B4. Radical Ecology

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This article New data shows No Kings was one of the largest days of protest in US history was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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No Kings Day on June 14 was one of the largest single days of protest in United States history, and it was probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017. The number of participants and expansive geographic spread that day are both signs of the persistent popular opposition to the second Trump administration.

The Crowd Counting Consortium has been collecting data on protest events and participation since the first Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017. Last week, we published our most recent monthly update, with estimated figures for the month of June, including the nationwide No Kings protests on June 14. With 82 percent of anti-Trump events for which we tallied participation on June 14, our estimates suggest that between 2 and 4.8 million people participated in over 2,150 actions nationwide. (We could not confirm estimated protest figures at 18 percent of events; almost all of these missing figures were in small towns.) However, we estimate the turnout at No Kings to be substantially larger than the turnout at the Hands Off protests on April 5, which mobilized a significant number as well — between 919,000 and 1.5 million people. 

No Kings in context

The Women’s March in 2017 — which involved between 3.2 and 5.3 million people — was, at the time, probably the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. No Kings in June 2025 had comparable aggregate turnout, albeit across far more locations. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March involved actions in over 650 locations, No Kings saw events in over three times as many locations, with events organized in big cities, small towns and places in between.

In that regard, No Kings was geographically more similar to some of the dispersed protests that began to dominate the U.S. protest landscape in 2018. For instance, on March 14, 2018, between 1.1 and 1.7 million students walked out of their classrooms on the one-month anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In an unprecedented demonstration, students in about 4,470 locations — from kindergartners to university students and even some homeschooled students — participated in what was then the largest number of recorded locations in a single day of coordinated protest in U.S. history. Ten days later, on March 24, 2018, the March for Our Lives drew an estimated 1.3 to 2.2 million participants in over 700 locations to demand safety from gun violence in schools. (The 2018 Women’s March, about two months earlier, had drawn an estimated 1.8 to 2.6 million people in 407 locations.) Protests throughout the month of June 2018 turned out several million protesters, largely accounted for by Pride marches and protests on behalf of LGBTQ+ rights — and over a thousand protests against the family separation policy implemented during the first Trump administration.

Sustained protest at geographically dispersed events in the U.S. reached its peak in the summer of 2020, during which millions of people mobilized at some 12,000 protest events in over 3,110 locations over eight months. This makes the wave of protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery the largest and broadest mass mobilization in U.S. history; notably, it built on years of intense organizing against police violence toward Black people and communities, including through the work of Black Lives Matter and other Black-led organizations, following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in Florida in July 2013, and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. 

Notable movement growth in 2025

While media attention is often focused on actors acquiescing to Trump’s demands, in the streets the popular protest movement continues to push back against the administration with notable persistence over time. Consistent with our past reporting, 2025 so far has seen far more protests than were recorded at this time in 2017 — a trend that continues through at least the end of July.

Overall, June 2025 saw protests in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Geographic dispersion of protest is noteworthy in part because prior research has found associations between the location of protest, protest participation and election outcomes. Generally speaking, higher turnout at protests in 2009 and 2017 was associated with more votes cast for the opposition party during the midterm elections in 2010 (for Republicans) and 2018 (for Democrats), respectively. 

Reporting on No Kings day highlighted the protesters’ desire to build upon street protest and to expand the coalition. An organizer in Beaumont, Texas, told local news, “We hope to encourage other people by being present in our community, to come join us, connect with us and get involved.” As the Nebraska Examiner reported, “Democrats, nonpartisans, and some Republicans who oppose Trump have used the protests as a political rallying cry or organizational tool.”

Furthering the emphasis on protests as tools, the event in Durango, Colorado, included “action tables” where protesters could do everything from write postcards to Congress to submit letters to the editor. Part of the aim of protests is also about the emotional resonance of being joyful in a like-minded group. “Nothing makes the oppressors more furious than seeing the oppressed having a good time,” said a trombonist who played amidst the protests.

Participants included the young, the old and the clever, with one sign in Anchorage, Alaska, reading “The Only Kings we want are salmon.” In Milford, New Hampshire, Marcie Blauner, age 97, attended her very first protest ever, holding a sign mentioning her age and “Pearl Harbor and D-Day were current events to me. Protect Democracy Again!” In Rochester, New York, protesters from the retirement community St. John’s Meadows also joined the nationwide protests. In expressing deep concern about the U.S. today, one resident highlighted what he saw as a potential historical parallel: the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.

In addition to the number of protests taking place, there are, of course, other indicators of the growing commitment of protesters to participate in a durable pro-democracy movement. One indicator is the willingness to participate in peaceful protests despite the threat of political violence. Tens of thousands turned out in Saint Paul despite the killing and attempted killing of several Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses the morning of the No Kings protests on June 14, followed by a warning of potential targeting of protesters by the at-large gunman. One peaceful marcher was killed in Salt Lake City by an armed volunteer who fired shots at a nearby armed man, who was also wounded. Counter-protesters in several locations around the country brandished weapons at No Kings protesters. However, those incidents of violence were exceptions — over 99.5 percent of reported protests had no injuries or property damage, with the latter reported in only 10 locations (just under 0.5 percent). 

A second indicator of commitment is that the No Kings coalition has hosted several online trainings over the past month that have attracted hundreds of thousands of views. The July 16 virtual training was probably the largest nonviolence training in U.S. history, with over 130,000 registered. 

Popular mobilization through protest is neither the entirety of the opposition to the Trump administration nor sufficient in and of itself to compel change. But historically, the mass public — in tandem with other societal actors like opposition politicians, lawyers, labor unions and courts — is likely to continue to play a crucial role in the U.S. and elsewhere in standing for the rule of law and democratic norms.

This article New data shows No Kings was one of the largest days of protest in US history was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article A veteran climate organizer’s new book shares lessons from the frontlines was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

One route to enhancing an activist’s power is to sign up for training sessions, where you can receive coaching on how to improve your organizing skills. There’s only one problem: Sometimes there aren’t enough trainers to meet the growing demand.

We learned this in the early 1960s, when the U.S. civil rights movement expanded too rapidly for available coaches to fill the need. As a result, Marty Oppenheimer and I published “A Manual for Direct Action.” When we ran out of copies, all we had to do was print more.

The current level of environmental crisis is no doubt increasing the need and demand for more activist coaching. Thankfully, Eileen Flanagan’s new book — “Common Ground: How the Crisis of the Earth Is Saving Us from our Illusion of Separation” — has arrived just in time to help out. (Flanagan is a longtime Waging Nonviolence contributor.)

Throughout the book, Flanagan’s knack for vivid description helps readers feel as though they are gaining first-hand experience. When, for example, a New Orleans environmentalist leader drives Flanagan around to see points of conflict, we readers seem to be in the car with her. We not only gain lessons drawn from powerful environmental activism, but we also feel a sense of personal comradeship with the people she interviewed and worked alongside.

Because Flanagan is a veteran activist and writer (and someone I have worked closely with over the years), she knows the questions readers want to ask — as well as the reassurance we might need at moments when the struggles we face feel overwhelming. What’s more, her writing style is more conversational and subtle than the typical activist manual, while also going quite a bit deeper in its analysis.

Anyone who digs into an issue for the years it takes to see progress made — or even a win — can feel that we know a whole lot about that particular fight. In the process, though, we may lose track of other important struggles the movement is waging, along with the associated lessons learned. One merit of Flanagan’s book is that she knows the questions we’d want to ask about the campaigns she describes — campaigns that vary widely in location and circumstance.

I didn’t know, for example, that Vietnamese youth in Louisiana were doing climate actions alongside Latinos, as well as Black and white people. Nor was I aware that Ojibwe people in Minnesota fought the installation of an oil pipeline that would damage ancestral lands.

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Flanagan doesn’t restrict herself to the U.S. either: In far-away India, she learned that activists succeeded in getting coal mining banned in a major forest — and through her interviews, we get the first-hand story of how they went about it. She also manages to link the story of a small rural settlement fighting pollution to the international climate treaty negotiations held in the Netherlands. The overall effect is one of feeling deeply connected to the victories of environmentalists all over the world, perhaps most particularly in places Americans rarely visit.

It’s not surprising that Flanagan succeeds in this way, having spent countless hours on far-away picket lines, in meetings and at organizers’ homes. Her writing skills show up in her ability to maintain the larger narrative wherever she goes: What’s working in this campaign? What are the challenges? How are activists meeting them?

Digging into victories — and challenges

Although this book offers the usefulness of a traditional activist manual, it offers so much more than that due to Flanagan’s remarkably personal style. For example, she shares the revealing moments when her own internalized racism was acted out. She then shares results of experiments she tried while working to unlearn that racism.

Previous Coverage

How a small Quaker group forced PNC Bank to stop financing mountaintop removal

Flanagan obviously enjoys describing victories, as when the Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT — a Philadelphia-based group she’s a member of — forced one of America’s largest banks to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining. That victory, which made it harder for struggling coal companies to secure financing, helped to inspire more climate finance campaigns, resulting in more than 1,600 institutions committing to $40 trillion-plus worth of fossil fuel divestment.

In describing the campaign, Flanagan shares a strategy tool that helped guide it: the spectrum of allies. She then connects that tool to an environmental campaign she observes in Louisiana, offering enough detail so that readers can pick up the tool and use it themselves.

As with any environmental book, “Common Ground” has plenty of information about facts and trends that may influence our strategic thinking. However, I was struck by Flanagan’s low-key way of relating environmental facts. She knows her readers: Most of us don’t need more motivation to act — we want to know how to act more effectively.

Importantly, Flanagan shares lessons from previous movements where grassroots campaigns won against seemingly overwhelming odds. In one example, she shows how the Baton Rouge bus boycott’s partial victory in 1953 in turn spurred the Montgomery campaign’s big win a couple of years later. It’s helpful to see environmental struggles in that larger context and know that we, too, can learn from and inspire each other.

Race, class and the value of coalition

Flanagan’s combination of big-picture skills and personal journalistic details show up over and over when describing activist coalition-building challenges. She’s unusually class- and race-aware, offering an example to activists of how to extend ourselves in such ways. She tells the story of her own ancestry (working-class Irish American) and describes how that was incorporated historically into U.S. white supremacy. She then uses that example to offer suggestions to readers for whom it might be relevant.

Basing her discussion on her own experience, as well as an interview with campaign strategist Daniel Hunter, Flanagan describes four models of campaign organizing in relation to race. She then passes along what works for building common ground within the group.

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One of her most profound learnings came from an Indigenous confrontation in Minnesota over the installation of a $4 billion oil pipeline project threatening to damage ancestral lands. She describes the confrontation:

In the long skirt I had been taught to wear for ceremonies, I prayed fiercely, holding one of six thin wooden shields that were covered with reflective metal, so that the police would see themselves if they looked at us. I was one of six white allies asked to stand as a safety barrier between the police and several Indigenous youths who climbed the corporation’s structure to sing and drum through the chain link fence. A young Indigenous man with long thin braids told me that when he was asked to sing a song, he consulted the Creator for guidance, and the words that came to him were a prayer for those doing the harm.

“They don’t know any better,” he said quietly.

That reply struck me. What do we make of this difference she sometimes found between Indigenous protesters and white protesters who distance themselves from police? Are Indigenous activists more likely to honor the humanity of the enforcers by acknowledging the limitations of knowledge and conscience that seem to handicap white police?

This was new to me. In my many activist decades of dealing with police — including being beaten by them — it never occurred to me to acknowledge their limitations of knowledge and conscience as their handicap!

Ultimately, I found “Common Ground” to be both an enjoyable and fast read. I can also imagine its “manual dimension,” lending itself to being read in a group of activists. The many practical tips could easily come alive and fuel both the strategy and creativity needed for new winning campaigns.

This article A veteran climate organizer’s new book shares lessons from the frontlines was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article New Jersey’s Break the Bonds campaign adds pressure on states to divest from Israel was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On July 13, roughly 100 people convened in Military Park in Newark, New Jersey for the launch of Break the Bonds, a new statewide campaign in solidarity with Palestine. Inspired by the BDS Movement — a call from Palestinian civil society organizations to boycott and divest from Israel’s economy — the activists in New Jersey vowed to get their state to divest from Israel Bonds. These bonds, as organizers explained, are direct loans that individuals and institutions make to the Israeli treasury, enabling its ongoing genocide in Gaza and broader oppression of Palestinians.

The initiative in New Jersey is the latest local expression of a national campaign that launched on May 23, 2024. Since that national launch, coalitions have formed across the country to pressure various state and local institutions to divest from Israel Bonds. Jewish Voice for Peace, or JVP, one of the national organizations behind the Break the Bonds campaign, has published dispatches from iterations of the campaign in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Providence. There have also been efforts in North Carolina, New York, Florida, and Illinois. All are targeting public institutions that buy Israel Bonds, including state treasuries and pension funds.

Speaking at the campaign launch rally, Wassim Kanaan, the chair of New Jersey’s chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, or AMP-NJ, denounced the complicity of U.S. institutions in the unfolding genocide. “Whether it be the healthcare industry, the academia industry, the very important economic industry … these sectors are not free of blame when we talk about Zionist atrocities and crimes.”

The coalition of organizations at the launch included local chapters of national organizations: AMP-NJ, the Council on American-Islamic Relations NJ, and JVP of Northern New Jersey and Central New Jersey. Several state-specific organizations were also present, including Ceasefire Now NJ, New Jersey Peace Action and Palestinian American Community Center.

JVP member Eric Romann described the coalition as united by each organization’s ongoing efforts to challenge U.S. support for Israel. That work also includes challenging support coming from New Jersey’s public institutions and officials “in the context of this ongoing genocide and long history of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”

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A recent Open Public Records Request filed by JVP shows that the New Jersey Division of Investment holds over $30 million in Israel Bonds. Correspondingly, the organizers are demanding that the state commit to not renewing or expanding those investments. At the same time, the coalition has several long-term goals for its campaign.

“We broadly would like to see, in the long term, the state of New Jersey adopt an investment policy that is consistent with principles of human rights, economic and racial justice, and environmental sustainability,” Romann said. “We would love to partner with other social movements and organizations in the state of New Jersey that would like to see an investment policy that reflects those principles.”

Understanding Israel Bonds

Because Israel Bonds are not well known among the general public, much of the initial work of the campaign has consisted of organizers explaining the purpose of these bonds and how they prop up Israel’s economy.

Its story began in 1951, when Israel’s then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion created the Development Corporation for Israel — the economic institution behind Israel Bonds. Since its inception, the Development Corporation has raised more than $40 billion for Israel’s economy. According to a Bloomberg report, U.S. investment in Israel Bonds has yielded $5 billion since the Oct. 7 attacks alone. This number is notably double the typical amount Israel was raising through Israel Bonds prior to the war. In a quote from the Bloomberg report, Israel Bonds President and Chief Executive Officer Dani Naveh claims that the largest share of U.S. investments in the bonds comes from state, city and local governments.

While the specific amounts of investment vary from state to state, organizers of the Break the Bonds campaign see the emphasis on Israel Bonds as a way to expose the complicity of U.S. institutions in Israel’s anti-Palestinian violence.

The campaign also raises the question of how taxpayer money gets spent compared to what might better benefit localities and states. Speaking at the launch rally in Newark, longtime community activist Larry Hamm said, “Instead of spending that money on war, they need to spend it at home on healthcare, on education, on jobs, on the needs of the people. That’s what we’ve got to build.”

Growing a grassroots campaign

While the campaign has not secured any divestments so far, activists have made important advances in exposing the role of Israel Bonds — and how much different cities and states contribute to these investments. As a result, several cities across the country have introduced divestment resolutions.

Last year, shortly after the launch of the national campaign — and following months of protests in the streets, at universities and outside of banks — the Cuyahoga County Council introduced a resolution to halt investment in Israel Bonds. Two days later, in Rhode Island, the Providence City Council introduced a similar resolution. More recently, in Illinois, union members filed an ethics complaint against the Illinois state treasurer over the state’s $100 million investment in Israel Bonds. This coincided with an Illinois state senator introducing legislation to halt investment in Israel Bonds.

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Other states have used various tactics to challenge investment. Activists in Philadelphia got the word out about their Break the Bonds campaign with protests, including one in which rabbis and allies blocked traffic to call for divestment. In Palm Beach, residents sued the county in May 2024 over its $700 million investment in Israel Bonds.

Back at the launch of New Jersey’s campaign, speakers acknowledged that their effort will likely be a long fight. At the same time, however, they also believe educating the broader community — and building a large and diverse coalition — is the best way to challenge these investments.

“The counterbalance to industries in cahoots are people in a movement who are in solidarity,” Kanaan said.

This article New Jersey’s Break the Bonds campaign adds pressure on states to divest from Israel was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

from  Act for Free

The Megamachine spreads its devastating skewers in all directions:
towards the ocean floor, other planets, and the last remaining areas of wilderness on Earth. There are many places to take a stand against a suicidal culture which, if not thwarted, will not stop before all known lifeforms have been consumed by runaway technological expansion. Not least of all in the Rhineland, so-called Germany, a European heartland of industry and extractivism.

Situated between Aachen and Cologne, the Hambach coalmine is the largest in Europe – and it is getting bigger every day. Run by the
mega-corporation RWE, this toxic pit supplies nearby weapons factories with electricity, pumps out untold quantities of carbon dioxide, and swallows forests and villages whole. There could hardlyy be a more concise image of what the expansion of civilization looks like.

Blocking the growth of the mine is the “Sündi”, a small woodland
squatted in autumn 2024, since then a zone of resistance against
capitalism and the state. RWE devastated the Sündi last winter, cutting most of its trees – although the occupation itself remains unevicted.

The desert has been unable to expand as expected since then, but cannot afford to do so any longer. An eviction attempt of the Sündi therefore seems likely this autumn – the cutting season starts October 1.

Let it be known that our beacons have been lit. You are invited to come from far and wide to the Sündi in September and October, to join the resistance here. Or to the nearby Hambacher Forest, which was squatted in 2012, and remains an autonomous zone to this day. This region was once a hotbed of struggle against power in all its forms – let us make it so once again, and answer with fire and sedition those who would see these habitats obliterated.

No compromise with industrial expansion!

For anarchy and high treason!

This article What fantasy stories teach us about defeating authoritarianism was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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An earlier version of this article was published by The Fulcrum.

Like many true elder millennials, I find comfort in escaping into fantasy worlds — “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars.” But lately, these stories haven’t just been a break from the chaos of real life. They’ve become a lens for understanding it. They remind me what courage looks like when the odds are stacked against you — and what it means to stand up, not just to threats to justice, but to silence, complicity and fear.

Lately, I’ve been thinking less about the final battles, the catharsis, the clarity, the triumphant arrival of friends. We’re not there yet. Not even close. What I keep returning to is “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” despite the deep discomfort of doing so — since it means revisiting a story that shaped my early moral imagination while reckoning with the dehumanizing and othering beliefs and behavior of its author. For all its flaws and the real harm she has caused, it remains a story that gave many of us early language for power, resistance and moral choice. This is that chapter — the one where everything tightens. The danger is real. The protagonists are scattered. The institutions are eroding and the air gets heavy with denial and dread.

Voldemort has returned, but the Ministry of Magic refuses to admit it. Rather than confront the threat, those in power turn on the people who do. Truth-tellers are ridiculed, surveilled and silenced. Education, once meant to foster critical thinking, is recast as indoctrination. Dissent becomes disruption. Truth becomes dangerous.

At the center of it all is Dolores Umbridge, smiling through pink cardigans and kitten plates as she issues decree after decree. Her power doesn’t come from brute force, but from something more insidious: the weaponization of bureaucracy. She governs through policy, paperwork and punishment, tightening control with every rule and ritual designed to reward obedience and punish defiance.

It’s also not just the rules; it’s the gaslighting. A kind so relentless that it makes you question your memory of what’s right, of what’s real. For instance, when Harry insists Voldemort has returned, Umbridge punishes him for “lying,” forcing him to write the phrase “I must not tell lies,” a denial of truth etched into his own skin.

Today’s decrees aren’t written in magical ink, but they echo those same tactics. They come dressed as executive orders, targeted investigations and retaliatory firings masked as efficiency, which looks like governance but functions as something else entirely. As political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt warn, “Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. … They convert public institutions into political weapons.” In this model, repression hides behind bureaucracy. It’s disguised as a process, making it harder to name and easier to doubt your instincts.

The goal isn’t just control. It’s to make resistance feel reckless. As those political scientists note, “When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government — because they could credibly face government retribution — they no longer live in a full democracy.”

That’s the danger right now: Fear pushes people into isolation, and when they are isolated, silence starts to feel like strategy.

What makes it more disorienting is that we can’t even agree on what’s happening. Some see democratic collapse. Others see righteous restoration. Many disengage entirely and are unmoved, overwhelmed or unwilling to name it.

This isn’t just polarization, it’s a fracture in our shared reality. And beneath that fracture, there is something even more destabilizing: a collapse of trust.

Trust is more than a sentiment. It’s the scaffolding of civic life, the thing that makes dissent possible, and gives us confidence that others will stand beside us, even if they don’t fully agree.

But according to a new report by the Pew Research Center, 64 percent of Americans say most people can’t be trusted, a number that hasn’t budged since 2016. And when trust erodes, democracy doesn’t collapse all at once; it decays quietly, from within.

Even in that decay, though, something begins to grow, not because it’s safe, but because it’s necessary.

In “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the institutions are compromised. The leadership is absent. The heroes are scattered. And still, something forms. Dumbledore’s Army doesn’t begin with a sweeping call to arms. It begins in the margins, with a few people deciding they won’t wait for permission to defend what matters. It wasn’t a dramatic uprising. It was a quiet refusal to comply in advance.

This is where we choose what kind of characters we want to be, not waiting for a rescue (because no one is coming), but recognizing the story depends on us.

Fantasy stories — and history — remind us: Turning points rarely feel like turning points. They don’t come with clarity or consensus. They come with hesitation. They come when people stop waiting for the right moment and start acting anyway.

Dumbledore’s Army begins

In every story we turn to for meaning — such as “Harry Potter,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” — there’s a moment when it feels like the heroes might lose. The world is unraveling faster than it can be repaired. The danger is real, the enemy is advancing and help isn’t coming.

That kind of despair isn’t just emotional, it’s strategic. It’s exactly what authoritarianism counts on. Not brute force, but momentum. The illusion that resistance is futile. That no one else will act. That the outcome is already decided.

But illusions can be broken.

And that has been happening in the United States. We’ve already seen cracks in the surface: mass protests, legal victories, institutional pushback. By the end of March 2025, there were more than three times the number of protests in the U.S. from the same time in 2017. As researchers Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam observed, “Americans seem to be rediscovering the art, science and potency of noncooperation. The resistance isn’t fading. It’s adapting, diversifying and just getting started.”

The way forward doesn’t require perfect coordination. It requires commitment and showing up however and wherever we can. This isn’t a single movement, it’s a mosaic. And that’s a strength, not a flaw.

We know what works. We’ve tested interventions, built infrastructure and shifted narratives. The question now is whether we’re showing up, consistently, creatively and together.

And that is starting to happen as people recognize that democracy isn’t self-sustaining. Educators are shielding students from political interference. Lawyers are refusing to capitulate under threat. Institutions and public servants are holding the line. Neighbors, coworkers and faith leaders are choosing not to normalize the unacceptable. People are stepping outside their comfort zones, seeking connection, building trust and strengthening the civic fabric.

The work is underway. The call now is to keep going and to bring others with us.

As Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy reminds us, “To believe in democracy is to believe that we, collectively, have the power to shape our future … until democracy is completely vanquished, and even after, ultimate power rests in the hands of We the People.”

Chenoweth’s research shows that almost every nonviolent movement in modern history that has mobilized at least 3.5 percent of the population has succeeded, and many have won with less. Reaching that threshold doesn’t happen on its own. It takes people inviting others in, making participation feel possible, even joyful.

And that’s what gives me hope. As long as enough of us keep speaking up, showing up and standing together, the story doesn’t end here. We still get to shape what’s written in the next chapters.

The magic is us

Fantasy stories remind us that it was never about the numbers; it was about the networks. Dumbledore’s Army. The Fellowship. The Resistance.

They didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t wait for someone else. They stepped into the story, scared, unsure and in motion.

Now it’s our turn. Now it’s your turn.

Maybe you’ve never seen yourself as an activist. Maybe you still don’t. That’s okay. Because this isn’t about activism as an identity, it’s about citizenship as a practice. And somewhere along the way, we stopped practicing it.

In America, we’ve come to treat citizenship like a spectator sport, something you check into every few years. Something reserved for politicians, pundits or the loudest voices in the room. But democracy was never meant to be a performance. It’s a collective act, sustained by ordinary people showing up in ordinary ways.

Real citizenship is how we meet this moment, not just in resistance, but in participation. Not just when the stakes are high, but when no one’s watching. Not just in protest of what we’re against, but in active pursuit of what we’re trying to build.

If we want to keep the experiment of American democracy alive, we can’t treat it like someone else’s job. We have to be participants, not spectators.

So, how do we start showing up?

Remember, we’re working with a mosaic. Practicing citizenship looks different for each of us, but here are three ways anyone can begin:

1. Find your people. Find your joy.

Democracy isn’t just sustained by protests and policies; it’s sustained by relationships. And right now, we’re living through a loneliness epidemic. According to Pew, nearly half of Americans say they don’t have a single person they could call in an emergency, or even trust with a spare key. That kind of isolation doesn’t just erode well-being, it weakens our capacity to care, to engage, to stand up for each other.

So start small. Community doesn’t have to be big to be powerful; it just has to be real.

If you’re looking for ways to start building community, here are a few places to begin:

• The Longest Table is a global movement bringing neighbors together over shared meals to build connection and empathy.
• National Good Neighbor Day is a national initiative encouraging neighborly acts and stronger local ties.
• A Wider Circle hosts “Neighbor to Neighbor Day” and other community engagement efforts that foster dignity and mutual aid.

And most importantly, make space for joy. Share meals, laughter and stories. These aren’t distractions from the work, they’re what the work is for. Even in the darkest chapters of history, people still fell in love. Still celebrated. Still found each other. Because joy, connection and belonging aren’t extras. They’re part of how we endure. They’re how we honor our shared social contract to care for one another.

2. Model the democracy you want

Our democratic values don’t just live in constitutions and courtrooms; they live in us. In what we expect. In what we tolerate. In how we treat people, especially those with whom we disagree.

That means refusing to accept injustice, corruption or dehumanization as normal. And it means calling in, not just calling out: having honest, respectful conversations that challenge harmful ideas while leaving room for learning and growth.

You don’t have to be a politician to shape democratic culture. Just let your values be visible in how you listen, how you speak and how you engage across differences.

These groups offer tools, trainings and spaces to help you do that work:

• Team Democracy encourages citizens to commit to safe and fair elections through their Principles for Trusted Elections Pledge — a visible, nonpartisan act of support for electoral integrity and civic trust, both during elections and in everyday life.
• Citizen University hosts Civic Saturday gatherings and leadership programs that help people practice civic rituals, build community and strengthen democratic culture.
• Civic Genius creates tools and events, like “How to Run for Office” workshops, that make it easier for everyday people to understand and engage in local government.
• Better Together America promotes civic unity by helping Americans engage across political differences, support democratic values, and restore trust in institutions and one another.
• One America Movement works with faith leaders and communities to confront toxic polarization by fostering relationships across religious and political divides.

3. Protect the process

Democracy doesn’t run on autopilot. It depends on systems that are fair, transparent and accountable, and on people who make sure they stay that way. Protecting the process means keeping those systems visible, responsive and strong.

That might mean volunteering as a poll worker or helping a neighbor get the ID they need to vote. Or it could mean attending a town hall, tracking how public money is spent, or submitting a comment on a local policy.

Here are some organizations that make it easier to get involved and stay informed:

• VoteRiders helps voters navigate complex ID laws and ensures access to the ballot.
• League of Women Voters offers nonpartisan guides and local engagement opportunities, such as candidate forums, ballot explainers and voter registration drives.
• Power the Polls recruits volunteers to serve as poll workers and ensure safe, fair and accessible elections in local communities.
• Open States lets you follow your state legislature and track bills in real time.

These practices aren’t side quests. They’re the main storyline, the way turning points begin — quietly, collectively and often before we realize it.

And if these stories have taught us anything, it’s this: The arc shifts when ordinary people decide the story is theirs to shape.

As Dumbledore once told Harry, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

We don’t need magic to know what comes next — just the courage to believe that our choices now determine how the story ends.

UPDATE 7/28/25: Added critique of “Harry Potter” author’s dehumanizing views.

This article What fantasy stories teach us about defeating authoritarianism was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

by Mark Olalde / Pro Publica

Josh Dini, left, and Gary McKinney, a member of a group opposing the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada, pass Sentinel Rock on a 2024 prayer ride to raise awareness of mining’s impacts on the environment and cultural resources. Credit:David Calvert/The Nevada Independent

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith grew up in a community that was deeply involved in the fight for Indigenous rights, protesting broken treaties and other mistreatment of Native American people. Members of the movement, she said, understood that law enforcement agencies were surveilling their activities.

“I’ve been warned my entire life, ‘The FBI’s watching us,’” said Farrell-Smith, a member of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon.

Government records later confirmed wide-ranging FBI surveillance of the movement in the 1970s, and now the agency is focused on her and a new generation of Indigenous activists challenging development of a mine in northern Nevada. Farrell-Smith advises the group People of Red Mountain, which opposes a Canadian company’s efforts to tap what it says is one of the world’s largest lithium deposits.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have for years worked alongside private mine security to surveil the largely peaceful protesters who oppose the mine, called Thacker Pass, according to more than 2,000 pages of internal law enforcement communications reviewed by ProPublica. Officers and agents have tracked protesters’ social media, while the mining company has gathered video from a camera above a campsite protesters set up on public land near the mine. An FBI joint terrorism task force in Reno met in June 2022 “with a focus on Thacker Pass,” the records also show, and Lithium Americas — the main company behind the mine — hired a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism to develop its security plan.

“We’re out there doing ceremony and they’re surveilling us,” Farrell-Smith said.

“They treat us like we’re domestic terrorists,” added Chanda Callao, an organizer with People of Red Mountain.

All told, about 10 agencies have monitored the mine’s opponents. In addition to the FBI, those agencies include the Bureau of Land Management, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nevada State Police Highway Patrol, Winnemucca Police Department and Nevada Threat Analysis Center, the records show.

Andrew Ferguson, who studies surveillance technology at the American University Washington College of Law, called the scrutiny of Indigenous and environmental protesters as potential terrorists “chilling.”

“It obviously should be concerning to activists that anything they do in their local area might be seen in this broad-brush way of being a federal issue of terrorism or come under the observation of the FBI and all of the powers that come with it,” Ferguson said.

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment. The Bureau of Land Management, which coordinated much of the interagency response, declined to comment. Most of the law enforcement activity has focused on monitoring, and one person has been arrested to date as a result of the protests.

Mike Allen, who served as Humboldt County’s sheriff until January 2023, said his office’s role was simply to monitor the situation at Thacker Pass. “We would go up there and make periodic patrol activity,” he said.

Allen defended the joint terrorism task force, saying it was “where we would just all get together and discuss things.” (The FBI characterizes such task forces, which include various agencies working in an area, as the front line of defense against terrorism.)

In this May 2022 email, an FBI special agent invites Nevada’s Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office to a joint terrorism task force meeting focused on Thacker Pass. Credit:Records obtained by Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica.

Tim Crowley, Lithium Americas’ vice president of government and external affairs, said in a statement: “Protestors have vandalized property, blocked roads and dangerously climbed on Lithium Americas’ equipment. In all those cases, Lithium Americas avoided engagement with the protestors and coordinated with the local authorities when necessary for the protection of everyone involved.”

Crowley noted that Lithium Americas has worked with Indigenous communities near the mine to study cultural artifacts and is offering to build projects worth millions of dollars for the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, such as a community center and greenhouse.

But individuals and the community groups opposed to the mine don’t want money. They worry mining will pollute local sources of water in the nation’s driest state and harm culturally significant sites, including that of an 1865 massacre of Indigenous people.

“We understand how the land is sacred and how much culture and how much history is within the McDermitt Caldera,” Callao said of the basin where Thacker Pass is located. “We know how much it means to not only the next generation, but the next seven generations.”

First image: Construction at Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass mine near Orovada, Nevada
David Calvert/The Nevada Independent

A Familiar Conflict

Indigenous groups are increasingly at odds with mining companies as climate change brings economies around the globe to an inflection point. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are contributing to increasingly intense hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires and droughts. The solution — powering the electrical grid, vehicles and factories with cleaner energy sources — brings tradeoffs.

Massive amounts of metals are required to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy infrastructure. Demand for lithium will skyrocket 350% by 2040, largely to be used in electric vehicles’ rechargeable batteries, according to the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. produces very little lithium — and China controls a majority of refining capacity worldwide — so development of Thacker Pass enjoys bipartisan support, receiving a key permit in President Donald Trump’s first administration and a $2.26 billion loan from President Joe Biden’s administration. (Development ran into issues in June, when a Nevada agency notified the company that it was using groundwater without the proper permit. Company representatives have said they are confident that they will resolve the matter.)

Many minerals needed to produce cleaner energy are found on Indigenous lands. For example, 85% of known global lithium reserves are on or near Indigenous people’s lands, according to a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia, the University of the Free State in South Africa and elsewhere. The situation has put Indigenous communities at odds with mining industries as tribes are asked to sacrifice land and sovereignty to combat climate change.

Luke Danielson is a mining consultant and lawyer who for decades has researched how mining affects Indigenous lands. “What I fear would be we set loose a land rush where we’re trampling over all the Indigenous people and we’re taking all the public land and essentially privatizing it to mining companies,” he said.

If companies or governments attempt to force mining on such communities, it can slow development, noted Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh, a professor emeritus of Australia’s Griffith University and author of “Indigenous Peoples and Mining.”

“If there are bulldozers coming down the road and they are going to destroy an area that is central to people’s identity and their existence, they are going to fight,” he said. “The solution is you actually put First Peoples in a position of equal power so that they can negotiate outcomes that allow for timely, and indeed speedy, development.”\

Environmental activists Will Falk, left, and Max Wilbert led early opposition to the mine, after which the Bureau of Land Management fined them tens of thousands of dollars for the cost of monitoring them. Credit:David Calvert/The Nevada Independent

“We’re Not There for an Uprising”

Most of the documents tracing law enforcement’s involvement at Thacker Pass were obtained via public records requests by two advocacy groups focused on climate change and law enforcement, Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. They shared the records with ProPublica, which obtained additional documents through separate public records requests to law enforcement agencies.

Given the monitoring of mining’s opponents highlighted in the records, experts raised questions about authorities’ role: Is the government there to support industrial development, protect civil liberties or act as an unbiased arbiter? At Thacker Pass, the documents show, law enforcement has helped defend the mine.

Protests have at times escalated.

A small group of more radical environmentalists led by non-Indigenous activists propelled the early movement, setting up a campsite on public land near the proposed mine site in January 2021. In June 2022, a protester from France wrote on social media, “We’ll need all the AR15s We can get on the frontlines!” Tensions peaked in June 2023, when several protesters entered the worksite and blocked bulldozers, leading to one arrest.

That group — which calls itself Protect Thacker Pass — argued that its actions were justified. Will Falk, one of the group’s organizers, said that, in any confrontation, scrutiny unfairly falls on protesters instead of companies or the government. “As a culture, we’ve become so used to militarized police that we don’t understand that, out of the group of people gathered, the people who are actually violent are the ones with the guns,” he said.

Falk and another organizer were, as a result of their participation in protests, barred by court order from returning to Thacker Pass and disrupting construction, and the Bureau of Land Management fined them for alleged trespass on public lands during the protest. The agency charged them $49,877.71 for officers’ time and mileage to monitor them, according to agency records Falk shared with ProPublica. Falk said his group tried to work with the agency to obtain permits and is disputing the fine to a federal board of appeals.

“None of us are armed. We’re not there for an uprising,” said Gary McKinney, a spokesperson for People of Red Mountain, which parted ways with Falk’s group before the incident that led to an arrest.

McKinney, a member of the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe, leads annual prayer rides, journeying hundreds of miles across northern Nevada on horseback with other Native American activists to Thacker Pass. He described the rides, intended to raise awareness of mining’s impact on tribes and the environment, as a way to exercise rights under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects tribes’ ability to practice traditional spirituality. Still, the group feels watched. A trail camera once mysteriously appeared near their campsite along the path of the prayer ride. They also crossed paths with security personnel.

Beyond the trail rides, the FBI tracks McKinney’s activity, the records show. The agency informed other law enforcement when he promoted a Fourth of July powwow and rodeo on his reservation, and it flagged a speech he delivered at a conference for mining-affected communities.

“We’re being watched, we’re being followed, we’re under the microscope,” McKinney said.

The records show security personnel hired by Lithium Americas speaking as if an uprising could be imminent. “To date, there has been no violence or serious property destruction, however, the activities of these protest groups could change to a more aggressive actions and violent demeanor at any time,” Raymond Mey, who joined Lithium Americas’ security team for a time after a career with the FBI, wrote to law enforcement agencies in July 2022.

Mey also researched protesters’ activities, sharing his findings with law enforcement. In an April 2021 update, for example, he provided an aerial photograph of the protesters’ campsite. Law enforcement agencies worked with Mey, and he pushed to make that relationship closer, seeking “an integrated and coordinated law enforcement strategy to deal with the protestors at Thacker Pass.” The records indicate that the FBI was open to him attending its joint terrorism task force.

Mey is not licensed with the Nevada Private Investigators Licensing Board, which is required to perform such work in the state, according to agency records.

Mey said that he didn’t believe he needed a license because he wasn’t pursuing investigations. He said that his advice to the company was to avoid direct conflict with protesters and only call the police when necessary.

“We Shouldn’t Have to Accept the Burden of the Climate Crisis”

The battle over Thacker Pass reflects renewed strife between mining and drilling industries and Indigenous people. Two recent fights at the heart of this clash have intersected with Thacker Pass — one concerning an oil pipeline in the Great Plains and the other over a copper mine in the Southwest.

Beginning in 2016 and continuing for nearly a year, a large protest camp on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation sought to halt construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. Members of the Indigenous-led movement contended that it threatened the region’s water. The protest turned violent, leading to hundreds of arrests. Law enforcement eventually cleared the camp and the pipeline was completed.

Law enforcement agencies feared similar opposition at Thacker Pass, the records show.

In April 2021, Allen, then the local sheriff, and his staff met with Mark Pfeifle, president and CEO of the communications firm Off the Record Strategies, to discuss “lessons learned” from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Pfeifle, who helped the Bush administration build support for the second Gulf War, had more recently led a public relations blitz to discredit the Standing Rock protesters. This involved suggesting using a fake news crew and mocking up wanted posters for activists, according to emails obtained by news organizations. Pfeifle sent Allen presentations about the law enforcement response at Standing Rock, including one on “Examples of ‘Fake News’ and disinformation” from the protesters. “As always, we stand ready to help your office and your citizens,” he wrote to the sheriff.

The department appears not to have hired Pfeifle, although Allen directed his staff to also meet with Pfeifle’s colleague who worked on the Standing Rock response.

Around July 2021, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office held a meeting “to plan for the reality of a large-scale incident at Thacker Pass” similar to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Police referred to the ongoing protests on public land at Thacker Pass as an “occupation.”

Allen said he didn’t remember meeting with Pfeifle but said he wanted to be prepared for anything. “We didn’t know what to expect, but from what we understand, there were professional protestors up there and more were coming in,” he said.

Pfeifle didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Members of People of Red Mountain have also traveled to Arizona to object to the development of a controversial copper mine that’s planned in a national forest east of Phoenix. There, some members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe oppose the development because it would destroy an area they use for ceremonies. (In May, the Supreme Court handed down a decision allowing a land transfer, removing the final key obstacle to the mine.)

On these trips, Callao and others have frequently found a “notice of baggage inspection” from the Transportation Security Administration in their checked luggage. She provided ProPublica with photos of five such notices.

An agency spokesperson said that screening equipment does not know to whom the bag belongs when it triggers an alarm, and officers must search it.

To Callao, the surveillance, whether by luggage inspection, security camera or counterterrorism task force, adds to the weight placed on Indigenous communities amid the energy transition.

“We shouldn’t have to accept the burden of the climate crisis,” Callao said, “We should be able to protect our ancestral homelands.”

This article A new youth-led lawsuit is challenging Trump’s fossil fuel orders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This summer, kids are taking the climate crisis to the courts. The 22 plaintiffs of Lighthiser v. Trump, a lawsuit filed in May, range from 7 to 25 years old. They are challenging three of President Donald Trump’s most controversial executive orders to “unleash” fossil fuels and revoke renewable energy initiatives. The orders roll back critical investments in sustainable technologies and climate science, declare a “National Energy Emergency” to increase fossil fuel use, and prop up the coal, oil and gas industries through deregulation.

The case will hinge on the youth’s constitutional rights — a pivotal angle in recent environmental suits. When hearings begin in September in the U.S. District Court of Montana, the Lighthiser plaintiffs will argue that the three executive orders violate their Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty. Additionally, they allege the president exceeded his authority by attempting to override laws like the Clean Air Act. As the case unfolds, it will have sweeping implications for the legal resistance to the Trump administration, and for the climate movement at large.

While the most dangerous consequences of the executive orders will play out over years, from environmental degradation to increased carbon emissions, the plaintiffs can also point to more immediate personal consequences. That could help them prove that the orders harmed them directly, providing legal grounds for the case, which are often questioned in climate lawsuits.

Delaney Reynolds, a graduate student in climate policy and one of the plaintiffs in Lighthiser v. Trump, described the immediate impacts of the orders on her own work. “[Trump] took down the National Climate Assessment reports and website, so they’re no longer accessible,” she said. “Those reports and other scientific documents are all things that I’ve been personally using for my PhD dissertation. So now that I don’t have access to them, my ability to even get my degree is under threat.”

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Reynolds also said that the potential impacts of the case extend far beyond the three executive orders that they’re challenging. She referenced other climate lawsuits she’s led in Florida, some of which were unsuccessful. Despite a suit getting dismissed, she said, “we gained the support in the court of public opinion. News about the case spread all across the state. … It basically comes down to educating people even if the lawsuit isn’t successful.”

Dana R. Fisher, the director of American University’s Center for Environment, Community and Equity, agreed. Much of Fisher’s research explores the strategies and motivations of the grassroots climate movement. Her latest book, “Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action,” argues for mass mobilization in response to increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters. With that aim in mind, she says constitutional climate lawsuits can be a critical tool for raising public awareness. In particular, they can reach moderates and those who don’t follow electoral politics.

The Lighthiser case, she said, presents an opportunity to elicit support or inspire action from people who wanted to install heat pumps or solar panels, but now can’t. “Even if [the lawsuit isn’t] successful,” she added, “it will help shine a light on some of these things that are happening.”

They’re also hoping to build on the momentum from previous cases. Nine of the Lighthiser plaintiffs — as well as Our Children’s Trust, the public-interest law firm leading the suit along with Gregory Law Group, McGarvey Law and Public Justice — recently scored a landmark victory in the case of Held v. Montana, which was upheld by the Montana Supreme Court last year. It argued that Montana’s aggressive fossil fuel extraction violated a state constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.” Our Children’s Trust and several of the Lighthiser plaintiffs from Hawaii were also successful last year in Navahine v. Hawaii Department of Transportation, which marked the first ever settlement between a state and youth plaintiffs to address constitutional climate concerns.

Despite those major wins, some differences set Lighthiser v. Trump apart as an especially difficult uphill battle. The challenges of taking on Trump directly, along with many of his secretaries and agencies, also named as defendants in the case, are difficult to overstate. It is all but certain that the president and his supporters will try to pressure the judiciary. Moreover, this is not a repeat of the cases against Montana or Hawaii, in which state constitutions set clearer protections for environmental rights. Lightiser has a national scope, and it’s already getting attention. Nineteen states — all Republican led — have filed an unusual motion to intervene in the case, defending Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mandate. Among more than 450 legal challenges to Trump’s executive orders, this is the only time states have sought such an intervention.

Previous Coverage

How suing the US government can empower the climate movement

The closest parallel to Lightiser in recent litigation might be Juliana v. United States, another high-profile youth climate suit led by Our Children’s Trust. That unsuccessful case was closed by the Supreme Court in March after nearly a decade of government avoidance and extreme legal tactics. It also had national implications, challenging the U.S. government’s investment in fossil fuels on constitutional grounds.

But Liz Lee, an attorney with Our Children’s Trust, emphasized that the new Lighthiser case is not “Juliana 2.0.” The major difference, she said, is that “the 21 Juliana plaintiffs were challenging the systemic national energy plan. … But this time around, we’re really focusing on the three executive orders.” That narrower focus means that there’s a clear remedy in this case, which has been a difficulty in more sweeping legal challenges. This time, as Lee put it, “You can’t say, well, climate change is too big. It’s too hard. We can’t handle it. Here, you revoke the executive orders.”

Our Children’s Trust has also been working to raise awareness and build public support for the case. They hosted a large press conference and rally on Capitol Hill on July 16, celebrating the introduction of concurrent House and Senate resolutions intended to support the lawsuit. The resolutions affirm young people’s fundamental right to a clean environment and condemn the executive actions of the Trump administration. They were introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley and Reps. Jan Schakowsky, Pramila Jayapal, and Jamie Raskin, along with eight Democratic senators and 43 representatives.

Although the resolutions are essentially symbolic, Fisher said they present an important opportunity to broaden the reach of the lawsuit and engage legislators, as climate activists set longer-term organizing goals and Democrats seek to regain control of Congress in the midterms. Resolutions “are a good way to gauge interest and get support,” she said, “particularly for minority folks when they’re not in power, so that they have a coalition already supporting an issue. Especially with the hope that there will be a turning of the tides.”

Rep. Jayapal spoke at the rally, urging young people to fight back against the Trump administration’s actions in the courts and Congress. “Every single one of us — no matter our age, our background, our race, our income — has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And you cannot divorce the future of our planet from that right… This administration is intent on destroying our planet, all to make the rich even richer. All of that action denies our youth a just future.”

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Underscoring the urgency of Lighthiser v. Trump, the devastation and death tolls from this year’s unprecedented climate disasters continue to rise. As the U.S. heads into hurricane season, with FEMA and other emergency response agencies severely impaired, many communities have already faced horrific floods, storms, fires and heat waves. From Texas to California, hundreds of people have been killed in recent events fueled by global warming.

Young people, in particular, are experiencing a steep mental toll from the impacts of climate change, sometimes termed “eco-grief.” A slew of studies and articles have documented the rise in climate anxiety, all of which illustrate the critical role of youth in environmental litigation and the broader green movement. This sort of personal harm is exactly what youth climate lawsuits like Lighthiser v. Trump must prove in court.

At the same time, Fisher said, the tragic results of extreme weather often motivate communities and individuals to take action. “Personal experiences open up these windows of opportunity,” she said. “Research documents how even if you are very right-leaning, if you personally experience a climate-exacerbated extreme event, or what we call climate shocks, it actually does change your attitude. People’s attitudes shift to be more supportive of climate action and more supportive of climate science.”

That attitude shift could help the Lighthiser plaintiffs capture wider public attention and build bipartisan support for their case, even as the administration pushes back in the months to come. Although it’s certain to be a tough legal battle, the youth in the suit have no hesitation when it comes to the stakes. Eva Lighthiser, the 19-year-old named plaintiff, said in a press release, “I’m not suing because I want to — I’m suing because I have to. My health, my future and my right to speak the truth are all on the line.”

Without action, Lighthiser said, “Trump’s fossil fuel orders are a death sentence for my generation.”

This article A new youth-led lawsuit is challenging Trump’s fossil fuel orders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article How movements can make the abundance agenda work for everyone was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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There’s an easy way to tell when the idea of what is politically possible — sometimes called the Overton Window — is changing. It happens when you see politicians and thinkers on both the left and the right start to agree on something. Right now, that agreement is about making it easier to build projects. 


Whether it’s Ezra Klein’s “abundance agenda” or tech-fueled ideas like DOGE and its northern copycat, the Build Canada project, there is growing alignment around the need to remove regulations and so-called “red tape” from our governments. And those in power are starting to listen — just take a look at the past few months in Canada.

Since the start of 2025, government from across the political spectrum have passed legislation following this emerging alignment. In Ontario, the right-wing Progressive Conservative Party passed the Protect Ontario By Unleashing Our Economy Act. In addition to gutting regulation, it lets the government create “special economic zones” where it can decide which laws apply and which don’t. On the other side of the country (and the political spectrum) British Columbia’s New Democrats implemented something called the Infrastructure Act meant to speed up approvals for major projects. Nationally, the centrist Liberal Party, under new leader and former central banker Mark Carney, passed the One Canadian Economy Act, which allows them to fast-track projects deemed to be in the service of nation building.

Although slightly different in scope and scale, each bill follows the two-part question at the core of “Abundance,” Klein’s new bestseller: “What do we need more of, and what is stopping us from getting it?”

Unfortunately for people and the planet, too many Canadian politicians believe the answer to the first equation is more mines and pipelines. To the question about what’s stopping us from getting them, their answer is: communities, Indigenous peoples and environmental regulations meant to protect clean air, clean water and endangered species.

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And yet, despite the extractive ideals driving this spate of legislation, these politicians aren’t necessarily wrong about our need to build things fast. When it comes to desperately needed infrastructure like affordable housing, public transit and clean energy, we are moving way too slow. That’s the very idea behind the Green New Deal and a “wartime” climate mobilization: We need more and we need it fast. Right now, politicians and the public are opening the door to just that, the question is: Can movements barge through and take over?

Problem or opportunity?

So far, in Canada, movements have responded to the new legislation by calling for it to be stopped or scrapped. It’s an instinct I understand, and were we still at the place where these were proposed pieces of legislation, I might agree. However, since these bills were rushed through without Indigenous consultation or public input, there is good reason for both skepticism and resistance.



Assembly of First Nations, or AFN, National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak used phrases like “troubling threat” and “risk to the honor of the Crown” to describe these bills. She excoriated the government for leaving out language around free, prior and informed consent in the federal bill, while also leaving the door open for conversation on what kinds of projects might make sense. In an interview with Liberal party strategist turned pollster and media personality David Herle, she specifically pointed to the AFN’s 2024 Closing the Infrastructure Gap report for a list of projects she thought the new legislation could address — projects that would deliver affordable housing, clean water and increased connectivity.

Perhaps Nepinak saw the same polling I did, showing that these pieces of legislation are wildly popular. Polling from the Angus Reid Institute found that nearly three-quarters of Canadians support fast-tracking major projects. A poll from Demand Progress in the United States found that 43 percent of voters would be more likely to support a candidate pushing to end regulations that “bottleneck” major projects. Movements can either view that as a problem or an opportunity.

On the one hand, the most talked about major project is still another massive tar sands pipeline to connect Alberta to tidewater. It makes sense for movements to view that as a problem. On the other hand, it’s also true that movements haven’t come to the table to propose any big projects of their own.

What if, instead of pipelines, this new momentum to build was marshaled behind public transit, clean energy infrastructure, affordable housing and clean water projects? All of these are easier and faster to build than a pipeline. They’re also much more likely to earn public support, especially when you dig deeper into the polling. Nearly half of Canadians, 49 percent, oppose or strongly oppose the idea of “condensing or bypassing environmental reviews” for projects, including ones deemed to be in the national interest. That number is likely to grow for things like mines and pipelines, projects that threaten clean water, air, communities and the climate.

A further 59 percent support requiring consultation from Indigenous communities, even on projects “declared in the national interest.” It is worth noting that the pollsters were careful to include “not offering a full veto” in the question, so it remains somewhat unclear where the public lies on the idea of respecting the concept of free prior and informed consent.

The Demand Progress poll is even more interesting. When they tested the idea of a candidate who presents ideas that combine elements of both the abundance agenda and a plan to take on corporate wealth and power, a whopping 72.2 percent of voters had a positive reaction.

A chance for proposition

For the last few years the climate movement has been struggling to find its footing in the face of economic anxiety, rising global tension and the threats posed by Donald Trump. This would give people something to rally behind. Instead of gearing up for another decade of pipeline fights, movements could use this moment to redefine what it means when governments say things like “major projects.” Instead of those being extractive by default, they could mean things that actually work for people.



There is a clear pathway to move these ideas from movements into politics. In the United States, the Democratic Party is searching for a pathway back from its crushing 2024 defeat by Trump. In Canada, the New Democratic Party — a formerly leftist party that has drifted towards the center in recent years — is stuck in a circular firing squad while it stumbles to figure out what to do after falling apart in Canada’s 2025 election. Both parties are desperate for good ideas, and their established orders have never been weaker. Strong movements that bring together a wide range of political actors behind a vision of building a new kind of infrastructure could easily step into these voids.

Imagine a connected movement of climate organizers, community groups and Indigenous peoples marching behind a clear set of shovel-ready projects that meaningfully improve people’s lives. In Canada you could even steal the Build Canada brand from the group of tech billionaires that created it. Lay out a clear list of five or 10 projects that build the kind of country you actually want to see. Invite the CEOs to sue over the name — better free publicity is hard to imagine.

A populism that builds

Klein’s argument in “Abundance” is that we need a “liberalism that builds.” The problem is that this approach, in a neoliberal order, will almost guarantee that both people and places are sacrificed. It happened the last time America had this kind of political alignment in the New Deal era.

The New Deal did a lot of great things. It built roads and railways. It put people to work and built a sense of social solidarity that conservatives spent decades tearing apart. But it also irreversibly damaged communities and ecosystems. The “redlining” of Black communities was just one example of this. Another is the hundreds of hulking slabs of concrete and steel that choked the rivers of America.

During the New Deal era, agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers dropped so many dams into U.S. rivers that, today, less than 1 percent of American waterways are still free flowing. These dams drowned communities, displaced people, destroyed Indigenous sacred sites and sent species and ecosystems onto the scrapheap of extinction. They provided power and jobs, but now many are considered to be such mistakes that they’re being ripped out. Just this year, a group of Indigenous youth made the first kayak descent of a free flowing Klamath River. The last dam was removed on Oct. 2, 2024. It was one of 108 dams removed that year, a trend that has been increasing as the social and ecological cost of these dams is being recognized.

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If Indigenous peoples had been at the table during the New Deal era perhaps this could have been avoided. Today, movements have a chance to push for just that kind of collaboration. It’s crucial for the kinds of infrastructure we truly need, like renewable energy and electrified transit.

There is a massive push to expand mining projects for the so-called “critical minerals” needed for batteries and solar panels. If the mainstream political order holds the reins, these projects will no doubt devastate Indigenous communities, water and ecosystems. They’ll build carbon spewing mining projects that they’ll tell us we need to combat emissions.

Movement judo

Social movements will always be in fights against larger forces and entrenched power. It’s David versus Goliath. The Rebellion versus the Empire. Organized people versus organized money.

These fights are almost never won through direct conflict. Instead, successful movements borrow a concept from the martial art of judo. The core principle of judo is momentum. Instead of taking a larger opponent on with a vigorous attack, you position yourself, prepare and then, when the moment comes, use your opponent’s momentum against them.

Right now, social movements have a chance to do just that. There is energy behind the idea that our societies and governments need to get to work on building things. Fighting that is a recipe not just to lose campaigns, but to lose the public. If instead, movements build power and support behind infrastructure and ideas that truly work for people, huge victories could be possible.

What’s more, in winning these kinds of things, movements can deliver in way that truly makes people’s lives better. With smart strategy, organizing and action, movements can take the momentum that governments are currently leveraging to back big developers, corporate power and fossil fuels and make it work for the public.

This article How movements can make the abundance agenda work for everyone was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

A conversation with Panagioti Tsolkas, on Alligator Alcatraz and the fight against toxic prisons Max Granger / Writing on the Wall Jul 08, 2025

Tule Lake internment camp, CA, 1943 / Alligator Alcatraz detention camp, FL, 2025

By now, you’ve probably heard of Trump’s latest white-terror marketing campaign: the ICE concentration camp hastily erected in Florida’s Everglades and officially dubbed Alligator Alcatraz. The $450-million ad-hoc prison opened last Tuesday, flooded on Wednesday, and began receiving detainees on Thursday. It consists of chain-link cages and FEMA trailers surrounded by more chain-link and razor wire, and is located about 45 miles west of downtown Miami, in the middle of a vast swamp. According to officials, the camp’s current capacity is 3,000 and will expand to 5,000 in the coming days.

Testimonies from detainees are already emerging, and the conditions they describe are as horrifying as they are predictable:

“They only brought a meal once a day and it had maggots. They never take off the lights for 24 hours… We’re like rats in an experiment… I don’t know their motive for doing this, if it’s a form of torture. A lot of us have our residency documents and we don’t understand why we’re here” -Leamsy La Figura, Cuban reggaeton artist and a detainee at Alligator Alcatraz.

A few hundred miles to the north, Florida is preparing to break ground on a second detention center at Camp Blanding, a National Guard base, with construction set to start this week. Meanwhile, Congress just passed a sweeping immigration and border enforcement budget with the aim of massively ramping up deportations, while Trump continues to send masked ICE gestapo and their military escorts into cities across the country (including 200 Marines just deployed to Florida) and Republican governors compete in the reality TV show known as the news for who gets to stage the next concentration camp Schadenfreude show.

To discuss the deeper context of this madness, the intersections of prisons, ecology, and human health, and lessons learned from past campaigns to stop, shut down, and improve conditions inside prisons and detention centers, I spoke with Panagioti Tsolkas, co-founder of Fight Toxic Prisons and Everglades Earth First!, a former editor at Prison Legal News and the Earth First! Journal, and a former staff organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition and the Center for Biological Diversity.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you know about the new ICE concentration camp in the Everglades and the area where it’s located?

In the late 1960s, officials in Dade County envisioned a massive airport in the Everglades, at the same site as the new detention camp. The original plan included six runways, covering 39 square miles. It would have been five times the size of JFK Airport, but in 1970, after only one runway was built, environmentalist and Indigenous opposition halted further construction. That fight led to the creation of Big Cypress National Preserve, adjacent to Everglades National Park, which was established as the country’s first national preserve in October 1974.

The Everglades was also the first national park in the U.S. created primarily to protect biodiversity. It was established in 1947 specifically to preserve the unique subtropical ecosystem, representing a shift from protecting places only for their scenic landscapes and tourism value. That said, it’s still epic as hell out there. If you can get a few feet off the ground, you can see for miles, like you’re standing on a mountain peak. It’s a vast wetland, with a mix of freshwater and saltwater, including sawgrass marshes, mangrove forests, and tropical hardwood hammocks. It’s also home to a vast diversity of species, including many that are endangered or threatened, including the last big cat roaming east of the Mississippi: the Florida panther.

Aside from that, the Everglades provides major water purification and flood control for the surrounding region, which supports millions of people. The area is also home to descendants of a resistance movement famous for kicking the U.S. government’s ass in the longest, costliest, and bloodiest of all the “Indian Wars” waged by the murderous psychos behind Manifest Destiny. That conflict is considered a precursor to the U.S. Civil War, because the Florida swamps also served as a refuge for Africans escaping slavery, who established Maroon communities there and integrated into some of the native tribes. The empire invested millions into the war because it knew that the alternative would be to watch a global slave revolt spread north from the Caribbean, as Haiti had demonstrated was possible only a few decades earlier.

Many Seminole and Miccosukee were forcibly displaced in the Trail of Tears and resettled in Oklahoma, but hundreds survived by staying in the swamps, where soldiers were scared to go. Some of the families never opted into the 1957 and 1962 formation of federally recognized Tribes, instead retaining their earlier claims to ancestral lands. This is why it’s such a huge deal to see native youth standing side by side with “immigrants” (people native to other parts of the continent and islands) and refugees descended from African slave revolts more than 200 years ago, holding signs saying “What Would Osceola Do?”1

Residents protest the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in the Everglades, near Ochopee, Florida. Photo: Giorgio Viera

Two weeks ago, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Everglades filed a lawsuit to stop construction of the facility. What is the status of that lawsuit?

The lawsuit asks for an injunction until there are environmental reviews of the project’s impacts, per the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements. This concentration camp—or internment prison, however you want to view it—was thrown together in a matter of weeks,  using the same sort of exceptions that allowed for the construction of walls through sensitive desert habitats and traditional Indigenous lands along the southern border. It’s reminiscent of what Arizona’s governor did with the rogue junk wall of shipping containers a few years ago (which the Center for Biological Diversity also sued over). In that case, a combination of direct action and legal challenges forced the federal government to uphold its own laws and take the wall down. This time, the feds are cheering it on. And they’re promising to pop up more of these prison camps all over the country. The court should rule on the injunction as early as this week.

How else are people resisting efforts to turn the Everglades into a militarized site of mass detention and deportation? What communities are on the frontlines of this struggle?

We’re seeing organized communities from surrounding areas showing up in large numbers, especially youth. This includes people from Immokalee—home to the famous Coalition of Immokalee Workers alliance—as well as folks from rural towns like Palmdale, where residents, with the support of groups like Earthjustice, Sierra Club, Earth First!, and other organizations, have a legacy of fighting and winning land-use battles in recent decades, like the fight to access and protect Fisheating Creek.

Urban immigrant youth from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Lake Worth, Fort Myers, and Naples are also coming out, along with hydrologists, biologists, and other scientists who have worked on protecting the watershed and its biodiversity. Notorious nature photographer (and neighbor to the site) Clyde Butcher has been out there, and the hook-and-bullet crowd of conservation sportsmen who want access to Big Cypress are raising hell too. They don’t want stadium lighting and traffic fucking up their hunting and fishing spots. Obviously there are some differences in priorities, but people on the ground are hashing them out together, working through them. There is incredible potential in that.

What is the campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP)? How are prisons connected to issues of ecology and human health?

I’ve been researching, writing and organizing at that intersection a lot over the past ten years. Thanks to the work of activists, academics, prisoners and their families, we have a significant body of work drawing these connections.

Prisons have the 24/7 pollution output of a small town, packed into a factory complex. On top of that, the populations inside are vulnerable to some of the worst impacts of climate and environmental injustice. People are literally trapped in cages while toxic floodwaters rise. Just to the north, in Manatee County, a few years ago prisoners were stuck in the flood zone of a phosphate mine-waste disaster. In Florida, prison labor is used to clean up after red tides and the toxic aftermaths of hurricanes.

In prisons across the country, prisoners experience mental and physical health impacts from indoor environmental conditions unique to incarceration, including mold outbreaks, arsenic and radon exposure, Legionnaires disease, Valley Fever, sewage leaks… In a case I studied, a prisoner in Michigan documented a rare blood poisoning condition connected to prolonged exposure to methane from a sewage leak near his cell. A lot of us, I think, have either lived in houses or know people who lived in houses with indoor pollution, like black mold. But people don’t generally think about what it would be like to be stuck in a room full of black mold, with nowhere to go.

Everything in prison is just incredibly intensified. Take extreme heat. Some people might think that not having air conditioning is, like, a first world problem. But try going without air conditioning when you can’t get out of the building. In states like Florida and Texas, where prisons don’t have air conditioning, people are getting sick or dying from the heat.

The day after Trump opened the Everglades detention camp, it flooded. I mean, of course it did: it’s in the middle of a swamp. This all seems so obviously intentional. It makes me wonder to what extent these dangerous and toxic prison conditions are a deliberate part of the punishment. Or at best, a kind of organized abandonment.

Yeah, that’s the legacy of the prison system. If you can make people terrified by the concept of prison, then social control is more effective. So yeah, I think it’s a reflection of the broader strategy.

In terms of ICE detention, obviously the Trump regime can’t deport all the immigrants in this country. It’s impossible, and it would have adverse impacts on the richest of the rich, who depend on immigrant labor. We know the goal isn’t to remove every undocumented person; it’s to create a climate of fear and terror, to make people more controllable, more scared to speak up or act in their own interests. So making a big show out of “Alligator Alcatraz” is part of that plan—to say, “Look at this place you could end up.” They’re bragging about the conditions, about the lethal dangers. That’s the story they want in the news. And unfortunately, I think it’s really hard for us not to play into that fearmongering—they create a kind of win-win situation by highlighting how fucked up the conditions are, and then we amplify it because, well, it is fucked up. So the sum of the discourse sends waves of fear through people, making them want to hide, or avoid joining a movement, avoid joining protests, avoid organizing in their community in any way that’s visible.

The Toxic Prisons Mapping Project

What are some concrete ways people have organized against prisons in recent years, and can you articulate any strategies that movements have developed to break out of that feedback loop, where advocates and abolitionists end up playing into these narratives of intimidation and fear?

I learned a lot about prison organizing during the years that I was involved in developing the network that came out of the Prison Ecology Project and the Fight Toxic Prisons research collaborations. At that time, we were in touch with many family members of people in prison who had visitation rights and would share information with us, and with jailhouse lawyers on the inside, who were often more comfortable advocating for themselves or on behalf of others because they do it on a professional or semi-professional level, on the inside. I learned a lot from my experience organizing with those inside/outside alliances that I think could be applicable, especially around how to make organizing demands while moderating how much retaliation comes down on people, who may or may not even be involved.

That was something we saw a lot of during the prison strike organizing. Initially, we started by surveying people about their experiences with conditions in custody. And then the strike for the anniversary of the Attica prison uprising was announced and we shifted to communicating with people about the demands being made around that. From there, over the course of two years or so, we were able to build a lot of relationships and connections with people who were hungry to hear from the outside and wanted to participate. We were able to get mail in, we were able to set up phone calls with people, or figure out who had phones and who could access the email, and figure out how to communicate safely. At the time, it wasn’t as common to have tablets; now a lot of prisoners do. So we had a lot of those contacts, but then those connections started getting severed: visitations started getting cut off, access to mail has been drastically limited, in part, I think, in response to that organizing.

We did see people lose their visitation status, which was really hard for some of the folks involved in the organizing. We also saw a lot of people sent to solitary just for being suspected of communicating with outside organizers. But we learned that people wanted to take action, and they wanted to take risks, when they knew they had outside support. I think this has also been the case in detention center organizing. The Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma has a lot of examples of repeat hunger strikes, with some success having their demands met. There have also been major lawsuit victories, although those strategies didn’t work in other circuit courts like they did in the Pacific Northwest. But the general strategy and concept is still useful, of coordinating together and having prisoners lead the way on litigation efforts, as we did in our campaign against the Letcher County prison in Kentucky, by using the environmental review process to engage people directly in prison.

So those are some of the lessons off the top of my head, which might be relevant for what comes next. But realistically, I think we’re going to see a couple years where internment or concentration camps in this country are filled up by the thousands, tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand people. How we communicate with and keep track of those people is crucial.

We should also look to the experience of organizing efforts in ICE detention under Obama. There’s a documentary I recommend everyone check out, called The Infiltrators. It’s about an organizing effort that people may not have heard of, or maybe haven’t thought of in a while, about young undocumented activists who intentionally got themselves arrested with the goal of organizing inside detention centers—in this case, the Broward Detention Center in Florida. At the time, they knew that their low-priority cases gave them a really good shot of getting out relatively quickly, so the idea was to get inside and organize people, take down names and names of family members, and create support campaigns for as many folks as possible. This elevated the level of pressure, by identifying people and their stories and then figuring out technical entry points to campaign for those people to get out, based on medical conditions or other factors.

So looking back at that case, and others like it, where people used those kinds of tactics for inside/outside organizing, would be a good thing to do in this moment, while we’re watching all this infrastructure be built. We know it’s going to be different, in that there’ll likely be a lot of turnover—people won’t stay in these facilities very long—but that could also shift: we might actually see a situation where they’re able to fill the camps, but can’t get the deportation process running as efficiently as they’re talking about. So people might end up sitting in these facilities for longer than we think, and we should be prepared for that.

Prisoners raise fists during the Attica uprising, September 10, 1971. Photo: AP

Listening to Republicans promoting the Everglades concentration camp—laughing as they talk about detainees being eaten by alligators or dying in the swamp when they attempt to escape—I was reminded of the southern border, where the U.S. government uses wilderness to inflicting suffering and death under the pretext of containing the movement of people. Do you think, in the case of the Everglades, that all this posturing about alligators and snakes is pure political theater? Or could we really see a situation where security at the camp is relatively lax, with authorities relying on the wilderness to contain people, and detainees are escaping into the swamps?

I mean, there is a legacy of that, as I mentioned, with Maroon communities, self-liberated slaves, and Indigenous communities from farther north escaping into the Everglades to survive. I can’t really picture ICE agents chasing anyone into the swamps. The experience I’ve had with Earth First! actions where we were like, “Alright, now we’re going into this swamp,” the cops basically stopped at the water and just watched and waited. But no, I don’t think people are going to be eaten by alligators. I think that’s political theater. But I do think it’s possible that the legacy of people escaping into the swamp could continue. I mean, honestly, the facility doesn’t look that well built. They put it up in weeks. It’s just chain link fences. It reminds me of the junk border wall, or really any section of the border wall, where people regularly climb or cut through it with little to no difficulty. It’s political theater. But yes, people could end up lost out there, and it’s also maybe a scenario where communities could support people in surviving escapes.

That’s all hypothetical, though, of course. But it makes sense to be asking hypothetical questions right now, even if they seem absurd, and to look at other countries with other experiences of migrant solidarity organizing. This administration is obviously spreading itself very thin. It’s well resourced—I mean, Congress just forked over $170 billion or more for immigration control—but it’s also spreading itself thin in a way that looks a lot like other late-game empires grasping desperately to hold onto the meaningless aspects of their culture, like whiteness, or “American” identity. It’s possible that if they continue to build more of these chain-link facilities as symbolic gestures, to induce fear, but they don’t actually secure them that well, that we’ll have a situation similar to the border wall, where what’s perceived as this high-intensity security infrastructure is really just a bunch of, you know, floodlights that don’t actually turn on and fences that you can just cut through with an angle grinder.

In 2023, you wrote an essay recounting your experience with the Stop Cop City forest defense movement in Atlanta. You explain how the State of Georgia lowered the threshold for charging people with domestic terrorism—from an act that kills at least ten people to basically any protest that involves property damage. This, you wrote, mirrors a national trend: . “In response to anti-pipeline, anti-police and anti-Trump protests, legislators in nearly 20 states proposed similar bills in 2017. Since then, 45 states have considered new anti-protest laws, with 39 state and federal laws passed that attempt to weaken First Amendment rights… [and] the most egregious of them, Florida Governor DeSantis’ anti-riot law, criminalizes anyone who participates in vaguely defined ‘violent public disturbance involving an assembly of three or more persons.” What has been the effect of this legislation in Florida, and is the general atmosphere of heightened repression having its desired effect and discouraging people from fighting back?

In Florida, they didn’t end up using those anti-protest laws in court. I think a lot of it was also political theater. I got arrested right around that time, at a solidarity protest at a prison, and there was a lot of talk about how they were going to use the HB1 anti-protest bill that had just passed—but they didn’t. I can’t think of any cases where it affected people directly, in part, I think, because of all the pushback. The Cop City example is more relevant here, and we’re still seeing the effects of that right now. People charged in the RICO case are going to court any day now, so we’ll be learning more about how that plays out in the coming weeks.

In the case of opposition to the detention center, I think the atmosphere of escalating repression is having the opposite effect. Getting hundreds of people to show up out on Tamiami Trail in the middle of the summer is pretty rare. I can’t think of many other examples when that’s happened. Usually, for other protests, we’ll see a couple dozen people. So I would say it’s turning people out more than it’s turning them away.

How can people get involved in supporting folks in prison and detention? What are some actions people can take, either individually, or as an organized group?

I’m part of a working group of environmental and immigrant rights activists that’s pursuing legal challenges against proposed detention centers or expansions of existing facilities, and we’ve been having some interesting conversations. The lawsuit filed against the Everglades detention center is a template that we think could be applied to other proposed camps. So I think people can plug into ongoing organizing and support the groups that are filing these lawsuits. A lot of the time, it’s grassroots groups with people on the ground who have standing, and they don’t have a ton of money. In the case of the Everglades, there are bigger NGOs that work in that region and have a legacy of environmental lawsuits, but in places like Folkston, Georgia, just north of the Florida line, where there’s a proposed expansion, not as much. So we need to support those efforts and the people working on the ground.

I think there are about a dozen or so detention centers that are good candidates for environmental lawsuits. One of these facilities is in Leavenworth, Kansas. It’s a federal prison located on a military base that they want to expand into an ICE detention camp. As far as I know, no one is litigating that. So finding those local fights and providing outside support is a good place to direct energy.

The other thing that came out of the fight against ICE in the Everglades is a model that many of us in the Earth First! movement are familiar with: tracking down the contractors and putting pressure on them. Often, these companies are small outfits that don’t want bad publicity; other times, they’re huge outfits and this one facility is not make-it-or-break-it for them, so they’d rather just cut their losses and not be affiliated with it. Mapping out those companies and putting pressure on them accordingly is a good approach.

Just the other day, I saw that some of the contractors for the Everglades camp have been taping over the company logos on their trucks…

Yeah, people were like, “Hey, I just saw a mosquito control truck come out to the facility. I don’t know if they have a contract, but here’s their phone number, let’s call and ask.” I think doing things like that can be incredibly effective. You don’t have to know for sure: It’s a fine approach to say, “Hey, we heard you were out there. Do you have this contract? Do you know the harm that this is causing?”

That’s something anyone can do. And it’s something that’s happening. It’s hard to measure the success in the immediate term, but we saw how it can play out just recently, with Cop City, where some companies were basically like, “We backed out of this project because people smashed our windows.”2 So occasionally you get this little glimpse of how protests, or bad publicity, or relatively minor acts of damaging property or exposing someone in the newspaper might get them to change their mind about affiliating with a project.

It’s the old SHAC model, essentially. But that was so long ago, maybe we should call it the Stop Cop City model instead.

1

Osceola was a leader of the Seminole resistance against the U.S. government’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Florida.

2

Reeves Young Construction, Quality Glass Company, and Atlas Technical Consultants all backed out of Cop City contracts in response to pressure campaigns.

Many far-right groups claim that migration drives environmental destruction, from river pollution to climate breakdown. These ‘ecobordering’ narratives greenwash racism and cover up the political and economic causes of ecocide.

As world leaders gathered at the COP26 climate summit in 2022, members of the fascist group Patriotic Alternative (PA) unveiled a banner declaring ‘Reduce immigration to reduce CO2’. The same day, the opaquely funded think tank Migration Watch UK posted an image of a forest fire hellscape emblazoned with the words, ‘Mass migration puts pressure on our precious environment’. These are just two examples of an emerging set of ‘ecobordering’ narratives which frame reducing – or eliminating – immigration as environmental protection.

Fascists declare that borders are climate action. Source: Patriotic Alternative via Telegram.

The far right sells racism as the solution to white people’s anxieties. If we want to develop up-to-date antifascist responses and avoid reproducing far-right narratives ourselves, we need to keep up with far-right storytelling. We also need to understand how mainstream discourse legitimises far-right issues. This article outlines how the British far right exploits ecological anxiety to push for harsher immigration policy. There are two main narratives: one claims that migration raises emissions and increases pressure on British nature; the other casts migrants as an invasive species threatening both British nature and the ‘indigenous’ population of white people. Both narratives are fed by the liberal mainstream.

Migration Watch UK illustrates ‘mass migration’ with climate disaster imagery. Source: Migration Watch UK via Twitter/X.

“The ravages of overpopulation”

The British far right often claims that migration threatens the environment via overpopulation. This narrative runs across the far-right spectrum. For example, the fascist Homeland Party takes a similar line to the radical right UK Independence Party (UKIP):

‘The most significant threat to the Green Belt, and the UK environment in general, especially England, is unsustainable population growth, which is predominantly fuelled by uncontrolled mass immigration’ (UKIP, 2020).

‘The environment in which we all live should be protected from the ravages of over-population, the new building projects, and pollution that goes with it’ (Homeland, 2023).

In their environmental policy, Homeland also holds migration responsible for water pollution: ‘When our sewage treatment plants cannot meet the demand of our rapidly increasing population, their only option is to release untreated sewage, causing great harm to our river ecosystems. This is unavoidable until the root cause, overpopulation driven by mass immigration, is dealt with.’

Homeland advertises ethnonationalism as ‘the REAL green solution’. Source: Homeland Party.

Although far-right groups generally apply this narrative to local environmental issues such as housebuilding, some also link migration to rising carbon emissions such PA’s banner shown in the first image. Identitarian group Local Matters and Migration Watch UK have both cited NGO Population Matters to claim that ‘our growing numbers are incompatible with our climate change commitments’. This, they reason, is because an individual’s carbon footprint will grow as they move from a poorer country to a richer country. Green Party candidate and Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Rupert Read voiced similar arguments in a deleted Ecologist article, although he does not advocate for tighter border controls.

These narratives obscure the underlying causes of environmental destruction – organising production and consumption around profit rather than wellbeing – whilst shifting the blame onto those least responsible. For example, English housing stock is already more than adequate for meeting needs and comfort if distributed more equally, but it is in the interests of homeowners as well as the financial and housebuilding sectors to maintain high housing demand through artificial scarcity. Meanwhile, the claim that overpopulation causes river sewage is extremely convenient for the privatised water companies which pocketed billions whilst leaving the infrastructure to crumble. In the case of climate change, ecobordering frames resource-intensive provisioning as inevitable and erases Britain’s responsibility for climate breakdown, instead blaming people who may very well be escaping its impacts.

“Protect our native species”

A second set of ecobordering narratives assumes a unique, spiritual connection between white British people and British nature. As Homeland writes, ‘Our people have an intrinsic bond with our homeland and are its natural stewards’. PA founder Mark Collett expands this idea in The Fall of Western Man, writing that ‘The strength and steel of the Western body was forged […] in the harsh frozen lands of Northern Europe’ through a process of ‘brutal natural selection’. As a result, ‘Blood and soil are the natural callings that must be at the centre of Western man’s mindset.’

The ecological undercurrents of this ‘blood and soil’ doctrine – popularised by the Nazis – present white British people as an indigenous species adapted to thrive in their ecosystem. Unlike overpopulation narratives, this position is mostly held by the ethnonationalist far right which believes that only those of a particular race can belong to a nation. For Homeland, ‘natural law’ dictates that ‘social harmony’ can only be achieved when each ‘ethnic group’ can ‘assert our unique cultural identity in our respective territories.’ Like the ethno-differentialists of the French New Right, Homeland claims to be ‘the true champion of diversity’, using strong borders to conserve a plurality of peoples and cultures.

According to this framework, fascists cast migrants as an ‘invasive species’ preventing the ‘native species’ from living peacefully – or even living at all. In the article ‘Ecocide’, PA writes:

‘By means of their NGOs, they have ferried invasive species across the Mediterranean […] Actions that have culminated in national governments spending billions to cement over bucolic landscapes in their rush to build accommodation for the “New Europeans” and tarmac over ancient woodlands to provide them with roads to aid their rapid access to social security offices, mosques and community centres where they can congregate and displace the indigenous species.’

Here, ‘they’ refers to Jewish billionaires George and Alex Soros, key characters in far-right conspiracy theories such as the ‘Great Replacement’. Replacement is a central mobilising issue amongst British fascists, with PA performing annual ‘White Lives Matter’ banner drops on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

PA refracts this conspiracy through a blood and soil lens. As a result, the perceived destruction of British nature by migrants becomes inseparable from the eradication of white British people altogether. In one flyer PA alludes to this existential threat with a photo of the red squirrel, a symbolic British animal that has faced harsh competition from non-native grey squirrels. Meanwhile, Homeland illustrates the threat of ‘being subsumed into a homogenised global mass’ with footage of deforestation, underscoring the deep association between white extinction and environmental destruction.

Homeland illustrates the threat of race mixing. Source: Homeland Party.

Ecobordering and the mainstream

Across Europe, far-right groups are exploiting ecological crisis to push for further border violence. In Britain, they justify this by arguing that (a) migration will increase pressure on resources such as land and water, as well as raising emissions; and (b) migrants are an invasive species simultaneously threatening nature and the ‘indigenous’ population of white people. However, overpopulation narratives in particular may be more strategic than heartfelt. For example, PA urges politicians to ‘reduce immigration to reduce CO2’ whilst also warning of the ‘Climate Con’. Meanwhile, Migration Watch UK is part of a network of right-wing think tanks located in Tufton Street, including Britain’s foremost climate misinformation organisation, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Although these ideas are most common on the far right, they are closer to the mainstream than people may realise. For example, blaming migrants for placing unsustainable pressure on nature reproduces neo-Malthusian overpopulation narratives. These have enjoyed centuries of popularity and continue to be upheld by policymakers, NGOs, and TV presenters. Indeed, the president of Migration Watch UK is a former British ambassador, now sitting in the House of Lords. Mark Collett’s theory of climate-induced racial difference is purely colonial-era scientific racism. Meanwhile, Conservative politicians and newspaper columnists repeatedly describe migrants using the invasive species imagery of a ‘swarm’, an ‘invasion’, or ‘cockroaches’. But more fundamentally, in many ways the far right is only making explicit what is already implicit in government policy: that certain racialised groups present a threat that must be met with violence. By placing ecology downstream of borders the far right is mirroring the state’s own priorities.

On one level, then, ecobordering narratives can be countered by drawing attention to the large inequalities in environmental impacts driven by economic inequality, as well as the endless expansion of production and consumption required by capitalism. However, without challenging borders themselves, this approach can at best maintain border violence at business-as-usual levels. As ecobordering discourse gears up to legitimise this increasingly repressive bordering regime, it falls to antifascist and other liberatory movements to address the root causes of racist violence and ecological crisis.

 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Lise Benoist, Miranda Iossifidis, Heather Luna, and Rohan Montgomery for their generous feedback.

 

Cable Collective is an antifascist research collective monitoring how ecological crisis is used to justify oppressive politics in the UK.

The post “Sink the boats – Save the world”: Ecobordering narratives on the British far right appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.

From the desk of Anne Petermann, GJEP’s Executive Director and Co-founder:  April has traditionally been a busy month for Global Justice Ecology Project.  It is the month in the Northern Hemisphere when the reawakening of spring energizes protest movements and actions for social and ecological justice. GJEP is proud to have been on the cutting edge […]