Organized action
- Tom Vermolen
- Jul 28
- 7 min read
Tip 4. Bringing people together in a sustained way
Tip 3 centered around common values. Tip 4 emphasizes a call to organize and to organizing around those common values! Coal, gas, and oil cartels lust to extend their profits as long as possible. To counter this, our trust and our power can only succeed through mobilization or grassroots organization. But the mobilization amounts to sudden, short-term spurts of “all out” to engage, for example, building the get-out-the-vote campaign, or generating a short-term public opinion to build a bicycle path. The excitement and engagement rises and diminishes comparatively quickly, characterized in Fig. 1 as rapid ups and downs. Less so with the organi- zation, which sustains itself and grows over generations, and builds a community unity–if done well. An organized climate movement will
hack away at fossil fuel power and ultimately end the cartels’ destructive power over the
world. Both approaches may succeed, but the organizational strategy has longer lasting, deeper effects, and success.The US civil rights struggle, anti-colonial movements, and the Suffragette movement through the 20th century to the present are a few examples. Sticking to mobilizing will not make the giant change we need, the repairing of our climate. Climate organizers can, shown in the red line of fig. 1.
The methods and thoughts suggested by Marshall Ganz, a dedicated, seasoned, and experienced organizer and theoretician, are relevant here:
Do not lose sight of the fact that we are in an age of transformational energy change occurring at a critical juncture. The latter is much like the Chinese symbol for crises, of danger and opportunity, or when Ganz cites Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination of criticality, a clear view of the world's pain and hurt, coupled with a sense of hope. We are now in an age of painful climate breakdown. How individual resources can be turned into collective power is at the heart of this urgent energy transformation. This relates to something Ganz never wrote about in depth but suggests, namely climate organizing.
Acknowledge that a first step for rescuing the climate can be one individual’s mobilization effort. Greta Thunberg took such steps in Stockholm to muster within herself her very limited resources, sitting down with a handmade sign. She made herself a solo activist. Eventually, others would join in, but the organizational clout was happenstance. The basic organizing needed to protect the climate still falls short. Ganz broadly distinguishes between growing a community and congregation, which is more organized and synergistically more powerful, as a strategy goal.
Recognize that the climate movement must develop into a formidable, organized political power. Even if we appeal to common values and pursue the prior Tips 1, 2 , and 3 (seen in the previous Newsletters), without organization, we will experience mounting loss and damage such as, unprecedented flash floods, wildfires, heat waves. The climate change movement, in all fairness, has thus far amounted more to mobilization efforts, planned or sporadic one-time events, and media events, than to long-term, viable, sustained action groups. Such events are now on a down curve, though with some rebounding to come as emissions climb and consequences intensify. To confront the deeper change, the movement must be massive in number—in millions or billions—global, organized, and able to confront the authority, efficacy, and power of Big Oil, Big Gas, somewhat Big Coal, pretenders, politicians, oligarchs, media moguls, military authority, and professional misinformers. Organizing is about realizing the possible, which is still only plausible, to grow the community into a congregation as an unstoppable force. Ganz identifies the challenge of organizing, as how people can turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change.
Use the public narrative to compel emotional learning and organizing. Ganz's framework is again helpful. Emotions are central to motivating broad action. The public narrative is key. It consists of three parts or stories. Each is always instructive, linked closely to achieving those shared values of Tip 3. The story of oneself shares our personal experiences and values that
inspire a person to lead, in our case, climate change work, captured in the actions of Greta Thunberg. These stories allow us to connect with others, even those we might disagree with.
The story of us, captured in the Fridays for Future global efforts, focuses on the shared values, experiences, and aspirations of a community described under Tip 3. The story of now, the repeated and worsening damage and loss brought on by climate change, is prompting an urgent response. These stories are action motivators. They remove action inhibitors to rescuing the climate. Public narrative is then the glue to bring people together, to organization[1], to reverse the fossil fuel narrative.
Accept and use emotions to motivate climate action. In the prior tips, especially Tip 3, we talked about linking the shared values of many. We might agree climate change harms children, life, nature, etc. But for organized action, values can, and must be turned into a resource, a moral one, to confront the climate challenge. At the core is motivation, linked to emotions. Billions today value a healthy climate, but lack motivation. The fossil fuel industry has promoted their own “action inhibitors”. In opposition, we activists know how, the use of a strategy, the mind, but not sufficiently why, an issue of the heart. We need to bring out that emotional information about climate. That second mapping amounts to an emotional one, shown in fig. 2.
Understand our climate movement weaknesses. Though not a climate activist, Ganz offers three relevant insights. The climate movement, in “listening to the science”, suggests, for some, that emotions are not helpful, but that only pure, objective science and cold-hearted facts, and long academic words arel. Talks on climate have often tended to fall into academic lectures. But the pursuit of climate science is a value and we should unleash the emotions of our need for science and how it hurts when we do not listen to the science. We do not need those big words either. We should access emotional resources rooted in our value of science. Climate science can unleash all five emotions without turnoffs, to inspire urgency, hope, anger, solidarity, YCMAD. The 134 children washed away in a recent Texas flash flood, deadly heat waves in India, forest fires in Europe–all have a climate science-based explanation, which the media and the entrenched power determinedly skirt. We should, in Greta's words, listen to climate science—and panic.
Secondly, we should also panic for the spreading of climate science, noting how brazenly politicians are willing to accept cutbacks in research, suppress or mock or doubt climate science, and even suppress mention of the very vocabulary used in climate change discussion. Many climate activists talk to like-minded folks, pushing science while disconnecting themselves from the hearts and minds of many ordinary people befuddled by contrary emotions. In Fridays For Future, we at times cordoned ourselves off, meeting our own kind every Friday at the town square, and meeting others by lying on the tarmac. We did not knock on doors or talk to our neighbor, the grocery clerk, the bus driver, high school kids, or the nurse.
Thirdly, addressed by Ganz, a critical role of leadership is to create constructive (climate) anxiety, a combination of (fossil fuel) fear and doubt to open people up to fresh ways, a balanced anxiety, neither too much nor too little. We still live under these and many other inhibitions to act!
By spreading these motivators on the right of Fig. 2, we can enjoin people to action. Children, for example, can succeed in activating their parents as the beginning of something much larger.[1]
Recognize that (climate) organizing is a particular form of (climate) community leadership. Leadership involves three things: the self, others, and action, Ganz reasons. Applied to the climate, it is about accepting responsibility, and enabling others to rescue the climate in the face of grave uncertainty. To do well, we try to begin and deepen our understanding by doing. Ganz cites Hillel (Pirkei Avot, Chapter 1:14) starting with “if I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self [only], what am I? And if not now, when?” Ganz takes this collectively.[2] First, to whom am I accountable? To myself, but also to those whose values I share, the community with whom I am engaging in a leadership contract. Second, what change does the community need, rooted in their experiences and understanding? Third, “if not now, when?” means, how can I start to work with the community, with its resources, to build the power needed to achieve that change. Paraphrased, for Ganz, climate organizing is about turning communities into constituencies. Turning resources into constituencies, collective power, is at the heart of organizing. In short, through climate leadership, we organize humanity, we step out of fossil fuels, and we use the renewable resources we have, really locally–all to form constituencies to act globally.
Build relations or people-ties to go to action. Ganz sees the glue to bridge the gap between relations and actions builds upon three ingredients: the public narrative, strategy, and structure. They are essential elements of bringing people to action. Communicating around these three elements, we can gain a better understanding of how we can act together. Put another way, organizing connects relations to actions and turns relations into relationships with a commitment, which drives action. Ganz urges two approaches: one-on-one contacts, mentioned in earlier tips, or house meetings. Not mentioned but also effective, climate action teams focused on smart goals are also invaluable. Any of these three ways transforms relations into relationships and transforms mobilizational into organizational growth, with an emerging, specific focus, e.g., more bike paths, more renewables, community-choice energy, lower food prices, lower energy prices, etc.
Mobilizing, not organizing, will never sufficiently increase the power to change until it is too late. Similarly, socializing only with people who agree with us puts us on the wrong track. Organizing, as reflected in the climbing trend line in Fig. 1 means building structures, leadership, and commitment with a wide variety of people through these three pillars, not with only those who agree with us. It means building relationships around shared values, building collective capacity, and nourishing commitment. Mobilizing or merely talking with those who agree with us, in contrast, reduces the need for commitment. It amounts to individual aggregation, and not vital, collective synergistic empowerment. Pulling together as one team is more powerful than having a team of individuals.
The Ganzian essence of Tip 4 is to take action to rescue the climate in the best and most sustainable way you can, organizing with others!