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Dear Activists: Your New Year’s Resolution Should Be to Throw a Better Party
Hey, activists: By building art and play into your work, you bring energy and fun to your movement and encourage stronger bonds among participants. Song, dance and visual props make your direct actions memorable and inviting.
The Pacific Northwest-based Backbone Campaign trains budding activists on how to do that. Here are lessons from their Localize This! Action Camp:
1. Have a Pre-Protest Planning Party
Pre-event coordination invites people who can't take part in the action to still be a part of the movement. And it lets participants get to know each other without the stress of protest day.
2. Do More Than March
Bike, kayak or rappel into your action. It's high visibility, and by using different means of transportation, you're also making a statement against our reliance on cars. Ask local rental shops to borrow equipment at discounted rates—better yet, invite them to get involved, too.
3. Get Crafty
Wheat Paste Recipe
1. Combine 1 part flour and 4 parts water in a saucepan.
2. Heat to just below a boil until it's the consistency you need it.
3. Whisk constantly to prevent clumping.
This has a shelf life of just a few days, so only make as much as you can use right away.
Papier-mache or inflatable puppets get your message seen above the crowd. They can become a mascot for your action and a defining feature in photos afterward. Get creative—but consider the weather.
How to Make a Papier-Mache Puppet
1. Use clay, foam, or bunched-up and taped plastic grocery bags to form the shape of your model.
2. Then, cover the form in plastic wrap to prevent your paper from sticking to it and layer strips of paper grocery bags dipped in paste to form the shell.
3. Cut the shell in half to remove it and papier-mache over the seam to fuse it together again. Add structural reinforcements as needed.
4. Use acrylic or water-based house paint and seal it with something waterproof for wear and tear.
5. Take a lesson from theater makeup and use high contrast colors for viewing at a distance.
6. When you're marching for miles, weight is everything. Go for light materials and keep your puppets hollow.
7. Find an old external frame backpack and cut off everything but the shoulder straps. Mount your puppet to it with PVC pipes and zip ties so you can wear it instead of carrying it.
8. PVC pipes are your best friends for building on a budget. To create curves, use a heat gun and bend them once the pipes are malleable.
4. Have a Post-Protest Deconstruction Party
Municipal trash cans stuffed with protest signs are bad public relations. Recycle them. Invite participants to join you to disassemble props and make them available to allied movements.
5. Small Direct Actions Count, Too
If big demonstrations and marching shoulder to shoulder for miles isn't your scene, get sneaky: Use light to project messages onto the sides of buildings. Get personal: Perform your own song with a portable speaker in a public space.
Make art about your movement and paste prints around town.
Reposted with permission from our media associate YES! Magazine.
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By Jennifer Molidor
One million species are at risk of extinction from human activity, warns a recent study by scientists with the United Nations. We need to cut greenhouse gas pollution across all sectors to avoid catastrophic climate change — and we need to do it fast, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This research should serve as a rallying cry for polluting industries to make major changes now. Yet the agriculture industry continues to lag behind.
Botswana, home to one third of Africa's elephants, announced Wednesday that it was lifting its ban on the hunting of the large mammals.
"The Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism wishes to inform the public that following extensive consultations with all stakeholders, the Government of Botswana has taken a decision to lift the hunting suspension," the government announced in a press release shared on social media.
Company Safety Data Sheets on New Chemicals Frequently Lack the Worker Protections EPA Claims They Include
By Richard Denison
Readers of this blog know how concerned EDF is over the Trump EPA's approval of many dozens of new chemicals based on its mere "expectation" that workers across supply chains will always employ personal protective equipment (PPE) just because it is recommended in the manufacturer's non-binding safety data sheet (SDS).
By Grant Smith
From 2009 to 2012, Gregory Jaczko was chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which approves nuclear power plant designs and sets safety standards for plants. But he now says that nuclear power is too dangerous and expensive — and not part of the answer to the climate crisis.
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By Brett Walton
When Greg Wetherbee sat in front of the microscope recently, he was looking for fragments of metals or coal, particles that might indicate the source of airborne nitrogen pollution in Rocky Mountain National Park. What caught his eye, though, were the plastics.
In a big victory for animals, Prada has announced that it's ending its use of fur! It joins Coach, Jean Paul Gaultier, Giorgio Armani, Versace, Ralph Lauren, Vivienne Westwood, Michael Kors, Donna Karan and many others PETA has pushed toward a ban.
This is a victory more than a decade in the making. PETA and our international affiliates have crashed Prada's catwalks with anti-fur signs, held eye-catching demonstrations all around the world, and sent the company loads of information about the fur industry. In 2018, actor and animal rights advocate Pamela Anderson sent a letter on PETA's behalf urging Miuccia Prada to commit to leaving fur out of all future collections, and the iconic designer has finally listened.
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If people in three European countries want to fight the climate crisis, they need to chill out more.
That's the conclusion of a new study from think tank Autonomy, which found that Germany, the UK and Sweden all needed to drastically reduce their workweeks to fight climate change.
"The rapid pace of labour-saving technology brings into focus the possibility of a shorter working week for all, if deployed properly," Autonomy Director Will Stronge said, The Guardian reported. "However, while automation shows that less work is technically possible, the urgent pressures on the environment and on our available carbon budget show that reducing the working week is in fact necessary."
The report found that if the economies of Germany, Sweden and the UK maintain their current levels of carbon intensity and productivity, they would need to switch to a six, 12 and nine hour work week respectively if they wanted keep the rise in global temperatures to the below two degrees Celsius promised by the Paris agreement, The Independent reported.
The study based its conclusions on data from the UN and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) on greenhouse gas emissions per industry in all three countries.
The report comes as the group Momentum called on the UK's Labour Party to endorse a four-day work week.
"We welcome this attempt by Autonomy to grapple with the very real changes society will need to make in order to live within the limits of the planet," Emma Williams of the Four Day Week campaign said in a statement reported by The Independent. "In addition to improved well-being, enhanced gender equality and increased productivity, addressing climate change is another compelling reason we should all be working less."
Supporters of the idea linked it to calls in the U.S. and Europe for a Green New Deal that would decarbonize the economy while promoting equality and well-being.
"This new paper from Autonomy is a thought experiment that should give policymakers, activists and campaigners more ballast to make the case that a Green New Deal is absolutely necessary," Common Wealth think tank Director Mat Lawrence told The Independent. "The link between working time and GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions has been proved by a number of studies. Using OECD data and relating it to our carbon budget, Autonomy have taken the step to show what that link means in terms of our working weeks."
Stronge also linked his report to calls for a Green New Deal.
"Becoming a green, sustainable society will require a number of strategies – a shorter working week being just one of them," he said, according to The Guardian. "This paper and the other nascent research in the field should give us plenty of food for thought when we consider how urgent a Green New Deal is and what it should look like."
- Reduced Work Hours as a Means of Slowing Climate Change ›
- How working less could solve all our problems. Really. | ›
- Needed: A shorter work week – People's World ›
Amazon shareholders voted down an employee-backed resolution calling for more aggressive action on climate change at their annual meeting Wednesday, The Los Angeles Times reported.