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

[00:00:00] Amy Westervelt: 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.

[00:01:08] 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

[00:01:23] Amy Westervelt: 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.

[00:01:34] Dana Fisher: Well thank you!.

[00:01:35] Amy Westervelt: so kudos to you. It's not easy. Yeah.

[00:01:39] Dana Fisher: 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.

[00:01:58] Amy Westervelt: 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?

[00:02:30] Dana Fisher: 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.

[00:05:33] Amy Westervelt: 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

the

[00:05:54] Dana Fisher: Uh huh.

[00:05:55] Amy Westervelt: 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

[00:06:03] Dana Fisher: 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,

[00:07:11] Amy Westervelt: I totally remember them.

[00:07:13] Dana Fisher: 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.

[00:08:21] Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

[00:08:23] Dana Fisher: 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?

Because the world shut down, initially.

[00:09:59] Amy Westervelt: Right.

[00:09:59] Dana Fisher: 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,

[00:10:43] Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

[00:10:44] Dana Fisher: always go in 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,

[00:11:01] Amy Westervelt: Feels more immediate to people,

right?

[00:11:03] Dana Fisher: 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

[00:11:22] Amy Westervelt: tried! It was very, like, it was nothing like what

the fossil fuel industry

[00:11:28] Dana Fisher: exactly.

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.

[00:12:08] Amy Westervelt: 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.

[00:12:40] Dana Fisher: You mean that we're gonna destroy ourselves? You

[00:12:42] Amy Westervelt: Yeah, exactly, like,

[00:12:43] Dana Fisher: completely uninhabitable? That?

[00:12:45] Amy Westervelt: 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.

[00:13:13] Dana Fisher: Wow, I completely missed that. I certainly would have chimed in there

[00:13:17] Amy Westervelt: 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

has different

[00:13:29] Dana Fisher: and the acti

[00:13:29] Amy Westervelt: about that, you know, um,

[00:13:31] Dana Fisher: 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

[00:15:17] Amy Westervelt: are already

[00:15:18] Dana Fisher: sure how you're like,

[00:15:19] Amy Westervelt: okay, how many of these paint protests are we gonna, you know, it's

[00:15:22] Dana Fisher: 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, .

[00:17:11] Amy Westervelt: 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.

[00:17:41] Dana Fisher: 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.

[00:18:11] Amy Westervelt: 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.

[00:18:19] Dana Fisher: 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.

[00:20:33] Amy Westervelt: 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.

[00:21:18] Dana Fisher: 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.

[00:24:38] Amy Westervelt: 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.

[00:24:57] Dana Fisher: 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.

And when I say meaningfully, I mean in a way that actually will try to, you know, cap global warming in some level that's sustainable and not going to lead to a bunch of tipping points that will cause devastation. Let's say it that way. Um, so, um, radical flanks, I mean radical flanks have formed in most of the social movements that you can think of in the history, you know, in, in the past.

Some of the most notable are during the civil rights movement or during women's suffrage. And these happen all over the world, but, in the climate movement, and, what's also worth noting here is that the radical flank, I'm using my air quotes, which you can't see because it's a podcast, but they take, they take radical actions in comparison to what the mainstream movement is doing at the time, right?

So the original radical flank of the civil rights movement was doing sit ins. Sit ins are peaceful, non violent. People would sit in places, right, and refuse to move. But those were confrontational. And they were, you know, illegal. And that made it a radical flank. It got more gritty and more aggressive from there, but that's how it started.

In the climate movement, the radical flank, which is groups that have started to say they need to do more than just legally permitted stuff, and advocacy, and letter writing, and You know, maybe doing some lobbying. Those have started to look a lot like throwing food, throwing paint, disrupting events.

I guess the most recent event in the United States was the Met Opera in New York city was disrupted in December, but there's been lots of events disrupted all over. We have had some sporting events. We had the crazy glue episode at the U. S. Open that I talked about with you and I talked about on, TMZ live, which was fun.

There's been a lot of slow marching ,bird dogging, which is getting a lot of attention lately, blocking buildings and crazy glue, right? So those are the ones that you probably imagine. You're probably seeing a lot of this, Yelling at and interrupting people, giving speeches, the blocking the buildings, the slow marching and the food probably is the most common right now.

And what I think is just worth noting here is as Oscar and Colin and I write about in Nature Magazine, when we look at the history of radical flanks and other social movements, this is really not very radical. I mean, in fact, some activists have written to me and been like, why are you calling this radical?

And it's like, yeah, I know that this isn't radical. It's radical in comparison to the mainstream movement. But it's not radical. Not yet. I mean, during the heyday of the suffrage movement, buildings were being blown up regularly, right? I mean, and people weren't throwing food at paintings, they were slashing paintings.

That's where radical flanks go. Now what's worth noting here is that a radical flank in general, the research shows it helps to draw attention to the issue and it also helps to gain support for the moderate component of the movement, right? So a great example is like Coco during the U. S. Open protest. Coco, while she was, having to stop playing. She said to people, she's well, I don't really love this tactic, but I certainly think climate change is an issue that we should be thinking more about, right? But that's exactly the reason these guys are doing it. So many people may be like, you know, I don't like this, what these guys are doing, but I do care about the issue and I want to take some action.

I'm not going to just sit here and watch TV anymore. And that's the point. So there is some people who have, you know, argued that the radical flank, it can be demobilizing and turn people off. And first of all, there's not a lot of empirical evidence that that's the case, except for a couple of very abstract internet surveys that were not conducted well.

Activism was taking place, but we're more hypothetical. But in addition to that, you know, I did collect data at the March to end fossil fuels that took place in September of this past year during climate week, right before the U. N. was meeting on climate change and organizers say there were 70, 000, 75, 000 people in the streets.

I did took a random sample of them and surveyed them, which is methodology that I use for much of my research and I've written a lot about. I added to the survey a question asking these people who were at a legally permitted protest. So these are people who are not necessarily engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. In fact, I think it was less than a quarter of them who said they had in the past year. I asked them. If they supported organizations that were doing civil disobedience, including and I listed a bunch of stuff that the radical flank could have been doing right.

And 100% of the people whom I surveyed said they support these groups. That doesn't mean they're doing it. And in fact, many of them have not been doing this kind of action, but they were supportive of it as part of the movement, as part of the repertoire of contention that is the climate movement today.

[00:30:10] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Do you want to define the shockers for people? I know I've had you do this before, but just to have it all in one place, I feel like it's useful,

[00:30:20] Dana Fisher: it's funny, I talked about shockers and disruptors somewhere, and I got an email from Rose Abramoff, and she's from Scientists Rebellion, for anybody who doesn't know, and she wrote me, and she goes, so I guess I'm a shocker then, huh?

So anyway, basically, I realized that the radical flank, which has been growing in terms of, you know, The proportion of actions that we've seen around climate taking place certainly during the period of the Biden administration has really shifted more towards these kind of confrontational tactics.

And so I wanted to understand who was in this radical flank and what kind of work they were doing. So I went out and I surveyed all the people and the groups that had been involved in this coalitional Effort to block the white house correspondence dinner, which was also the event that was the birth of climate defiance that it's worth noting now, since they're getting a ton of press.

And then at the same time, I also interviewed a whole bunch of leaders and activists who were involved in engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience around climate change. And it was very clear from the research that there were two different ways that people were engaging in kind of confrontational climate activism.

And so I, I thought it was valuable to split them into two camps and I call one group, the shockers. And these are the activists who are using nonviolent civil disobedience specifically to, to shock the public and to get media attention. And the goal there is media attention and to have a broader conversation about the climate crisis and to get attention for it in the media.

And the outcome of success there that they use is media attention. So, for example, if you go to Climate Defiance's webpage, you will look at all of the media coverage they've had. It's been remarkable. In fact, this week alone, I have done two interviews for mainstream media outlets about climate defiance.

So they're going to continue to get that media coverage and the thing about shockers is that they're really focused on this one way of doing action. And these are the folks who are throwing paint and the slow marching and the, gluing, a lot of that. At the same time, there are also the activists that I call disruptors.

And disruptors Are parts of the radical flank that are integrating nonviolent civil disobedience into a broader campaign or what we call a repertoire of contention. And that means that they'll have moments of civil disobedience, moments. Of activism that is aiming to get media attention and aiming to draw more attention to the work they're doing But it's embedded in a broader campaign I mean a really good example of this is divest harvard when they stormed the Harvard-Yale game and got all that attention But that was part of this broader campaign to get alumni and faculty and students to push for harvard university to divest from fossil fuels or um Some of the work that third act has done in their divestment campaign to push for big banks to stop investing in fossil fuel expansion.

And so they have done some actions. They did a really interesting one where they blocked the entrances of banks around the country. And they called it the, the rocking chair rebellion, where a lot of these-- these are retirees. Who take rocking chairs and they paint them and then they plunk down the rocking chairs in front of the entrance way and sit there in their rocking chair and refuse to move.

But it's part of this broader campaign. So the idea is to shine light and focus attention on all the other stuff they're doing and why people should join their campaign. So those are the two different camps.

[00:33:50] Amy Westervelt: You've already kind of talked about this a couple times and I know we've talked about this before too, and you talked about this in the book too, what have you seen quote unquote working. And, where do you see this headed?

And I guess how do you define working in terms of this question of did this protest work?

[00:34:11] Dana Fisher: Well, I mean, that's the thing that's interesting in this moment where we're teetering on the edge of the precipice that is the climate crisis. There are lots of different ways that movements have worked. I mean, some movements have worked and some actions have worked because they're getting more attention.

My conclusion is that we need this broad and vibrant and diverse ecosystem of climate activism right now. It's absolutely needed. We need shockers and disruptors. And we need everyday people who are not comfortable doing any type of civil disobedience to be joining in, in their own way to help push us towards The systemic changes that are needed to stop this crisis, or I mean, it can't be stopped, but to limit it so that we can get to the other side.

And so, one of the things that I think has worked, and this finding comes from not just research on the climate movement, but also the research that I've done on previous movements. I mean, so my last book was called American Resistance, and that was about the resistance to the Trump administration and its policies, which was this coalition of progressive groups and movements.

I also did a big study of the post George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests and looking at those actions and how they worked or didn't work. And through all of them, I mean, I've looked at outcomes to some degree in terms of social change, and with the climate crisis, we just see these incremental changes that are just not enough.

But, I mean, there are some. I mean, for example, is a pause on expanding LNG exports a success? Sure. Is it enough to stop the climate crisis when we're talking about future exports, not the current exports, which we're number one in the world for, and you know, projected to continue to increase our exports already?

No, not enough, but you know. Sure, a successful outcome. And it's a point, you know, it's a point on the scatterplot. We can say it that way. But so the things that I think have been really successful, though, and some of these examples of incremental successes are part of what is needed. We just need a lot more of it is the ways that activists and movements have been creating community and real solidarity.

And I think there's some really interesting examples recently of the way the climate movement has been working to help support labor, the climate movement was out in mass to support the post George Floyd Black Lives Matter movement. During those protests, there were a whole bunch of different climate groups that came out in solidarity and marched in solidarity and support and helped to push for, again, the incremental changes that we saw, some of which were purely symbolic.

To address systemic racism in our country, but it, it worked. It didn't, it wasn't enough, but it was, it was the beginning. And hopefully that struggle is going to continue as well.

[00:37:04] Amy Westervelt: Just to sort of wrap up, you give some suggestions for Where this might be headed and where it should be headed to, get us to a place where we're actually acting and, maybe for people who are listening and are like, okay, well, I want to get more involved.

What should I do? What should I focus on? I feel like people ask me this all the time. And I Treat it like being a guidance counselor or something where I'm like, well, what are you interested in? What are you good at? What's your network like, you know?

[00:37:31] Dana Fisher: Right, right, I mean, I

[00:37:33] Amy Westervelt: yeah, but I'm curious how you answer that question oh and actually I I want to end on you Defining what an apocalyptic optimist is and how other people can kind of get there

[00:37:44] Dana Fisher: okay, if you want to get there and join me in my apocalyptic optimism. Okay, well, we'll go there. We'll go there next. But first, I'll just say, I've been trying very hard to Co opt this term of the all of the above strategy that the Biden administration and previous administrations have used around our energy mix to talk about activism.

So I believe strongly that we need an all of the above way of engaging with and pushing for substantial climate action to address the climate crisis. And what that means is one, we need to create community and real solidarity. And I, I do believe that as much as there's been pushback from some people about my saying that social media and engaging with and, uh, taking advantage of influencers is not a great tactic.

I think that that, there is a role there for influencers for sure but I think that the big place where social change is most possible is when you're building it on real community and community involves people in their everyday lives in where they live, work, breathe, where their kids go to school, making change, and taking action together.

And part of that, involves Cultivating resilience. And here, you know, you were talking about how you talk, talk to people, my thing would be like, are you comfortable? Are you comfortable being an activist? What kind of activists are you comfortable with? Are you willing to get arrested?

I mean, but whatever, whatever the answer to those questions, assuming you care about climate, you know, our climate and about getting us comfortably as a society to the other side of the climate crisis, Everybody should be thinking about how they can cultivate resilience. And that, when I say resilience, I mean social and environmental resilience, right?

That is, making our communities capable of handling the climate shocks that are coming. Because we are doing nothing to stop them. So anybody who wants to just say that we should just put our heads in the sand and wait You're in for like some really sad awakenings that have to do with breathing in wildfire smoke, and floods, and extreme weather, and extreme heat, and all of the social people that's gonna be related to that in terms of People in your communities who are in need of support because they become unhoused or because of people having to move and relocate and migrate.

And you know, our country particularly is doing a wonderful job with migration right now. So, um, but so there's so many ways that we can help to make our communities capable of handling the shocks that are coming because they are coming.

I mean, the last thing for those people who say that they're willing to become activists and are willing to get, you know, get a little spicy. I think that there is a really important lesson here that I was very uncomfortable writing about, but I feel like has to be written about with regard to the way that the movement needs to be open to willing to and ready to capitalize on moral shocks.

And when I say moral shocks here. I particularly mean violence and I mean, I'm not saying that climate activists should get violent. No, I think they should stay the course. And I think it's wonderful and beautiful the way that climate activism has continued to be nonviolent so far. Right. And there's been some property destruction, a lot of paint smearing, but, really very, very, very nonviolent.

And I think that should continue. And I applaud all of the activists and the organizations that have been involved in that. Particularly as law enforcement has become more repressive. And we're going to see that more and more in the United States, but all over the world. And you've, you've talked a lot about that, but the other thing is that counter movements will rise up and will rise up to be aggressive against the activists.

We saw it in other movements as they grew. And as more nonviolent civil disobedience was used and as actors started to feel threatened and those counter movements are very likely to be violent and to escalate. And that's a place where the activists need to be ready for it. I know that there's been some accounts from folks from Climate Defiance about how aggressive, security has been when they try to disrupt political officials events.

That's only the beginning. And it's unfortunate, and it's terrible to learn the lessons from the Civil Rights Movement, but I think That's what we need to focus on. And we need to be prepared and these activists, people who are comfortable with it, need to understand that that's what's coming and that's where this movement is probably going.

[00:42:08] Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

[00:42:09] Dana Fisher: So then the last thing, are you ready for the apocalyptic optimist? Okay.

[00:42:13] Amy Westervelt: Yes.

[00:42:14] Dana Fisher: So I call myself an apocalyptic optimist.

And what that means is that, based on all of the science, and I'm not a natural scientist, but all of my brothers and sisters in the natural scientists who have spent so much time modeling out how the earth and the different, systems are going to respond to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

I know that the worst is still to come, and I know that from studying policymaking for the past 25 years and the insufficient actions that we as societies have taken to respond, I know that it's going to get a lot worse. So I'm apocalyptic in that I believe that we are going to see a lot of destruction and, and very likely many lives lost, including many frontline communities that are going to be hit.

They'll be hit the hardest, that's why they're called the frontline communities, right? which includes less privileged folks and communities of color for sure. But I'm also optimistic, so being an apocalyptic optimist means that I see that it is only the pain and suffering of the crisis that is likely to mobilize the masses and get us working together enough as a movement, as, as, people who work together to achieve the goal of getting us to the other side of the climate crisis.

But I believe 100 percent in people power and I know that we have it in us, but as unfair as it seems, the future is up to us and it is not until we and our friends and family and neighbors and communities start to push back and say, That enough is enough and fossil fuel companies do not need to make any more money.

They do not need to be subsidized. They need to get with the program and help us stop this crisis before it gets so bad that it's impossible to imagine that we could think of states staying stable. I mean, if we continue down this road, instability is the most likely outcome and that has been modeled very clearly by political scientists about what could come.

We need to stop that, but we need to do it, because nobody's coming to help us. And that's why I'm an apocalyptic optimist. A lot of people don't like that and think it's a cop out. But I do. I mean, there's lots of research that talks about social change that's embedded in despair and destruction. And basically , I believe that's the case.

But the optimism comes not from my believing that the, you know, the state is going to save us, which it kind of did with COVID. At least it did when it stepped in, right? It's actually that we're going to have to save ourselves. Which is the title of my book.

[00:44:48]

Amy Wester