The Sea Is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook

By Cynthia Kaufman and Bill McKibben

The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook is an invitation to get involved in the movement to build a just and sustainable world in the face of the most urgent challenge our species has ever faced. By explaining the entrenched forces that are preventing rapid action, it helps you understand the nature of the political reality we are facing and arms you with the tools you need to overcome them. The book offers background information on the roots of the crisis and the many rapidly expanding solutions that are being implemented all around the world. It explains how to engage in productive messaging that will pull others into the climate justice movement, what you need to know to help build a successful movement, and the policy changes needed to build a world with climate justice. It also explores the personal side, how engaging in the movement can be good for your mental health. It ends with advice on how you can find the place where you can be the most effective and where you can build climate action into your life in ways that are deeply rewarding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781629638898

Cynthia Kaufman

Cynthia Kaufman is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action De Anza College, where she runs and teaches in a community organizer training program. She is the author of three books on social change: Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury, 2020), Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books, 2012), and Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change (2nd Edition PM Press, 2016). She has been active in a wide variety of social justice movements including Central American solidarity, union organizing, police accountability, and most recently tenants’ right and climate change. She publishes on social justice in Common Dreams.

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Praise for The Sea Is Rising and So Are We

"The Sea Is Rising and So Are We is a rare kind of book, at once a primer for activists and an astute commentary on a set of critical topics that even a seasoned climate stalwart could benefit from. It takes on some really tough questions—transformational change, how to talk about the emergency, the need for a specifically global politics of climate justice—and it does in a manner that is both simple and sophisticated. It’s not an easy balance, but Kaufman pulls it off."

—Tom Athanasiou, author of Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming

"In The Sea Is Rising and So Are We Cynthia Kaufman has provided us with a vital manual for confronting the climate crisis and its root causes. Kaufman offers compelling analysis, a comprehensive mapping of the political landscape, and practical guidance for action—all in a straightforward and accessible manner. Most importantly, she offers hope."

—Tony Roshan Samara, program director of land use and housing at Urban Habitat

"Cynthia Kaufman’s The Sea Is Rising and So Are We is a valuable overview of where we as a species are in the existential fight to prevent catastrophic climate disruption. It covers a lot, from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment of our situation to the need for a personally supportive movement culture to sustain our climate activism. It is an accessible, up-to-date resource both for those who have been in the climate fight for decades and those who know they need to do so but haven’t yet figured out how."

—Ted Glick, longtime climate organizer and author of Burglar for Peace

"Cynthia Kaufman’s The Sea Is Rising and So Are We challenges us to focus our attention on the powerful actors and structures that are at the root of our current climate crisis. In this moment of rapid transformation, Kaufman pushes us to see the reality of the situation we are in while providing concrete examples of actions that are already being taken and ways that people with diverse talents and interests can all contribute to creating a sustainable world. As a teacher of undergraduate courses on public policy, environmental politics, and community organizing, I welcome this work that seamlessly weaves together all of those elements in a profound yet accessible way."

—Lena Jones, board member of Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy and political science instructor at Minneapolis Community and Technical College

Racial justice and anti-capitalism need to be core to the movement to stop climate destruction. By focusing on challenging the entrenched interests that are driving human society toward destruction, this book points us toward the kinds of solutions that we need to throw our hearts and souls into with as much energy as we can mobilize.

—Eddie Yuen, coauthor of Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth and Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement

The Sea Is Rising and So Are We

A Climate Justice Handbook

Cynthia Kaufman

The Sea Is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook

© 2021 Cynthia Kaufman

This edition © 2021 PM Press

ISBN: 978–1–62963–865–2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947292

First published in Canada in 2021 by Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada

1–800–718–7201

www.btlbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright www.accesscopyright.ca.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication information available from Library and Archives Canada

Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

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PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA.

This book is dedicated to all the brave and passionate people who are working to build a just and sustainable future.

Contents

Foreword

Bill McKibben

This book is wonderful for its straightforwardness and simplicity. Cynthia Kaufman doesn’t claim, I think, to break new ground, but the truth is that new ground doesn’t need to be broken. We know most of what we need to know about climate change—its causes, dangers, and solutions. What we need is a commitment to fight and a plan for making that fight effective. What we need is a way past the barriers—structural, political, psychological—that keep us locked on what is frankly a suicidal path. And these are precisely what this book supplies.

I wrote what is often called the first book on global warming, way back in 1989. Even then we knew pretty much what would happen if we kept burning gas, oil, and coal. But we also believed, I think, that if the facts were known, then the powers that be would begin to act with the speed and courage the science required. That turned out to be wrong. Though we quickly won the scientific argument, we continued to lose the fight, because the fight wasn’t about data and evidence. Instead, like most fights, it was about money and power, and the fossil fuel industry possessed those in quantities sufficient to carry the day.

Their power cost us thirty crucial years. But by now we see the scope of the crisis so clearly (see it in the flames, the floods, the rising oceans) that huge numbers of people want to act. And increasingly we see the villains in this drama for what they are: we understand that the oil companies, and the giant banks that lend them their money, are willing to break the planet in order to extend their business models a few more decades.

That clarity doesn’t make the task at hand easy, but it does make it simple. And Kaufman’s genius lies in explaining how to go about that task. How to join together in the multiracial, intergenerational coalitions that can hold power accountable; how to bring the message of a positive future that can motivate more people to act; how to break through our own psychological obstacles and free ourselves to act as we must.

I don’t know if we will succeed—the scariest element here is the short time that physics is giving us to act. But I do know, from years of organizing around the world, that we will fight. And I know that books like this one—based on real-world experience of many battles—will help us understand what that fight must look like. It is a gift to all of us at work in this battle (and a great gift to give to anyone you want to bring on board).

Acknowledgments

I want to thank everyone working for a just and sustainable future. Special thanks go to those who read early drafts and gave advice for the book: Anna Goldstein, Carlos Davidson, Amy Merrill, Tom Athanasiou, Jacques L’aventure, Anna Goldstein, Patrick Reinsborough, Brian Malone, Bill McKibben, Marian Mabel, Dan Fuchs, Leonard Skylar, Zoe Volpe, Keris Dahlkamp, and Jamie Henn.

Introduction

Hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable.

—Moses Maimonides

Near where I live, in Pacifica, California, there is a big piece of land right at the ocean that was once slated to become a giant freeway interchange. That plan was stopped by local people who saw no need for increased freeway capacity.

When I moved to town fourteen years ago, that land was covered in muddy, disconnected dirt bike trails, almost inaccessible to walkers, and overgrown with invasive weeds. A few years after that, the land was acquired by the federal government, replanted with native plants, and developed with walking and biking trails. It is now a thriving home for countless bugs and butterflies that rely on the native plant species to survive, and it is becoming a better home for the endangered San Francisco garter snake, one of the most beautiful snakes in the world. From the blufftops of Morey Point you can see lines of Brown Pelicans, those iconic birds that were taken to the brink of extinction by DDT and brought back by regulation inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

The park is also a place of refuge for a racially and economically diverse group of people who come from far and wide to walk, get a break from the city, exercise, and enjoy spectacular views of the ocean. The park’s open spaces are free and belong to everyone. The park uses federal tax money to hire a very diverse set of employees and helps paid interns on their paths to meaningful careers.

One of my favorite things in life is watching a devastated landscape be turned into something thriving, beautiful, and socially sustainable. It helps heal me from the sense of hopelessness I often feel in the face of the climate crisis. I take heart in Arundhati Roy’s statement, Another world is not only possible; she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.¹ For that new world to really be brought into existence, it needs especially, to be able to breathe.

What will it take to heal that seven-mile-thick strip of air that provides the foundation for life on earth, which we call the atmosphere? We are living in a time of unprecedented change, much of it for the worse. The possibility is real that human society will continue on the path of destruction, and the world will become a permanent war zone, as our land becomes inhospitable for farming, we are subject to more disasters, social systems become unstable, and people fight for survival.

Also real is the possibility that we will act quickly enough to heal the atmosphere that keeps all of our ecological systems functioning, and in the process we may actually make our societies more livable and socially just. And, of course, we are most likely to end up with some of both. There has already been irreparable harm, and there is more destruction certain to come. How much more we don’t yet know. There also may be some very significant positive changes in society that come as a result of dealing with the climate crisis. Which future we end up with is an open question, and it is one that we all have a part in determining, with the acts we take in the next short period of time.

Many of us are in a deep state of despair as we face the reality of how far along this crisis is and how entrenched the political forces are that keep us from making this transition as quickly as we need to. The climate is already hitting some of the tipping points we have been warned about. For example, as the polar ice melts, the ocean becomes blacker and absorbs more heat, rather than reflecting it. Similarly, as draught leads to fire, those fires emit more greenhouse gases. The situation we face is urgent, and we need to reduce emissions dramatically and immediately. That is a tall order when we realize that global emissions are continuing to rise. We all find our own way to deal with these realities on an emotional level. For myself I have found that it is important to simultaneously be open to knowing how bad the hand is that we have been dealt while also focusing my attention on those places where I can make a difference.

There are different roles for different people in moving to a society that can sustain a healthy atmosphere. There are engineers who are inventing better heating and cooling systems, better electric buses, and better appliances. There are people in businesses working to save money by using less energy. There are artists who are helping us understand what we are up against and to connect us with our passions to build a better world. There are investors putting money into green energy and sustainable practices. There are politicians working on regulations mandating stronger vehicle emissions standards. There are individuals who are changing how they live to lower their personal carbon footprints and encouraging others to do so as well.

All of those things are crucially important, and if you are doing them you should feel proud that you are helping to bring the transition to a sustainable society. But there is one missing element if those are the only things that are done: challenging power. There are entrenched powers in society keeping things from changing as quickly as they need to change. As I write this, fossil fuel companies are still building new infrastructure, spreading misinformation, and trying to protect their ability to sell the resources they count as assets. All around the world, governments are subsidizing fossil fuel production to the tune of around over $4 trillion a year, with the US contributing $649 billion a year.² That is more than the US, the largest military power in the world, spends on the military.

Politicians in many countries still take campaign money from fossil fuel companies. And in the US, fossil fuel titans, such as the Koch brothers, have poured billions of dollars into partisan gerrymandering, and other schemes to make it difficult for candidates to get elected who want to take bold action for the climate. Those billionaires, and the major fossil fuel companies, have used that money to spread misinformation around the climate crisis. That work has lulled millions of people in the US into a sense of complacency, which slowed down a political response by several decades. It has also helped make our political system unable to take bold action.³

In order to heal the atmosphere, which all living things depend on, and which holds together all of the systems that make life on earth possible, we need to disrupt the social and political systems that are getting in the way of a rapid transition to a healthy and just society. The climate justice movement is focused on challenging the powers that keep us on a path of destruction. It focuses its attention on what is needed to have a just transition, that is, a transition to a society that is both environmentally sustainable and socially just.⁴

Because we live in a world of multiple and intersecting forms of power, that work requires careful attention to capitalism, racism, and sexism. The climate crisis is a threat multiplier. Those with more money can move up hill as the coasts become unlivable. And the continuing racial discrimination in lending will mean people of color will be less likely to get the loans needed to move. As hurricanes hit Puerto Rico with increased intensity, its status as a colony will mean it is less able to rebuild. As large parts of Africa become unfarmable, the women who do not hold title to land will be harder hit than the men who own land and who are able to leave the land and move to cities. The 2017 and 2018 fires in California were devastating for people from all socioeconomic classes. But wealthier people had homeowner’s insurance and most have been able to rebuild. Renters, and those owners without adequate insurance, have been left homeless or have had to leave their communities.

People with resources, social status, and political power are more protected from the devastating impacts of the climate crisis than are those with less of these things. The needs of frontline communities, those who work in fossil fuel extraction and don’t have other job opportunities, those who live in communities devastated by the drilling, mining, and refining of fossil fuels, and those who are exposed to the impacts of disasters without insurance to cover their losses, need to be front and center of our analysis of what we are facing and the best choices for policies.

Much of the work needed to remove the barriers to the adoption of the practices needed to switch from extractive and exploitative economic and political systems to ones that meet human needs requires that we challenge entrenched powers. We need forms of action that work hard for goals that run counter to the system that is designed to keep moving along in its preprogrammed ways.

Activism is not always disruptive, but its goal is to challenge the inertia behind a world on a path of destruction. People engaged in activism can