Movements without Leaders

How to Make Change on an Overheating Planet

Bill McKibben

The history we grow up with shapes our sense of reality — it's hard to shake. If you were young during the fight against Nazism, war seems a different, more virtuous animal than if you came of age during Vietnam. I was born in 1960, and so the first great political character of my life was Martin Luther King Jr. I had a shadowy, child's sense of him when he was still alive and then a mythic one as his legend grew; after all, he had a national holiday. As a result, I think, I imagined that he set the template for how great movements worked. They had a Leader, capital L.

As time went on, I learned enough about the civil rights movement to know it was much more than Dr. King. There were other great figures, from Ella Baker and Medgar Evers to Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X; and there were tens of thousands more whom history doesn't remember but who deserve great credit. And yet one's early sense is hard to dislodge: the civil rights movement had his face on it. Gandhi carried the fight against empire; Susan B. Anthony, the battle for suffrage.

That is why it is a little disconcerting to look around and realize that most of the movements of the moment — even highly successful ones like the fight for gay marriage or immigrant's rights — don't really have easily discernible leaders. I know that there are highly capable people who have worked overtime for decades to make these movements succeed and that they are well-known to those within the struggle, but there aren't particular people the public at large identifies as the face of the fight. The world has changed in this way, and for the better.

It's true, too, in the battle where I've spent most of my life: the fight to slow climate change and hence give the planet some margin for survival. We had a charismatic leader in Al Gore, but he was almost the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, a politician makes a problematic leader for a grassroots movement because boldness is hard when you still envision higher office; for another, even as he won the Nobel Prize for his remarkable work in spreading climate science, the other side used every trick and every dollar at its disposal to bring him down. He remains a vital figure in the rest of the world (partly because there he is perceived less as a politician than as a prophet), but at home his power to shape the fight has been diminished.

This doesn't mean, however, that the movement is diminished. In fact, it's never been stronger. In the last few years, it has blocked the construction of dozens of coal-fired power plants, fought the oil industry to a draw on the Keystone Pipeline, convinced a wide swathe of American institutions to divest themselves of their fossil-fuel stocks, and challenged practices like mountaintop-removal coal mining and fracking for natural gas. It may not be winning the way gay marriage has won, but the movement itself continues to grow quickly, and it's starting to claim some victories. That's not despite its lack of clearly identifiable leaders, I think. It's because of it.

A Movement for a New Planet

We live in a different world from that of the civil rights movement. Save perhaps for the spectacle of presidential elections, there's no way for individual human beings to draw the same kind of focused and sustained attention they did back then. At the moment, you could make the three evening newscasts and the cover of Time (not Newsweek, alas) and still not connect with most people. Our focus is fragmented and segmented, which may be a boon or a problem, but mostly it's just a fact. Our attention is dispersed.

When we started 350.org in 2008, we dimly recognized this new planetary architecture. Instead of trying to draw everyone to a central place — the Mall in Washington, DC — for a protest, we staged twenty-four hours of rallies around the planet: 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history." And we've gone on to do more of the same — about 20,000 demonstrations in every country but North Korea.

Part of me, though, continued to imagine that a real movement looked like the ones I'd grown up watching — or maybe some part of me wanted the glory of being a leader. In any event, I've spent the last few years in constant motion around the country and the Earth. I'd come to think of myself as a "leader," and indeed my book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, reflects on that growing sense of identity. However — and it's the curse of an author that sometimes you change your mind after your book is in type — I've come to like the idea of capital L leaders less and less. It seems to me to miss the particular promise of this moment: that we could conceive of and pursue movements in new ways.

For environmentalists, we have a useful analogy close at hand. We're struggling to replace a brittle, top-heavy energy system, in which a few huge power plants provide our electricity, with a dispersed and lightweight grid, where 10 million solar arrays on 10 million rooftops are linked together. The engineers call this distributed generation, and it comes with myriad benefits. It's not as prone to catastrophic failure, for one. It can make use of dispersed energy instead of relying on a few pools of concentrated fuel. The same principle, it seems to me, applies to movements. This idea was behind the 2014 nationwide series of rallies called Summerheat. We didn't organize them ourselves. We knew great environmental-justice groups all over the country, and we knew we could highlight their work while making links between, say, standing up to a toxic Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, and standing up to the challenge of climate change.

From the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, where a tar-sands pipeline is proposed, to the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, where a big oil port is planned; from Utah's Colorado Plateau, where the first US tar-sands mine has been proposed, to the coal-fired power plant at Brayton Point on the Massachusetts coast and the fracking wells of rural Ohio — Summerheat demonstrated the local depth and global reach of this emerging fossil-fuel resistance. I've had the pleasure of going to talk at all these places and more besides, but I wasn't crucial to any of them. I was, at best, a pollinator, not a queen bee.

Or, consider a slightly older fight. In 2012 the Boston Globe magazine put a picture of me on its cover under the headline "The Man Who Crushed the Keystone Pipeline." I've got an all-too-healthy ego, but even I knew that it was over the top. I'd played a role in the fight, writing the letter that asked people to come to Washington to resist the pipeline, but it was effective because I'd gotten a dozen friends to sign it with me. And I'd been one of 1,253 people who went to jail in what was the largest civil disobedience action in this country in years. It was their combined witness that got the ball rolling. And once it was rolling, the Keystone campaign became the exact model for the sort of loosely linked well-distributed power system I've been describing.

The big environmental groups played key roles, supplying lots of data and information while keeping track of straying members of Congress. Among them were the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and the National Wildlife Federation — none spending time looking for credit, all pitching in. The Sierra Club played a crucial role in pulling together the biggest climate rally yet, the February 2013 convergence on the Mall in Washington.

Organizations and individuals on the ground were no less crucial: the indigenous groups in Alberta and elsewhere that started the fight against the pipeline that was to bring Canadian tar sands to the US Gulf Coast graciously welcomed the rest of us without complaining about how late we were. Then there were the ranchers and farmers of Nebraska, who roused a whole stadium of football fans at a Cornhuskers game to boo a pipeline commercial, the scientists who wrote letters, the religious leaders who conducted prayer vigils. And don't forget the bloggers who helped make sense of it all for us. One upstart website, InsideClimate News, won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the struggle.

Non-experts quickly educated themselves on the subject, becoming specialists in the corruption of the US Department of State process that was to okay the building of that pipeline or in the chemical composition of the bitumen that would flow through it. CREDO (half an activist organization, half a cell phone company), as well as Rainforest Action Network and The Other 98%, signed up 75,000 people pledged to civil disobedience if the pipeline were to get presidential approval.

And then there was the Hip Hop Caucus, whose head, Lennox Yearwood, has roused one big crowd after another, and the labor unions — nurses and transit workers, for instance — who have had the courage to stand up to the pipeline workers' union that would benefit from the small number of jobs to be created if Keystone were built. Then there are groups of Kids against KXL and a recent grandparents' march from Camp David to the White House. Some of the most effective resistance has come from groups like Rising Tide and the Tarsands Blockade in Texas, which organized epic tree-sitting protests to slow construction of the southern portion of the pipeline.

The Indigenous Environmental Network has been every bit as effective in demonstrating to banks the folly of investing in Albertan tar-sands production. First Nations people and British Columbians have blocked a proposed pipeline that would take those same tar sands to the Pacific Ocean for shipping to Asia, just as inspired activists have kept the particularly carbon-dirty oil out of the European Union. We don't know if we'll win the northern half of the Keystone fight or not, but so far it's still tied up in knots. President Trump has granted federal approval, but great local activists in Nebraska and the Dakotas have forestalled state approvals. At a decade and counting, the pipeline company has already spent billions in extra carrying costs. However, it's already clear that this kind of full-spectrum resistance has the ability to take on the huge bundles of cash that are the energy industry's sole argument.

What the Elders Said

This sprawling campaign exemplifies the only kind of movement that will be able to stand up to the power of the energy giants, the richest industry the planet has ever known. In fact, any movement that hopes to head off the worst future depredations of climate change will have to get much, much larger, incorporating among other obvious allies those in the human rights and social-justice arenas.

The cause couldn't be more compelling. There's never been a clearer threat to survival or to justice than the rapid rise in the planet's temperature caused by and for the profit of a microscopic percentage of its citizens. Conversely, there can be no real answer to our climate woes that doesn't address the insane inequalities and concentrations of power that are helping to drive us toward this disaster.

That's why it's such good news when people like Naomi Klein and Desmond Tutu join the climate struggle. When they take part, it becomes ever clearer that what's under way is not, in the end, an environmental battle at all but an all-encompassing fight over power, hunger, and the future of humanity on this planet. Expansion by geography is similarly a must for this movement. Recently, in Istanbul, 350.org and its allies trained 500 young people from 135 countries as climate-change organizers, and each of them is now organizing conferences and campaigns in their home countries.

This sort of planet-wide expansion suggests that the value of particular national leaders is going to be limited at best. That doesn't mean, of course, that some people won't have more purchase than others in such a movement. Sometimes such standing comes from living in the communities most immediately and directly affected by climate change or fossil-fuel depredation. When, for instance, the big climate rally finally occurred on the Washington, DC, Mall in February 2013, the 50,000 in attendance may have been most affected by the words of Crystal Lameman, a young member of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation whose traditional territory has been poisoned by tar-sands mining.

Sometimes it comes from charisma: Van Jones may be the most engaging environmental advocate ever. Sometimes it comes from getting things right for a long time: Jim Hansen, the greatest climate scientist, gets respect even from those who disagree with him about, say, nuclear power. Sometimes it comes from organizing ability: Jane Kleeb, who did such work in the hard soil of Nebraska, or Clayton Thomas-Muller, who has indefatigably (though no one is beyond fatigue) organized Native North America. Sometimes it comes from sacrifice: Tim DeChristopher went to jail for two years for civil disobedience, and so most of us are going to listen to what he might have to say.

Sometimes it comes from dogged work on solutions: Wahleah Johns and Billy Parish figured out how to build solar farms on Navajo land and to crowdfund solar panels on community centers. Sometimes truly unlikely figures emerge: investor Jeremy Grantham and Tom Steyer, a Forbes 400 billionaire who quit his job running a giant hedge fund, sold his fossil-fuel stocks, and put his money and connections to work effectively fighting Keystone and bedeviling climate-denying politicians (even Democrats!). We have organizational leaders like Mike Brune of the Sierra Club and Frances Beinecke of the National Resources Defense Council or folks like Kenny Bruno and Tzeporah Berman, who have helped knit together large coalitions; religious leaders like Jim Antal, who led the drive to convince the United Church of Christ to divest from fossil fuels; and regional leaders like Mike Tidwell in the Chesapeake and Cherri Foytlin in the Gulf and K. C. Golden in Puget Sound.

Yet figures like these aren't exactly "leaders" in the way we've normally imagined. They are not charting the path for the movement to take. To use an analogy from the internet age, it's more as if they were well-regarded critics on Amazon.com review pages or, to use a more traditional image, as if they were elders, even if not in a strictly chronological sense. Elders don't tell you what you must do, they say what they must say. A few of these elders are, like me, writers; many of them have a gift for condensing and crystallizing the complex. When Jim Hansen calls the Alberta tar sands the "biggest carbon bomb on the continent," it resonates.

When you have that standing, you don't end up leading a movement, but you do end up with people giving your ideas a special hearing, people who already assume that you're not going to waste their energy on a pointless task. So when Naomi Klein and I hatched a plan for a fossil-fuel divestment campaign last year, people paid serious attention, especially when Desmond Tutu lent his sonorous voice to the cause.

These elders-of-all-ages also play a sorting-out role in backing the ideas of others or downplaying those that seem less useful. There are days when I feel like the most useful work I've done is to spread a few good Kickstarter proposals via Twitter or write a blurb for a fine new book. Conversely, in 2013 I spoke in Washington to a group of grandparents who had just finished a seven-day climate march from Camp David. A young man demanded to know why I wasn't backing the sabotage of oil company equipment, which he insisted was the only way the industry could be damaged by our movement. I explained that I believed in nonviolent action, that we were doing genuine financial damage to the pipeline companies by slowing their construction schedules and inflating their carrying costs, and that in my estimation wrecking bulldozers would play into their hands.

But maybe he was right. I don't actually know, which is why it's a good thing that no one, myself included, is the boss of the movement. Remember those solar panels: the power to change these days is remarkably well distributed, leaving plenty of room for serendipity and revitalization. In fact, many movements had breakthroughs when they decided that their elders were simply wrong. Dr. King didn't like the idea of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign at first, yet it proved powerfully decisive.

The Coming of the Leaderless Movement

We may not need capital-L Leaders, but we certainly need small-l leaders by the tens of thousands. You could say that instead of a leaderless movement, we need a leader-full one. We see such leaders regularly at 350.org. When I wrote earlier that we "staged" 5,200 rallies around the globe, I wasn't completely accurate. It was more like throwing a potluck dinner. We set the date and the theme, but everywhere other people figured out what dishes to bring. The thousands of images that accumulated in the Flickr account of that day's events were astonishing. Most of the people doing the work didn't look like environmentalists were supposed to. They were largely poor, black, brown, Asian, and young because that's what the world mostly is.