After the Failure of Rio+20: A Human Preservation Movement?

by Jeremy Brecher
[Originally published by the Labor Network for
Sustainability at:
http://www.labor4sustainability.org/uncategorized/after-the-failure-of-rio20-a-human-preservation-movement/#more-1865]

A quarter-century ago, when "Save the Whales!" was a
popular slogan, a New Yorker cartoon showed one whale
asking another, "But can they save themselves?" In the
early 21st century, experts and ordinary people alike
are asking each other how we humans can save ourselves
from the threats we have created. Front and center are
the Biblical consequences of climate change -- the
fires, floods, storms, droughts, and heatwaves -- that
we are now witnessing daily. Close behind come the
global economic meltdown, the growing division of rich
and poor within and between countries, the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction, the pollution and
overexploitation of local environments, and the
synergistic convergence of these and other crises toward
catastrophic global tipping points.

As the failure of the Rio+20 conference and a string of
previous international environmental, economic, and
security conferences from Copenhagen to Mexico City
demonstrate, national governments and their leaders are
incapable of seriously addressing problems that require
global solutions. Is there another way for us humans to
protect ourselves from mutual destruction?

Kiss your ass goodbye

We can glean part of an answer from the little known and
often distorted history of the movement against nuclear
weapons.

In the pantry of my childhood home hung a poster headed
"What to Do in the Event of Nuclear Attack." It was
around 1952 and I was probably six. It was the height
of the cold war and we lived near New York City; nuclear
war was a palpable threat. I remember my family
planning what we would do in the event of nuclear
attack: We had friends with a farm in Canada, and my
parents said that if we were separated from each other
we should all try to reassemble there.

At school in the early 1950s we had air raid drills.
Sirens would sound and we would "duck and cover" under
our desks. There were plenty of jokes among the kids
about our instructions: "In the event of nuclear attack
bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss
your ass goodbye."

At the very height of cold war hysteria, studies found
radioactive isotopes of strontium-90 in American
children's baby teeth. A newly-formed National
Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (soon known simply
as SANE) ran full-page newspaper ads headlined, "Dr.
Spock is Worried." A large picture showed the famous
pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose books were the
childrearing bible for tens of millions of Americans,
with a bottle of milk labeled X for poison. The ad
explained that fallout from nuclear tests was landing on
the crops eaten by cows and entering their milk.
Children would experience birth defects, radiation
poisoning, and cancer, from the contaminated milk.

The unimaginable threat of nuclear war was suddenly
brought home by the concrete and immediate threat to the
health of Americans' children. Our own government and
its nuclear program became the perpetrator of that
threat, rather than simply our protector against enemy
attack.

Thousands responded to SANE's ads, and soon tens of
thousands were participating in rallies, marches, and
local committees. By 1963, a nuclear test ban treaty
became national policy, and a moratorium on nuclear
testing, which had been widely excoriated as "unilateral
disarmament," was in place.

The sudden projection of the peace movement from the
margins to the masses was startling. It resulted not
from the concerns that had long preoccupied peace
movement activists, but from one that was a side issue
for most of them. But it was one that millions of
people, seeing the immediate self-interest of protecting
their families from nuclear fallout, found compelling.

Awareness of the dangers of fallout from nuclear testing
opened many Americans to concern about the broader
dangers of nuclear war. They came to see a halt to
nuclear testing and a test ban treaty as just the first
step toward more general disarmament. They moved from a
small concrete concern to a wider shift in worldview.
And they learned to question what was said by those in
authority.

The unknown impact

Millions of people worldwide, I among them, talked,
wrote, organized, voted, marched, and sat-in to demand
the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons. While
we were marching and protesting, we generally believed
that our movement was having little or no impact, and
many of us lived in a state of chronic despair. Only
when I discovered Lawrence Wittner's magisterial three-
volume history The Struggle Against the Bomb did I find
out I was wrong.

Wittner himself had started out believing that the
struggle against the bomb had been "ineffectual." But
the information he uncovered in the declassified records
of the superpower war agencies changed his mind.
According to Wittner, "Most government officials - and
particularly those of the major powers - had no
intention of adopting nuclear arms control and
disarmament policies. Instead, they grudgingly accepted
such policies thanks to the emergence of popular
pressure." Confronted by a "vast wave of popular
resistance, they concluded, reluctantly, that compromise
had become the price of political survival. Consequently
they began to adapt their rhetoric and policies to the
movement's program."

Occasionally high government officials have acknowledged
the effect of public opinion and the anti-nuclear
movement on policies such as the treaty to ban nuclear
testing. AEC Chair and outspoken disarmament opponent
Glenn Seaborg once admitted that, thanks to "popular
concern" about nuclear testing, "persistent pressure was
brought to bear on the nuclear powers by influential
leaders and movements throughout the world." In 1988 US
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy wrote that he
agreed with Seaborg that "what produced the treaty was
steadily growing worldwide concern over the radioactive
fallout from testing." The atmospheric test ban "was
achieved primarily by world opinion."

Ultimately peace movement action and world public
opinion led to the test ban treaty, detente, the end of
cold war, and an eighty percent reduction in strategic
nuclear weapons. Although it didn't "ban the bomb," the
movement provides an example of a successful
reconfiguration of the global system initiated by a
global social movement. If we have avoided mutual
destruction until now, it is largely due to the efforts
of that movement.

A human preservation movement?

Sometimes people who appear powerless and
stymied have used social movements to transform
the problems they face -- and history and
society as well. The US sit-down strikes of
the 1930s forced US corporations to recognize
and negotiate with the representatives of their
employees. The civil disobedience campaigns
led by Gandhi won Indians independence from
Britain. The civil rights movement of the
1960s gained the abolition of legalized racial
segregation in the American South. The
Solidarity movement and its general strikes led
to the fall of Communism in Poland and helped
bring about its demise throughout Eastern
Europe and the USSR. The "Arab Spring"
overthrew dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt
and reshaped the power configuration of the
Middle East. Occupy Wall Street transformed
the political discussion and helped transform a
one-sided into a two-sided class struggle in
the US. Can the power of social movements be
the basis for "saving the humans"?

Social movements arise to express common interests that
are not being represented by established institutions.
The threat of mutual destruction gives people worldwide
just such a common interest -- resisting mutual
destruction. That of course doesn't abolish other,
conflicting interests, but it does establish a new and
overriding one. Can that common interest be the basis
for a global peoples movement to put human existence on
a safe, sustainable basis -- and to impose what is
necessary for human preservation on corporations,
governments, and the economic and nation-state systems
of which they are part?

Addressing apparently disparate global threats to human
preservation ranging from climate catastrophe to nuclear
proliferation to destruction of water, land, and air as
part of the broader problem of ensuring human survival
could provide a new basis for collective action. Like
the ban-the-bomb movement, a human preservation movement
might well not have a single organization, ideology, or
even name. But it would define a shared project guided
by common objectives and a common interpretive frame.

Plausible affirmability

A human preservation movement may seem like an
extravagant, implausible, even ridiculous idea.
But we have already witnessed at least two
powerful global movements addressing two of the
great threats to human survival in the era of
mutual destruction. Both the anti-nuclear and
the climate protection movements defined global
threats and mobilized millions of people
worldwide to combat the policies and
institutions that perpetrated them.

At first glance, human self-destruction may appear to be
a collection of separate problems. But there are good
reasons to treat these apparently disparate issues
within a common interpretive frame. All are produced by
uncontrolled power centers and their interactions. All
need the same kind of interconnected changes in the
organization of social power for their solution.
Treating them as one problem may make it possible to
coalesce the disparate social forces necessary to
address them. Human survival can provide the broadest
and most compelling reason for social transformation and
concerted action.

We can make a comparison to the conditions in which
nation states formed in the 18th and 19th centuries.
People faced many distinct problems in such spheres as
economic development, military security, law, and
governance. But all had roots in the combination of
small, despotic principalities and duchies with
sprawling, poorly organized imperial dynasties. And all
led to the same institutional change - the formation of
nation states -- to solve them.

The formation of nation states did not abolish separate
parochial interests. But most individuals and groups
came to pursue their more parochial interests within the
emerging national framework. They sought to have their
aspirations included in national policies. National
rulers, conversely, tried to keep parochial interests
from turning to separatism by ensuring that many of
their aspirations could be pursued as part of a broader
national interest. In the case of the United States,
unification arose out of thirteen independent and
rancorous former colonies. A similar process at a later
time brought together the states of Europe - at war with
each other for a millennium - into the European Union.

Why would people do any more to support a human
preservation movement than the separate movements for
climate protection, disarmament, economic justice, and
the like? Because what people really want is to have
their lives and the future of the things and people they
care about put on a secure basis. Climate protection,
disarmament, and economic justice are, after all,
primarily means to that end. A human preservation
movement offers what we really want - a future protected
against the major looming threats, including the threat
from unknown unknowns.

Emergence and convergence

How might the elements of a human preservation movement
draw together?

The closest example I know to such an emergence and
convergence was the development of the movement against
economic globalization in the 1990s. As the effects of
globalization became increasingly evident, people's
established strategies of addressing their needs in
national contexts became less and less effective. The
process of developing new, global strategies was
polycentric, emerging in different ways in different
places around varied issues and utilizing different
forms of action. Gradually, but punctuated by sudden
leaps, those experimenting with these initiatives began
to learn of each other, engage in dialogue, and
coordinate common actions. The result was what we know
as the global "anti-globalization" or "global justice"
movement - aka "globalization from below."

A similar process might well characterize the emergence
of a movement for human preservation. It will have
roots in existing environmental, peace, and justice
organizations, especially those that are already
connected internationally. It will incorporate many of
the elements that have already come together worldwide
to combat global warming. It will draw on the global
justice movement, much of which is now represented in
the polycentric World Social Forum process. It will
include many who are responding to issues of survival
within political systems at all levels. It will involve
many organizations like unions and religious
congregations whose primary purpose is not to address
issues of survival, but which are drawn in by the
concerns and interests of their constituencies. These
will include many new recruits, such as the evangelical
Christians who have begun to shift from a shunning of
environmental concerns to a new focus on "stewardship."

Something like this already appears to be happening in
Occupy Wall Street. Its recent resolutions and action
have increasingly incorporated the threat of climate
change, nuclear weapons, the global food crisis, and
other human survival issues as crucial effects of the
tyranny of the 1%.

Between a risk and a certainty

How can people power force the changes that are
necessary to ensure human survival? We can see new
answers emerging in the movement against global warming.
The globally coordinated campaign for a climate
protection agreement provides one example. The shut
down of coal-fired power plants by nonviolent direct
action in many places around the world provides another.
The massive global days of protest organized by 350.org
provide a third. While globally coordinated social
movements go back at least to the abolitionist struggle
against slavery, they have been significantly
facilitated by the rise of social networking and other
new communication technologies, and the ways to use
these most effectively are only now being invented.

Finding ways to use people power for human preservation
will require experimentation with diverse kinds of
action by millions of people around the globe. It takes
creativity to parlay the actions of ordinary people into
effective pressure on those who have power. But because
the powerful are ultimately dependent on the rest of us,
our organized withdrawal of our support, acquiescence,
and consent can be a force they have to reckon with.

A human preservation movement will be an uncertain
venture into the unknown. But as scientist and novelist
C.P. Snow said in 1960 of the risk of trying to limit
nuclear weapons compared to the certainty of a global
catastrophe:

"Between a risk and a certainty, a sane man does not
hesitate."

Indeed, a human survival movement might echo the closing
words of the Port Huron Statement just half-a-century
ago:

"If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been
said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the
unimaginable."

Jeremy Brecher's new book Save the Humans? Common
Preservation in Action, published by Paradigm
Publishers, addresses how social movements make social
change. Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books
on labor and social movements, including Strike! and
Global Village or Global Pillage and the winner of five
regional Emmy awards for his documentary movie work. He
currently works with the Labor Network for
Sustainability.

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