Climate Activist Tim DeChristopher & the Power of Civil Disobedience in Growing Movements

[Joe Shlabotnik]

On Civil Disobedience:

At the event, DeChristopher recalled, “I got a lot of great response from people who were not professional environmentalists.” However, “Professional environmentalists hated me at that point. They looked at me like I was a turd in the punch bowl trying to ruin the agenda they had been working on for years by talking about civil disobedience. And now there has been this tremendous shift just in the last few years where civil disobedience is embraced in the mainstream of the climate movement and even at the Sierra Club.”

“I don’t think there’s been a deeper understanding of what civil disobedience is and what it is really valuable for,” DeChristopher explained. He continued, “There has to be actual risk, not just perceived risk.”

So much of what the current climate movement is doing is “photo-op style civil disobedience where everything is pre-arranged and the cops will draw a little box and they say, if you stand in this box, we’ll give you three warnings and we’ll take you to the station, process you and you’ll pay a $100 citation and you can go read about it in the newspapers the next day.” The problem is, by “substituting perceived risk for actual risk and by doing that, we’ve missed out on part of the opportunity for education.”

From experience, DeChristopher described the power of civil disobedience to educate. In conservative areas of Utah, he had many people come to him wanting to talk about why he put himself in the position, where he faced time in jail. “They saw this person putting themselves in harm’s way” and had a “natural inclination to try and understand why.” They wanted to understand what he had done on an emotional level and that opened up space for a conversation about what led him to be concerned about climate change, which he might not have been able to discuss with that person if he had not taken action.

There also was a power to build the movement that DeChristopher experienced. As he faced the real possibility of doing time in prison, people flocked to support him. Many of them were women around his mother’s age, he said, and they saw that he was in trouble and vulnerable. “We’ve underestimated that, that power of being needed to help someone out in this movement,” DeChristopher said. Being vulnerable gave DeChristopher the ability to draw people into the movement, who had not been organizing. “We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable,” he added.

Much more, and a good read at: http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/09/28/tim-dechristopher-the-unreasonable-morality-needed-to-confront-climate-change/