How can we make the radical social changes needed to address the climate crisis? What kind of large ecological disaster or mass mobilization in the streets needs to take place before we take meaningful climate action?
Dana R. Fisher is the Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity and Professor in the School of International Service at American University. Fisher’s research focuses on questions related to democracy, civic engagement, activism, and climate politics. Current projects include studying political elites’ responses to climate change, and the ways federal service corps programs in the US are integrating climate into their work. She is a self-described climate-apocalyptic optimist and co-developed the framework of AnthroShift to explain how social actors are reconfigured in the aftermath of widespread perceptions and experiences of risk. Her seventh book is Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.
I call myself an apocalyptic optimist. In other words, I do believe there is hope to save ourselves from the climate crisis that we have caused. However, I also believe that saving ourselves will only be possible with a mass mobilization that is driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world. A generalized sense of extreme risk can lead to peaceful and less-peaceful mass mobilizations at the levels needed to stimulate an AnthroShift. Only a global risk event (or numerous smaller events that are seen as threatening social and economic centers of power) will motivate the kind of massive social change that is needed. In other words, without a risk pivot—be it driven by social or environmental change—an AnthroShift that is large enough to respond adequately to the climate crisis and open a large enough window of opportunity postshock is improbable.
At this point, it is impossible to predict if such a shock will come from ecological disaster, war, pandemic, or another unforeseen risk. What is certain, though, is that without such a shock that motivates an AnthroShift large enough to reorient all the sectors of society to respond meaningfully to the climate crisis, it is hard to envision the world achieving the levels of climate action needed. Instead, the best we can hope for is incremental change that does not disrupt the dominant nodes of political and economic power; such incremental change has the potential to reduce the gravity of the crisis, but it will not stop the coming climate crisis.
– Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
To reach that kind of mass mobilization to reach a level of 3 to 5 percent of the population taking to the streets, you point out, would take a major ecological disaster. And I hope it doesn't reach that point because lives will be lost. Of course, lives are already being lost. Over 8 million people are dying each year due to air pollution, so it's more than incremental. It's just happening silently.
DANA FISHER
There's been some interesting research recently about the fact that we don't really know how many people are losing lives because of extreme heat, right? Extreme events are climate change-exacerbated events, which I call climate shocks in the book. We haven't been counting that. I think we will start counting it and we'll get a better sense of the trends, but there's no doubt that the numbers are going up, even though we aren't sure about the exact numbers globally.
We need a lot more people pushing back against power, particularly given the way that fossil fuel interests are continuing to push greenwash to try to continue to affect decision-making. The Trump administration is trying very hard to attract funds from oil companies with the promise that all regulations will be gone. And fossil fuel interests are supporting elected officials and pushing for decision-making that reflects their interests, which is not in the interest of the planet and certainly not in the interest of the general public. I know at the most recent COP, OPEC had its own pavilion. You would have never seen that back in the 1990s, but nowadays, they are trying to present themselves as a pathway towards the other side of the climate crisis, which is just absolutely not true.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Tell us about the American Climate Corps. A lot of people aren’t aware of this new program.
FISHER
The American Climate Corps was not my idea, but I have been very lucky to be involved in helping to evaluate it. The American Climate Corps builds on the legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which came out of the New Deal after the Great Depression in the United States when the country was getting very close to there being a toppling of the government because there was such a crisis here after the Depression. There were Dust Bowls. People were migrating all over the country to try to find work. And it was a really dark time in the United States. So part of the New Deal included establishing this Conservation Corps, where–and it was only men at the time–young men could go to work, earn a livable wage, work on teams, and help to build things in the United States. And some of them planted trees. So some of it was conservation, some of them planted trees. They helped with the railroads. They built all sorts of things with the Army Corps of Engineers. So there has been a call for a while now to build an American Climate Corps, which is building off of this legacy.
The Biden administration finally announced the American Climate Corps last September during Climate Week. In fact, the announcement came out, and one of the unfortunate things about the Climate Corps is that it builds on this amazing legacy, but it didn't receive much funding because the funding was originally going to be part of the Build Back Better Act, which the Biden administration proposed early on. The climate-related policy that ended up being reformulated and repackaged as the Inflation Reduction Act. the Climate Corps was not funded as part of that. So it's coming out in a much more limited manner, but what it basically is doing is merging a number of preexisting programs that are designed to help train young people to do work around climate change broadly defined across different agencies in the U. S. government to train them so that they have experience working on addressing climate change in a variety of ways, and also have a pathway into doing green jobs. Be they in the federal government, for nonprofits, or elsewhere in the government. And so it's a wonderful opportunity. The hope is that it will expand out to be thousands, if not more than thousands, tens of thousands of jobs. And that's that's the promise of the Climate Corps, but we have to see how it works out because as somebody who works with the federal government a lot, I know that the president can propose these amazing policies, but part of it is about congressional funding to see what's possible.
So, right now, the big question is what kind of funding will come through to support it. This summer will be the first Climate Corps will hit the ground, if you can say it like that, and the first Corps will be focusing on addressing forest fires, which are driven by drought, which is driven by and exacerbated by climate change. And we've seen a lot of that out West, so there'll be some programs that are partnerships between the AmeriCorps federal program and the US Forest Service to get young people trained to help to address forest fire and to limit forest fires.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
As you think about the future, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
FISHER
For young people, I think it's really important to be honest and say that it's going to be a bit of a crazy ride, right? But we're in this together, and we, particularly as adults, those of us who have been around for a while, need to start thinking through how we can be responsible and teach responsibility to our children. We also need to teach our children how to be hopeful and understand how they can be part of the solution. Because it's going to take all of us, no matter where we are or what we're doing, it will take all of us working together to get to the other side of the climate crisis. And as unfair as it may seem, the future is up to us. So we have to make it what we want, to actualize a future that supports as many people as possible and that doesn't destroy the planet.
