We all know the plotline: Single-minded, passionate activists attempt to take on immense money and power, hidebound ideology and bureaucratic paralysis to turn the tide on the most important issue ever.
We could be talking about climate change. But we could also be talking about the abolition of slavery, marriage equality or countless other political struggles from history. Each of those other movements holds a bonanza of lessons for climate activists on how sweeping change succeeds or fails.
Abolition: Angels and Aloofness
No movement was ever more entitled to the moral high ground than abolitionism. What can climate activists learn from the anti-slavery movement?
First, being on the side of the angels may not matter. Abolitionists’ morality and common sense ran headlong into arguments of economic necessity and states’ rights in defense of slavery. Similarly, states’ rights and economic need are rhetorical refuges in climate debates today. So don’t wait for common sense to prevail. Abolitionists waited for decades, and it still took a catastrophic war to resolve things.
Second, smug aloofness doesn’t help. Abolitionists were viewed as effete and elite, eggheads and dilettantes. So much so that they even repelled one of their own. In his 1841 essay Self-Reliance, the existentialist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called out abolitionist leaders for what he saw as their “incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off” while ignoring social ills in their own northern backyards.
If enviros made the rebirth of coal towns via renewable energy a priority, Appalachia’s coming Reconstruction Era could replace perpetual bitterness with prosperity.Today’s environmentalists are similarly perceived as being detached from the grim realities of coalfield towns, and that has opened up opportunities to blame green groups and regulators for the decades-long and inevitable market collapse of King Coal.
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