Greta Thunberg, Thanks for Getting Me Off My Lazy Butt

I don't consider myself an activist. I am way too hypocritical and impure for that. I don't typically participate in direct action or marches. It's really not the arena I feel I have the most to offer. Also, I don't like the earnestness, the black-and-white rhetoric, and us-vs.-them stuff, and the chest-pounding spectacle of moral superiority.

Through my research on environmental justice, the environmental movement, and environmental politics over the past 20 years as a scholar, I would never have said that my work slipped into anything resembling "activism." Advocacy, yes, because I would always conclude things like "we should stop doing X, and start doing Y to protect human and environmental wellbeing," or whatever. But a march? No thank you.

And I don't really like high-schoolers. Nothing against any of them individually, but high school was not a good time in my life, and even seeing high schools triggers me a bit.  I can do college students, barely, because at least they want to be there, and at least I can tailor my curriculum to their passions. They are ostensibly adults, so even on a high-hormone, poorly-developed pre-frontal cortex day, this pretense of maturity helps elevate the tone of our interactions.

So how did I end up speaking for the 30 or so Eureka high school students for today's Youth Climate Strike?

My daughter and friend school striking with us at the Youth Climate March

Sure, that's not a lot of people. But there was also once a time when Greta Thunberg was not a lot of people either.

What a march does is turns one person into thirty people into tens of thousands of people, right before your eyes, in the flesh, across the planet.

It counteracts all the ways that capitalism would have us think of ourselves as individuals, operating in our bubbles, tiny nobodies with no power to do anything against the monstrous beast of climate change.  Showing up is not my thing.  But showing up today because I couldn't see the grey area in the issue of young people really freaking out about the planet they will be inheriting, showed me that the showing up is a bolt of energy to everybody around you. It's also just the beginning, a symbol of what's to come. When you surround yourself with people working on solutions, hope is inevitable. As Greta Thunberg might say, you can't wait around to feel hopeful before you act. Action brings hope. 

I'm not likely to show up to a lot of marches or other showing up opportunities, but on occasion, especially when I'm offered a chance to, even in a small way bolster youth passion and help steer the narrative a bit as a speaker, I just gotta go.

Maybe it's the urgency of the situation, maybe it's the certainty of issues, maybe I'm getting older and feel like I have less time to dawdle over grey areas (though that's generally where you'll still find me), maybe it's having kids, maybe it's the Facebook algorithms. But I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I've become a bit of a climate justice advocate. I still don't like the mainstream environmental stance on climate change--it's all too much about science and facts and ice caps--and I really don't like the climate movement's inability to think about racial justice, but I am convinced that the movement is moving in the right directions. It's getting more intersectional, more savvy about identity politics, class, and justice, and more aware of how climate change is not about wilderness and rock-climbing, it's about urban infrastructure, access to resources, distribution of pollutants, and both human and natural resource exploitation. And guess who's fixing the climate movement to figure all this out? KIDS.

I'm blown away by the Sunrise Movement's language about social justice. I'm blown away by even what I'm seeing with the Green New Deal. It may not acknowledge colonialism, and it may not fully get the grassroots aspects of climate justice, but it really soothes my soul that this proposal is getting so much air time, and that it seeks to connect issues of social structure, class, race, geography, and justice with the environmental crisis. That's a revelation.

In the past, I would have said, it's not good enough. I would have put on my academic hat and criticized it line by line. I probably would have even called it oppressive, even bad for the environment. I would have argued that if mainstream politicians are backing it, then by definition it can't be good enough. My scholarship was perhaps more "radical" in my early days.

In the past, I would have poo-poo'ed marches as mere performances of self-righteousness. And of course, they don't themselves change anything. That is always the problem with getting people to show up for things-- showing up itself never changes anything, it just offers a space for people to vent about how bad things are.  Who wants that? Not me. I'm already overwhelmed with thinking about how bad things are. I can't stand the thought of amplifying my inner voice by hanging out with others who feel the same way.

But I'm starting to get that marches can offer a crucial ingredient for social change. That's why they're called an "action," even though I've often disagreed with that characterization. Knowing you are not alone in your frustrations and fears, and that you can huddle up with this group before you charge onto the field, creates a kind of awareness of collectivity that I have only recently begun to study. It turns out that this "infrastructure" of collective resilience and solidarity is really important. Researchers are showing that it is more valuable dollar for dollar to repairing communities in the face of climate disruption than what we spend on improved dykes, repaired highways, and new buildings.

That juice you feel when you realize you're not alone? That's not just warm fuzzies, that's the most important ingredient for climate adaptation.

I was amazed the high schoolers didn't just use the march as an opportunity to ditch class. I am amazed they were thinking passionately about the fate of the planet. I am amazed that they are willing to respond to parents and critics who say they should be working out these problems in the classroom by saying that the classroom isn't doing enough, and that it will be too late when those solutions come to pass.*

I am just in total awe that the youth climate movement is taking the narrative and the politics in their own hands.  Kudos to Stella Saba, Nigella Baur, and the high school students from Arcata and Eureka who had the courage to face climate change, their futures, and maybe even their parents, in the face. It feels like change is a'coming.

*Don't get me wrong, as a professor, I want students showing up. But it's ALWAYS a struggle. My students can barely stand being in class while the world burns and so much suffering is going on. I get it: though I disagree, I can see why students feel the classroom doesn't always feel like the place where solutions will emerge.

On the Limits of "Action"

I'm a theory-head. I'm just going to put that on the table right now: confession- I loooooove theory.

When I hear from students and activists (and student-activists), and anti-intellectuals of various stripes that theory isn't action, and that somehow there's a need to turn theory into action, or that the theory we do in the classroom isn't action-y enough, or the ever earnest, "what can we do about it??????", I have to admit that I do get a bit irritated in defense of the very important, real material and cultural work that theory achieves.  In some worlds, people say, "words matter," or "ideas matter." Indeed, many cultural norms exist to remind us that words have greater heft than sticks and stones, which my culture always told me break bones worse.  But I've seen words do worse.  

Ideas pack punches.  Words matter.   I just finished reading Patricia Hill Collins' On Intellectual Activism.  In it she discusses the false binary between hate speech vs. hate acts: "This division between speech and actions is part of the ethos of violence" (192), she writes.  She continues, in a "framing context that severs acts from ideas, speed can never be violent."  Thoughts vs. actions, theory vs. practice, doing vs. thinking, words vs. deeds-- the illusion many of us hold that these are binaries is itself a kind of violence, to Collins.  What would it mean for the social justice work we do in our classrooms if we broaden our notion of what counts as an "action"?

One of the problems with students asking for immediate actionable plans is that they ignore the broader relevance of information that doesn't have immediate and obvious impact on their own daily lives.  So, for example, an article that comes across their Facebook feed about the credibility of Scott Pruit, or the role of natural history in promoting eugenics, or the spread of Zika in Latin America, all seem unrelated to their most pressing question: what does it have to do with me, and what can I do about it?

Pushing aside for a moment the relevance question-- "what does this have to do with me?"-- might help our students grasp a larger context of the problems they face, understand their own experiences within social and historical structures, and recognize their efforts within broader regional, national, and even international movements.  Also, forcing students to make connections between these seemingly unrelatable news events helps them learn intersectional and structural analysis better--this is what I take Collins' theory of "critical consciousness" to mean.

Another thing is that students often feel that there is "no scholarly research" on the current events they care about, as if they're making up the first ever analyses of climate change that ever existed.  Forcing them to make connections between the things they think are valuable, important questions that they feel they came up with themselves, and the world of scholarly research that has been thinking about these issues forever and in myriad nuanced ways, is really important for fueling the movement with the best intellectual resources available.  The impasse between intellectual work (e.g. scholarship) and "action" is further exacerbated when we don't creatively demand that students see the connections between academia and action.

Collins insists that "academia is activist politics, where struggles over the meaning of ideas constitute the primary terrain of action."  Any view of academia that separates mind, body, and passion, she continues, "separates out truth and knowledge from politics and ethics" (146-7), which is a world that I, like Collins, reject.  Students need to imagine a world where "objectivity and activism" are linked, because "to be intellectual and activists is to be knowledgable, critical, passionate, and caring, all at the same time"-- thus, "intellectual activism" (147).

So, can scholarship, theory, and the academy bolster students' activist and action-oriented fantasies?  What happens to the academy, the life of the mind, the humanities, if we fail to do so? 

The myopic focus on "action" at the expense of thinking, theory, and the realm of ideas runs parallel to the anti-intellectual wave in America right now, as well as the moves toward rejecting the arts as superfluous to a functioning, productive society, and the move toward corporatizing and vocationalizing higher education.  I would argue the aversion to theory in favor of "action" is part of this broader cultural shift away from valuing the world of ideas, recognizing their material impacts, and associating them with liberation.  I love Timothy Morton's essay title, "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!" precisely because it feels like a rejection of the assumptions privileging action over thought, and a defense of cogitation over just diving in and screwing things up before you've thought enough about it.  As Collins puts it, "learning to think for oneself"--e.g. gaining critical consciousness-- "often leads to action" (131).

What's at stake here if we don't make robust cases for the value of theory as a kind of action, or ask our students to challenge their assumptions about how awesome "action" is?  At best, we continue to make ourselves irrelevant.  Worse, we are complicit in hoarding ideas in the ivory tower and ignoring the ways that they have always been and continue to be the fuel of grassroots social change.  The academy and certainly the humanities need to do better at making their ideas meaningful in our current climate, but also, we can do a lot to explain to students why a knee-jerk impulse to make scholarship "relevant" can be dangerous too.  We should discourage them from being seduced by visible actions they are accustomed to seeing in heroic films. If they think that's how social change works, they will be ill-equipped for the actual work of social change.  Can we cultivate in our students a love of the hard work of thinking about, theorizing, and contextualizing "action"?

Adrienne Maree Brown also suggests that the need for spectacular, visible action is a symptom of patriarchy; perhaps a feminist approach to my students' obsession with action is to ask them to consider whether action is to theory as male is to female.  Whether we agree or not, the conversation does hint at the futility of this binary.  Feminists indeed have long argued that the theory/praxis relationship is dialectical, not hierarchical.  So when my students want action and reject theory, I'm tempted to go back to some of these foundational essays, and make the point that this binary has already been rejected.  Regardless of whether it's boring archival work or feminist theory, I do think it's critical to contextualize students' over-emphasis on action within a broader historical and social framework; who else has been thinking about action/praxis?  How have these debates unfolded in different moments and under different pressures?  What makes our context unique? What makes it similar? Might we need to put the action question aside in order to think clearly, without a constant leaning toward action, about a topic? Might our need for immediate action derail us from grasping a problem with an open mind?



This is problematic too because social change, like Rob Nixon's notion of "slow violence," is slow.  Robert Bullard reminds us that "it's a marathon, not a sprint," and Rebecca Solnit's essays "One magical politician won't fix climate change," and "Acts of Hope", help student-activists take the time to learn how to sustain their idealism over the long-haul, and to not expect to see immediate, spectacular evidence of their efforts.  I love Solnit's description of how watershed moments are results of countless hours of labor and a synchronicity of events leading up to a visible moment of progress.

Here, Adrienne Maree Brown's theory of Emergent Strategy (see my previous post on this fabulous book) is beautiful-- if we see our efforts in a collective and not through the American individualistic lens of the atomistic self, we can rest assured that our efforts are contributing to a massive swell of a force, instead of be anxious about how little our individual actions mean in the enormity of the problems we face.

When I was a professor at University of Alaska Southeast, I learned a lot about Alaska Native cultures that has profoundly shaped my theories about things like action, words, discourse.  I remember one elder explaining to me that the reason she has a piercing on her lip is to remind her to choose her words carefully. Over the years I was there, I learned that words have material consequence and value in the real world for Alaska Natives.  I learned for example that you cannot retell an Alaska Native story without permission-- the words of the story themselves are a matter of possession-- it's a weak comparison to say that they are property, because of course the idea of property is part of the entire colonial myth that exploits and destroys indigenous knowledge. But to imagine words as a form of material reality is not the way I have been educated.

This insight is valuable here as I convince students of the value of chewing on discourse, close-reading texts, creating art and other cultural products, finding and appreciating the heft of their own voices.

Students are going to want to act; I'm not suggesting here that we hole them up in the library and remove them from the real world (again, a problematic binary, but I'm using it precisely to make the point).  On the other hand, we could do better to make scholarship, ideas, theory, and the life of the mind seem much more relevant to their goals, more clearly support their work, and complement and make more powerful their activist/action/agency ideals.