Where is the soul of a movement? What is the history of environmentalism? What do race and class have to do with it? What can one organization do to overcome past failures and start winning the big fights? These are some of the questions that we asked ourselves when the members of Energy Action Coalition decided to read “Soul of Environmentalism” in the summer of 2007. In the spring, the Council of Energy Action had voted to enact a new Anti-Oppression plan for the coalition that would help to educate staff and organizations about vital issues of discrimination, privilege, and injustice. The plan was also intended to serve as a catalyst for challenging the dynamics that have built an environmental movement that often puts men in management positions more often than women and generally lacks representation from low-income communities and communities of color. The core elements of this new Anti-Oppression plan were a 2-day summer training on anti-oppression for all coalition staff and the institution of one reading per semester focused on a topic related to anti-oppression or social justice that would be combined with facilitated discussions with the staff of each organization and anyone else who’d like to participate.
We chose “Soul of Environmentalism” as the first anti-oppression reading for Energy Action Coalition because it exposes the root of one of the key questions we seek to answer as a coalition – how do we change the paradigm of whiteness and privilege in the environmental community in order to build a more powerful and unified movement? “Soul of Environmentalism” was written in the Spring of 2005 by nine economic, environmental, and social policy leaders as a response to the essay, “Death of Environmentalism,” written by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus a few months earlier. If “Death” was a critique of the mainstream environmentalism in a post-global-warming world, “Soul” was an attempt to carve out solutions by uncovering environmentalism’s forgotten history and examining theories of transformative politics.
Sixty people read the 30-page essay and participated in facilitated discussions in Washington, DC, San Francisco, Concord, NH and Portland as well as two teleconference discussions in June and July. The discussions ranged from one to two hours long. Each facilitator was given a set of 11 questions to choose from as well as a set of community agreements to share with the group to ensure a safe, non-threatening and productive space for everyone involved. The intention of each discussion was to challenge people on a personal level to consider what the readings meant for their own life and their own work and to consider what the coalition and the youth movement can do to address the topics at hand.
After engaging in four of these discussions as a facilitator or a participant, re-reading “Soul of Environmentalism” and looking back at the key takeaways from each of the seven discussions I came away with three important lessons for our movement:
1 – Tell human stories.
2 – Get real about the history of this movement and challenge privilege.
3 – Start from your own soul perspective and invest in deep change solutions.
(more…)
