An excellent post, Sunny. I feel that it is the responsibility of the Green Party to lead on policy formulation and implementation within the wider green movement, and to bring all of these groups together to discuss what can be achieved by acting in a coordinated manner.

In particular, the green movement should be examining how it engages with the wider public – is the Climate Camp this year as effective as the one at Kingsnorth in raising the issue of climate change onto the public agenda?

I would also like to draw attention to the excellent 10:10 campaign, for having an easily understood, quantifiable and achievable objective: http://www.1010uk.org/

So enough of the sneering and condemning just because the organisation in question doesn’t do everything you think it should do

Fair point,but what if it does things you think it shouldn’t do?
Everyone should be open to criticism. That might be misplaced, but to blanket all criticism as sneering (a very pejorative term) stifles debate and gives certain groups carte blanche, which is not necessarily a good or safe thing.
It’s a skinny old tightrope to walk between rightly dismissing unjustified critics and being accountable and responsible to wider society…unjustified ain’t really an objective judgement.

@Sunny

We need to start thinking in two ways: horizontally (different, groups doing different things) and in terms of a movement. You think WWF, FOE and Greenpeace don’t sit down and talk with Plane Stupid, Climate Camp? They do because they know they serve different functions. It’s about time others on the left also started thinking along the same lines.

My bold. IMHO the environmental movement as a whole (there are of course exceptions) has two major flaws.
1) It does not accept scientific evidence on matters it disagrees with for idealogical reasons, ie nuclear power and GM.
2) Many of it’s leading voices see it as a political movement of the Left.

While the first point is fairly easily dealt with by public education and excluding idealogues from the debate, the second point is more troubling. The environmental problems are a global concern and by framing arguments in a way they rest on and appeal to a certain political demographic creates needless ideological opposites. Reducing pollutants and recycling is not the responsibility of parties of the left, it is the responsibility of all humanity. By creating a false dichotomy between left/good and right/bad you reduce the debate to the childish namecalling which has been its feature for many decades. It’s time to rise above that and accept that this is an apolitical concern.

”Different arms of the environmental conspiracy”

Perhaps more like political parties on the left. Many of whom can’t stand each other.
Plane Stupid is not a part of any movement I’d want to belong too. And I’m sure that the writer of that Observer article is aware that Climate Camp is not The Movement.

What the purpose of Climate Camp is I’m not really sure.
Can you imagine that instead of standing outside Sainsbury’s with their little table and their newspapers on a saturday morning, that the SWP were regularly chaining them selves to its doors in protest at something or other?
It would get on your nerves after a while.

”Different arms of the environmental conspiracy”

Why not stick to the social movement literature?

Climate Camp is a Social Movement Organisation (SMO) within a Social Movement, that uses tactics present in the Social Movement Sector (SMS).

@ Naadir (5)

Climate Camp is a Social Movement Organisation (SMO) within a Social Movement, that uses tactics present in the Social Movement Sector (SMS)

Does revolution these days really have to be couched in such managerialist, management consultancy type terms: kinda defeats the purpose-let’s change things, but using consumerist, capitalist, economic neo-liberal, Blatcherite methodology and terminology I half expected to see a TM symbol in there.

Fair point,but what if it does things you think it shouldn’t do?

There’s two problems here usually:
1) That people think only one kind of action should be taken. I don’t follow that view. If direct action people want to chain themselves to company HQs and others want to publush policy papers – I think we should recognise that it’s different strokes for different folks.
If it’s straight-forwardly back-firing on everyone, for example if they start becoming terrorists and killing innocent people, then obviously I’d be the first to condemn that.

2) There is too much introspection and not enough fighting the opposition. Some environmental groups may not be that effective, but the problem here isn’t the lack of environmental groups, but that there are significant number of wingnuts who believe man made climate-change is a farce and some global socialist conspiracy.

I would rather spend time fighting them than people on side.

Gimpy:
1) It does not accept scientific evidence on matters it disagrees with for idealogical reasons, ie nuclear power and GM.

That may be, but there are also legitimate concerns about that. But the bigger concern is the lack of education with the public who think that man-made climate change is a joke.

2) Many of it’s leading voices see it as a political movement of the Left.

In the political world this may be the narrative, but that doesn’t mean the wider public has to get involved in that rhetoric. Some political grand-standing will be obvious because most of the deniers are right-wingers who see it as some massive socialist conspiracy. That doesn’t mean the public cannot be communicated to in a non-partisan way though. Does it?

A more pertinent question would be What precisely is a Peter Beaumont article for?

“A Peter Beaumont article, with its often hazy message and complex inner negotiations, with its indulgent obsession with its own workings, its insularity and …elitism… is in danger of becoming about Peter Beaumont, a crappy half-arsed hack on Britain’s worst serious newspaper, rather than about the wider fight to inform the British public. With all its energy and motivation, that would be a shame.”

Sunny, you are absolutely right to criticise this lazy garbage, and your analysis is right, up to a point. I would go further and ask whether Beaumont isn’t really simply tagging on to the “grumbling hack” campaign to put the boot in because they engage the mainstream media on their terms, not the press pack’s.

The key thing about the Climate Campers is that they actually get something – anything – done. Any so-called lefty’s right to criticise them starts when they achieve more than they do. Talk about motes and beams.

This pic of the campers at Edelman PR is fantastic. The Campers are precisely exactly absolutely on the money. http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/

More here: http://london.indymedia.org/articles/2158

If Shell and BP are allowed to develop the Alberta tar sands, then any other attempt to reduce CO2 emissions is virtually a waste of time, and it’s pretty much all over for modern civilisation. But that’s not worth reporting for a twat like Peter Beaumont.

Another one here, from this morning: http://london.indymedia.org/articles/2181

“Activists from Don’t Build Kingsnorth have today invaded the Dartford offices of construction giant Laing O’Rourke. The protest is against the company’s bid to build Britain’s first coal fired power plant in 30 Years at Kingsnorth in Kent.”

The campers with unerring eye target the CO2 sources that are both massive, and for which we British are responsible. The consistency of their focus is exemplary. Would that we could say the same about stupid, lazy, hypocritical Mr Beaumont.

Thanks for the links Strategist. I’d like to think Beaumont has his heart in the right place. But yeah, all this sneering does annoy me.

@ gimpy (3)

Reducing pollutants and recycling may not be solely the responsibility of the left, but the fact is that until very recently even mainstream right wing parties have been dismissing global warming as a made-up story designed to sabotage capitalism, and many still dismiss the idea of doing anything at all significant about it as ‘unrealistic’ or ‘naive’, since it means going against the modern right wing dogma that says it is never legitimate to intervene in the economy in the interests of society.

@11 My pleasure, Sunny. I’m cooled down a bit now, and therefore happy to believe Beaumont can do better too in the future, but he just got my goat for a moment there…

@ Alasdair (6)

It’s not academics faults that management peeps appropriate their shorthands.

I only wanted to highlight the fact that the relationship between Climate Camp and others is fairly well understood in the social sciences. A whole journal has been devoted to the field for 13 years.

The American social movements schools greatest insight was to treat social movements in the same way as other parts of society, and see the people involved as being parts of organisations. This allows people to study strategy, leadership and networks as key to social movement success. More importantly, they’ve shown how the right-wing have effectively mobilised over the last few decades – something that European normative social movement theory has nothing to say about since progressive movements have been overprivileged in European study.

This comes back to Sunny’s argument about working out ways to fight the other side.

@ Naadir. Quite so, but once the language becomes more redolent in the public mind of the contortions of bullshitters, then I’d suggest dropping it. There isn’t time to attempt to reclaim it, nor the willingness.using such lingo will turn away more folk than it attracts. System change language has been so thoroughly appropriated by wankers that, even though the analysis may effectively be the same I’d definitely couch it in other terms, as a form of dissociation from the shysters.

Naadir – was going to make the point but Alisdair has done it above. I’ve not read that stuff. I’m sure it is interesting and I’ll have a look tonight. but generally I hate such jargon…

Alasdair & Sunny H. I agree it’s not ideal to use the terms in public debate, and neither would you need to. However, since little’s been done to systematically popularise the field*, would-be movement leaders (wink wink) need to be familiar with the lingo if they’re going to learn from others successes.

* At least in the UK. The US situation is different, with activist scholars, a reasonably popular and accessible blog, and with Obama’s strategists almost certainly being familiar with the literature.

Save the drowning polar bears!