Whether we look towards the Earth’s balanced systems, the nature of politics or even some of our shared ideals, the things we have relied on as stable have started to show cracks. It is unsettling. And it can leave us feeling frustratingly impotent.
But it’s also a moment of potential. It stirs in many of us a desire to find different ways to get out of this problem we’ve ended up in. This is the first of a set of articles focused on how we might respond in ways that are rational, fair and empowering. Ways that look to our shared humanity, rather than to authority, for solutions.
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Nowadays, I am, most days, muddy. Or grass-stained.
I spend a fair bit of my time with trees and vegetables and compost and soil. It’s one of the main ways I pay the bills. I grow things to sell, I teach people to grow things, and I potter outside for fun, when there’s time, which I’m lucky to have sometimes and always wish I had more often. I get through more trousers than I used to.
Quite a few moons ago, I wore a different hat (and different trousers) to earn my keep. A slightly professional one, in the charity sector. For quite a time, I worked in the activism section of a big (ish) campaign organisation. I played my small part in all sorts of impressive national campaigns – fights that were undoubtedly worth fighting, on topics like fracking, insect decline, climate change. You know the sort of thing.
Battles were won sometimes. The war was not. Our living world was, and still is, collapsing. That was a strain on us all at the time, whether we said it out loud or not. It is a greater strain, on ever more people, today.
Now, I consider it to be a fact that the world would be worse if it weren’t for these battles. There is no excuse for giving the bastards an easy ride. Opposition, obstruction and resistance to the powerful elites that thrust the world in a direction that most people don’t want it to go in, are vital and valuable. Imagine what the world would be like if those that caused the worst of the damage knew no one would even try to stop them.
Battles matter. Even so, back then, as now, it could be hard to feel that we were just building more and more dams, with ever-greater desperation, simply to slow the rate of an inevitable flood. We knew the bastards were winning. The campaigns we ran weren’t having enough of an effect.
But. But…
Ever-present in that charity, was a collection of the most bizarre, extraordinary, fantastically difficult, stubborn, effective, passionate and driven people you could meet: the local activists. The people who, in their spare time, were knee-deep in local authority development plans, site battles and street stalls. They were talking to whoever would listen and lobbying councillors, MPs and, when they got the chance, even Government Ministers.
They ran their own campaigns, on the things that mattered locally and beyond. Campaigns of all shapes and colours, with all manner of tactics and campaigns. Campaigns that meant nothing beyond the borough they ran in, to campaigns that made national news.
Like everyone else, they won some and lost some. The luxury of my position, working on activism from the ‘centre,’ was that I could stand back and see the full extent of this maelstrom of resistance - happening all at once, all over the country, different campaigns, different people, different tactics, different messages.
As when looking at the Earth from space, that perspective was very different. From that wider perspective, you don’t see just individual campaigns, projects and challenges. You see something else that is magical, uncontrollable, unstoppable. You see the beehive buzz of activity spread in its diverse glory across communities everywhere. You see a movement. And it is in movements that I think we may find hope.
As I wrote in Permaculture magazine in 2016,
“None of us really hankers for small, piecemeal, bit by bit, change. What we really want to see, and arguably can’t see enough of right now, is really big, significant change…
But that real change – the substantial, lasting, visionary and progressive change that really feels like the scale of impact we’re all wanting – can’t be achieved through a simple project, or a campaign or a group. It never has been and never will be. That kind of change can only ever be achieved by movements.
Movements are beautifully messy collections of groups, opinions, tactics and ideas from all over the place, that are all heading, sometimes loosely, in the same direction. They are bursting with variety. Different people in different places doing different things in ways that together are slowly adding up.
Not everyone in the same movement can recognize how vital they are to each other and not everyone in a movement will get along or agree with each other. Indeed, many will passionately disagree, on tactics, ideas and even solutions. The priorities of different groups will differ and different groups will look different, sound different and often demand different things.
That can be frustrating but excitingly, what makes a movement so powerful, so unstoppable, is the very fact that it is so diverse, so varied, so bursting with colour, creativity and innovation. It is impossible to control, impossible to manage, impossible to predict and outwit.
And slowly, over time, so often, the different actions generated by the different people start to add up. Shifts start to happen and at some point, hard to predict quite when, a momentum becomes unstoppable and accelerates, a tipping point is reached and what seemed so far away not so long ago, starts to feel within reach.”
There are some out there, often including those with power, that would have us believe that we are powerless. That our world changes around us, and we ride along. A fine way to protect your own power is to make others forget the potential of theirs, after all.
But when collective humanity’s energy is driven through the medium of a movement, made up of a vast array of campaigns, projects, arguments and actions, it seems to me like a power that is almost impossible to contain or control, even if you have billions of dollars to play with.
Unlike a single campaign or a single project, the power of movements is in their vastness and their inherent complexity. Through such diversity of approaches, tactics, messages and campaigns, through their goal not of a policy change but a vision, there is nothing concrete to pin down, nothing to grab at. It is a murmuration: a vast mass of whirling and swirling that makes it impossible to focus on a target.
Of course, the anarchic strength of movements doesn’t make the goals of their participants inherently good. Movements grow out of darkness, and it’s easy to get lost in the dark. All movements are searching for the light, but some movements end up searching down dark, dead-end alleys; looking for solutions in the wrong places. Solutions that rest on the blame or suffering of others, for instance.
But these strange, collective energies we call movements are themselves powerful, and channelled towards a better world, towards things like social justice, equality, democracy – they are probably the only route to the realisation of those ideals.
The great changes that nudge humanity towards something that feels fairer and kinder, to each other and the living world around us, can only be realised through movements.
Movements have something of the murmurating starling to them, it’s true, but often also something of the oak tree. Time moves differently to these great trees, living as they do for upwards of six hundred years. What feels like a year to us, feels like a month to an oak. Perhaps their perspective might help when we despair at the state of the world around us.
It’s easy to see the negative headlines and the losses, the changes in the wind and the switching of narratives, and to feel at a loss. But like it or not, the scale of betterments that we all dream of, that we know are essential, and which sometimes feel so far away, usually drip-by-drip their way into reality at a far slower pace than the pace we live at. It can be hard to see it happening and frustrating to see it happening not-fast-enough.
At times like that, like now, it would seem to matter more than ever that we remind ourselves of the ‘timescale of betterment’. To be a starling, but to think like an oak. Some things cannot be resolved as fast as we would like, or as fast as they need to be. These are not reasons to stop trying. Even when it all feels hopeless, the oak tree is our reminder to keep the energy up.
Imagine if we held on to our belief, in a time when things seem darker, that in humanity, and in our chaotic, clamorous, collective energy, there is power to be found in every one of us that cannot be clamped down on, cannot be controlled and cannot be contained. Within the diversity of movements lies strength that no authority can grab hold of. Strength that in its core essence, is unstoppable.
So long as we don’t stop.
If we buy the marketing spin from those in power, and we stop believing, and acting, then the bastards win. If we stop shining a light to the way out of the darkness, however far away that feels, then the disoriented movements will continue to search in the dark.
Martin Luther King once said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Inspiring as this is, it implies that justice will eventually prevail, come what may. That justice is fated. In fact, as any pole vaulter will tell you, the pole only bends when you bend it. If we stop, there is no bend to be had.
***
There is something in all of this. Movements seem to be the foundation for the yous and the mes to harness our collective power, and build something better than we are led to believe is possible.
But it’s not enough. Broad, humanist ideals are great, but we need some meat on the bones of these ideals. What do we build? And how do we build it? We’ll come back to that.