May Boeve: Changing Climate Change

I was interested in environmental issues and animal rights when I was a young kid, and I had a lot of support from my parents to pursue activist projects when I was little. But I didn’t feel like anything really stuck for me until I got to college and I connected with a group of students who were really passionate about climate change. What I was interested in at the time was the connection between environmental issues and international development. So for me it was the combination of having this lifelong passion for activism, and having a group of people I could be active with.

When 350.org started in 2008 we were focused on the [2009] UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen. This was supposed to be a time when world leaders would come together and develop a treaty to reduce carbon emissions globally. We wanted to demonstrate to them that there was this global movement of people who were paying attention — who knew what a good outcome would look like — and so we began organizing a global day of action where people all over the world held up 350 signs and made these beautiful images as a way of saying, “The science has spoken, 350 [parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere] is the level we need to get back to; this treaty in Copenhagen needs to get us to that level.”

Copenhagen was not a big success, and one of the reasons is because there’s not national political pressure on climate change. We realized that that had to change, so now we take as our mission trying to build the national political conditions that will result in urgent action on climate.

Climate change is unique in that the actions that are required to reduce the effects of climate change have diminishing impact as time goes on, so the longer we wait to act, the more severe the impacts are. That’s one aspect: the “ticking time bomb” quality of the issue.

The second is, the root causes of climate change are the root causes of so many other global problems. Exploiting resources, particularly fossil fuels, often happens in the wealthiest countries by some of the same major corporations that are driving other problems around agriculture and trade. And so climate change connects to other issues.

We try to do it through inspiring actions that anybody could participate in — designing programs and projects that will have a common interest for people. We really don’t keep tabs on a lot of the groups active around the world, and some are more active than others. But what we’re increasingly seeing is efforts to show solidarity across cultures and regions. A couple of weeks ago, a bunch of the Pacific Islanders we work with organized a Pacific Warrior Day of Action. Different indigenous traditional dancers in Tuvalu and Fiji and other countries organized these warrior dances, and the message was, “We’re not sinking, we’re fighting back.” We asked anybody else in our global network to send them a photo of them saying, “I stand with you.” So we try and find ways to have the stories reverberate.

A very strong role. We’ve emphasized storytelling throughout our whole work — uplifting stories of individual people who are doing incredible work in their countries. And we use social media to tell stories. We’ve done a lot with video and with live streaming of protests, and ways to make the online and the offline worlds reinforce each other.

One of the most influential people for us has been Marshall Ganz, who worked with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers and then went on to help design the Obama campaign’s field program. He’s got this really interesting formulation about organizing, which starts with the story of self, and then it goes on to the story of us, and then the story of now. And this is basically a way that you organize so that people want to be part of your movement. It starts personally because if you can’t explain why you do this in your life, then how can you expect anyone to join you? If I speak on a panel and just talk about the science of climate change, people don’t know what to do with that. But if I talk about the story of climate change and I talk about why it motivates me, people connect to it. So the storytelling is in many ways strategic movement building.

We acknowledge that’s part of the way people live right now. But people are not given choices — by choices I mean, why isn’t our electricity grid powered with more wind and less coal? We think it’s because of the way the political system is rigged and the influence the fossil fuel industry has. So how do we tackle that? Part of that is taking away their social license to operate. For the fossil fuel industry it’s their product that is the problem, and it’s what the product does to the planet. So that has to be challenged and that has to cease feeling like an inevitable way that the economy works. You sort of have to accept the complexity — the conflict between being a consumer but also being someone advocating for something different — because you don’t have a choice.

A transformation in the way political leaders around the world treat this issue, and an ambitious plan to save the climate that’s taken seriously and not seen as secondary to economic growth. And what helped get us there was a vibrant social movement around the world.

This work wouldn’t really be worthwhile for me if I didn’t feel like I was part of a movement. And I think that’s true for everyone who works with 350. Who are the people who inspire you? What are the conversations and the classes and the readings that really get you thinking, and who are the people you share that with, and what can you do together? Connect with the people who share a lot of what you share and a lot of the same interests, and who inspire you to do what inspires you.

Another is, don’t get too overwhelmed by the complexity of all the issues out there. I had a hard time as a student focusing on one thing when you know there are so many problems and so many paths to solutions. How can you justify spending all your time on global AIDS when blood diamonds also really get you fired up? Understanding that building movement in one area helps build movement in other areas freed me from feeling like I had to go to every meeting, I had to be part of every club.

I think maintaining hope is essential to being able to do the work. And what fuels it is some of the stories about what people are doing that’s confronting really huge odds and being successful. People who have been working in Ecuador to clean up after Chevron when Chevron left Ecuador and left their pollution behind, who haven’t given up, and who have tried every tool to try and make sure that justice is done. Stories like that are what keep me hopeful.