In Backlash to Campus Pro-Palestine Protests, Echoes of Standing Rock and the Global Crackdown on Climate Protest

 There was just another high profile soup protest with climate protesters throwing soup at the Mona Lisa in France. And to be clear, throwing soup at the plexiglass protecting the Mona Lisa, the painting was not harmed. It did spark yet another round of discourse, though, about whether these tactics work or whether climate activists are being too radical.

Or whether they're just being annoying and making everyone hate them and their cause.

All of which makes it an excellent time to talk to social scientist Dana R. Fisher about her research over the past several years on the climate movement and her book, which brings all that research together. It's called Saving Ourselves, and it comes out today. It's all about the climate movement, what tactics have and haven't worked for it, and where it's headed in the years ahead. Welcome back to Drilled, the real free speech threat. I'm Amy Westervelt. After the break, a conversation with Dana Fisher.

 Hi, I'm Dana R. Fisher. I am the director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity and a professor at the School of International Service at American University, which is a mouthful. I'm also the author of Saving Ourselves from Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Thank

 Okay, so, the first thing I want to tell you about my reaction to this book was I was like, ah, it's so nice to read, a researched academic book that's really well written and easy to read.

 I know, I, I suffered through this. In fact, I think we spoke about it as I was suffering through this. I mean, I started writing the book while I was on this fellowship at the Library of Congress, and you and I spent all this time in the reading room trying to figure out the tone.

It was a heavy lift to try to balance it, informed, but accessible, and not boring. So, hopefully.

 I think you succeeded. It's really very readable and, clearly well researched, but also very readable. But I wanted to ask you, you talk about this in the intro that, that this was a departure from how social science is usually conducted in that you're giving some predictions and some advice on what people might do. And I wanted to have you talk about that a little bit. what is the usual approach to social science and how are you kind of departing from it in this book?

 Well, sure. So I'm a social scientist. I was raised as a sociologist. So normally the way that I've, I've done my work since the nineties when I finished, is that we come up with a theory, we come up with some hypotheses. So those are predictionsof what we think we're going to find, we go out in the field and we collect data. I mean, I do a lot of primary data collection. With, um, policymakers and activists. So I go out and I collect data of some sort. I analyze my data and, you know, and basically I say, Oh, it, it works.

It doesn't work. This is how we need to change our understanding of the world. And then, you know, I tweak that. And then I go out and collect more data, right? That's kind of the research process. And that's the way I've been doing my work. And it still has been, around connecting to politics and connecting to thinking about political processes.

But it hasn't been about telling us what's going to happen next, because we don't know. I mean, no research can do that. In fact, one of the things that Has always been an interesting conversation about the IPCC is the way that this modeling work is basically in a lot of ways prescriptive because it's basically taking historical patterns.

And then using them to predict what's going to happen in the future. And so I kind of used a similar idea to that. I mean, I don't do quantitative modeling per se, at least not in the work that I present here. But what I did instead is I basically take all of the findings from having studied climate policymaking through the U. S. Congress since the 90s, right? So since we've been trying to get some sort of bill through both houses of Congress. Presidential efforts to try to address climate change as well as the ways that multiple actors in the United States have responded, including particularly activists and looking at all of them and how they've responded over the years.

I've written many, many papers. I wrote a section for the recent IPCC assessment for working group 3 and I took all of that. And basically. You know, spun it around a little bit to think through, okay, so we, we see very clear patterns here, so how can we predict what's coming next given the patterns? And I wrote the final chapter specifically to that and to make some suggestions rather than the way that I've done my previous books where even the books that were written for a trade audience, you know, everyday people in those cases, I usually would end with kind of, and, theoretically, and in the research world, this is what we need to start thinking about.

And here, one of the things that I think I come to, one of my big conclusions is that I don't know that we need to be thinking anymore. What I think we need to be doing now is acting and, and the climate crisis is just, it's daunting, but it also is, we're in a moment where we need to do and stop thinking.

And so I wanted to use the expertise and the findings from all of this research over the past 25 plus years to speak to that. And so that's what I tried to do.

 You also talk about lessons learned from the pandemic and I don't want you to give away every single thing, because I want people to go and read the book, but I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what your takeaway from the pandemic was in terms of seeing, you know, there was so much conversation about what climate could learn from

 you know, in the, in the aftermath of COVID 19.

And yeah, I'd love to have you sort of Give a little bit of an overview of your

 Sure. I mean, you know, it's funny. So, so the book actually started out as this piece that I was asked to write for Climate Action, which is a nature journal, but it's now, I guess, where most of the social science and policymaking stuff goes for the nature journals around climate.

They actually asked me if I would write something and I wanted to take this theory of anthro shift, which Andrew Jorgensen and I wrote in a journal called Sociological Theory, which means nobody reads it except for a very small number of people, and I wanted to apply it to the climate crisis.

And so I wrote a piece called Anthro Shift in a Warming World. And in it, basically I took the lessons learned from COVID and, and I build on that in the book. And what I basically look at is the way that the world mobilized, you know, some could say, and some people did say they moved, mobilized quickly, except for that it actually took a while for people to really lock down. And I don't know how much you remember of I guess it was the early days of 2020 when we were hearing these like murmurs of this disease in Asia.

And then there were those videos that went live on social media of people who were in lockdowns in Italy. I don't even remember these,

 right? I mean, so, so it happens. It happens to be that I was teaching my environmental sociology class at the time. And I have a whole section on risk. Where we spend a bunch of time on reflexive modernization, the risk society, which is one of my favorite social theories from Ulrich Beck that nobody reads anymore.

And so we're reading it and I like get obsessed with this disease because it's a wonderful example of a risk pivot and the way that this universal sense of risk and people worrying about What's coming can actually motivate people to take action. And so I, every, every class I had, I did like a COVID update and I had a friend and colleague of mine in Japan tell me they shut down the schools.

And then there was these Italy, Italy videos. And so I was showing them to my class and, and I was like, you guys know, we may not see each other again. I mean, actually, I didn't think that we were going to shut down for as long as we did. But I, and it was funny because at a certain point my husband said to me, he's like, We are not discussing this anymore at the table because I, I had gotten obsessed with the daily numbers and what was happening and what was coming and so I saw it coming but then the world did shut down and most people hid in their houses, schools closed.

 And Greta Thunberg went on and made a big statement saying this shows what can happen when people recognize a crisis and respond to a crisis to the level needed. And so everybody all over was like, Oh my gosh, look, this is a great lesson for how climate and climate policymaking can happen.

So I use this, you know, the way that the world responded to think through, how much this could be what we need to address the climate crisis. The problem is that as the COVID pandemic wore on, some people decided that the risk wasn't worth their hiding inside. Some people got pissed off with the government telling them that they couldn't go out, that they had to wear masks.

Some people got vaccinated or had the disease and said it wasn't that bad and decided that, you know we shouldn't worry about people who are most at risk because they wanted to have more freedom and, and the world opened up. I mean, it slowly opened up and then it opened up completely, even though we're, we're living through another wave of the pandemic.

I just had COVID a week ago. So it's interesting, but the world turned back and we ended up back at our business as usual. And it's interesting when thinking about this and comparing it to the, the climate crisis. I mean, first of all, it helps us understand the level of risk and the intensity and personal feeling of risk that you must have to make substantial personal change and for you to support social change on the level of what we really need to address the climate crisis. And, you know, in the paper that I wrote about this, I talk about how what's really interesting is there were all these unintended climate consequences in terms of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, right?

 We had a huge bounce back and we're way back above that trajectory now. So the world shifted right back. And one of the things that's part of the theory And I won't get into the weeds on this one, because most people's eyes will glaze over.

But, one of the things about the theory is that when we talk about this idea of anthro shift And that is the way that society can reorient itself in the face of, of, of a dire sense of risk is that it's multidirectional, which means that the world can change like we saw with COVID, but it can shift backwards.

It's not, we're not on a one way street towards saving the world or destroying the world. We can go back and forth. And there are lots of historical examples of this. And I think that's one of the problems with a lot of social theory is it assumes that we're always going one direction,

And so with the pandemic, it basically helped me think through how bad things really have to get to address the climate crisis. And it's even worse with the climate crisis in a lot of ways, because First of all, the threat of disease is, you know, is extremely,

 feels more immediate and people can understand it better.

Right. But in addition to that, there are not all these, we'll call them vested interests today that are pushing back hard, right? Like there wasn't a group of like economically strong and privileged actors who were like, no, no, no, no, no. Keep the world open because everybody was terrified

 tried! It was very, like, it was nothing like what

So we have now this huge pushback and we have pushback in terms of pushback from the economic interests, from the ways these economic interests have bought and paid for many political interests and political representatives, as well as all of the, you know, and you've done all this work on this and the way the PR machine has helped to confuse individuals so they don't even understand what's going on. And so it's just harder. And so in the end, by looking at the pandemic and comparing it, it just tells us how big and how bad things have to get before we could see this kind of mobilization happening, this kind of social change happening, because it's just so much change that's needed.

 Right. You talk about this in the book as well, the, the lessons that we can learn from social change research and from civil rights movements and all of those things, but then also there are lots of things that make the climate issue somewhat unique. Like I just was thinking the other day about how, while of course, every civil rights fight feels urgent, there's this external urgency here that doesn't necessarily exist in other realms.

 You mean that we're gonna destroy ourselves? You

 yeah, exactly. These climate shocks that you mention in the book, there was a whole back and forth on Blue Sky where people were, of course, because, there was yet another Soup on a Painting protest,

people were having that debate again. And someone was like, I don't understand why anyone uses these tactics because

they've never worked for any cause ever in history.

And I was like, that is actually just totally untrue.

 Wow, I completely missed that. I certainly would have chimed in there

 but it was interesting because I was like, well, you know, um, a, like, there's not a ton of agreement around what worked would mean in this scenario. Everybody

 I mean, there was an interesting debate that I did, I did get tagged in on about, you know, whether or not these tactics are successful. I ended up pushing back and, you know, all those stuff that I've written about this and my piece with Oscar and Colin in Nature recently that specifically looks at the outcomes of this kind of activism and the broadening radical flank of the climate movement.

But what I will say is just everybody has a different definition of success, and the big, the important thing to note here is that it's a question of what the activists are trying to achieve, and I thought it was great because Oscar posted in response to this, this outraged, uh, climate person about, you know, how dare they attack the Mona Lisa, um, He responded by saying, you know, actually look at the front page of the Washington Post right now.

It has the video and then it has the demands of this group on the front page of the wall. I mean front website page of the Washington Post. That's it. That's the goal. As I talk about in the book, these are shockers. The whole goal is to get media attention to raise public awareness about an issue.

It's not to change hearts and minds. It's not to mobilize people who disagree with them. It's not to make people happy. It is intentionally to make people uncomfortable. The thing that I think is that the people don't get is that like, as uncomfortable as you might get that somebody threw some soup. On the coding over the Mona Lisa, the deal about these kinds of, um, tactical innovations, which is what we call them and tactical diffusions is what we call them in the social science world is that everybody knows.

I mean, and the activists know this, that you have to keep getting more outrageous to get the media coverage, because at a certain point, everybody's going to be like, Once you hit the Mona Lisa, I mean, where do you go from there? The Sistine Chapel? I mean, I'm

 okay, how many of these paint protests are we gonna, you know, it's

 right. I mean, how much food is it? It's very nice. It's very benign, but you know, it's going to have to innovate and, and it also is likely to radicalize because people are going to start to think it's blasé and that's where things get. They get spicy. Some people use the word interesting, and it depends what they're doing, and it is going to be divisive.

Actually, I have a colleague who wrote this great book recently called The Struggle for the People's King and she specifically wrote about the way that, Martin Luther King Jr. 's memory has become sanitized and basically a lot of the grit has been taken out to make him a national hero and how that takes away a lot of the What was part of the movement and the way the movement played out during his period of his Leadership before he was murdered and it's really interesting to look at it because this you know That means that all of these activists who are all of these other people who are like, oh my god Well, look at the civil rights movement. As though everybody loved the civil rights movement. That's just not true! People were so annoyed and people were complaining and activists were getting the shit beaten out of them by white supremacists as well as law enforcement.

And in some ways, as I talk about in the book, that's part of why the civil rights movement was able to get so much support and be able to push for the types of changes that it did eventually achieve. Which is, is interesting, in terms of the role that violence played there.

But I think it's really important that we cannot see that if we just look at the sanitized version of MLK Jr. And the role that the civil rights movement played in history, right? Because it did involve conflict and it was not popular and it involved a lot of disruption that people didn't like. And then there was a lot of nasty nastiness in terms of the way that many Americans responded, .

 Historically, we don't tend to have a good sense of what these movements have accomplished or, you know, how effective or not they've been until several years later . In the moment, they're annoying to everyone, that's the whole point.

Okay, you're annoyed, you know, great. But you being annoyed is not indicative of whether or not this protest or this vein of protests has worked, we're not really gonna know for a while, which also becomes problematic with climate because it feels so urgent and time limited.

 And the other response could also be that while you're annoyed, if you're willing to talk about this, and you're willing to talk about how this is not the tactic I would support, but of course, I support climate action, that is exactly the point, because that's what the radical flank does.

It basically pulls support towards the more moderate actors in the movement. And that's what, you know, it's all part of this, this beautiful dance towards social change, which is so very needed. And I didn't talk about anthro shift at all, which was your question.

 Yeah. Sorry. Actually, can I wanna have you define Anthro shift a little bit and it's okay for it to be a little bit in the weeds.

 All right, well, so an anthro shift, I mean, an anthro shift is basically, it's a, it's a, it's a social theory that combines components of a number of different theories that talk about the relationship between society and the environment. And what it basically posits is that an anthro shift will occur when there's a perceived risk that reaches a critical threshold and leads people to alter their behaviors.

It compels social entities to respond and mitigate the risk. Um, and the, the most important components of an anthro shift are one that there is this risk that motivates individuals and actors to, to push for change, but also that it can move in multiple directions. But the big point that I make in my book and build off of the experience of the COVID pandemic to talk about it is that to reach the tipping point.

Things have to be pretty bad and when I say bad, they could be that people are just really, really worried about getting sick and dying. Take, for example, the covid pandemic, um, or it can be about watching the water rise and maybe knowing that you don't have any home insurance will motivate change, but there's not a lot of evidence to show that that is a big enough sense of risk to get people to change.

But it all builds, it builds also off of --this research that talks about windows of opportunity that open up after disaster. And so, when we think about risk, there are lots of different ways we can think about risk that I talk about in the book and when we wrote the theory. But one of the ones that I think is the most useful is natural disasters.

And I mean, we can think about them as, you know, these various climate shocks, which are these deviations from the normal weather patterns and normal patterns that are exacerbated by climate change and you know that it comes in the form of drought that leads to wildfire that comes in the form of extreme weather, extreme heat, extreme storms, flooding cyclones.

I mean, look at the news today and you can see many of them taking place right now, but the question is how much of that is needed to push for the type of mass pressure that will get us. To get the policy makers to make the social change.

 Yeah okay. Then one of the chapters, I like how you do this in the book where you have a chapter about, Individual action and then a chapter about collective action, in part because I feel like in this conversation that's dominated climate spaces for a really long time that that tries to sort of pit those two things against each other. Engaging in protest and activism and even like political organizing is almost never what people talk about when they talk about individual action. It's usually like what you buy. So yeah, I'd love to have you talk a little bit about your view of that conversation in general and how you'd like to see people think about where they plug in.

 So, first of all, I mean, I am not a person who says that we shouldn't be trying to, you know, make changes in our everyday lives. And I try to lift up some of my favorite work in that area, because there's been some really interesting work that kind of models and thinks through how individual actions can have substantial effects on overall carbon consumption and, contributions to greenhouse gases, et cetera, and so forth.

So I think that's very important. That all being said, we also know and, you know, I talk about some of the work you've done, but we know that individual actions by themselves will be absolutely not enough to get us where we need to go with the climate crisis because we need systemic change.

And I talked through the ways that people have modeled this to understand that and Particularly thinking about how there was that MIT class that spent the semester trying to model the carbon consumption of everyday people.

And they looked and actually modeled the consumption of a homeless person. And when they did that, they found that even a homeless person who had neither home nor vehicle, but lived in a shelter was unable to get their carbon consumption down to the level of a developing country if they were in the United States.

And that just, I mean, it's just a wake up call in a lot of ways for me about the degree to which we cannot just say, we'll take the burden on and we'll, we'll do our individual things in our houses because that's just not going to do it. And you can't just buy your way out of the climate crisis.

There needs to be a real change. And so when I was writing the book, you know, I started, I didn't realize that I was going to end up with this whole discussion about individual action. But it's interesting because as I was doing the work that led to, that led up to the book, I ended up having conversations with activists a number of different times about some of the research that I'd done when I was working on the IPCC, and I said, you know what would be really cool is, in addition to your doing your activism, it'd be so cool if you guys committed to doing, you know, X, Y, and Z individual actions, so we could actually track how much carbon you've saved, but how much carbon you're still using.

And, you know, as a good argument for why the, you know, all of the things you're calling for is so important. And I couldn't get any activists willing to commit to doing that with me so that we had some numbers. Cause you know, having those numbers is so valuable and it tells a really great story.

The other thing I can do is I can join in collectives. And then that's the question about where we can really get, you know, build power. And the book is all about understanding where the most likely points of opportunity are as the crisis worsens.

And that's where collective action absolutely plays a role. Now, does it, is it going to end up looking like soup being thrown on a couple of, you know, Plexiglass covered paintings. Although I'm sure the Mona Lisa is covered with like gold glass or something fancy, not, you know, but basically, no, it's not going to look like throwing soup, but is throwing soup going to help us pay, you know, pay, get people to pay more attention, more people to think about these problems.

Sure. And it's going to evolve and it's going to get grittier and probably less palatable for many editors and people who want to write about stuff on social media. Because that's how things work. That's how they evolve and that's how they eventually achieve some of their goals.

 I know we've talked about this before, but I'd love to have you define for people what the radical flank is and, how it's worked in the past and how, climate folks are thinking about, about using that dynamic to push for, for real action here.

 Sure, okay, so a radical flank is a faction of a social movement that spins off and chooses to employ more confrontational tactics to achieve its goals. Radical flanks usually form when a movement's been around for a while and has not gotten much success. Take, for example, the incremental successes that we've had in the United States around climate, which, while progress, are nowhere near where we need to be if we want to actually, you know, start to reduce carbon emissions and address the climate crisis in a meaningful way.

Transcription

Dana R. Fisher compiles years worth of research on protest in general and climate protest in particular for a comprehensive look at tactics, what "works," what a protest "working" even means, where the movement is likely to go next and where it needs to go to achieve real climate action.

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Dana R. Fisher on the Past, Present and Future of Climate Protest

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In Backlash to Campus Pro-Palestine Protests, Echoes of Standing Rock and the Global Crackdown on Climate Protest