The groups protested against two particular nuclear power plants; those two plants opened anyway. You can call that a failure, but Kauffman notes that the actions inspired people around the country to organize their own antinuclear groups, a movement that brought about the cancellation of more than one hundred planned nuclear projects over several years, raised public awareness, and changed public opinion about nuclear power. Then she gets into the really exciting part, writing that the Clamshell Alliance’s “most striking legacy was in consolidating and promoting what became the dominant model for large-scale direct-action organizing for the next forty years…. It was picked up by … the Pledge of Resistance, a nationwide network of groups organizing against US policy in Central America” in the 1980s.
“Hundreds more employed it that fall in a civil disobedience action to protest the supreme court’s anti-gay Bowers vs. Hardwick sodomy decision,” Kauffman continues. “The AIDS activist group ACT UP used a version of this model when it organized bold takeovers of the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in 1988 and the National Institutes of Health in 1990, to pressure both institutions to take swifter action toward approving experimental AIDS medication.” And on, into the current millennium.
But what were the strategies and organizing principles the Clamshell organizers catalyzed? The short answer is nonviolent direct action externally, and consensus decision-making process internally. The former has a history that reaches around the world; the latter, one that stretches back to the early history of European dissidents in North America. That is, nonviolence is a strategy articulated by Gandhi, first used by residents of Indian descent to protest against discrimination in South Africa on September 11, 1906. The young lawyer’s sense of possibility and power was expanded immediately afterward when he traveled to London to pursue his cause. Three days after he arrived, British women battling for the right to vote occupied the British Parliament, and eleven were arrested, refused to pay their fines, and were sent to prison. They made a deep impression on Gandhi.
He wrote about them in a piece titled “Deeds Better than Words,” quoting Jane Cobden, the sister of one of the arrestees, who said, “I shall never obey any law in the making of which I have no hand; I will not accept the authority of the court executing those laws.” Gandhi declared: “Today the whole country is laughing at them, and they have only a few people on their side. But undaunted, these women work on steadfast in their cause. They are bound to succeed and gain the franchise.” And he saw that if they could win, so could the Indian citizens in British Africa fighting for their rights. In the same article (in 1906!) he prophesied: “When … [the] time comes, India’s bonds will snap of themselves.”
Ideas are contagious, emotions are contagious, hope is contagious, courage is contagious. When we embody those qualities, or their opposites, we convey them to others.
That is to say, British suffragists, who won limited access to the vote for women in 1918 and full access in 1928, played a part in inspiring an Indian man who, twenty years later, led the liberation of the Asian subcontinent from British rule. He, in turn, inspired a Black man in the American South to study his ideas and their application. After a 1959 pilgrimage to India to meet with Gandhi’s heirs, Martin Luther King wrote: “While the Montgomery boycott was going on, India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change. We spoke of him often.” Those techniques, further developed by the civil rights movement, were taken up around the world, including in the struggle against apartheid, at one end of the African continent, and in the Arab Spring, at the other.
Participation in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s shaped many lives. One of them is John Lewis, one of the first Freedom Riders, a young leader of the lunch counter sit-ins, a victim of a brutal beating that broke his skull on the Selma march. Decades later, as a congressman, Lewis was one of the boldest in questioning Trump’s legitimacy, and he led dozens of other Democratic members of Congress in boycotting the inauguration. When the attack on Muslim refugees and immigrants began a week after Trump’s inauguration, Lewis showed up at the Atlanta airport to protest.
When those women were arrested in parliament, they were fighting for the right of British women to vote. They succeeded in liberating themselves. But they also passed along tactics, spirit, and defiance. You can trace a lineage backward to the antislavery movement that inspired the American women’s suffrage movement, forward right up to John Lewis, standing up for refugees and Muslims in the Atlanta airport. We are carried along by the heroines and heroes who came before and opened the doors of possibility and imagination.
Michel Foucault noted, “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” You do what you can. What you’ve done may do more than you can imagine for generations to come. You plant a seed and a tree grows from it; will there be fruit, shade, habitat for birds, more seeds, a forest, wood to build a cradle or a house? You don’t know. A tree can live much longer than you. So will an idea, and sometimes the changes that result from accepting that new idea about what is true, or right, just might remake the world. You do what you can do; you do your best; what what you do does is not up to you.
That’s a way to remember the legacy of the external practice of nonviolent civil disobedience used by the antinuclear movement of the 1970s, as with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which did so much to expand and refine these techniques.
As for the internal process: in Direct Action, Kauffman addresses the Clamshell Alliance’s influences, quoting a participant named Ynestra King: “Certain forms that had been learned from feminism were just naturally introduced into the situation and a certain ethos of respect, which was reinforced by the Quaker tradition.” Sukie Rice and Elizabeth Boardman, early participants in the Clamshell Alliance, as Kauffman relates, were influenced by the Quakers, and they brought the Quaker practice of consensus decision-making to the new group: “The idea was to ensure that no one’s voice was silenced, that there was no division between leaders and followers.” The Quakers have, since the seventeenth century, been radical dissidents who opposed war, hierarchical structures, and much else. An organizer named Joanne Sheehan said, “While nonviolence training, doing actions in small groups, and agreeing to a set of nonviolence guidelines were not new, it was new to blend them in combination with a commitment to consensus decision-making and a non-hierarchical structure.” They were making a way of operating and organizing that spread throughout the progressive activist world.
There are terrible stories about how viruses like HIV jump species and mutate. There are also ideas and tactics that jump communities and mutate, to our benefit. There is an evil term, collateral damage, for the noncombatants killed in war as a sort of byproduct of war’s violence. Maybe what I am proposing here is an idea of collateral benefit.
What we call democracy is often a majority rule that leaves the minority, even if 49.9 percent of the people—or more, if it’s a three-way vote—out in the cold. Consensus leaves no one out. After Clamshell, it jumped into radical politics and reshaped them, making them more generously inclusive and egalitarian. And it’s been honed and refined and used by nearly every movement I’ve been a part of or witnessed—from the antinuclear actions at the Nevada test site in the 1980s and 1990s to the organization of the shutdown of the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in late 1999, a victory against neoliberalism that changed the fate of the world, to Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and after.
So what did the Clamshell Alliance achieve? Everything but its putative goal. It provided tools to change the world, over and over, and a vision of a more egalitarian, inclusive way to use those tools. There are crimes against humanity, crimes against nature, and other forms of destruction that we need to stop as rapidly as possible, and the endeavors to do so are under way. They are informed by these earlier activists, equipped with the tools they developed. But the efforts against these thi
ngs can have a longer legacy, if we learn to recognize collateral benefits and indirect effects.
If you are a member of civil society, if you demonstrate and call your representatives and donate to human rights campaigns, you will see politicians and judges and the powerful take or be given credit for the changes you effected, sometimes after they’d initially resisted and opposed them. You will have to believe in your own power and impact anyway. You will have to keep in mind that many of our greatest victories are what doesn’t happen: what isn’t built or destroyed, deregulated or legitimized, passed into law or tolerated in the culture. Things disappear because of our efforts and we forget they were there, which is a way to forget that we tried and won.
Even losing can be part of the process: as the bills to abolish slavery in the British Empire failed over and over again, the ideas behind them spread until, twenty-seven years after the first bill was introduced, a version finally passed. We have to remember that the media usually likes to tell simple, direct stories in which, if a court rules or an elective body passes a law, that action reflects the actors’ own beneficence or insight or evolution. They will seldom go further to explore how that perspective was shaped by the nameless and unsung, by the people whose actions built up a new world or worldview the way that innumerable corals build a reef.
The only power adequate to stop tyranny and destruction is civil society, which is the great majority of us when we remember our power and come together. The job begins with opposition to specific instances of destruction, but it is not ended until we have made deep systemic changes and recommitted ourselves, not just as a revolution, because revolutions don’t last, but as a civil society with values of equality, democracy, inclusion, full participation—a radical e pluribus unum, plus compassion. This work is always, first and last, storytelling work, or what some of my friends call “the battle of the story.” Building, remembering, retelling, celebrating our own stories is part of our work.
This work will only matter if it’s sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren’t immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when you fail at your immediate objective—to block a nominee or a pipeline or to pass a bill—that, even then, you may have changed the whole framework in ways that make broader change more possible. You may change the story or the rules, give tools, templates, or encouragement to future activists, and make it possible for those around you to persist in their efforts.
To believe it matters—well, we can’t see the future, but we have the past. Which gives us patterns, models, parallels, principles, and resources; stories of heroism, brilliance, and persistence; and the deep joy to be found in doing the work that matters. With those in hand, we can seize the possibilities and begin to make hopes into actualities.
Acknowledgments
Writing is done in solitude but it is by no means made in isolation. In that solitude I find the quiet to think and respond to the world and the things people have said, and everything I write is in conversation with others. The essays in this book evolved out of adventures and ongoing conversations with the people most important to me. My thanks go out to: Taj James, Erica Chenoweth, Jon Wiener, Astra Taylor, Sam Green, Marina Sitrin, Antonia Juhasz, L. A. Kauffman, Joan Halifax, Gavin Browning, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Garnette Cadogan, Cleve Jones, Maurice Ruffin, Alan Senauke, Melody Chavis, and many others with whom I’ve ruminated, marched, hoped, and worried over the past few years. A special thanks goes to the climate activists I’ve been blessed to work alongside these past several years, including May Boeve, Anna Goldstein, David Solnit and Bill McKibben of 350.org.; Steve Kretzmann and the crew at Oil Change International, on whose board I now serve, with pride, and my old friend and new fellow board member Renato Redentor Constantino. And my apologies to so many people I have overlooked.
Of course once something’s written, it goes to an editor to be published, and I’ve been lucky to have as editors for these essays Dorothy Wickenden at the New Yorker, John Freeman and Jonny Diamond at Lithub, the excellent gang at the London Review of Books, Christopher Beha (to whom an extra dose of gratitude is due for hiring me to write the Easy Chair column in 2014) and Emily Cooke at Harper’s, Amana Fontanella-Khan and Merope Mills at the Guardian, and at Haymarket Books, Anthony Arnove and Caroline Luft.
Special thanks for talking to me about Alejandro Nieto go to Elvira and Refugio Nieto, Adriana Camarena, Ely Flores, Oscar Salinas, Ben Bac Sierra, and Jorge Del Rio, and to Sana Saleem, who worked alongside me to report the story of the trial and the murder. And more thanks for an early education in thinking outside the Judeo-Christian box to Lewis DeSoto, long ago.
The essay “Break the Story” was given as a commencement address at my alma mater, the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and I’m grateful both for the honor of talking to an extraordinary group of graduating journalists and for the superb education I received there long ago, in ethics as well as in reporting and law and resourcefulness.
As for Jarvis Masters, who continues to be a cherished friend and a stunning model of grace under extraordinary grimness, I regret that my writing on him in this book doesn’t convey how funny he is and how much fun we have talking. He has produced many kinds of liberation during his imprisonment, and that is a beautiful thing.
And, as ever, thanks to C.
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About the Author
© Adrian Mendoza
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty or so books on feminism, Western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (f
or which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to the Guardian.
Call Them by Their True Names Page 16
