Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  In that sense, solar power could be a technology of repair, social as well as environmental. Even as it helps heal the atmosphere, it can help reduce that chunk of inequality that derives from the control of oil and gas deposits. In neither case can it do the job entirely: there are other sources of inequality, just as raising cows and cutting forests contribute to climate damage alongside power plants. But it’s a start. And so, the fact that it doesn’t represent a quantum leap forward in human power is a feature as well as a bug—it fits better with the human game.

  * * *

  You can say much the same for nonviolence, the other “technology” I want to posit as a practical hope. It works hand in hand with innovations such as solar panels, in fact, because if we are to build the political will to deploy renewable energy fast enough, we’ll need a bulldozer for reshaping the zeitgeist. That’s the job of movements.

  Almost by definition, nonviolence is less immediately powerful than the forces (violence, coercion) it wishes to replace. (Unarmed protesters can always be shot, and many have been.) Violence is time-honored—it’s the tool humans have used to resolve their differences over long millennia. When history needed to be unstuck, often the only crowbar for lurching forward was a revolution of some kind, fought with whatever weapons one could obtain. There’s no need to view this history as abhorrent, any more than we need to think of burning coal in the twentieth century as some kind of crime. I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and all summer long, I gave tours of the village green where the first battle of the American Revolution was fought. (Indeed, looking back, one sees that it was the first battle against the greatest empire the world had ever known.) The Minutemen were demanding real if imperfect democracy. One honors Captain Parker and his outgunned men.

  But eight miles down the road from Lexington, in the town of Concord, and three generations later, another idea about resistance began fitfully to emerge from the complicated mind of Henry Thoreau. In 1846 he left the cabin at Walden Pond, where he was making his later-celebrated sojourn, and took a walk into town. He bumped into Sam Staples, Concord’s constable and tax collector, who reminded him that he hadn’t paid the annual poll tax required of all males between the ages of twenty and seventy. True, said Thoreau, he hadn’t, because as an abolitionist, “I cannot for an instant recognize as my government that which is the slave’s government also.” So, he was led off to jail, and there he spent the night. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have visited and asked why he was there, only to be asked in return, “Why are you not?” In any event, as Thoreau later wrote, he was thinking of solutions that went well beyond the simple democratic rule his New England ancestors had fought for:

  Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.1

  Being an introvert and more than a little misanthropic, Thoreau was not about to organize anyone. His idea was quixotic enough that almost no one, including the fervent abolitionists around him, followed his lead. And the slavery question, of course, was settled only by a war as bloody as any in American history.

  But if the world paid Thoreau little heed initially, time has amplified his idea. Tolstoy read him and wrote about him; through Tolstoy, Gandhi came to know of his essay, which he said in 1907 had been “written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.” Gandhi’s great “experiments with truth” occupied much of the next half century, and though they came too late to prevent the two world wars, they did eventually succeed in driving the British out of India. The work that the Minutemen had begun with muskets on Lexington’s green, Gandhi and his followers finished with their courage at the saltworks in Gujarat—and then Dr. King adapted those techniques to take on some of the evils that the original American Revolution had institutionalized.

  When I say “nonviolence,” I do not mean only, or even mainly, the dramatic acts of civil disobedience that end in jail or a beating. I mean the full sweep of organizing aimed at building mass movements whose goal is to change the zeitgeist and, hence, the course of history. (Indeed, Gandhi made it clear that his satyagraha also included “constructive work” to build local economies. In his day, the key symbol was the spinning wheel, but now his old ashram at Sevagram boasts not only solar panels but a biodigester to make cooking gas from cow manure.) This movement-building differs from normal politics, from the daily fight for comparative advantage within the prevailing system and for the minor modifications of that system (tax cuts, say) that are in line with the existing, dominant currents of public opinion. Instead, I’m thinking of dramas such as the fight for suffrage, or against Jim Crow, or for gay marriage—each of which required a full-spectrum movement that stretched from the electoral to the illegal and was more focused on shifting culture than on winning narrow legislative victories. One of the finest theoreticians of nonviolence was Jonathan Schell, who, with his book The Fate of the Earth, had suggested that nuclear weapons, because they were so powerful, were rendering wars unfightable. In a subsequent book, The Unconquerable World, he advanced the idea further. Violence was increasingly dysfunctional, he wrote, and “forms of non-violent action can serve effectively in the place of violence at every level of political affairs.” Or, more eloquently, it was the method by which “the active many can overcome the ruthless few.”2

  I believe, as I’ve said before, that nonviolence is one of the signal inventions of our time—perhaps, if we are lucky, the innovation for which historians will most revere the twentieth century. Not everyone agrees. Indeed, to the most hard-nosed, it seems like so much faith-based mumbo-jumbo. The futurist Yuval Hariri said it was difficult to choose the twentieth century’s greatest discovery. Antibiotics, perhaps? The computer? “Now ask yourself what was the influential discovery of … traditional religions in the twentieth century. That too is a very difficult problem, because there is so little to choose from.”3 His sneer is misplaced. True, nonviolence didn’t emerge straight out of religion, and indeed, it sometimes subverted it—some of Gandhi’s greatest campaigns were aimed at Hinduism’s enduring caste discrimination. But mahatmas and ministers definitely led in developing this kind of resistance, and there is a spiritual insight at its core, one that traces at least back to the Sermon on the Mount. That’s the idea of turning the other cheek, of taking on unearned suffering, of engaging our sympathy for the weak instead of our truckling admiration for the strong. Even in what seems like the very clinical world of environmentalism, mounds of research and data aren’t ultimately decisive: the fight over climate change is ultimately not an argument about infrared absorption in the atmosphere, but about power and money and justice. Given that industry has most of that money and hence most of that power, it usually wins—unless, of course, a movement arises, one capable of changing hearts as well as minds.

  Such a movement arose in the late 1960s, after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and amid burning rivers and smog-choked cities. But it made little progress until Earth Day in 1970, when twenty million Americans (a tenth of the population) joined in demonstrations in every corner of the country. That unprecedented display of concern (and some subsequent electoral defeats for politicians tied to polluters) jolted Washington. With the usual balance of power upended, for a few years, major corporations lost one battle after another: Richard Nixon, no environmentalist, had little political choice but to sign the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the other environmental laws still in effect today.

  But success can sap mov
ements. The organizations that had taken to the streets now retreated to big Washington offices, where they concentrated on lobbying. For a while, that strategy worked, because that first Earth Day had put enough juice in the battery to run a powerful motor for a decade or two. But that energy began to dwindle, and eventually the power of money reasserted itself. By the George W. Bush administration, the oil companies were back in control, able to scuttle any chance at progress on climate change. After Barack Obama’s election, a Democratic Congress failed to pass even modest cap-and-trade legislation to fight global warming. And so, some of us decided that the time had come to try to rebuild the in-the-streets movement, so that we’d have a chance to win the fight as well as the argument.

  Many people in many places have played many roles in that revival—especially, tellingly, those in the poorest places hardest hit by environmental change. For some of us, the vehicle was a small group called 350.org, which we formed in 2008 (the “we” initially being me and seven undergraduates at Middlebury College, in Vermont). We didn’t concentrate on policy, but instead on mobilization, figuring that without a movement pressing for change, it was pointless to worry about precisely what change should look like. Our strategy was, frankly, ludicrous (“organize the world”), but beginner’s luck has its place, and apparently there was an unfilled ecological niche. People around the planet were indeed worried about global warming, but they felt powerless against such a huge force; the mere act of gathering them together overcame some of that despair. Our first attempt to rally the globe, in 2009, saw 5,200 rallies in 181 countries, what CNN called the “most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” Most of those gatherings were small, but over time, the movement has grown to the point where we can put hundreds of thousands of people in the street. When we joined with others to fight the Keystone Pipeline, it helped set off a worldwide spate of battles that now tie down and complicate every fossil fuel infrastructure project. (The head of one of America’s biggest energy lobbies has complained long and hard about the “Keystone-ization” of all the industry’s plans.) Thousands in kayaks—“kayaktivists,” of course—helped persuade Shell it didn’t really want to drill in the Arctic; dozens of states and countries have now banned fracking; and some have gone so far as to stop new oil and gas exploration.

  It’s a movement now, and one increasingly led by kids, indigenous nations, communities of color. In the fall of 2018, a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg staged a “school strike,” sitting on the steps of Parliament instead of going to class on the theory that she couldn’t be bothered if the government couldn’t be bothered to care about the climate. Her action galvanized sentiment across northern Europe, and on the other side of the globe, Australian schoolchildren were soon on strike, too, and occupying the foyer of their Parliament. Meanwhile, in Britain an Extinction Rebellion movement had sprung up, staging civil disobedience actions to shut down traffic across London. In the United States, young people staged a sit-in at Congress to demand a special committee on a “Green New Deal” by early 2019 pollsters reported that 80 percent of Democrats and 60% of Republicans backed the idea, or at least the slogan.” The Earth is running a fever, and the antibodies are starting to kick in. Which doesn’t mean we’ve won. We haven’t. The Koch brothers and the oil companies are holding on, thanks in part to Mr. Trump. We’ve scared them enough that they’ve begun to lash out—I’ve spent months with fossil fuel operatives following my every move with video cameras, thanks to the oil-funded efforts of the country’s premier “opposition research” firm. After a remarkable display of indigenous unity at the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Koch-funded legislators passed “anti-protester bills” in one statehouse after another, all designed to discourage that brand of dissent. (In Oklahoma, trespassing near “critical infrastructure facilities” now can get you ten years in prison.)4 The same is true around the world, from Duterte’s Philippines to Erdogan’s Turkey to Maduro’s Venezuela to Putin’s Russia, where protest is often lethal. But the oligarchs face a fight at every turn. As Naomi Klein has said, if we can’t get a serious carbon tax from a corrupted Congress, we can impose a de facto one with our bodies. And in so doing, we buy time for the renewables industry to expand—maybe even fast enough to catch up a little with the physics of global warming.

  I recount all this not to boast—as I say, we’re not winning, and in any event, I’m not much of a leader. (Having helped get things started, I’ve found it a relief and a pleasure to turn the spotlight toward the young, diverse, and remarkable organizers around the world.) Still, it has been a great privilege to see up close that, even against the biggest and richest forces on the planet, this technology of nonviolence can prove its power. The week in the fall of 2011 that civil disobedience against Keystone began at the White House, for instance, the National Journal reported on a poll of its 300 “energy insiders” on Capitol Hill and in the K Street lobbying shops. Ninety-one percent predicted that TransCanada, the company attempting to build the pipeline, would soon have its permit. But then 1,253 people went to jail, more than had committed civil disobedience about anything in decades. And then tens of thousands circled the White House—depending on your outlook, it was either a group hug or a temporary house arrest for Barack Obama. Before too many years had passed, polls showed a clear majority of Americans opposing this project. The pipeline’s not built yet, and even if it someday goes in the ground, its chief legacy will be a widespread understanding that we shouldn’t head down this path any longer. In the early summer of 2018, Pope Francis used precisely the language we’d pioneered in that fight: most oil, gas, and coal, he said, needed to “stay underground.”5 We’d begun to change the zeitgeist, which is the reason we’d gone to work in the first place.

  It’s possible to imagine a similar movement arising over, say, designer babies. In fact, such a campaign would in some ways be easier, because the proponents of such work aren’t yet entrenched—there’s not yet an Exxon equivalent, with a massive revenue stream and a harem of congressmen and senators. And activists would come to such a fight from both left and right, which means potential great power and also constant stress. I can’t tell you what will trigger that movement—likely some development (a human clone? the next set of designer babies?) shocking enough to really capture people’s attention—and I can’t promise that it will win. If Google and companies like it mobilize on the other side, it will be a hard battle, probably won or lost on who is able to define what constitutes “progress.” But it might well be the start of a larger movement in defense of the human.

  Nonviolence is a powerful technology, despite the fact that we still know very little about it. Think about our understanding of military power: almost every nation on the planet has an academy or two devoted to the study of war, producing men and women who know everything about flanking maneuvers and close-air support. They join militaries better funded than any other part of our society. Our police are often heavily militarized as well. Visiting the encampment at Standing Rock was a reminder that state and local authorities, flush with surplus Pentagon gear, can seem almost indistinguishable from the armed forces. They had sound cannons and water cannons and vehicles that were, in essence, tanks; they wore the bulked-up tactical gear of the warrior. The oil companies hired security guards who came with snarling German shepherds.

  And yet, all that firepower was almost powerless against the encampment that had gathered along the confluence of the Cannonball and the Missouri Rivers. In fact, the more force the oil barons deployed, the less it worked. The day they turned the dogs loose on peaceful demonstrators was the day that Standing Rock turned into a crisis for the White House, because people there knew what the pictures meant—they were a direct link to the iconic images of Birmingham and the civil rights movement. That Barack Obama was forced to enjoin the pipeline was a great victory; that Donald Trump bailed it out was a great, sad accident of history. But anyone who thinks that time is ther
efore on the side of the oil companies is reading history wrong. This movement will win (though, as we’ve seen, it may not win in time).

  It will win in part because force has less purchase than it used to. Oh, it’s still powerful, in the Dakotas, and in China, and in Russia, and in plenty of other places. But this new technology of nonviolence is challenging it. We’re still early in the learning curve, and we lack a West Point or an Annapolis, but people around the world are trading lessons. The Serbian group Otpor! learns tactics from the overthrow of the nation’s strongman Slobodan Milosevic, and it teaches those tactics to the young people mounting the Arab Spring; their successes and failures teach new lessons still. Over time, if we manage not to end the human game, these new ideas will continue to flourish, because they draw on precisely what is most human about us: creativity, wit, passion, spirit. None of these sounds like any match for money and weaponry, but ask the millions who rallied spontaneously to stop the president from separating families along the border. Sometimes this works.

  Or ask the Nebraska rancher who managed, marvelously, to combine the crucial technologies of photovoltaics and civil disobedience. Bob Allpress raises cattle and alfalfa on a nine-hundred-acre spread that TransCanada Corporation wants to bisect with the Keystone XL Pipeline. He’s been fighting the pipeline for years—and in 2017, he built a big solar array right in its path. If TransCanada wants to build the pipeline anyway, “not only would it have to invoke eminent domain against us, it would have to tear down solar panels that provide good clean power back to the grid and jobs for the people who build them,” Allpress said.6