Grassroots Organizing and Public Activation in Climate Action By: Mariah Harrod Grassroots activism entails citizens organizing around some common value or goal. In contrast, top-down efforts utilize overarching frameworks to impose large-scale change on communities. Both approaches to environmentalism have been undertaken with their own merits and pitfalls, yet in the face of such time-salient and globally threatening issues as climate change in the midst of a lack of binding international governmental agreement, grassroots organizing offers an accessible and universally motivating route to mitigation. To demonstrate these advantages I highlight one grassroots organization working against climate change, the Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition (KSEC). KSEC is a statewide network of students and their allies holding the government, corporations, and other institutions accountable through education and activism (“Our Mission”). By utilizing college campuses, KSEC is able to alter the actual practices of communities and individuals and increase regional solidarity to empower the public in a way that
Transcript
Grassroots Organizing and Public Activation in Climate Action
By: Mariah Harrod
Grassroots activism entails citizens organizing around some common value or goal. In
contrast, top-down efforts utilize overarching frameworks to impose large-scale change on
communities. Both approaches to environmentalism have been undertaken with their own merits
and pitfalls, yet in the face of such time-salient and globally threatening issues as climate change
in the midst of a lack of binding international governmental agreement, grassroots organizing
offers an accessible and universally motivating route to mitigation. To demonstrate these
advantages I highlight one grassroots organization working against climate change, the Kentucky
Student Environmental Coalition (KSEC). KSEC is a statewide network of students and their
allies holding the government, corporations, and other institutions accountable through education
and activism (“Our Mission”). By utilizing college campuses, KSEC is able to alter the actual
practices of communities and individuals and increase regional solidarity to empower the public
in a way that is imperative for the globally-affected populace to respond to climate change.
Within the past few months, KSEC has demonstrated remarkable success in reducing
carbon impacts through lobbying. This was chiefly accomplished through the work of one of
three teams subdividing KSEC, the Political Working Group. The PWG is composed of students
from Centre College, University of Kentucky, Transylvania University, Eastern Kentucky
University, and Covington Latin High School and administrated by KSEC President Cara
Cooper. Relying on biweekly conference calls and delegation, this team has recently managed to:
organize a climate action rally at the state capital partner with a legislative sponsor and introduce a state bill (currently HB 339/SB 190)
establishing a feed-in tariff, mandating Kentucky utility companies purchase 12.5% of
their electricity from renewable sources, and setting an efficiency standard for these companies to create energy savings over time
collect over 700 student signatures on a petition indicating support of the bill hold a lobbying day and youth forum for the bill in which a new sponsor and supporters
were recruited persuade the EKU president to sign a climate commitment
KSEC members & allies join to listen to speeches relating to representative action on climate change.
KSEC students meet with a bill sponsor to discuss lobbying strategies.
These accomplishments are perhaps intangible in print but when enforced supremely efficacious
in catalyzing larger scale mitigation through citizens organizing. Additionally, the two less active
KSEC teams, the Local Food Working Group and the Just Transition Working Group, have held
their own planning meetings and lobby days to convince local and regional decision-makers to
cut fossil fuel use. These initiatives involved meeting with decision makers and demanding
adherence by merit of being a paying student or voting constituent. Grassroots organizing thus
allows an individual to amplify their voice on a more intimately personal scale than is possible
through a distant lens of democratic representation.
Though institutional change is powerful and pervasive in the battle for emission limits,
individual alterations in behavior as a result of public aggregation both arise from and establish
norms to influence the remainder of society. This is unique to small grassroots organizing which
relies heavily on interpersonal relationships and emotional appeal. Seasonally—with short
sessions in fall and spring and a week-long program in the summer—KSEC holds a “summit”
inviting students, graduates, teachers, and allied environmental associations to participate in
workshops for discussion of relevant issues and possible solutions. At these summits, provided
meals are often vegetarian, vegan, or local to reduce the resource consumption and emissions
associated with meat and distantly processed foods.
Spring 2016 Summit.
Participants remind each other to shut off lights, compost fruit peels, and exchange advice on
sustainable farming. These are important conversations unique to small-scale grassroots activism
in that they sidestep the larger scale tendency to overlook the individual. Indeed, mass media has
failed to significantly alter individual behavior by marketing a “one size fits all” distant,
impersonal, and uninspiring message (Moser and Dilling 165-168). Whereas top-down
approaches often justify climate change mitigation using mentally inaccessible information,
grassroots organizing engages interpersonal relationships in which social reinforcement—and the
tailoring of specific interests, narratives, and emotions—is strongest (Moser and Dilling 168;
Hoffman 79).
Top-down approaches to climate change mitigation rely heavily upon scientific and
economic analyses and, when political, are morphed through the lenses of several stakeholders
rarely held accountable for accurate constituent representation. This ivory towered information
alienates people and thus promotes contestation (Hoffman viii). Bottom-up grassroots organizing
—at least on a small scale—aggregates individuals and inspires using emotional narrative. KSEC
encourages story-telling as a catalyst of climate activism within events such as the youth forum
and upcoming Clean Energy Tour. At the former, student and ally speakers (including members
of KFTC and STAY Project, Senate candidate Sellus Wilder, and a Clean Power Planet
podcaster) spoke in the capitol rotunda on why renewable energy is important to them.
Explanations ranged from living in an industrial town with prominent health concerns to fear for
an economy dependent upon finite resources to desire for youth to remain in the state.
Similarly, the Clean Energy Tour recruits miners, farmers, students, and graduates to provide
narrative on renewable energy in Kentucky to an audience of legislators. These endeavors are
significant and unique to bottom-up approaches because story-telling provides a personally
relatable intrinsic motivation to change behavior (Kearns 414). By emphasizing the veritable
experiences of the individual, grassroots organizations are able to bridge the gap between people
to work in solidarity to mitigate climate change. The same cannot be true of national policies
formed by an elite oligarchy and seen as an imposition on a disconnected public; this motivates
pushback through both corporate lobbying against regulation and individual noncompliance
when people cannot genuinely appreciate the benefits of mitigation. Thus grassroots organizing
can establish social norms through emotional narrative in a way that top-down approaches can
only unsustainably enforce.
Grassroots organizing currently lacks the large scale solidarity necessary to effectively
address our climate crisis, but this does not make it less necessary. Where top-down frameworks
fail in persuading (rather than attempting to coerce) behavior and empowering the public to act
collaboratively, bottom-up frameworks haul ass. Fundamentally, a climate action plan issued by
an oligarchy without approval of the rest of the globe will fail. Humans require relatable
motivation to justify action, and it is individual humans who are both responsible for and capable
of altering climate change. Though localized organizing can seem too small or too
disharmonious, this is a flaw of current recruiting tactics rather than of bottom-up activism itself.
Effective, cohesive grassroots organizing capable of keeping our temperature rise well below 2°
Celsius must learn to appeal to common interests and become more inviting to those who may
not be economically or mentally on par with those affiliated. We must begin to find these
universal values and act in solidarity as a globe—not as representatives of it—if we are to save
ourselves. Climate change is undeniably a tragedy, but it also provides a historically unique
opportunity to form a unified international front against a collective threat. In light of renowned
Kentucky environmental lawyer Tom Fitzgerald’s speech topic at Centre College, I too would
agree that Margaret Mead was right: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed
citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” We must intertwine our
roots.
Works Cited
Hoffman, Andrew J. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate. Palo Alto, US: Stanford UP, 2015. Print.
Kearns, Laurel. “The Role of Religions in Activism.” Ed. Dryzek, John S., Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg. Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford UP, 2011. Print. 414-425.
Moser, Susanne C., and Lisa Dilling. “Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science-Action Gap.” Ed. Dryzek, John S., Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg. Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford UP, 2011. Print. 161-169.
