THREAD: I'm a community organiser in a big Australian climate advocacy organisation and Australia is on fire. I’m back at work today and have 18 thoughts re what the volunteers and colleagues I work with are going to need and what we might need to do differently.
1. We’re in the era of climate impacts now. Our movement started to stop this kind of thing happening, and that governs our whole approach and way of thinking. But now it is happening. We need to think about what that means for policies and how we work.
2. It’s OK first to acknowledge that it sucks. If you’re like me, you probably hoped something would come along and wake people up a bit, and also really wish it hadn’t been this. You might have also hoped we could avoid this day by working really hard. And yet here we are.
3. Since we’re in the era of climate impacts, we need to have positions and policies for handling climate impacts, and to start building public understanding and support for them. If we don’t have them yet we should start working on them.
4. Climate impacts also intersect with issues most of our orgs haven’t yet said very much about, for example border policy, the rise in gendered violence that follows disasters, the fact that rich people can charter boats to get them off beaches before the Navy arrives, and more.
5. Because the world of advocacy is structured as a thousand tiny issue-specific cells, most of us can’t come up with intersectional policy or statements on our own: we need to collaborate.
Maybe it’s more useful instead to help other orgs make the links to climate, and feel confident speaking about those links. Or maybe we should do both, I don’t know. I do know we’re a tiny part of civil society and can’t change society on our own.
6a. The impacts on First Nations mob are brutal, the discussion around responses led by mob is hopeful, and both are underreported in the media. Organisations which can help to amplify those stories should.
6b. This would also be a particularly good year for orgs to start using our reach to persuade people not to have a party on the birthday of colonisation if we haven’t started yet - that day is going to come on top of a lot of other tragedy.
7a. Entering the era of impacts also creates new ways for people to help who might not have been involved before, since all kinds of mutual aid and community support initiatives are now climate-related.
7b. There’s space for new kinds of action, probably new organisations, definitely new people. Is this work we should do ourselves, or is it more useful to support newcomers to organise themselves well and avoid those mistakes we’ve worked out how to avoid, or both?
8a. We’ve occasionally made space for people’s grief and sorrow, but most of the time we ask people to channel it into action pretty quickly. The action is still important, but their grief and sorrow is getting overwhelming, as is ours.
8b. We should start making more space available for people to deal with this, or else no-one will have the emotional energy to be involved in proactive campaigns.
8c. Personally I am a fan of Joanna Macy’s take on this aka ‘the work that reconnects’, and will be training in it this year; let me know if you’re also interested.
9. It’s really fucking terrifying, and it’s easy to feel hopeless, and like it’s too late to do anything worth doing. Explaining what people can still do, and why it matters, is more important now than it’s ever been.
10a. Related, everyone who thought climate impacts hitting a wealthy country would automatically make the government of that country take climate seriously is in for a real rude shock, and at real risk of despairing and giving up.
10b. Explaining what it takes to change a society and why it matters that we try is more important now than it’s ever been.
11a. Our ability to have any break at all from the things we work on is pretty drastically reduced. We’re seeing friends and family losing houses, getting evacuated, losing loved ones; some of us are having that happen ourselves; the news is saturated with disaster.
11b. That creates opportunities for solidarity, which is good, but also really increases our risk of burnout. I’ve gone into the start of a big year with burnout symptoms before and it wasn’t pretty. And I think they're probably all big years from here on in.
12a. You are all very conscientious people, or you wouldn’t be here. I know you tend to look at lists like the above and say WE HAVE TO DO BETTER, and push yourselves to work harder. But I don’t know many people in the climate movement who could work much harder for very long.
12b. If we add anything to what we already do, we’re going to have to drop other things. I don’t know what those other things are, but I’m sure we can’t go into 2020 after a summer like this and just keep pushing ourselves harder and not burn out.
13. So again, perhaps we shouldn’t try to be everything to everyone and should instead help other movements and organisations feel more confident to talk about how climate is impacting what they care about.
14a. I do know that people like you, who were willing to stare climate horror in the face before a few weeks ago, are rare and precious and I want you to stay involved for the long haul. Please be kind to yourselves and each other.
14b. It’s an easy time to want more from one another, to vent simmering frustrations with each other. But our only real hope has always been getting way more people involved, not a tiny fragment of the population working twice as hard, three times as hard, whatever.
15a. To be in a social movement is to have ideas about what it should be doing differently. I have those frustrations too, those things I wish our movement had done and hasn’t yet.
15b. But I want to communicate those things kindly, to remember you’re breathing the same choking poisonous air as me, that like me you have friends and family who’ve had to evacuate, who may have lost homes or friends, that you’re immersed in the horror too.
16a. The Overton Window has shifted: there are things that seemed unrealistic before this fire season which don’t seem unrealistic any more, and likewise with things that seemed realistic.
16b. It’s possible this is just a brief window; a mate of mine in the St Andrews CFA says people get real complacent real fast even after a nightmare fire. Is this different? I don’t know. We shouldn’t take it for granted, anyway.
17. People who were skeptical of global warming will start acting like they always knew it was real. The powerful ones we should hold to account, but the average punters who believed the lies in good faith we should just thank and welcome..
...and give conversation guides to so they can persuade those of their mates who are still on the fence.
18. We’ve learned before that even outrageous misinformation campaigns scapegoating some population can take root and be quite effective, and can have hideous results.
I’m not sure how many people are buying the line that greenies are starting fires to make people believe in climate change, but I’m not assuming it’s going to die quietly and I am not at all sanguine about it.
Our opponents have everything to lose if they can’t point the blame somewhere else, so they are highly motivated to make that smear work.
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