What does marching for science, or for women, or for No Kings, actually accomplish? In this talk with climate activism expert and professor Dana R. Fisher, we explore what activism does for the planet. We talk about the “radical flank effect”, disruption, nonviolence, and the crucial importance of non-“activist” actions, too. Joining the call from military-occupied Washington, D.C., Dr. Fisher explains why we all might need to become “apocalyptic optimists” to stay clear-eyed about how bad things are (such discomfort motivates us to act) while pushing for change in small, local ways, so we can still feel efficacious in these times.
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Show notes:
- Dana R. Fisher’s website and books
- James Hansen’s 1988 testimony on climate change
- IPCC Sixth Annual Report (for which Dana Fisher was a contributor on a chapter on civic engagement as mitigation)
- The Inflation Reduction Act (under 2025 Republican governance), an essay from the Brookings Foundation
- NPR piece on 4 in 5 parents wanting climate change education in schools
- Wikipedia entry on the 3.5% rule of social movements and regime change
Transcription
FISHER: In the end, we don't all have to be climate activists. We don't all have to get arrested. And we certainly don't all have to be crazy gluing ourselves to things. But there's something we all can do to join the collective of civil society, to push back and push for these systemic changes that we need.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I'm Sarah Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt. In today's show, I'm talking with Dr. Dana Fisher, author of an incredibly timely book called Saving Ourselves From Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Dr. Fisher, superpower is understanding how movements change the world, and exactly how bottom up grassroots activism alters culture and politics.
I thought she'd be a great person to talk to today, because so many of us assume that the monster in the room is too big to fight. That none of us individually matters, and the will of “the people” is becoming less and less important. Of course, this matters on a collective level, but it also matters on a personal psychological level, which is how I want to frame this conversation. The ways that collective social movements change politics matters to you individually, because if you feel that change is possible at the small scale, that small groups of people can do things that are greater than the sum of the parts, then you are much more likely to make an effort, get up in the morning and get to work.
In social psychological terms, one’s perception of personal (what's called participatory efficacy) leads to actual collective efficacy. I talked about the idea of pseudoefficacy before on this show. This is another concept in the world of social psychology that explains why we feel so powerless in the face of big problems, like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill for eternity, if we feel a problem is too big to solve, we just give up rather than try to solve even a small part of it.
Dr. Fisher's research gives us hard data about why we shouldn't feel pseudoinefficacious. This arena of change, this locus of power, isn't out there in the halls of money and in men in suits. Dr. Fisher argues it is us. So let's get to this conversation, so Dr. Fisher can connect these dots for you between your personal sense of defeatism and the way collective movements work.
A little about her: Dr. Fisher is a director for the Center for Environment, Community and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC. She's written several books, including Activism, Inc: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America and American Resistance: from the Women's March to the Blue Wave.
Are you ready to talk about her newest book, Saving Ourselves? Let's dive in.
Welcome to Climate Magic, Dr. Fisher. FISHER: Thank you so much for having me, Sarah.
RAY: Could you tell us a little bit about your story? How did you personally come to researching the role of civil society in addressing climate change? FISHER: When I finished college, I went to DC a long time ago, in the 1990s, with the idea that I was going to help save the planet by working as a member of civil society with advocacy groups. And I learned how to lobby. And as the junior lobbyists on a bunch of different environmental coalitions, I ended up lobbying all the most conservative folks, which meant that I didn't get to do anything that had any effect whatsoever. But I also learned about how that process worked. And while I thought the process was so valuable, I did not feel like my personal skills and my knowledge was being used to the best of its ability. And so I went on my way to a long journey that took me eventually to Madison, Wisconsin, where I did my PhD in sociology, and that led me to being a professor.
But along the way, so much of my energy and interest was in how individual citizens garner power within the political system. Right. And so I learned about one of the ways to do it through lobbying. And it's just one of the tools in our toolboxes. And then I went out and did other things. And what I really wanted to do was pull apart when it mattered and how it matters and what mattered more, and how we could help make it even better. Right? And so that's, you know, that's the research side of me.
And so I ended up doing that in graduate school, although in graduate school, you know, I ended up… It's kind of funny because at the time I was trying to come up with an environmental problem to study because I knew I wanted to do environmental work. But at the time that, you know, climate change was something that was just being discussed, you know, early on, I mean, James Hansen had already given his testimony before the US Congress, which happened in, you know, late 80s, but it was still something that people were talking about, but it wasn't very common. And so I ended up studying the climate, you know, with the climate regime, which was the international regime that was working towards the Kyoto Protocol, which was the international treaty that was supposed to save us, right? Save us from the climate crisis. If it had been, you know, ratified and moved to a legal force globally as it was designed to do, and had the United States under the George W Bush administration had not basically killed the whole treaty. We would be living in a very different place if we had had a president, Al Gore. That is right.
So there are lots of ways that it could have been different. But so anyway, so I've been studying it since then. And so I say the policy making process. But a lot of my focus is on people power and the role of people power.
And this book is actually, was born out of my having worked for the IPCC, for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I was a contributing author for the most recent assessment report, which was called, Assessment Report six. And I wrote a section on civic engagement and activism, with the point being that they brought in this section around citizen efforts, which was new. It had never been written about before in and it was in the mitigation section.
I was chapter 13. And so I wrote that part. And there was so much that didn't get to be said because of the structure. And I really wanted to dig deeper. And I thought, you know, what else is that? I think that the general public needs to know about this. And so I decided I was going to write a book that brought together a lot of papers, a lot of academic research I had done that was accessible for the general public, for us to start to understand where we are, how we got here, and what we need to do now so that we can start to, you know, figure out our paths forward. Everybody can have a different path forward, but it all is towards the same goal. And that is saving ourselves from the climate crisis. I mean, and I would argue it's saving ourselves from the polycrisis that exists now because we're also experiencing, you know, the growing authoritarianism and the crisis on democracy in our country as well.
But when I wrote the book, I didn't see that one coming.
Ray: This question of the role of civil society, collective activism, collective action and changing and exactly the mechanisms by which they change policy, I think is super important to unpack, because I think a lot of people think, what's the point of getting involved? What's the point of going to a march or demonstration? What's the point of, you know, getting to know my neighbors or any of the kinds of things that are now kind of listed as standard actions, changing my light bulbs, whatever. And that sense of, of inefficacy or doesn't matter, that maybe is the way you felt when you were lobbying conservatives, you know, like this isn't going to go anywhere.
How is this useful? This Sisyphean task of climbing up this hill, right? Like I can't do this. I wonder if you could even dive into the kind of nitty gritty weeds on this a little bit. How exactly does your research on how change happens at the top start from the bottom, right? How do we get off our woeful and self pitiful butts to, really know that our engagement will matter and that it affects things that will actually happen and affect things at scale?
FISHER: Let me answer your question in kind of a different way, a slightly different way, which is just to explain to you my theory of change.
You know, so what I lay out in the book is the research I've done over the past 20 some years where I've studied climate policymaking, both internationally and at the national level, and come to the conclusion that nothing that we've done so far has come anywhere near addressing the problem of the climate crisis. So even the big wins, like the Inflation Reduction Act, which, you know, may rest in peace now, even these big wins have only been small steps in the right direction. And as a result of that, you know, I take a step back and say, okay, so how exactly are we going to get where we need to go? We cannot continue to wait for the right administration to pass the laws that will actually work, because if we were going to do that, or as the perfect treaty was going to happen, it would have happened already.
And things are getting worse and worse. And we are now personally feeling the effects of the climate crisis around the country and around the world. So we need to start doing something. And so my theory of change actually starts from being realistic about where we are on the climate crisis. And where we are in the climate crisis is that we are, you know, the days, you know, the days are getting dark and we are experiencing the effects of climate change now.
When I started doing this back in the 1990s, we weren't experiencing effects. And when we were talking about climate policymaking, it was all about saving the polar bears.
RAY: Yeah. Super abstract.
FISHER: It was about the idea that one day we might have more extreme weather events, we might have more severe wildfires, we might have more drought, we might have food scarcity because of climate change, because that's what the scientific models were suggesting would happen. But at the time, that wasn't happening. So nothing happened. And instead, fossil fuel interests, which had a stranglehold on decision making for, you know, decades, tightened their stranglehold and blocked any meaningful policy and basically blocked our ability to phase out and shift away from the types of fossil fuel burning that is leading to the climate crisis.
And instead of the systemic changes that are needed, they have given us incremental policies like the Inflation Reduction Act or blocked it altogether, which is how we got to the Trump administration. Number two. Right, as well as Trump administration number one. But so my theory of change starts with this recognition that things are bad, they're getting worse.
And nothing we've done so far has gotten us anywhere near it, which sounds really depressing, which is why I call myself an apocalyptic optimist. So that's the apocalyptic part.
The optimistic part, though, is the fact that I'm inspired by the fact that we know that when things get bad, when people experience the climate crisis firsthand, there's a lot of research that shows us that people actually mobilize and get involved, and they don't, you know, sit in their houses and feel despondent and like they can't do anything. They get out helping their friends and neighbors and they get angry.
And that emotion actually is extremely empowering for people to start to push back. And so my theory of change runs through the experience of the climate crisis, as unfortunate as it is, just because all the other channels through which this change could have happened–they haven't happened. And I've been studying it for a long time now. So if we wait long enough, could it happen?
I mean, I remember during the, you know, the Biden administration, I said, well, but we have made progress. Isn't this enough? And I said, look, if we didn't have, you know, tornadoes all over the country, if we didn't have extreme weather events, these severe storms that are coming and hitting, you know, and they're hitting with more severity and, you know, increasingly frequently, if we didn't have all those things, sure, we could wait for incremental policymaking to take effect. But we're experiencing the effects, the climate crisis, firsthand, and it's affecting all of us.
RAY: Yeah. Before we get into how you walk us back from the brink, which is I really appreciate that you gave us a little teaser there about apocalyptic optimism. So I want to I do want to go there, but I sort of want to wallow a little bit in how bad things are.
Only because I don't want to be accused of rose tinted glasses and denial. And, and of course, I and I know you aren't. And your first at least two chapters, you talk about how bad things are and you talk about the failures of the state and the failures of the market. And I'm sort of wondering if you could put a little bit of flesh on those at the risk of, of, having people want to stick their fingers in their ears. But you write that “instead of the systemic change that is woefully needed, we have all been redirected to focus on taking personal steps to make a difference.” This is so discouraging to me, right? This that top down change is elusive. You know, it's past the point of that. And as you just put it, you it hasn't happened yet. So, we have to look to something else instead of wait around. I think of this also from the perspective of young people realizing that the adults in the room don't really aren't really in charge. You know, the adults are and are totally in some other universe. And I felt when I read that part of your book, I had this feeling of what was the point? I think you meant to bring your readers there, right? So walk us through walk us through a little bit more about how exactly the fossil fuel industry has gotten its tendrils into all this.
I think I would like to not. I think before I read your book, I would have liked to have pretended that the fossil fuel hadn't had as much power and effect over the last, you know, 50, 70 years as it has. Can you tell us a little bit more about them
FISHER: You know, energy in most advanced industrialized nations has been dominated by burning of fossil fuels, right? That's how we've fueled the industrial revolution, and that's how we're now apparently fueling the AI revolution to, for better or worse, right.
And as a result, the folks who provide us with the fossil fuel infrastructure and the resources themselves have gotten a stranglehold on decision making. They have privileged access to power. They privilege access to resources. Some of the ways that looks is that they get to have subsidized access to our federal lands. They have subsidized access to the extraction process. They don't have to pay for the pollution that they actually emit into our atmosphere or into, you know, into our waterways. And they have to do that less now than they did even, you know, six months, seven, eight months ago. Right?
Because that's, you know, that's how power works when they have a stranglehold like this. And the reason, and one of the things that I try to point out in the work, and I build on a lot of really amazing research that other people have done, is the fact that it is not just political party that explains this, right? And certainly the folks in the Republican Party, in the United States are much more connected directly to fossil fuel interests. But if you actually look at fossil fuel company donations and fossil fuel, like the whole the whole ecosystem of the fossil fuel industry, and you look at who's funding the largest campaigns you see across the aisle, we see Chuck Schumer. We'd see, you know, many, many other Democrats, leading Democrats. And actually, their research clearly lays out that when people take money from fossil fuel interests, and of course, those companies can give a lot more money than you or I can with our $20 donations or whatever we can afford, they actually get access to decision making, and the folks who take money from fossil fuel interests are statistically significantly more likely to vote against climate policy making. it makes complete sense, right? Yeah. And it's an you know, they get what they pay for, right?
RAY: And then also this is also like just depressing on the, on the front of democracy of thinking, oh I have some I'm civil society, I'm the will of the people. I'm going to vote and it's going to be great. I mean, that, that, that particular delusion, I think we've all been disabused of for some time..On climate change. Yeah.
FISHER: The one thing I would just the one thing I would just highlight here and I think this is where, you know, I, I am an apocalyptic optimist. So I'm going to throw some hope in here. Is that yes. We can't just vote. And certainly we can't just vote for Democrats and think that's going to solve the problem. But we can still support Democratic candidates. But we need to make sure that we're paying attention, and they need to know we're paying attention. There was you know, there's been this great effort to get people who run for office to take a fossil free challenge, right? Or a fossil free pledge, which basically means that people running for office don't take money from the plastics industry, don't take money from the fossil fuel industry. And guess what happens when they get elected? They don't actually vote for fossil fuel interests. They vote for your and my interests. And that's the priority for them. Too few of them have been elected into office because unfortunately, we also see that the Democratic Party frequently blocks them when they're given a chance.
And that's something that we can all change. Can we change it at the National level? Yes, it's going to be hard, but we can do it. But we can, you know. But while that will be a heavier lift and we're going to all have to work together on that, we can change it in our communities today. I mean, I'm assuming in Humboldt County, I'm imagining you not have people who are elected in office who take a lot of fossil fuel money, but we see it around the country, and what we can do about it is right in our local communities. We can actually push back. Yeah. And we can make sure that the local people who are running for office don't take that kind of money, because when they don't, they actually are much more open to investing in clean energy and getting rid of fossil fuel infrastructure and transitioning to, you know, electric school busses.
All of these really like nitty gritty things that you can do in your communities that will make a huge difference, not just for, you know, how much carbon goes in the atmosphere, but also to the breathing quality of the air. You know.
RAY: co-benefits, as they call it.
FISHER: Exactly. Yeah. Okay.
RAY: So just listening to you, I have about 15 directions to go. I was thinking, as you were speaking, the effects of climate change to that we are already feeling that might motivate things we can get to. And in the section of your book where you talk about disruption is going to be required for this. I want to get to that.
But like things like pandemics and authoritarianism could arguably also be considered. So as you talk about the polycrisis, you know, I often think it's not just extreme weather events because a lot of times I'll go into rooms and ask people how they've experienced climate change and rarely will, almost never will they say, the pandemic or, the person in office right now is a result of climate change or I mean, I out and that might take a couple more steps of connection and connecting the dots. But, you did also in your book, talk about education also being another place where fossil fuel has sort of got a tendrils.
FISHER: I mean the right broadly has invested a lot more in our local communities. And the left.
RAY: Okay, there you go.
FISHER: And what that and a lot of that money is linked to fossil fuel interests. And as a result, what we're seeing with attacks on school boards and push and pressure around libraries and library books, well, there's a lot of different issues that are connected with the books that are being phased out. And the pressure at the local level.
It is embedded in that. Right? Yeah. And so we've seen these climate, let's call them climate free curricula that have been pushed in that basically keep young people from learning the direct connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change, which is direct, clear, and it is 100% certain.
And yet there is this constant effort from folks who are connected with the fossil fuel interests to make that connection less clear. I want to confuse people because when you confuse people, what you can do is you can provide misinformation and make people think that when you have an extreme event, it's not caused by climate change, it's being caused by, hey, John Gavin Newsom's water policies. Or it’s being caused by Joe Biden, who is seeding clouds to create hurricanes that would make disasters in North Carolina. I mean, a lot of this misinformation that we're open to it if we don't understand the process.
I mean, I actually been doing a bunch of work around trying to help educate, people post college who are doing service Corps work to try to understand those that the way that the climate crisis and the science around climate change works, and so that we can understand the effects of climate change and then the work that we need to do around it. Because what we know from research is that when people understand the process better, you can't, you know, you can't fool me if I understand the way it works.
And so that's something that's so very important for us to understand and for us to push for at all levels, starting, you know, with kids in elementary school, but all the way up through college, because in a lot of universities, they're not consistently teaching climate curricula. In fact, there's now going to be a move against that in many universities, unfortunately.
RAY: Yeah. I want to pick up on this idea of, you know, the erasure of climate from education to kids as a sort of a starting point of where this all is all happening and the gap it opens up for misinformation. I want to kind of bring like a psychology lens into it, too, that when I speak with teachers, I speak a lot with a lot of k-through-12 teachers as well as higher ed folks. They they often think they assume that if they bring them into the classroom, they're going to be attacked or cancelled or reported or upset somebody.
And I often try to remind them that something like 65 or 70% of parents across the country want climate in their education for their kids.
FISHER: And I don't want to I think it's crazy. I just want just to it's yeah, I for one cycle is that nobody ever asks if you bring fossil fuel into the country. I mean, our into the curriculum, if you bring plastics into the curriculum, if you bring it, I mean like literally bring plastics into the classroom, which we know the dangers of class plastics and microplastics. You think that, you know, there would be pushback there.
RAY: That's political too.
FISHER: Yesterday I just dropped my daughter off at college for the first time at her dorm.I don't want to talk about that part, but I want to say this is that her dorm does not have recycling, no recycling at all. And it was interesting because I was talking to one of the students as we were dropping her off and I said, where are the recycle bins? I can't even recycle. I mean, I can't recycle my cardboard.
That's like the easiest layer of recycling is like cardboard, paper, I mean, and students, they still use that paper. But then I also, you know, her roommate came in with this whole like, huge case of little plastic water bottles. There's little ones, you know, and I was like, really? We can't, you know, come on, throw me a bone here, right?
RAY: I don’t dare ask what college that was.
FISHER: We are not talking about, you know, why aren't we riled up about this? And I know there are a lot of student groups that are starting to think about plastics, and there's a lot of people who are starting to talk about the dangers of plastics. But we need to, like, think, you know, and challenge this assumption about what you should be learning, what you shouldn't be learning this.
So I run this center, a university wide center on my campus, and we were talking about whether or not I could encourage everybody at the center who's affiliated. We have, you know, 50 some faculty who are affiliated with our center. I wanted to encourage everybody to divest from fossil fuels. Right.
And the one of the student groups on campus was really trying to push me. And I said, you know, let me look into it. And I had a conversation with a number of the faculty, and I learned that the chemistry department start-up packages for faculty. So faculty, when they start, they get some funds to use for the research. Everybody gets this money to use for their research. And doing like chemical chemistry research is expensive. They've got to buy, I don't know, beakers. I'm a social scientist, but like beakers, whatever, they have to buy their stuff.
It's funded by the petrochemical industry. So it's built in. And these are ways that the industry has this stranglehold on us, because all of a sudden it's not just like, yes, we know climate change is bad and we know we need to do something about it, but it's also but we also don't want to lose the funding because who else is going to pay to help start up, you know, these faculty members?
RAY: Yeah, I mean, I think to myself, so that saw the material tendrils, the way the fossil fuel has a stranglehold as you described in your beautifully. And those are all really good examples. And it's amazing to me that it's always the labor on the shoulders of students to get these things changed, and they get they get turned down a lot of places, a lot of time. I find it depressing. But we keep supporting them and keep trying to do it.
But, along these lines, I think about that particular chemistry professor or when just something, an example like an individual person, how are they making this decision? And it has to do with does that sort of I mean, I'm sort of using psychology here to try to analyze what's going to make people do that thing where they say, aha! I know about the climate stuff, and this is such a value to me that I simply can't accept the money or I simply can't do this thing, or there's going to be a cost to me because of my moral righteousness on this particular value.
And I think or like the teachers that I'm describing who don't want to bring it up in the classrooms because they're worried about pushback. And I think there's an incredible amount of people who don't name climate, don't talk about climate, don't bring up in the classrooms, don't divest because they're getting their startup packages from the petrochemical industry. Because they think that, that is the unpopular thing to do, that they won't be approved of by their peers, that the psychological, in their minds think the psychological costs of making that decision are higher than the cost of going with their status quo way. And, and I think that the one thing I find interesting and in you touch on, in your book, too, towards later in the book, that when we start to think that everybody around us agrees with us, when we start to believe that we'll be supported in the decisions we make, we won't be left hanging. When we realize the social pressure of not being cool with our peers if we don't do it that way, or we know the parents are not going to yell at us if we bring this up because we know 75% want us to talk about it. If we, that little psychological trick of knowing that we won't be banished from the, not banished from, like the sort of evolutionary psychology of being banished from the tribe, where if we know we're not going to be banished or or even, you know, don't worry about losing our jobs. We would that level of extreme, are we going to be more likely to do it? And what would that take?
FISHER: Well, I think that once we realize we're part of a collective that cares about the climate crisis and is willing to stand up for it, we are so much more than the sum of our parts.
RAY: And that's really what you're trying to do in the latter part of the book, right? Is you're trying to say, look, the civil society is where it's at, and you need to look around and realize how many people actually are on board with this.
FISHER: I would say it's like, a contrary perspective to the look to the left to look to the right. Most of you don't agree or most of you won't be here. You know that they sign a say in some situations, right? In this situation, of course, on the right, most of you are on the same page. What do they care about?
RAY: The same things can you imagine all about? Yeah. Can you imagine if that's what they did a freshman orientation and said, yeah, right.
FISHER: I mean, look, you'll have to try right, figure out how to work together and build solidarity.
That's where it's at. I mean, that's kind of how I try to end the book is about thinking about these three different things that we need to do and need to understand to save ourselves from the climate crisis. And as I try to highlight, although I do spend a lot of time talking about climate activism and talking about, you know, the more radical flank of climate activism that has become more confrontational, although not violent at all, in recent years. In the end, we don't all have to be climate activists. We don't all have to get arrested. And we certainly don't all have to be crazy-gluing ourselves to things. But there's something we all can do to join a collective of civil society, to push back and push for these systemic changes that we need.
RAY: Yeah, this is really, truly the path of what I mean by climate magic, right? This kind of everybody can do something. And that giving up, I can't, I'm not in the spaces of power or, or an individual person doesn't matter. All of these reasons why we disavow our responsibility, that, get us off the hook, the climate magic idea that you're describing right there is, no, there's you don't have to glue yourself to Van Gogh or whatever, you know?
But I do want to I do want to pick up pick you up on the sort of, confrontational activism questions or radical flank stuff that you write about in your book. First of all, how do you sort of, what's your taxonomy of activists there for climate activism? You talk a little bit about the 3.5%. You talk about the radical flank, you talk about whether or not going to demonstrations and marching if you've even gone that far in your politics, whether it even matters. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your chapter on activism and what are all these different ways of thinking about. Is it effective, what parts are more effective than others? That kind of thing?
FISHER: Well, I mean, so a lot of the work that I talk about here builds off of my last book, which was called American Resistance, which was all about the resistance, the first Trump administration, which I thought I was writing because it was this one moment in time. But here we are again. So, during the book, I ended up, the book actually started because I was working on this project on clean energy, in swing states. And when Trump got elected into office instead of Hillary Clinton back in 2016, it was a depressing time to be studying clean energy and swing states, because basically we swung away and investment and open mindedness and concern for climate changes disappeared pretty quickly. Right? So I knew what I was going to be studying instead of what I was hoping to be studying, which was an expansion. It ended up being a contraction and understanding how climate policymaking, again, didn't work.
So at the same time, I also studied protests and activism. So as these big protests are being called, some colleagues of mine and I decided we were going to go out and start surveying protesters, which I've done over the years, on and off. And we started at the Women's March in 2017, which I didn't realize was going to be, but ended up being the largest single day of protest in U.S. history.
And after that, I continued going out in the streets collecting data, because people just kept going out in the streets, right, for these large protests. And when I talk about in American Resistance is the fact that, you know, while it used to be that protests were the goal of a social movement, if you think back to the March on Washington, like the original MLK March on Washington, that was a goal that they were working for folks in the civil rights movement were working for for like two years. Everybody in their communities, in their churches, were figuring out how to get people together to all descend on DC, to listen to MLK give his I would ended up being the “I have a dream speech,” right? But it all was built from all of this infrastructure and local work that happened.
But that's not how we do activism anymore. We have social media, and you no longer have to go into the basements of churches and school groups, community groups, to find people to go and rent busses, to go places. You just need to post something really compelling on social media, which is an amazing tool of social media. It changes the ways that activism works.
So. So what I talk about in American Resistance and I lay this all out is how, as a large scale protest event, like we saw with the Women's March or with the, you know, sorry, sorry, my nation from the No King's Day of Action or the hands off day of action, all of these days of action that we had more recently. Those moments are moments for what we call collective identity formation and a time for people to go out in the streets and feel like they're not alone. To recognize that you are part of a collective.
But that is not the end of the activism in any stretch of the imagination. It is actually the beginning. And what I talk about in American Resistance is how going out in the streets was the beginning. For many people who got out there, they felt like they were not alone. They recognized they were not alone. And then they got involved.
And it's what happens after those days of action that is the most important part. Unless you're talking about going out in the street and staying out in the street when a general strike and refusing to go back home. And I know a lot of NGOs, a lot of environmental lawyers, civic groups, protest groups have embraced this notion that all we need is 3.5% of people in the streets. Well, if you're talking about following the model that the autocratic or anti autocratic movements did, which is worth the 3.5% rule came out of it is about people going out in the streets in a nonviolent way and refusing to go back home and refusing to go to work. That's what they're talking about. That's not how it works here in the United States. That's not how civil society works. And we are a long way from that, which I am happy to say we are. But as a result, civil society going out on one Saturday, 3.5% of us, 5% of us. That doesn't matter.
What matters is people get out in the streets and find their people and find their modes of social change. Their behavior works. Work through people in your community to prepare so that the community is more resilient and there is more mutual aid and support available. When people are hit with climate shocks, or when people you know to defend communities against ICE.
There's so many things that we can be doing in our communities to build resilience, to prepare us for the climate shocks that are coming, and to push back against power to help climate champions run for office, so that fossil fuel interests don't continue to have this stranglehold.
All of those things matter, and very few of them have to do with disruption at all. It's more about change and change making, and we can all be agents of change.
RAY: Yeah, I love what you're saying because I hear from students a lot, too. Oh, I'm not an activist or even myself. I think I'm not an activist. And I think that there's this binary thinking about either you are participating in politics and that's the only way it looks, unless you're running for office, or you are chucked out and you’re not involved. And I love that you're giving all this nuance between these two poles that you don't have to be an activist on the street demonstrating or even, you know, gluing your hand is something. That there's this wide, wide range of stuff that is about building community, and it's about promoting local change, which anything local, by definition is something within our grasp.
FISHER: Right, exactly. And I mean, and that's the thing I think that so many people think about, wow, how am I going to stop project 2025? How am I going to stop their attack on the endangerment finding? Or they're, you know, approving all of these known carcinogens to be in our water and airways, all of those things, those seem huge. I mean, they seem huge to me. Right here in D.C.. Yeah. And I do a lot of work with policymakers, but that seems huge.
But what does this mean? Huge is we just they just phase out what are they called like leaf blowers that are oil, you know, gas, you know, so now you have to have electric leaf blowers, electric lawnmowers. Right. It's a small thing. But when you think about that happening in communities across the country, it actually is a big thing, you know, reduces, you know, it reduces fossil fuel consumption. It makes the air quality better. You know, just so many things that it supports. So, I mean, these are these small things.
So I think that we can do it. You know, everybody can do this by pushing towards the policy side. They can push towards more the, you know, community building side. But it all gets the same place when we think, you know
RAY: I think about the leaf blower example in our community. We just passed a barely thin margin passed, night, a night light pollution ordinance or something. And I'm like, this is such a small but seemingly, just for me, it's not just about or not just for me. The data suggests that the sort of standard climate science research would want to measure the success of this by how much carbon it reduces in the atmosphere. And you can say, well, that's just not enough, right? It’s so little.
But the kind of social science, community building, more activist side of me wants to say, well, we can't measure how that then created kind of a nudge effects of a feedback loop for people to think, oh, if the community thinks that's a good idea, maybe I could push for this other thing. Maybe there's some space there open up for this other place to do it. Oh, maybe I'm oh, I'm not alone in my hatred of night light blaring into my bedroom at night. I am in a community of people who care. Or maybe I'll actually go develop this mutual aid thing over here now.
FISHER: Exactly, recognition. Yeah. Coalition building and capacity building. And it can start really small and it can start on something that's not specific to climate.
Yes, there are so many ways yet to build and that's what this solidarity is all about. We got to build this solidarity that is about supporting people in our communities. So more supporting people, particularly those who are most in need in our communities. Right?
And meeting people where they are. So if if night light is the issue that's going to bring everybody together to start with, I'm sure it could be, you know, it could be, you know, I'm just trying to think of like what can be the leaf blowers. Right? A lot of people here were really upset about the leaf blowers. I mean, I don't like, you know, the sound and knowing that was like putting, you know, more, more oil into these things. I was like, that's a that's a great idea. I mean, my, my I'm big one. I mean, I'm more of excited about the, about the electric school busses personally, you know, either that they're hiring any of them, but it's just working, that's the part that matters. Yeah.
RAY: To that point earlier about the activism not being the demonstration street being the beginning, not the end point. And all of that work that went into the March on Washington was about community building, about creating the networks of civil society, the sort of labor of finding, similarity across differences, having other reasons to trust each other beyond just a political party, you know, really rallying all of these infrastructure building. And that, to me is part is, if we shift our a little bit of our attention away from how we how do we get carbon out of the atmosphere and more towards how do we build that infrastructure so that we can actually achieve anything, much less adaptation and resilience-building against climate shocks? Because we're certainly not going to get any help from FEMA anymore.
FISHER: Especially not if you're in a blue state like you and I both like.
RAY: Oh yeah. So there's a I have a sense of it. It seems to me like if you look at the poly crisis, all these problems going on and you don't and you're overwhelmed and you don't want to just pick climate or just pick authoritarianism and the demise of democracy, or just pick higher education or, or even k-through-12 education, the solution that is for all of the things is this one, right? Like this. Like building the social infrastructure in your local community. And it doesn't even have to name the word climate, as you pointed out. I love that.
FISHER: For sure. I mean, that thing that's so amazing about is when you do that and you find like minded people, if you're all like minded around issues that are of concern to people on the left right, be it reproductive rights, be it immigration rights, be it health, racial justice, be it climate justice. I mean, you could just the list goes on and on. LGBTQ rights, I mean, like all of these things. So at this point, there is a wonderful opportunity for building solidarity. And yeah, through that, you can start to think about a platform of issues that are most important for people. And I would imagine, given the data that we know, most of the people, climate will be on their list.
RAY: Yeah, yeah.
FISHER: And one of the things that we've been doing since Trump 2.0 came to office is I've been back out in the streets surveying because, you know, I feel like I got to get those data since it's possible. And I'm here in D.C. and I have a research team to do it.
So we've been out there and we've been asking people, you know, one of the questions that we ask, and we started asking this at the first Women's March in 2017 is, what issues motivated you to participate in this protest or activism today? And what we find is there are these clusters of motivations, and it depends on what's going on in the news at the time. But climate's always an issue for at least half of the people in the streets.
RAY: Well, no matter what.
FISHER: And you know, if climate is an issue even at, you know, at the No King's day of action, even at the March For Our Lives back in 2018, which was specifically around gun violence and ending gun violence, right. If climate is so persistent an issue, when you get involved in your community, you know, it's extremely likely the people who are also getting involved to try to protect the community are going to also care about climate change. So it can be part of the issue that you work on together.
RAY: Yeah, I love this because I think there's been, you know, so much there's been a sort of scarcity politics and a lot of movement spaces where it's like, we have to pick the one thing and just focus on the one thing, because otherwise we'll never get anything done. But in this particular moment where everything is under attack and everything feels so impossibly far away, and the monster in the room feels so much bigger than it ever was before. There's like you just said, an incredible opportunity for coalition building and finding the sort of going back to the drawing board of building that social infrastructure in order to create the kinds of movements that are successful and achieving goals as imperfect as those achievements are, like the IRA or whatever. And I don't even mean to just mention national things. I mean, the local things too, are also imperfect.
That the imperfection is maybe something we might want to embrace a little bit more.
FISHER: Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, democracy is an experiment. It's it's a local experiment. It's an experiment amongst people who don't know each other very well or, you know, and sometimes there are these fragile networks of folks who get together because they have common interests, but they also have common differences. Right? So I think that taking advantage of a common interest and working together is what this time is all about. I mean, it's interesting what, when the book came out, we were in the Biden administration and, you know, election 2024 was coming, but it was not here yet. And at the time, I did a bunch of interviews, and they said to me, oh, what's going to happen if Trump wins? And I said, well, actually, you know, an election of Donald Trump to office, again, while horrible in many ways, will be great for at least a coalition that actually has the capacity to push back and implement the types of systemic changes we needed, because we know things are going to get a lot worse. And we know that social movements bond together when there's a common enemy and Donald Trump will, if not, you know, he'll be many things to many people, but he will be a common enemy for many folks, and that will make it easier. And that's what we need because it was just so hard. Even the climate movement was fighting with itself during much of the Biden administration, and now it's a lot easier to work together. Because everybody knows that what's going on is not good.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. I even was speaking to someone in South Africa yesterday who said that what's happening in the US is causing the climate movement to congeal and grow strength there too. And I was I was like, gosh, this is having that kind of knock on effect of exactly what you just described about people saying, let's build more coalition. Even though we have differences where we might have in the past that would have caused us to not work together. But under these conditions, let's just put it aside and work together to get anything done, to have number power. And, that's maybe even more international in scale than, than just in the US. So I, I love hearing that from my South African colleague. I thought oh wow, great I guess.
Oh you know, yeah, I actually had a bunch of questions in here that you've touched on, about radical versus incremental change. I think people, this tension, which I know that I have students who battle this out in the classroom about, we need this radical throw out the system, there's no point waiting around for incremental change, kind of Angela Davis approach, versus is kind of like, let's just work with what we've got, where we are. I don't know if that's something you'd like to speak to. I really do want, I am paying attention to time. And I really want to ask you about Washington, DC, what's happening right now, and your chapter on “Saving Ourselves Won't Be Popular and It will Be Disruptive”. People despair is like just Stop Oil's tactics of going themselves. But in your book, you talk about how, for example, using the example, the Freedom Riders, the popularity of these movements was actually much lower before these actions happened, and that they actually increased the sort of to normalize their positions.
I don't know which direction you'd like to go down and how and your timeline. But which one of those kind of things is jumping at you?
FISHER: Well, let's talk about popularity and climate activism for a moment. Yeah. Activism and social movements in general. Right. So as activism, so as social movements continue their struggles and they don't achieve their goals like the climate movement has, what we end up seeing is an emergence of what is commonly known as we call it, a radical flank. And I'm using my air quotes because in many cases a radical flank is not particularly radical, but they're more common.
You're more of a confrontational, more aggressive part component of a movement. Right. And again, aggressive, not meaning hurting people necessarily, but just more in your face. And we saw that become really clear during the time when I was writing the book. Right. So during this time up, you know, after Covid, as people were coming out and starting to be like, wow, the climate crisis is so bad, we need to do something about it. There were folks were like, we gotta we ought to get more attention. And climate change wasn't getting enough attention.
The media people weren't thinking about it enough. So some people said, that's it, we're going to get more confrontational. And they took these tactics like, you know, gluing themselves to things. They threw a lot of soup. They threw, you know, they threw paint. They smeared paint. None of those were harming people or property, actually. In fact, like the property I was just reading today is somewhere online. They were talking about how the Van Gogh stint that happened in the, in, the big museum in I think it was the National Gallery in London. That actual stunt where they basically selected paintings that had protective coatings on them. Right. You know, so it was just say, the change of protective coating, clear, clean it off. And then they had glued themselves to the wall below it. So they had to repaint that. And it cost less than 500 pounds to fix or something like that. And the people who did it end up in three and a half years in jail. And so, geez, on the one hand, I wanted to just talk about the unpopularity.
So one: absolutely, a lot of people are not going to like it. In fact, the whole point of this type of more confrontational activism is to throw you off and get your attention by, you know, shocking you, which is one of the reasons in my book, I talk about these folks as being shockers. They use the performative acts that throw off your social norms, right? Your people are not supposed to go into museums and throw things where people are not supposed to go to the US open and glue their feet to the concrete, right?
RAY: Or even just stop traffic.
FISHER: You know, you're getting out, getting where you're going. Just you sit down in the middle of a highway. You're not you're not supposed to do that. In fact, I tell my kids they cannot do that. Right. But so you're not supposed to do is dangerous. And you know, you're not supposed to to bother people in their everyday lives.
And the thing is, the reason the folks are doing that, even though they know it's not popular, is because it's one of the only ways to get me attention. And the media attention, you know, is shown to help expand the movement. So it gets media a lot of people who are concerned about an issue to join in a movement, enjoy more moderate components of the movement, which is why the research talks about this as a radical flank effect. But, with regard to that, I just would say, you know, in terms of saving ourselves, it's going to take you know, it's an all hands on deck moment. We're going to need more people who are working in their communities, more people who are thinking about, you know, the electric leaf blowers or electric school busses, more people who are thinking about mutual aid in areas that are getting hit by floods or wildfires or tornadoes or insert all of the extreme events, extreme heat, which we're seeing like crazy in Europe right now. Right. We're going to need to see all of that.
But it also is about some people who are going to use disruptive tactics, like, you know, the folk I do some work with the folks at Climate Defiance. They are the ones, the bird dogging folks who go to events of elected officials and business leaders and just yell at them at their events to get attention. Right. It is extremely effective at getting attention, but a lot of people don't like it.
Yeah, because you're not supposed to go to somebody's event and yell at them. You're supposed to sit down and listen to what they have to say. You're not supposed to call them ou on taking a bunch of money for the fossil fuel interests, or voting against people's health concern for the climate you're supposed to actually, like, compliment them on the things they did do.
And these folks don't do it. But it's all about breaking our norms to get more attention. And the point about this not popular is that that's actually, you know, and that's part of the deal, and that's part of the deal as the movement and, you know, whatever we're going to see that pushes back against power. It's going to have to include some things that will make us uncomfortable.
I am most heartened by the fact that this many years into the climate movement, we are still seeing the movement being extremely committed to nonviolence and even not committed to property destruction. What we're seeing in the UK right now is the folks from Just Stop Oil have decided they're no longer doing this performative acts where they block traffic and do disruption like that. They're starting to shift towards sabotage, and they're being extremely tactical about it and picking, you know, fossil fuel companies and cutting off their, their, you know, electricity and stuff like this. It's like symbolic and makes for a really good story. And it also is easier to do in a secret way where you don't end up getting arrested and being held in jail for such a long period of time.
We're not seeing that in the United States. And I think that's really heartening. I think that's because the activists are really committed to nonviolence and to thinking about their theory of change as running through building a movement based on people recognizing that nonviolence is the answer. And I think that that's really heartening.
And one of the other things that I talk about in the book is the way that repression can both expand a movement, but can also, and, you know, escalate violence. And when I talk about violence, I don't talk about violence coming from activists on the left or climate activists. The violence is more coming from law enforcement. And we saw that during the civil rights period. We saw that during, the, you know, protesters who were protesting after George Floyd was murdered in the summer of 2020. And there's lots of opportunity to think about violence today and violence against peaceful activists. There's some good examples from LA.
And this brings us to DC and what's going on in Washington, DC right now. We have, you know, a crazy occupation going on in our city. There were some wonderful videos from last night's action that took place downtown. I think it was in the U Street area, which is an area that's known for bars and music, where a bunch of folks basically occupied the streets and they performed go-go dancing and performed all this music. And so these activists came out with signs against ICE. We saw I mean, if you look at the videos, it's amazing the number of police officers are there. There are police cars there, and they just were watching in some cases, a couple people, you know, they even were getting down with the dancing. But it was a very much this joyful protest to claim that D.C. doesn't need to be occupied and that these, you know, it's a free DC. And there was always a move towards statehood in Washington, DC, because DC is not a state, and doesn't have a lot of the same rights that we have if we live in states in this country. But the thing that was so wonderful is it was this joyful, peaceful moment of resistance.
And, a number of people I know, including some folks in the media, were posting, gonna be like, this is why we need occupation, right? We need militarized, gun wielding members of our military to come in and stop people from doing Go-Go in the streets. And the concern I have is that the more people you have who are threatening, individuals and civil society who are being peaceful, the more likely it is that there's going to be a clash that could bring out violence. And I just think it's amazing and so wonderful to see how peaceful everybody's being.
Last, because I think, you know, a lot of the research says that to expand a movement, you need to commit to nonviolent civil disobedience and peacefulness. You know, and, I mean, we're seeing a lot of that. But, I mean, there's just so many guns, so many military, you know, military people in the streets, you know, although I have gone looking for them and, you know, you know, you don't see them there, a lot of them hanging out around Union Station and harassing homeless people, which is not really what our military is supposed to be doing.
RAY: You know, I, we were all watching, of course, because this is the sort of litmus test for, I mean, we all know everyone on the left is sort of thinking this is what Trump is trying to do to see whether or not he can do it elsewhere. And precisely because DC doesn't have statehood, that’s why he can practice this here. And so the kind of, you know, knowing that this is this is like everything else, the capitulation here just opens the door for authority, you know, the authority to do it so many other places. So you got to stop it here, right? And the idea, the story that that creates of people dancing and being delightful and therefore not needing to be cracked down on by the police state is really is tactical. Yeah, it's very tactical. And I and I appreciate you bringing that that example up.
FISHER: What I can see is that there is a really nice coalition of groups, including some folks who are involved in the climate movement. We have some folks who have been involved in the struggle for racial justice in our communities. We're seeing some groups that are more general political that are all coming out to support the, what we're calling the Free DC movement, which is basically to stop the occupation. And that is the thing is that you see these coalitions that are broad and focused on solidarity. They are trying to draw attention to the way that, you know, this occupation is not about crime in DC. In fact, one thing that I thought was really depressing I saw recently is there are some communities in the District of Columbia. We have eight wards, and some of the wards are known for being, you know, places where there is more likely to be crime. There are a lot of people, you know, a lot of poor people who live there. And they are, you know, kind of more frontline communities. And so they struggle more. And the people from those communities are saying, we haven't seen one armed person come in here. Where are you not helping to protect the peace here? Right. So it's very strategic. I mean, and the places where we see a lot of military so far, it's all for photo effect. I mean, it's all for in the media.
RAY: Yeah. What a performance on a spectacle. You truly do make the case despite sort of ending with the police takeover of DC and that but also that joyful Go-Go dancing resistance tactic. You make the case in your book that it is not fair, and the failures of the state in the market are unforgivable. And yes, the fossil fuel industry has eliminated those as arenas of change. Your theory of change can no longer include those, as much as you might have wanted to. But that does mean that the power is, is ours. And I do think that that is the apocalyptic, apocalyptic, optimistic point of your book. And I just wanted to make sure I brought it to the end there. And if there's anything you'd like to add along those lines, by all means.
FISHER: Well, I mean, I think I would just say that was a wonderful summary. I would just say that, yeah. I mean, I think that again, why when we try to think about how we're going to save ourselves and how we're going to stop this poly crisis, and you can start with so many different issues that have gone wrong in the past seven, eight months now. One of the things that I, I think everybody needs to remember is that we need to start by being realistic about where we are. And things are crappy. And nobody, you know, nobody should be trying to tell everybody, oh, it's going to be okay. We just all have to, you know, wait for the next election. It's all going to be okay. Because as we know, as we saw what happened in Texas and you know what's happening in California, like there is a battle going on about our democracy.
But when we start to think back to it, down to our community levels again, I think everybody needs remember that it's not too late for us and that the power is in our hands. We have an amazing amount of capacity for social change, and we as humans have the amazing capacity to work together and create collectives. And so I think we all just need to, need to get angry and need to think about what we're going to do, starting from a realistic point of view, recognizing what the challenges are and how we can going to combat them.
And I think the best thing to do, again, is to look at the community level rather than looking too high up, you know, into the government federally, because there are a whole bunch of challenges there. But I'll end with this one hopeful point, which is what we're seeing the right achieving right now, started, some of the groundwork was lean decades ago, but much of it started right after Obama won his first round at the white House, 2008. And one of the things that a lot of folks on the right started doing is they started building capacity at the local level, you know. Right. And, you know, and there is no reason why we cannot do that, and we cannot do it to save ourselves from the climate crisis, from this crisis of democracy and everything else that's going on.
But anybody who says that you should only be paying attention to what's happening in Washington, DC, unless you live in Washington DC, that is absolutely wrong.
RAY: Yeah, I love that. I think that the “I'm only looking at the national news. And also that means I feel I have no power” is a trap that you're trying to warn us against.
So I, I, I really love ending on that note. That is a real action item to take from the conversation. Thank you so much for talking to me, Dr. Dana Fisher. It's been such a treat and I love your book.
FISHER: It's great chatting and, and thank you for having me. This has been a wonderful conversation.
RAY: You've just been listening to my conversation with Dana Fisher, author of Saving Ourselves. Show notes can be found at KHSU.org.
I'm Sarah Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.