Letter to an activist

Dear X,

Yes­ter­day we had an argu­ment. The crux of our argu­ment is this: You believe real actions to save the plan­et are tak­en by trained, spe­cial­ist activists. Online actions, such as emails from a sup­port­er don’t count. You called them “triv­ial.”

I dis­agree.

I don’t know if you come from actu­al expe­ri­ence of those kinds of real-world actions you cham­pi­on. I do. I say this only to estab­lish that I know where­of you speak. I have US fed­er­al tres­pass on my rap sheet for hik­ing to ground zero at the Nevada nuclear weapons test site and delay­ing a det­o­na­tion by evad­ing secu­ri­ty for four days. I’ve marched on Wash­ing­ton and Lon­don. I’ve tast­ed tear-gas. I’ve bro­ken the law in Johan­nes­burg and Geneva, I’ve seen the inside of a Boston jail cell. I’m inti­mate­ly famil­iar with old style met­al hand­cuffs and mod­ern roller-lock reten­tion sys­tem dis­pos­able restrain­ing devices.

But I wasn’t born an activist, and I don’t know many who are. The polit­i­cal act that first opened my eyes to civil dis­obe­di­ence and the pow­er of non-vio­lent direct action was a triv­ial one. I went to a con­cert.

As it turned out, it was actu­al­ly a ral­ly. But that wasn’t why I showed up. I showed up because I liked the music of Jack­son Browne and Bon­nie Rait. And before I knew it, I was swept up. I heard the speech­es. I got the point. I signed a peti­tion. I bought a t-shirt. There was no email in those days, but had I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to send an email, I would have.

I don’t know how many oth­er peo­ple who showed up at one of the No Nukes ral­lies went in as music fans and came out oppo­nents of nuclear pow­er, but I was one of them. A triv­ial act put me on a very long road toward polit­i­cal action, civil dis­obe­di­ence, and direct, non-vio­lent action.

Send­ing an email or sign­ing a peti­tion or becom­ing a mem­ber of any activist organ­i­sa­tion is, for many, a small first step toward engag­ing with the chang­ing of the world.

And that’s essen­tial. Not every­one can run a rigid-hulled inflat­able boat in front of a har­poon. Not every­one can sail into the for­bid­den zone around a French nuclear weapons test. Not every­one can occu­py the Brent Spar oil rig to keep the UK gov­ern­ment and Shell oil from using the ocean as a dump­ing ground.

But those are the exam­ples that make peo­ple take action. And those of us who take those actions need to realise that we do so not sole­ly for the sake of the speci­fic action we take, but for the exam­ple it sets. The peo­ple that do those actions are the role mod­els for peo­ple who recy­cle. Peo­ple who buy ener­gy-effi­cient light bulbs. Peo­ple who buy organ­ic local pro­duce. Peo­ple who sign peti­tions and take email actions. Peo­ple who vote prod­ucts up and down with their wal­lets, and send politi­cians who don’t pro­tect the envi­ron­ment out of office with their votes.

Cer­tain­ly, the peo­ple who risk their lives, their free­dom, or their rep­u­ta­tion to stop ille­gal fish­eries put far more on the line for their beliefs than some­one who sim­ply sends a let­ter to their super­mar­ket ask­ing them not to stock pirate fish. But nei­ther action dene­grates the oth­er. They rein­force each oth­er.

For some, online activism is an adjunct to action in their dai­ly lives. For oth­ers, it’s a gate­way to larg­er actions. For still oth­ers, it may be all they do. That’s ok. Activism is a big church — it needs to include all those faiths, not splin­ter over who is wel­come in the door, and who shall be turned away as hea­then, or unwor­thy.

We have to provide those easy oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple to make a stand. And we need to design those oppor­tu­ni­ties so they real­ly make a dif­fer­ence. Every time some­body cre­ates what I call a “San­ta Claus cam­paign,” in which peo­ple are asked to write let­ters that will nev­er be read ask­ing for things that will nev­er be deliv­ered — they weak­en the form and chip away at people’s will­ing­ness to take real online actions. And I mean real online actions like Lawrence Lessing’s polit­i­cal donor strike to get cor­po­rate mon­ey out of the US elec­tions, like Amnesty’s suc­cess­ful efforts to free polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, like Greenpeace’s efforts to turn lead­ers of the IT sec­tor into cli­mate cham­pi­ons, by pro­vid­ing a coun­ter­force to the petro­le­um and coal lob­bies — and in so doing increas­ing the val­ue of their stakes in smart grids and renew­able tech­nolo­gies.

I’ve seen online activism stop a nuclear repro­cess­ing plant in Japan. I’ve seen it spur Apple to com­mit to phase out tox­ic chem­i­cals. I’ve seen it turn the tourist indus­try in Ice­land into an ally in the fight to save whales. I’ve seen it dri­ve Dove to the nego­ti­at­ing table over their use of rain­forest-destroy­ing palm oil in their prod­ucts. I’ve seen it dri­ve the gov­ern­ment in Argenti­na to pass a law pro­tect­ing their forests. There sim­ply isn’t any doubt: online activism works.

So there you have it. I know you work hard every day for what we both believe in. And as ever in Green­peace as in any activist organ­i­sa­tion, we will have argu­ments. May it always be so. Nobody can ratio­nal­ly expect har­mony from a group of head­strong, author­i­ty-ques­tion­ing, qua­si-anar­chists who think they can change the world.

But I hope my lit­tle mes­sage this morn­ing has helped you see my point of view. And that you’ll sign up to be a part of a 3-mil­lion-strong list of folks who have made a dif­fer­ence already, and who want their mice to con­tin­ue to roar.

For the Earth,

Bri­an