Category: Advocacy

Building something better: How community organizing helps people thrive in challenging times

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Photo by Matheus Bertelli
Photo by Matheus Bertelli

By Stephanie Malin and Meghan Elizabeth Kallman, The Conversation (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Americans don’t agree on much these days, but many feel that the U.S. is on the wrong track and the future is bleak. In a time of unprecedented division, rising inequality and intensifying climate change, it’s easy to feel that progress is impossible.

In fact, models exist all around us for building safer and more equitable spaces where people can thrive.

We are sociologists who study organizational systems, political and economic institutions and environmental justice. In our new book, “Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change,” we explore how people adapt to crises and thrive in challenging times by working together.

The organizations that we profile are small, but they make big impacts by crafting alternatives to neoliberal capitalism – an approach to governing that uses austere economic ideas to organize society. Neoliberalism aims to put government in service of corporations through measures such as deregulating markets, privatizing industries and reducing public services.

Here are three groups we see building something better.

Humans being, not humans buying

Some groups build better systems by rejecting neoliberalism’s hyperindividualism. Individualistic logic tells people that they can make the biggest changes by voting with their dollars.

But when people instead see how they can create real political changes as part of communities and collective systems, amazing things can happen. One example is the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest areas in the U.S.

This organization is led by and serves Lakota people who, like other Native nations, contend with devastating structural inequalities such as racism and poverty. These challenges are rooted in settler colonialism, especially the Lakotas’ loss of their tribal lands and displacement into less secure locations.

Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation leaders describe how they are drawing on their people’s history and legacy to build a strong and healthy community.

Thunder Valley focuses on healing from daily traumas, such as poverty and high suicide rates. Its goals include teaching the Lakota language across generations, empowering young people to become community leaders and promoting food sovereignty by raising food for the community in greenhouses and gardens.

Thunder Valley’s other programs are designed to create community and security in ways that lift up Lakota approaches. For example, its housing initiative works to increase access to affordable housing and provides financial coaching. Homes are built and neighborhoods are designed according to Lakota traditions. The organization views home ownership as a way to strengthen community connections rather than simply building individual wealth.

Thunder Valley’s programs also include a demonstration farm and a Lakota immersion Montessori school. In 2015, President Barack Obama recognized the organization’s work to heal and build a multigenerational community as a Promise Zone – a place building innovative collaborative spaces for community development.

Claiming space by making music

Brass and percussion street bands play for free in many U.S. communities. They form mainly in cities and are deeply linked to contemporary urban justice issues.

Acoustic and mobile, these bands play without stages to elevate them or sound systems separating musicians from audience. They invite crowds to join the fun. They may play alongside unions and grassroots groups at political protests, or in parades or community events.

The common factor is that they always perform in public spaces, where everyone can participate. Street bands create bridges across social divides and democratize spaces, while inviting play and camaraderie amid huge social challenges.

Band leader and composer Jon Batiste leads a peaceful protest music march through the streets of New York on June 12, 2020, following the death of George Floyd while being detained by police in Minneapolis.

In the 19th century, brass bands flourished all over the U.S. and Europe. In the U.S. South, street bands emerged from benevolent societies – social organizations that helped free and enslaved Black Americans cope with financial hardships. These groups eventually morphed into “social aid and pleasure clubs,” the forces behind New Orleans’ famous parades.

Today, the brass band movement convenes yearly through the HONK! Festival in cities across the country such as Boston; Providence, Rhode Island; and Austin, Texas. Drawing on a tradition of protest, HONK! events are designed to assert that performers and ordinary people have a right to occupy public space, as well as to disrupt state or corporate events.

Affordable community-based energy

Other groups find ways to build economic systems that serve communities rather than private companies or industries.

That’s the goal of the Indigenized Energy Initiative, a community-owned, nonprofit solar cooperative in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The organization was founded following protests on the Standing Rock Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which carries oil from the Bakken formation in North Dakota to a terminal in Illinois.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its supporters opposed the pipeline, which crossed its ancestral lands and vital waterways, arguing that it violated treaties and tribal sovereignty. The project was built, but opponents hope to shut it down through a pending environmental review.

Indigenized Energy’s executive director, Cody Two Bears, emerged from Standing Rock protests aiming to build the first solar farm in oil-dependent North Dakota. The organization aims to provide low-cost solar energy for all community members, promoting energy independence.

Today, the Cannon Ball Community Solar Farm has 1,100 solar panels and a 300-kilowatt generating capacity – enough to power all of Cannon Ball’s homes. The farm sells its power into the state grid, earning enough to offset the electricity bills of the community’s veteran and youth centers.

Longer-term goals include building tribally owned transmission lines, installing solar panels on tribal homes and community buildings and expanding support for solar power in North Dakota.

Building better systems

We see similarities among these organizations and others in our book. Initiatives like commmunity-owned solar cooperatives and collective models for home ownership and neighborhood planning aim to build economic systems that meet community needs and treat people equitably. Instead of finding answers in individual consumption or lifestyle changes, they build collective solutions.

At the same time, communities across the U.S. have different views of what constitutes a good life. In our view, acknowledging different experiences, goals and values is part of the work of building a shared future.

In recent years, many scholars have pointed out ways in which neoliberalism has failed to produce effective solutions to economic, health, environmental and other challenges. These critiques invite a deeper question: Are people capable of remaking the world to prioritize relationships with one another and with the planet, instead of relationships to wealth? We believe the cases in our book show clearly that the answer is yes.

Authors:

Stephanie Malin
Associate Professor of Sociology; Co-Founder, Center for Environmental Justice at CSU, Colorado State University

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman
Assistant Professor of International Development, UMass Boston

Disclosure statement
Stephanie Malin has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Colorado Water Center, the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (a branch of NIH), the Rural Sociological Society, and CSU School of Global Environmental Sustainability.

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman is a Democrat representing District 15 (Pawtucket, North Providence) in the Rhode Island Senate. She is a co-founder of Conceivable Future, a women-led network of Americans bringing awareness to the threat climate change poses to reproductive justice and demanding an end to US fossil fuel subsidies.

‘We must trigger social tipping points’

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Photo by William Bossen on Unsplash
Photo by William Bossen on Unsplash

The risk of dangerous, cascading tipping points in natural systems escalates above 1.5°C of global warming, states a recent study.

By Yasmin Dahnoun, Ecologist (Creative Commons 4.0).

Multiple climate tipping points could be triggered if global temperature rises beyond 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to a major new analysis published in the journal Science.

Even at current levels of global heating, the world is already at risk of triggering five dangerous climate tipping points, and risks increase with each tenth of a degree of further warming.

An international research team synthesized evidence for tipping points, their temperature thresholds, timescales, and impacts from a comprehensive review of over 200 papers published since 2008 when climate tipping points were first rigorously defined. They have increased the list of potential tipping points from nine to sixteen.

Die-off

The research concludes that we are already in the danger zone for five climate tipping points: melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, widespread abrupt permafrost thaw, the collapse of convection in the Labrador Sea, and massive die-off of tropical coral reefs.

The paper was published ahead of a major conference, Tipping Points: from climate crisis to positive transformation, at the University of Exeter, which will take place next week.

Four of these move from “possible” to “likely” at 1.5°C global warming, with five more becoming possible around this level of heating.

David Armstrong McKay, from Stockholm Resilience Centre, University of Exeter, and the Earth Commission, was the lead author of the report. He said: “We can see signs of destabilization already in parts of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, in permafrost regions, the Amazon rainforest, and potentially the Atlantic overturning circulation as well.

“The world is already at risk of some tipping points. As global temperatures rise further, more tipping points become possible. The chance of crossing tipping points can be reduced by rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions, starting immediately.”

Safe

The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stated that risks of triggering climate tipping points become high by around 2°C above preindustrial temperatures and very high by 2.5-4°C.

The new analysis indicates that earth may have already left a “safe” climate state when temperatures exceeded approximately 1°C above preindustrial temperatures.

A conclusion of the research is therefore that even the United Nations’ Paris Agreement goal to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting warming to well below 2°C and preferably 1.5°C is not fully safe.

However, the study provides strong scientific support for the Paris Agreement and associated efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C, as while some tipping points are possible or likely at this temperature level, the risk escalates beyond this point.

Liveable 

To have a 50 percent chance of achieving 1.5°C and thus limiting tipping point risks, global greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by 2030, reaching net zero by 2050.

Co-author Johan Rockström, the co-chair of the Earth Commission and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said: “The world is heading towards 2-3°C of global warming.

“This sets earth on course to cross multiple dangerous tipping points that will be disastrous for people across the world.

“To maintain liveable conditions on earth, protect people from rising extremes, and enable stable societies, we must do everything possible to prevent crossing tipping points. Every tenth of a degree counts.”

Decarbonising 

Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and a member of the Earth Commission, was a co-author of the report. He said: “Since I first assessed climate tipping points in 2008, the list has grown and our assessment of the risk they pose has increased dramatically.

“Our new work provides compelling evidence that the world must radically accelerate decarbonizing the economy to limit the risk of crossing climate tipping points.

“To achieve that, we now need to trigger positive social tipping points that accelerate the transformation to a clean-energy future.

“We may also have to adapt to cope with climate tipping points that we fail to avoid, and support those who could suffer uninsurable losses and damages.”

Collapse

Scouring paleoclimate data, current observations, and the outputs from climate models, the international team concluded that 16 major biophysical systems involved in regulating the earth’s climate (so-called “tipping elements”) have the potential to cross tipping points where change becomes self-sustaining.

That means even if the temperature stops rising, once the ice sheet, ocean, or rainforest has passed a tipping point it will carry on changing to a new state.

How long the transition takes varies from decades to thousands of years depending on the system.

For example, ecosystems and atmospheric circulation patterns can change quickly, while ice sheet collapse is slower but leads to an unavoidable sea-level rise of several meters.

The researchers categorized the tipping elements into nine systems that affect the entire earth system, such as Antarctica and the Amazon rainforest, and a further seven systems that if tipped would have profound regional consequences.

Interlinked 

The latter include the West African monsoon and the death of most coral reefs around the equator.

Several new tipping elements such as Labrador Sea convection and East Antarctic subglacial basins have been added compared to the 2008 assessment, while Arctic summer sea ice and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have been removed for lack of evidence of tipping dynamics.

Co-author Ricarda Winkelmann, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a member of the Earth Commission, said: “Importantly, many tipping elements in the earth system are interlinked, making cascading tipping points a serious additional concern.

“In fact, interactions can lower the critical temperature thresholds beyond which individual tipping elements begin destabilizing in the long run.”

Opinion: Big oil goes all in on toxic plastic

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Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash
Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash

Great at creating problems for humanity, fossil fuel giants increase oil demand in the form of plastic.

By Maya Rommwatt, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Oil companies are high on the hog again, with record high gas prices fueling record profits–profits so high they’re even catching the attention of Democrats in Congress. And of course, they’re using the profits to buy back shares so their shareholders will benefit from higher stock prices.

Maybe all that money is going to their heads because only a handful of years have passed since we learned Exxon and many other big oil companies have known since the seventies exactly how their dirty product was about to trigger a global meltdown. Yet they’re still up to their old tricks and trying to fool us while they pump more oil. As governments and communities race to stop runaway climate change, oil companies have quietly found a way to sell even more oil, in the form of plastic. Plastic production is projected to grow astronomically and is expected to account for 60% of oil demand in the next decade.

It would be nice if plastic made from oil was as clean and benign as makers of plastic would like us to believe, but petrochemical plastics are dirty from start to finish, and it’s the product where big oil is placing its largest bets. It turns out some of the biggest oil corporations are also some of the biggest petrochemical corporations. And petrochemical production is mostly plastics.

Cheerleaders of increased plastic production can talk all day about how the solution to the plastic waste crisis is simply more recycling, but less than 9% of plastic is actually recycled, and the industry is now trying to relabel plastic incineration as recycling to help justify increased production. And plastic waste may be just the tip of the iceberg. Before all of the needless plastic products and packaging oil companies make even reach the waste stream, they’ve already done countless damage to communities near sites of production and to consumers.

To make plastic out of oil, petrochemical plants release toxic air pollution that saddles nearby communities with inordinate negative health impacts, communities which are more often likely to be communities of color. If plastic production increases as planned, these communities will be subject to even more dangerous air pollution than they already grapple with.

Once the plastic is made, it enters the market where consumers become the next group of humans put at risk by dirty oil in the form of petrochemical plastic. Unless you live on the dark side of the moon, where presumably it’s not yet a problem, then you’ve probably heard of the microplastics problem. How plastic things fall apart into little pieces, each shred smaller than the last. How scientists can’t seem to find a place on the planet that’s not teeming with microplastics. How scale doesn’t matter because it’s in the air above the tallest mountains, in the streams on every continent, and in our blood and breastmilk. Now that we know it’s everywhere, scientists are beginning to ask if plastic is actually safe, because it’s made with myriad chemicals.

As they examine the toxic impacts of petrochemical plastics, scientists are beginning to warn that it’s not looking good for us. The more research that is done into the impact of plastics on human health, the more that dangers are discovered. Plastic contains many toxic chemicals, and it turns out many of those chemicals are moving from the plastic into our bodies. That plastic soda bottle you drank out of last week? Odds are good that the chemical used as a catalyst in the bottle making process has made its way into the soda. That polyester stuffed animal your infant adorably sucks on the ears of? It’s also made with a dangerous catalyst that may be released into your child’s mouth. Defend Our Health tested beverages in plastic bottles and found dangerous chemicals in every single one, at least one of the chemicals a known carcinogen.

We cannot continue allowing oil companies to poison our air, bodies, and climate with their toxic product. This is a critical moment in history, and when they’re not too busy reaping outrageous profits, oil companies are trying to convince us the product they’re selling isn’t killing the planet and everything on it, despite the evidence. Instead of making more stuff we don’t need, like a box full of air-filled plastic bubbles that take up nine-tenths of the box space because it was somehow cheaper for Amazon to mail a thing that way, perhaps the industry could check the room and start trying in earnest to transition itself off its dirty product. You’d think none of these companies would want to be the last one around trying to sell a product no one wants, but it seems they’re all participating in a mass delusion driven by short-term thinking. It’s time to draw down, not ramp up, oil and gas, and that means plastic production too.