High Noon

It was Friday at high noon, on the third day of a heat wave, the third heatwave in Connecticut this summer. The air no longer held the haze delivered by fires 3,000 miles away.

If there’s a canary in the Climate Coalmine, she’s on her back and her left leg is twitching. Those alarmed about the looming facts nonrenewable energy heating up the planet came out to demonstrate.

A band of protestors began their march from The Green but headed to an unpredictable destination. They were masked, distanced, and determined. Sweating it out on a lethally hot day they marched, surprisingly, to Chase Bank on Church and Wall.

Few pedestrians were out, being the worst time of day and the worst day of the week, when folks are thinking about their weekend, maybe the beach, that’s if they’re not closed due to bacteria in the water from run off; aka pollution.

Looks are deceiving. There’s a mindset, an assumption that enormous crowds, endless days of demonstrations, famous speakers move history. Actually, in-depth studies over broad chunks of history prove… not really. Maybe they end up that way, but there's a lot of pedaling to get change moving.

Harvard Business Review’s George Satell is an expert on how organizations and movements succeed and fail. “The strength of a movement is not large crowds but small groups,”. Having a clear purpose and being organized, incredibly organized, and staying on message is paramount. A multitude of smaller groups will influence those who make the laws, if the purpose is a noble [benefits the whole], not selfish one.

Friday's collective goal was specific; ending the funding of fossil fuels which cause the new norm; rising waters and flooding, megafires, historic temperatures, and extreme land and property-destroying weather. That day they were targeting J P Morgan Chase Bank, which ranks “for the fourth year in a row” as the number one lender to the fossil fuel industry, investing $316.7 billion between 2016 and 2020. For information on the methodology go here.

Connecticut Climate Crisis Mobilization, known as C3M is a “coalition made up of many Environmental Organizations, Unions, Community leaders, Religious Groups, Youth Organizations and concerned citizens, from all across the State of Connecticut,” according to their Facebook page. Melinda Tuhus who heads up the organization pointed me to Samantha Dynowski, state director of Sierra Club Connecticut’s opinion piece in the New Haven Register who explained, “The Public Utility Regulatory Authority is contemplating funneling more ratepayer funds into gas utility companies to build more pipelines and encourage more customers to use fossil gas rather than clean alternatives like zero-emission heat pumps, and the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection continues to permit unneeded new fossil fuel power plants despite their climate harms and threats to water and wildlife.”

The New Haven chapter of the 400 hub nationwide Sunrise Movement, which is financially backed by 350.org and international “renewable energy for all” non-profit is an influential powerhouse. They joined the C3M with their young cohorts represented.

Connecticut's Unidad Latina en Accion was also there. Over the years they've built up their numbers and credibility, and have received funding from established foundations like Newman’s Own and help from Yale with a strong network of other organizations they work with. Latinos account for more than half our country’s population growth: they are a voting bloc to be contended with, listened to.

These organizations are often tied to renewable energy's Green New Deal, and candidates sponsored by the Green New Deal? 99% of them won their races in November 2020.

I’m familiar with small movements. I watched the Obama campaign kick off in 2007, not bothering to attend the puny gatherings at my local college. Then Obama delivered the “A More Perfect Union” speech. That rose me off the couch and into a local DNC office, then I flew on out to Ohio as a field worker. No one had worked the internet at that time like he did: people donated frequent flyer miles online, opened up their homes to visiting volunteers through an online coordinator, pulled together driving and meals swiftly, at the tap of a finger; unheard of. Watching it from the inside you could see this was not a political group; it was a multigenerational, diverse army. More than once I cleaned the campaign bathrooms, and was happy to do so.

If you saw our little cluster of volunteers knocking door to door, you’d never know how large our organization was. There was a single-minded mission, a required comportment, and maybe a very tidy unspoken dress code, no swearing or mayhem. This is also cited by Satell, "If you look at pictures or film of the sit-ins and marches of the 1960’s, you’ll see nicely dressed young men and women keeping their composure in the face of snarling dogs and police batons. That was a tactic civil rights protesters intentionally adopted, and it worked. Now compare that to the unkempt protesters at Occupy events. That’s the difference that creating and instilling values makes."

These are also clues to a successful movement.

The banners were rolled up, farewells were given, the demonstrators obviously beaten down by the weather, but already making plans for more action as they held a mini-meeting on the broiling sidewalk in the very weather that will become the norm if people don’t wake up.

#newhavencounty #connecticut #elmcity #ClimateJustice #SunriseMovement

#renewableenergy #ChaseBank #energy