Climate Disobedience Center founders O'Hara, DeChristopher, Marcum, Ward hold photo of Lobster Boat Blockade action at press conference
For 30 years environmentalists have attempted to change the United State's and world's trajectory on fossil fuel emissions through incremental reform efforts. Drawing on conventional wisdom, environmental advocates believed their efforts would lead to sufficient incremental change to avert disaster. Those efforts have failed, and in the ensuing decades the magnitude and urgency of the crisis has escalated dramatically. Drawing on current science, we recognize that what is needed is a massive, decisive end to the fossil fuel era to avert the worst cascading effects of the climate crisis.
Each of our founders has experienced despair in the face of our impossible challenge, and yet we continue to struggle to defend the world we love. We have found that the greatest way to work with feelings of pain and grief is to engage in principled action. It is through this work, grounded in love, that we are able to experience joy and hope. We do not seek to shield others from their own experience of despair, as we realize it is a valuable part of liberation. We do not operate in safe space, but rather in the vulnerable space of new possibilities.
We must move from linear change to an exponential change model. Civil disobedience is the single most effective tool for cracking the consensual climate hallucination, in the same way that the lunch counter sit-ins of the early 60’s helped shatter the illusion of incremental racial progress of the post-WWII years.
The purpose of the Climate Disobedience Center is to serve as a catalyst for direct action, creating points of vivid moral clarity, emboldening both climate activists and the unlikeliest of allies, capturing the heart and soul of the climate debate.
The Climate Disobedience Center brings together an experienced team to provide logistical, legal and spiritual resources, on the ground assistance, and advice to climate activists engaged in civil disobedience across the country. The Center will deploy those assets to nurture strong, grounded communities of resistance willing to take risks of moral imagination, and is committed to supporting those who hold allegiance to a higher moral law through the legal process and consequences of action.
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