Movements Without Leaders And Climate Change

Movements Without Leaders   

In recent months -- and it’s the curse of an author that sometimes you change your
mind after your book is in type -- I’ve come to like the idea of capital L leaders
could conceive of, and pursue, movements in new ways.           

The history we grow up with shapes our sense of reality -- it's hard to shake. If

thousands more whom history doesn't remember but who deserve great credit. And yet
one's early sense is hard to dislodge: the civil rights movement had his face on it;

Which is why it's a little disconcerting to look around and realize that most of the
movements of the moment -- even highly successful ones like the fight for gay
marriage or immigrant's rights -- don't really have easily discernible leaders. I
struggle, but there aren't particular people that the public at large identifies as

It's true, too, in the battle where I've spent most of my life: the fight to slow
the fight has been diminished. 

That doesn't mean, however, that the movement is diminished.  In fact, it's never
the movement itself continues to grow quickly, and it's starting to claim some

That's not despite its lack of clearly identifiable leaders, I think. It's because
of it. 

A Movement for a New Planet 

for the spectacle of presidential elections, there's no way for individual human
segmented, which may be a boon or a problem, but mostly it's just a fact. Our
attention is dispersed. 

When we started 350.org five years ago, we dimly recognized this new planetary
architecture. Instead of trying to draw everyone to a central place -- the Mall in
Washington, D.C. -- for a protest, we staged 24 hours of rallies around the planet:
5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called "the most widespread of day
of political action in the planet's history." And we've gone on to do more of the
same -- about 20,000 demonstrations in every country but North Korea. 

I'd grown up watching -- or maybe some part of me wanted the glory of being a
leader.  In any event, I've spent the last few years in constant motion around the
country and the Earth. I'd come to think of myself as a "leader," and indeed my
that growing sense of identity. 

However, in recent months -- and it's the curse of an author that sometimes you
change your mind after your book is in type -- I've come to like the idea of capital

For environmentalists, we have a useful analogy close at hand. We're struggling to
"distributed generation," and it comes with a myriad of benefits. It's not as prone
applies to movements. 

In the last few weeks, for instance, 350.org helped support a nationwide series of
rallies called Summerheat. We didn't organize them ourselves.  We knew great
in Richmond, California, and standing up to the challenge of climate change. 

proposed, to the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, where a big oil port is
planned, from Utah's Colorado Plateau, where the first U.S. tar-sands mine has been
and the fracking wells of rural Ohio -- Summerheat demonstrated the local depth and
global reach of this emerging fossil fuel resistance. I've had the pleasure of going
to talk at all these places and more besides, but I wasn't crucial to any of them. 

of me on its cover under the headline: "The Man Who Crushed the Keystone Pipeline."
I've got an all-too-healthy ego, but even I knew that it was over the top. I'd
Washington to resist the pipeline, but it was effective because I'd gotten a dozen
friends to sign it with me. And I'd been one of 1,253 people who went to jail in
Keystone campaign became the exact model for the sort of loosely-linked
well-distributed power system I've been describing. 

the National Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the League of
Conservation Voters, and the National Wildlife Federation, none spending time
pulling together the biggest climate rally yet, last February's convergence on the
Mall in Washington. 

Organizations and individuals on the ground were no less crucial: the indigenous
leaders who conducted prayer vigils. And don't forget the bloggers who helped make
coverage of the struggle. 

civil disobedience if the pipeline were to get presidential approval. 

crowd after another, and the labor unions -- nurses and transit workers, for
instance -- who have had the courage to stand up to the pipeline workers' union
built. Then there are groups of Kids Against KXL, and even a recent grandparents'
the pipeline. 

The Indigenous Environmental Network has been every bit as effective in
First Nations people and British Columbians have even blocked a proposed pipeline
European Union. 

We don't know if we'll win the northern half of the Keystone fight or not, although
President Obama's recent pledge to decide whether it should be built -- his is the
ultimate decision -- based on how much carbon dioxide it could put into the
atmosphere means that he has no good-faith way of approving it. However, it's
the huge bundles of cash that are the energy industry's sole argument. 

What the Elders Said 


The cause couldn't be more compelling.  There's never been a clearer threat to
survival, or to justice, than the rapid rise in the planet's temperature caused by
can be no real answer to our climate woes that doesn't address the insane

That's why it's such good news when people like Naomi Klein and Desmond Tutu join
the climate struggle.  When they take part, it becomes ever clearer that what's

home countries. 

leaders is going to be limited at best. That doesn't mean, of course, that some
people won't have more purchase than others in such a movement. Sometimes such
standing comes from living in the communities most immediately and directly affected

what he might have to say. 

community centers. Sometimes truly unlikely figures emerge: i nvestor Jeremy
effectively to work fighting Keystone and bedeviling climate-denying politicians
Golden in Puget Sound. 

Yet figures like these aren't exactly "leaders" in the way we've normally imagined. 
Internet age, it's more as if they were well-regarded critics on Amazon.com review
strictly chronological sense. Elders don't tell you what you must do, they say what
sands the "biggest carbon bomb on the continent," it resonates. 

When you have that standing, you don't end up leading a movement, but you do end up
you're not going to waste their energy on a pointless task. So when Naomi Klein and

useful work I've done is to spread a few good Kickstarter proposals via Twitter or
David. A young man demanded to know why I wasn't backing sabotage of oil company
genuine financial damage to the pipeline companies by slowing their construction
bulldozers would play into their hands. 

But maybe he was right. I don't actually know, which is why it's a good thing that
the power to change these days is remarkably well distributed, leaving plenty of
when they decided their elders were simply wrong. Dr. King didn't like the idea of

The Coming of the Leaderless Movement 

leader-full one. We see such leaders regularly at 350.org.  When I wrote earlier
that we "staged" 5,200 rallies around the globe, I wasn't completely accurate. It
everywhere other people figured out what dishes to bring. 

The thousands of images that accumulated in the Flickr account of that day's events
were astonishing.  Most of the people doing the work didn't look like
young, because that's what the world mostly is. 

but because they are subjected to it. That's why frontline communities in places
where global warming's devastation is already increasingly obvious often produce
margins, since they are quite literally on the cutting edge. 


More recently, in the immigration rights campaign, it was four "Dreamers" walking
gay rights movement into a new phase. 

But Dan Choi doesn't have to be Dan Choi forever, and Tim DeChristopher doesn't have
next few years but also last for generations. Think of each of these "leaders" as
infusions of new ideas. 

the 1990s around the planet. 

cases, the crowds began to dwindle even without police repression -- only to surge
that superstorm hit the East coast). 

necessary one. 

How to Save the Earth 

hierarchy, even if it's an informal and shifting one. But the promise of this moment
flow. That kind of trajectory catches what we'll need in a time of increased climate
stress -- communities that place a premium on resiliency and adaptability,
dramatically decentralized but deeply linked. 

And it's already happening. The Summerheat campaign ended in Richmond, California,
justice activists has waged an increasingly spirited fight against the plant. 

continue to cover up the horrors it's responsible for in an oil patch of jungle in
past the two-degree Celsius temperature rise that the world has pledged to prevent,
which would bring on the worst depredations of global warming -- and yet they are
now on the hunt in a major way for the next round of "unconventional" fossil fuels
to burn. 

shake the status quo. 

And so our movement -- global, national, and most of all local. Released from a
breathe more easily in far less polluted air. 

the suffering of the planet. 

I'm sure much of this thinking is old news to people who have been building
movements for years. I haven't. I found myself, or maybe stuck myself, at the front

What I do sense, however, is that it's our job to rally a movement in the coming
the world in record time. 

That won't happen thanks to a paramount leader, or even dozens of them.  It can only
engaged citizenry. Rooftop by rooftop, we're aiming for a different world, one that
must run on that kind of power too. 

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of

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