[Peace-discuss] climate activist Tim DeChristopher, on activism

[Stuart Levy]

Tim DeChristopher is the young man who, intending to protest a sale of public lands,
ended up throwing sand in the gears of the auction itself, and is now sentenced to
two years in Federal prison.

There has been some but not a lot of media attention of this, but Rolling Stone
is on the ball.  DeChristopher gave a very moving interview, talking about
the whole approach to activism.  We can learn from this!

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/meet-america-s-most-creative-climate-criminal-20110707

The article isn't long, but here are some excerpts:

(on violence)
 ... violence is the game that our government is really, really good at.  And
 if we wanna play their game, they’re always gonna win.  That’s what they’ve
 always shown. And violence, or anything that’s perceived as violence on the
 part of activists, justifies harsh repression by the government, whereas
 non-violent resistance and civil disobedience tend to undermine the moral
 legitimacy of our government. 


(on sacrifice)
... We study a lot of science but not much history, so we end up with a
movement that knows a lot about the technical problem, but not about how change
happens in America.  When we study history, we see that social movements in
American history have sacrificed a lot.  Look at the Freedom Riders.  That
first bus of Freedom Riders got blown up and they were beaten within an inch of
their lives and put in a hospital. And then after seeing that a group of
students from the University of Tennessee said we can’t let it end that way.
They not only dropped out of school the week before finals and left their
already-integrated city, Nashville, which didn’t have segregation, but they
signed their last wills before they went on the bus. They knew exactly what
they were getting into. And I don’t know of anyone in the climate movement that
has met that level of sacrifice, myself included.


(At one point, he compares the environmental movement with the climate justice movement.
I've just been reading Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow", and this sounds
like the difference between the "liberal" and "radical" approaches to race relations
after Reconstruction.  It was the radicals, the Populists, who sought to make
common cause between poor whites and poor blacks based on their common oppression --
theirs was the view that was really dangerous...)

    One of the defining goals of the environmental movement is a cleaner, greener
    version of the world that we have now. The climate justice movement has
    realized that that that would still be a world of injustice, based on
    exploitation, with people who are afraid of their own government.  And that’s
    not really something worth fighting for.  We want a radically different world.
    We want a healthy, just world. And the climate justice movement has stopped
    being dependent on the environmental movement; it has started to strike out on
    its own.