‘Occupy’ can learn from oil activists
Alex Hiatt
In the past month the Occupy protests have finally caught national and international media attention, something we can all be glad about (even if most of the coverage is less than approving). I think we should be proud that the worst we on the left can say of the movement is that it lacks ideological photogeneity. Yes, they’re a ragtag and piecemeal bunch, but strength lies in diversity, no? However, you might rightly ask: What concretely have they accomplished?
Actually, I’m not here to pick on Occupy. They are people braver than I, putting more on the line than I am willing to risk, fighting for a future I want to live in. So, I’d like to be constructive. I mention Occupy’s seeming inefficacy because there is another powerful movement accomplishing great things at the same time that Occupy is stagnating: the Keystone XL opposition movement. If you follow U.S. environmental news, you probably are already aware of this movement, but maybe not. After all, the pipeline has been operating since June 2010, yet hasn’t been on the radar of even most American environmentalists since this summer.
In short, the Keystone XL project would expand the existing Keystone oil sands pipeline all the way from Alberta, Canada to the coast of Texas, where the oil would be refined and sold on the international market. The list of environmental concerns associated with Keystone XL and oil sands is far too large to detail here. Suffice it to say that I agree with NASA’s top climatologist James Hansen, who argued the pipeline’s boost to Canada’s oil sands extraction would mean “game over for the climate.”
The good news, which offers a useful point of contrast to Occupy, is that the American wing of the Keystone XL opposition movement, after a lengthy, epic battle, has probably won. The transcontinental scale of the pipeline made it a project requiring the direct approval of President Obama himself. Earlier this year, a coalition of environmental activists, led by author Bill McKibben, launched an impressive grassroots campaign to prevent that approval. It began in earnest when an open letter, signed by progressive and environmental heavyweights including Naomi Klein, David Suzuki and Hansen, was published calling on American citizens to engage in civil disobedience in order to send the strongest possible message to Obama.
The movement has since affected concerted and consistent actions nationwide, culminating in the largest act of civil disobedience the United States has seen in decades, when over one thousand activists were arrested outside the White House in August, including a close friend of mine from Lawrence University. The movement earned support from Nobel laureates including the Dalai Lama, has received positive coverage from Stephen Colbert and other popular cable news personalities, and has extracted explicit disapproval of Keystone XL from newsprint giants including The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.
Ultimately, Obama went from ignoring the movement to offering vague encouragement to finally halting the project in November. He’s ordered a new, independent review of the whole thing, and hopefuls within the movement don’t expect the project to withstand that. McKibben published a piece on the movement’s headquarters website, www.tarsandsaction.org, entitled “Big News: We Won. You won.” Maybe premature, but this is without doubt the biggest victory for American environmentalism in long while.
But there are bigger fish to fry, such as the corrupt system without which the oil industry wouldn’t have progressed as far as it did. This is the system against which Occupy has been railing. So what is it that Occupy lacks that the Keystone XL movement has? Money? Name recognition? A clear goal? Soundbites? An enemy less daunting than capitalism itself? I’m not exactly sure, but I think there is a lot Occupy could learn. Or maybe it’s on its way to victory and us cynics should just be patient. Perhaps the best social movements are slow burning ones. I’m no expert on the history of activism, but what I see now are two movements: One that knew its enemy and defeated it, and one that pretends to knows its enemy, but gets nothing done. Where does it go from here?