Over the last few months Ken Ward had a series of terrific posts on Gristmill regarding the scale of our challenge and strategic considerations.
From my neck of the woods it seems like pieces of a successful strategy are in motion. But there are significant missing pieces including a sufficiently broad grassroots movement.
My question, where are people discussing strategy?
More below the fold.
Most of the big enviros are heavily focused on DC (in addition from various litigation and business alliance strategies). Clearly federal legislation is hugely important but the reality is that the scale of change required is massive and even good federal legislation will be insufficient. Action is needed at every level: personal, institutional, municipal, state, federal and international.
My sense is that there is a huge gap at the base in terms of grassroots outreach and mobilization. The Sierra Club and PIRGs have grassroots strategies but in the overall picture, but no where near as broad as necessary (full disclosure: I'm heavily involved in the Sierra Club's Cool Cities campaign which is has a grassroots dimension but perhaps better described as a type of grasstops campaign).
Where are the other vehicles? StepItUp was great but unclear if there will be sustained action. StopGlobalWarming.org has a list but limited activity. Gore has a list of 500,000 but focus looks like DC and the plans are unknown. The Climate Project is creating urgency but not an outlet for action. Student groups like the Campus Climate Challenge is great but of limited scale. MoveOn is intermittently active. Religions groups are starting to move but also unevenly.
A full spectrum of mobilization is needed and there seems to be a particular gap between "personal action" (CFLs) and city level (Mayors’ Agreement) – ie: local neighborhoods & institutions (green your church, business, apartment, etc). This needs to be engaging and allow the kind of bottom-up, peer to peer stuff that technology now makes possible. But in scanning the blogosphere I don't see it (ClimateProgress, Climate Change Action, etc). With the exception of Ken's articles on Gristmill and a few others there's very little discussion. All of the blogs are focused on spot news and commentary. I'd like to find out if there is a good forum on strategy and mobilization.
I welcome your thoughts and am interested to learn if there are any strategizing forums surfacing.