Moving beyond protest to achieve climate justice requires building a people-powered movement of movements--creating multi-issue coalitions that can build critical mass--in order to have a significant impact on the outrageous wealth and power of the global financial, industrial, and political elites who currently control the system for their own selfish ends.
Which points directly to one thing we should work on right away. We either need to just get rid of money, which we could actually do, or base the way it is valued on an entirely different set of principles that don't include an unrealistically elevated status that has no material foundation. The concept of money making money--speculation, derivatives, even compound interest--is simply a bad idea.
We don't need an aristocratic class that purports to keep the lower classes in line. Dominator control hierarchies, historically expressed through the Divine Right of Kings up to today's oligarchy (kleptocracy is a more realistic term), are opposed to the way nature works. Social status today is artificial and capricious.
What useful function to society do the 1% actually serve? They tend to dabble in fashion and act as patrons of the arts. I'll grant that the former is still important, but it shouldn't pay more than a schoolteacher, and the latter should be integral to our social contract. Corporate CEOs are just glorified logistics clerks who like to party and tend to have (actually select for) below average empathy levels.
We've built society on a set of principles that turn out to be false. The truth is we're part of nature and we can't escape the consequences of our actions. Systems science and an Earth-centric spirituality provide a foundation for a systemic alternative, where our actions can be congruent with the way nature works, and increase possibilities for reaching potential without destroying our life support system.
The overall project of transitioning into a sustainable future is not one of getting rid of all the pieces we've invented and the knowledge we've gained over the millennia, but weaving the majority of them into a different framework--one based on networks of mutuality instead of hierarchies of domination. The carrying capacity aspect of sustainability defines how far they can scale, or if they should even be allowed. For some items we may need to rethink the need it's meant to fulfill and other ways of doing so.
What we want
In a phrase, reconnecting and relocalizing. What we want is to build a social system reconnected to the source of life and all that makes life meaningful. We're tired of being offered, or coerced into taking, artificial substitutes for natural fulfillment that tend to be addictive. More than just an abstract concept, this connection can be personally experienced through methods in applied ecopsychology such as the Natural Systems Thinking Process. For the other half of this phrase, we can relocalize our lifestyles, communities, and economies through the Transition Initiative movement and other similar processes such as bioregionalism and ecocities.
There is still a place for protest. But marches and rallys need to be replaced by Chautauquas. In order to be specific in the actions we expect from world leaders to address global warming (if they plan on keeping their jobs) we need information, and more importantly, how it fits together--its context. This is known as connecting the dots, and while it's an acquired skill, it's not a particularly difficult one to pick up as we're wired to think systemically.
Core organizers of the People's Climate March say because the march is composed of hundreds of organizations representing environmental justice, faith, and labor groups there's no one ask for policy change. But there should be, as they certainly share a root problem, as well as a common goal.
The common goal of all of the assembled single-issue organizations is a sustainable future, even if they're not currently using that terminology. Here are the things we're for:
* An Earth jurisprudence that, along with its environmental benefits, grounds industrial and financial regulation, and forms the basis of local steady-state economies
* An end to new fossil fuel extraction since there's already enough in reserves to fry the planet. We don't need to drill another hole in Earth, or blow the top off another mountain. Tar sands, off-shore drilling, and fracking are absolutely, totally, completely unnecessary and merely speed up the process of ecocide.
* Healthcare, education, and shelter for all
* A minimum living wage for 15 hours of socially beneficial work that can provide for a family of four. And because we have an economy that is about 75% waste, we can actually afford both of these last two points.
* Rational sex education that includes family planning and its intimate relationship with sustainability
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