Settling for Genocide

The U.S. climate movement has an optimism problem. Some of us refuse to go along.

Dear friends,

I have a new piece for The Nation just up this morning, “Against Climate Optimism—Because ‘Team Normal’ Won’t Save the World,” which I hope you’ll read and share, especially if you’re among my many colleagues and comrades in the climate movement.

It’s no fun disagreeing with one’s colleagues and comrades, especially in public. Sometimes, though, staying silent feels like betrayal—of one’s principles, one’s integrity, even of the larger cause to which one is committed, something much larger than any of us as individuals. And so a restatement of principles becomes necessary.

A decade ago, I wrote a widely-read cover story for The Boston Phoenix in which I criticized my former mainstream media colleagues for failing to cover the climate crisis as a crisis, arguing that the root of the problem was a kind of self-censorship, a failure to tell the truth. (NYU media critic Jay Rosen called it the “best-ever thing on climate change and the American press,” for whatever that’s worth.) Why are you a journalist, I asked, if you can’t level with the public about the scale and urgency of the climate threat? The piece marked my break with mainstream journalism and my decision to engage fully as both an activist and journalist.

With this latest piece for The Nation, I’m afraid it’s now the climate movement that I’m compelled to criticize. Not that this is the first time I’ve done so over the past ten years, but this one feels different to me, more like the end of something. I hope you'll read it. Here’s a quote:

There’s something deeply disturbing—chilling, even—about the doctrinaire insistence upon hope and optimism in Democratic and mainstream climate movement circles. I find it chilling because it implies, on the part of the optimists (who are, by the way, almost always white and either NGO or party affiliated), a readiness to settle. That is, a readiness to accept a world beyond 1.5 degrees, even two degrees—with all that will bring.

This past summer, during the heated debates over the Democrats’ major climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, I found myself unceremoniously censored and pushed out of a movement insiders’ email group called xxx xxxxxxxx [REDACTED BY REQUEST OF THE LIST OWNER] (in which I’d participated since 2012), the existence of which is supposed to be secret but never really has been. The only reason that I and others can see for my being shut down in that forum was my strong criticism of the IRA’s betrayal of environmental justice and my refusal to go along with its cheerleaders’ relentless triumphalism and deeply misleading party-line optimism.

My question for those movement insiders is not unlike the question I asked my journalistic colleagues back in 2012. Why are you a climate activist if you’re unwilling to face the facts of our situation—and to take any action, any risks, commensurate with the facts? What kind of a movement is unwilling to tell the truth?

Meanwhile, coal is still burning—needlessly—in New England, where I live, and its use is still rising in the developing world. New fossil-fuel infrastructure, especially gas, is still being funded and built as the industry, here and globally, expands its operations in the face of dire warnings. At this late date, in full knowledge of the global consequences, every new project—and every existing operation that should have been phased out years ago—is an act of ecocide that amounts, in many places, to genocide.

Some of us do not consent.

-WS

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P.S. As many of you know, I’ve been engaged for three years now with the grassroots No Coal No Gas campaign in New England. I don’t speak for the campaign; as an independent writer, my views are my own. But it’s a strong, principled, caring community of resistance in which I feel at home, and with which I’m prepared to go the distance. If you’re in New England, and looking for a movement community, I’d encourage you to check it out. We’re always up to some sort of good trouble.

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