against corporate power and elites is a good starting place. But for all the reasons and with all the components we've mentioned having culture, having art, having fun, having an aesthetics and that that also needs to connect with people's material interests. I think public ownership is a good example of that. I'm of the view that the climate organizations should focus on things like public ownership of the electric grid and public ownership of the electric grid and public ownership of the electric grid that centers renewable energy deployment, locally controlled by the people, for the people of the people. That's a nice example of an ideology about public ownership that would have climate benefits, it would have resilience benefits and it would connect with people's everyday experience and material interests and potentially be a big mobilizer. But I'm not sure everyone agrees with me on that or I don't see that being an ideology yet.
Speaker 1:But it should be Go back one step. You described being at that demonstration five of you and then you said that the larger elements that were driving those more let's call them liberal, but really it's larger demonstrations and outpourings don't like all that stuff. And my question is, and I don't know, is it the case that the elements that are pushing those efforts, that are mobilizing those efforts, don't like it, but the grassroots could very easily like it? I mean, that is, is it really the case that if there were 30,000 people, let's say, in San Diego, in that demonstration, right in San Diego, in that demonstration, right that if you sat in a bar or in a bedroom or wherever, right, with each one of those people, ridiculous.
Speaker 1:But if you did and you described, probably for only about a minute and a half, palestine and you asked them should we be sending bombs to drop on these people? I think most would say no in such a conversation. In other words, I'm not sure that the problem is the population as compared to the people who are I don't know what to call it in command of the population. I don't mean Trump, I mean, you know our.
Speaker 2:The organizers of the rallies, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean I think, look, maybe you're right. Look, I think I remember being at a at the big no Kings one, and I was close to the uh Palestine solidarity group, jewish voice for peace and allies, and they were very lively and they made a hell of a racket and they had some good numbers they must have been 50, 60 of them and they had drums and they had really strong chants and I was with them for a while and then I was near them as I was walking and I sort of looked around at the people typical liberals, I would say who really were discomfited by this. They wanted to move away from that. This was not why they came. This looked to them like something else. It wasn't what it was. They weren't able to connect the dots.
Speaker 2:Now you might be right you may be right that the dots could be connected for them, but that's a political education issue. This is, I think, interesting. What we're talking about here is the Noah King's thing happens 60,000 people there and everyone leaves and goes home. But if there would be a way of joining people up and all the different organizations and spaces, there is some kind of coherence and there is some kind of commitment to political education and understanding and shared understandings, then you may get somewhere. Michael, I don't know how easy it is to take, let's just say, a liberal for want of a better word a middle-class white person of a professional class, and sit down and explain to them what's happening in Gaza and Palestine.
Speaker 1:They know.
Speaker 2:They do.
Speaker 1:Well.
Speaker 2:I don't know, it just isn't it doesn't.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't know how to people are now dying in the street, literally starving to death in the street, dropping in Gaza. I think people can understand that it's not very complicated, right. I mean it's just not Just like Trump isn't complicated. Somehow. There's a disconnect between knowing that, knowing everything is broken, knowing it's abysmal, no Right and then feeling it.
Speaker 1:Not going back to Netflix, not going back to I mean, students will correct me, you teach, tell me if this is false my nieces. I asked them about high school because that's where they are, but I think it's true for college too. I said you know, is there any discussion of what's going on in the country? In your classes, is there any discussion of Trump and of you know the direction things are moving in and the fears people have? No, I said any, no, none, that was their answer. Is it happening?
Speaker 1:In other words, even on the college campuses, this should be the topic, right, this should be not even just in sociology classes or economics classes, but in fucking mathematics classes. Right, it ought to be coming up, if not by the faculty, then by the students. But it doesn't. I mean, I just don't understand it. Commiserate with weep over what's happening and then go to class and go right back into doing whatever it is that the class is doing, which has nothing to do with what's going on in the world, and I don't understand how that happens, I mean psychologically.
Speaker 1:That's partly why I invited you on, because of your background and you know whether you had thought about this kind of thing well, it's interesting what you say.
Speaker 2:I mean, if I can come back to the climate space, you know joanna macy, who recently died, who's sort of uh, very well known for well, all sorts of things, coping with our emotions, and she described the. But she described the three things the great turning the business as usual and the double reality. What was that? The third one, double reality, double reality, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like you know, I was at the University at UC San Diego back in I don't know February when the LA fires were happening, and then we started to have some fires here. In fact, a fire broke out right next to the campus and faculty were jumping in their cars and fleeing to the freeway. So that was for a moment business as usual broke down and suddenly it's kind of like a David Lynch movie. The curtain was lifted and people kind of saw the underlying reality, right, quite frightening. Reality is not the way we thought it was. Something needs to change, we need something different. But then the next day it's business as usual.
Speaker 2:So you kind of live in this double reality and you know, I think it is a real challenge. You can, for example and I have this with students in my class when I lay out the climate science for them and the predicament, where we are likely headed, what is happening, how things are unfolding, how much heating we have, how much damage we have, the impacts we're on our way to two Celsius now. Maybe within 10 or 15 years 99% of coral reefs will be gone. I mean, anybody who engages seriously with that, as students in my class are sort of forced to, will be in tears, right. I mean, if people haven't sobbed and felt grief, then they're not paying attention to reality, they don't care about the world and the biosphere and the animals and plants and people. So you kind of can feel that you can see it, you can be shocked by it. But then of course you come out of the lecture, as you said, and the sky is blue and everyone around you is carrying on as usual. And it's quite hard to carry these things at the same time right To carry the sense of the heavy knowledge you have of what's happening and to kind of get on in everyday life. And I think psychologically that is very difficult and I think the onus is on those of us who do see clearly and have understanding and knowledge in our various spaces to keep on communicating and keep on rousing people and keep on waking them up.
Speaker 2:And I think you know, in these authoritarian times and I sort of think about the wider neighborhood and the spaces I'm embedded there's very the parents of the kids at school. No one talks about this. It's quite hard to talk to people and sort of say you know, this doesn't look good, this direction of travel. I'm very concerned about the country. I'm concerned about the ice raids in our neighborhood. People don't really want to talk about it, and I think this gets back to where we started our conversation. We are atomized, fragmented in these late neoliberal capitalist times. There isn't a space in the society, in the culture, to have political discussions, to be organized, to feel solidarity. People go back to their home and do their thing, and so I think we've sort of done a bit of a circle here, michael and the onus is on us to kind of keep banging the drum, I suppose.
Speaker 1:We agree again. Just as another indicator of it, I guess you're in a law firm or you're in a university, because those are two things that came under assault quite visibly in the US right, and Trump's at the door, trump's demanding obedience. And it's not a smaller firm. These things are big and they have hundreds to thousands of lawyers, and many of them are young and haven't gone through 10 years of courtroom socialization. They are just out of law school and they want to do something with their lives, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:But the reflex seems to be where's my resume? In other words, the reflex is they're affected, they're worried, they're going to get fired, they're even convinced they're going to get fired. But their reflex is I'll solve it on my own. They're going to get fired, but their reflex is I'll solve it on my own. Give me my resume, I'll compete and get another job. And on the campus it's sort of similar, you know, when the Columbia thing broke, and then now it's happening elsewhere too and not getting as much coverage. The students, they're affected. I mean, it's not as if it's not, it's right in their face, right, right there. And yet the solution is to sort of hunker down individually, not everybody, but a lot. So I guess it's you calling it atomization. I'm going a step further, I guess because we often think of movements are atomized. It's every fucking person is atomized, right? I think that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean just, you know, on the campuses. To be clear, we had a very impressive sort of encampment in multiple places last year.
Speaker 1:For Palestine.
Speaker 2:For Palestine. We had a mobilization and I want to say what I saw was, you know, at the core. It was small at the beginning but it, you know, before the encampment there were rallies every week.
Speaker 2:a thousand strong. I mean, there hadn't been rallies that big at UC San Diego since the Vietnam era. A thousand strong every week, okay. So more and more students start to get the idea Something's wrong here. They're000 strong every week, okay. So more and more students start to get the idea Something's wrong here. They're driven by moral concern. They can see it on TikTok and Instagram. Their friends are doing it. It had a kind of I don't know, it didn't really have a culture and aesthetics. Perhaps that was broadly appealing, but it's something you needed to go to and turn up, and people are paying more attention.
Speaker 2:And then we had the incumbents and they got crushed before Trump, right by the liberals, right by the university chancellors not every campus, but certainly ours and that crushing was very bad, michael, because it created a fear and it shattered the solidarity and, of course, those spaces on campus. By the way, I think another reason they were crushed was that they represented as kind of like Occupy space. It was a liberated space. There was barter and exchange, there was poetry and dance, there were people behaving as if we didn't have this kind of voracious capitalist system around us, right?
Speaker 2:They were actually for a moment, entertaining a different world. It was beautiful in that sense, quite aside from the.
Speaker 2:Palestine issue, entertaining a different world, was beautiful in that sense, yeah, quite aside from the Palestine issue. So it was crushed and you know it's that happened before Trump and that created like a really. So I think, look, we don't have to be too. I think we can see ignition, it can happen again, people can get engaged, but we have to sort of it has to get figured out. There has to be some good heads put together about this. We need honest analyses. We need to recruit the social movement scholars of the past and the present, those people who've been in movements and understand things practically, to start really thinking hard about how to put these ingredients together.
Speaker 1:All right, we're at an hour. Is there something that we haven't addressed that you'd like to bring up before we bring it to a close? I mean, I guess.
Speaker 2:I'm curious about what you think, michael about. I don't know. No'll leave. I'll leave it there.
Speaker 1:I'll leave it there I'm curious about what you think. I don't know nothing, actually. I'll give you a little anecdote on that. I think I have said I have answered questions, I don't know, more times in the last six months than in the prior 77 years. Right, and it's just a perpetual. I don't know, I'm not sure I can guess, but you know, and I think that's part of what the intention of what is all that's going on is, you know, and we have to somehow go be better than that also and start to have some answers. Anyway, it's been a pleasure having you and maybe sometime down the road we'll do it again.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about one little project before we get off. It's called All of Us. I don't know whether you've seen anything. All of Us, capital U, capital S and it's mostly a cyber project because it means to connect people to organizations. So, in other words, joe in Des Moines goes to all of us online and wants to, is aroused, has become upset, or maybe he's a longtime activist coming back one or the other, and he uses this facility to search for organizations that he's interested in, that do the things he or she wants to do and that has needs that he or she can relate to and it has a means to connect with them. So it's precisely one small step in trying to move people from being mobilized to being connected and engaged, and it's at allofusdirectoryorg and there are a lot of climate groups who have begun relating to it, so maybe you can take a look at it, let us know what you think and tell people about it.
Speaker 2:Will do and sounds like a very good idea. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:All right, well, thanks a lot, take it easy, and all that said this is Mike Albert, signing off until next time for Revolution Z.