Power to the People

How to Assemble Small Climate Action Groups

Note: Some readers have told me they are interested in starting their own local climate action groups, but are hesitant to start. I learned to cook from Julia Child who, just having learned to cook herself, wrote meticulous directions for other beginning cooks about how to make pie crust and French onion soup. It is in this spirit that I offer this long and granular account of the first Freeport Climate Action Now, FCAN, groups we've assembled. The best cooks I know are the ones who are willing to experiment with recipes, make mistakes, learn from other cooks. It takes a long time to learn to make a good pie crust. Here’s our first attempt at mastering the art of social activism in the time of Code Red.

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It is eerily beautiful here in Maine in mid-November. “Welcome to Maryland!” I’ve wryly muttered to myself all week. The weather is a dangerous delight. Lawns are still lush green. My friend’s crocuses are blooming in her garden, pansies blooming in mine. The low light filtered through the oak and birch leaves still clinging to the trees diffuses a yellow-orange glow into the air, making it feel as if I’ve awakened inside an impressionist painting.  It wasn’t until a few days ago that a night time frost brought those leaves down and finally bared the trees—though by noon the morning temperature had risen into the high fifties.  The sun warmed my back as I knelt in the garden and buried tulip bulbs 6” deep in the moist dirt.

It is an act of faith, this ritual of planting bulbs in late fall and anticipating the startle of joy when green life finally emerges out of the snow in April; faith I will still be alive to see their green tips emerge; faith they won’t shrivel in the cold earth; faith something so magnificent as a red tulip will grow out of these small pale fists.

The dictionary defines faith as “complete trust or confidence in someone or something.” If, like me, the narrative of the future of global warming as it plays out on the world stage at COP26 in Glasgow is what you have been paying attention to this week, it’s hard to find any trust in any of the promises of the world’s institutions: either the countries’, the financial institutions’ or the fossil fuel companies’.  “The mistrust is so deep that each new initiative gets written off by activists as soon as it’s announced,” Bill McKibben writes in a very disturbing piece in The New Yorker.

Here in Freeport, FCAN members had the opportunity to hear first hand what was going on at COP26. It is our great good fortune to have on our steering committee a young woman, Susana Hancock, who is an Arctic expert with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She’s been in Glasgow for the last two weeks participating in events there. On Tuesday, she joined FCAN Live from Geneva where she’d traveled to give an invited TED talk to the UN on the cognitive linguistics of climate messaging!! (Look for a great improvement in my climate crisis language next week after I’ve seen her Ted talk!)

Looking at our faces lined up on my laptop’s Zoom gallery screen that bright morning, I saw in our eyes the faith we all had in her—her astounding breadth of knowledge, her deep analysis of the data behind the promises coming from the mouths of governments and banks and fossil fuel companies, all of which, she said, echoing Bill McKibben and an in depth piece in the Washington Post, amounts to very little. Over five hundred lobbyists for the fossil fuel companies were admitted as attendees at the conference. She described their smug self-congratulatory grins as they stood around at cocktail parties, adjusted their ties, smoothed their expensive suits, clinked glasses of bubbly champagne to celebrate their greenwashed confabulations. 

“How are you able to sustain your spirit in the face of all this greenwashing, this lack of transparency, this false posturing?”,  I asked Susana who curiously didn’t seem depressed or despairing. “Oh, I’ve had my breakdown moments, but they haven’t lasted, I’m meeting interesting, dedicated people from all over the world who have good ideas, good energy. It keeps me going.” “And too, this gives me spirit,” she said putting up a video of the streets of Glasgow last Saturday crammed with thousands of protesters, chanting, holding signs, marching.

Power to the people, my generation’s rallying cry, is back.

I confess I was a half-hearted activist in my twenties, on the fringes of protests against the Vietnam War and for Civil Rights; arguing with my parents about my long-haird boyfriend’s good character instead of taking to the streets. I wasn’t awake enough then, invested enough in life’s beauty and pain to be drawn to movements focused on change. Watch out world, I’m awake now, and I’m angry at the institutions who are perpetuating short term profits over life on this earth. I’m rooting for the exquisite balance of life forces that allow those tulips to bloom in the spring.

I’m ready for the streets.

Or, for this iterations of the streets: the small groups FCAN held at the library, on the steps on Bessies’ porch, the picnic tables at Wolfe Neck Farm.  “Concerned about Global Warming? Let’s Talk About It,” our posters read. We put those posters up all over town, in the library and Town Hall. 

I was nervous about the first meeting, held one dark night at the library. My greatest fear was not whether anyone would come, or how the discussion would go: it was that I would muff the alarm code disarmament drill I’d been taught earlier in the day. I envisioned loud shrieking sounds going off while I waited in shame and fear for the police to arrive with their swirling lights throwing red circles into the sky and arrest me for breaking and entering.  

At seven, when the meeting was set to start, myself and a few steering committee members finally heard the entrance door rattle and the sound of voices in the hall. A mother and daughter pair and a husband and wife shyly entered the big room. The conveners outnumbered the attendees by one! We’d arranged the chairs in a circle and everyone wore masks, which presented the next big challenge, because, despite my multimillion dollar set of hearing aids, I am still a deaf old lady who relies on lip reading.  Everyone had to lean into each other to hear, to pay careful attention.  Something about this leaning in gave the conversation a curious kind of intimacy and importance. 

It is a maxim of group behavior that the leaders of a group like ours share their own vulnerability as a way to start the conversation.  Finding myself moved by what each of the steering committee members said, I realized I’d never really had a chance before this to hear them talk about what they cared about. Margaret M., one of the steering committee members, started us off by eloquently describing her fear she’d never again see the Harraseeket river frozen over, snowmobilers racing over its surface. Group members spoke about loving Freeport and all the ways life here will be threatened by unfettered fossil fuel burning. One of the attendees has experience with an organization called Transition Towns. 

I’d never heard of this movement, but I looked it up and here’s the mission statement:

To catalyze a network of communities working to cultivate a just, caring, resilient, and regenerative world through training, support, and collaboration. Hmm. People are out there DOING this stuff!! 

We met for over an hour and a half.  One woman spoke about being in the State Theater in Portland in 2012 with Bill McKibben when Unity College was the first institution to announce divestment from fossil fuels.  She scrolled through her photos to find me the picture, and there she was in the front row, right next to Bill, everyone one on their feet, cheering.

The feeling in the room that strikes me as most salient now is one of relief, relief to be in connection with others who feel the same way and to be using our collective knowledge and imagination to think about what we could do as a community. The four people were eager to meet again.

I locked up, managed to do the whole procedure in reverse without causing a great ruckus. This is how it all starts, I thought to myself on the drive home: slow, small, until gradually the circle expands. But I also realize that we are organizing with tools from the sixties: posters, word of mouth. Sure we had a few large email mailings put out by the library and Bessies and Wolfe Neck Farm, but we don’t have a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter presence. Yet. In 2021, we need a whole new set of skills for activism. 

Last Saturday morning’s meeting at Bessie’s Farm Stand was planned for outside, and I had on my winter layers.  The sun was bright, the leaves still on the trees cast that yellow-orange glow over the neighborhood as we drove the short distance there. When we arrived, Kathy H.,  our host, was preparing her beds for the autumn garlic planting. The setting was perfect: the side porch is in the sun and there was little wind and the view out over the fields was pastoral in both the meanings of that word. Cars drove up, doors slammed, neighbors hugged each other, exclaimed on the beauty of the day.  I knew less than half of the ten people who came. Curiously, no young people arrived.  Everyone was over fifty. Most in their sixties and seventies. People sat on the porch steps, lined up in rows, looking into the sun, which, by now, was high and warm. Kathy peeled garlic cloves and the papery sound of the peels coming off accompanied the little bits of autumn bird call. I sat in a chair facing them.

What happened during the next hour and a half was pure magic.

So much energy erupted from our discussion that if you’d looked down on this spot from space, our little circle of earth would have been glowing.  I began, as before, by sharing my sense of despair dealing with the climate crisis alone and my wish to act in a collective way. Then each person followed and told her story.

First, a woman my age spoke, “I write letters and turn my heat down,” she said, but “I do these things by myself and it doesn’t feel like enough.”  She said that in the housing complex she lives in some people have food insecurity.  A truck delivers food to the people there, but the food comes from far away and is unappetizing. “Why can’t we get local food?” she asked.

The next person to speak was a woman who is a national leader in land conservation work. She’s working with the Wabanaki who have much to teach us, she said, about how to live in community in ways that will allow us to adapt and thrive in the face of the large scale changes we are about to experience.  “We need to shift our way of being in community,” she said. Issues of equity and social justice should guide our work in the future, she wisely reminded us. 

Next to add his thoughts was a retired analytical chemist, worried about the Gulf Stream slowing down, aware of all the existential threats to life. He echoed what many say, that individual action won’t get us anywhere, that we need big systemic changes in the power structure.  But still, he was there, on the porch.  He must have some hope that together we could do something to influence this power structure.

His wife spoke next.  She was full of ideas about what we could do as a community:  Solar energy, charging stations, food gardens. I could feel her sense of frustration that we hadn’t done these things yet as a community, that time was short, that we needed to start. Now.

A man who lives around the corner from Bob and I raised his hand. He’s a teacher at the Waldorf School here in Freeport.  He spoke about his anguish at knowing what threats to life the kids he teaches are going to face in their future. His words were so moving I had to close my eyes and pinch back tears. And he, too, had many ideas about what we could as a town be doing: what about zoning, what about food, what about electric cars, what about solar farms? He’s from Orono and when he was a boy his block came together for picnics and events a few times a year. He could envision the folks who live on Litchfied Rd. coming together in this way to educate and support each other to do this work.

Another neighbor offered a large space on her property, “with two hepa filters,” for meetings in the future. She wants to feel like she’s helping to do something on a larger scale.  She’s sick of her own “blah, blah,” she said in reference to Greta Thunberg’s complaints about world leaders talking but doing nothing.  She had many ideas about what we could be doing together.  She’s a woman who once lived in a commune, traveled the country with a band, knows about community.  Let’s find out where the grants are, let’s find out what other communities are doing, let’s involve the business community here in Freeport, let’s make Freeport a model community. Let’s Go!!

Her husband was next to speak. He is a neighbor but what I didn’t know about him is that he is a national and international expert on waste management! He’s ready, he said, to volunteer his time to see what he can contribute on a local level. “I know how municipalities work, I know how the grant process works. I can help.”

That’s when I noticed the shift.  We weren’t strangers anymore. Words like if or perhaps or what about gave way to the words we can. We’d shifted to an aspiration we’d invented together and had ownership of. We’d shifted to the idea of making Freeport a model community, that the work of this committee can be to imagine what a responsible, low carbon, sustainable, just community would look like and then to put in place the actions to accomplish those ideals.

I was blown away.  So much expertise right here in front of me.  So much imagination and heart and energy. The group wanted to have another meeting soon and continue our discussion.  The hardest part for me was not scheduling that meeting. The going forward energy was so infectious I would have scheduled a meeting in my neighbor’s space the next day!  But both Bob and Margaret suggested we wait and meet after all the group meetings have concluded, then invite everyone back for a planning meeting before the January 20 meeting.  Disappointed, the group agreed to wait!! 

Our third meeting was yesterday at Wolfe Neck Farm.  The dirt road to the Farm had been recently smoothed, the sky was clear blue but a mist rose from the surface of the ocean and dusted the islands in the distance with what looked like crystallized sugar. Bob and I got there early and lugged picnic tables out from under a tent and into the sunshine.  Jeannie M. from Wolfe Neck Farm arrived on her bike to be sure we had all we needed and to assure us that the farm is very interested in working with us, sharing what they are learning about carbon sequestration and farming, cow farts and seaweed.

On Saturday mornings, the farm is a hub for young families eager to get out of the house.  Smiling young couples, trailed by little ones needing encouragement to walk in a straight line, strolled by us and waved, all headed for the cows.  We recognized two young women, one pushing a baby carriage, the other holding the hand of a toddler.  We knew them both because they’d grown up with our children. We met their children, cooed, asked about their parents. We shared what we were up to, here beside the circle of picnic tables.  They were polite, but showed no interest in joining or finding out more about what we were up to. How would I have responded when I was their age, a mother with a young baby? I believe I would have responded much the same. I would have needed to bring a heavy curtain down between my fears about my child’s future and my happy Saturday morning walk with a friend beside the mist covered ocean. 

The meeting went well. I didn’t feel quite the same magic as I did the Saturday before, but I did feel the resolve to act, to find common ground with people on both sides of the political divide and both sides of 295. Importantly, there was agreement that bottom up organizing of local groups is what’s going to make a difference now, now that we can’t rely on the government, or corporate institutions to make the changes. 

Power to the people!!  

As in the other meetings, no young people came out to sit with us, despite the emails the Farm sent out to young and old alike. Maybe it’s because FCAN isn’t using social media well.  Maybe it’s because the forty somethings are busy with children and careers and relieved that we, the white haired generation, are finally stepping up, doing our share. Maybe it’s easier for the old (or people in the Third Act as Bill McKibben’s new action group is called) to face the emergency of climate on a daily basis because we won’t actually be here when the really big changes happen. We will have climbed through the escape hatch and flown off into the star-bright heavens, leaving behind the big mess we made when we were young and nimble, making our mad dash up the ladder of success. 

We have one more small group next week, this one hosted by one of our younger members, Kate O., whose leadership will, I hope, attract more people her age. She’s going to use a different recipe for the event. Instead of a group discussion, she plans on getting people involved in a few art exercises for both kids and adults. Drop in any time!! It’s at Mast Landing Brewery from 5 to 7 on Thursday! She’s a very good cook.