History’s playbook for climate action

The secret to social change with historian Dr. Emily Pawley

This week I am delighted to welcome guest editor Emily Pawley. Emily is an environmental historian who teaches at Dickinson College, a sustainability-focused liberal arts college in Pennsylvania that I featured in my newsletter last year.

History holds many lessons for us on how past social movements can teach us about how to tackle the climate crisis, and I’m excited to learn more about this.

Take it away, Emily!

When I’m talking about the history of the climate crisis with my students, they often get stuck on the question, “How do we get to systemic change?” We can describe policies we need; but how do we get policy makers to respond? It’s easy to freeze in the face of these questions—and many of us do!

To help them think this through, I often drill down into the histories of social movements. This involves displacing some myths. As political scientist Jeanne Theoharis points out, popular accounts of social movements often limit themselves to saluting heroes and avoid discussing tactics and strategies. They can present past change as inevitable and at the same time make future change hard to imagine.

Newer historical research can help us move past this sense of blockage. In today’s newsletter I want to bring in some takeaways from historians of the civil rights and environmental movements to help make social movement for climate action easier to imagine.

Emily and her family at the D.C. Climate March in 2017

Social movements have driven more systemic change than we actively acknowledge. It’s no exaggeration to say that the effects of social movements shape our lives every day.

With every breath, we benefit from the environmental movement’s campaigns to put scrubbers on factory smokestacks, take lead out of gasoline, and add catalytic converters to cars. A 2020 study concluded that the Clean Air Act prevented between 185,000 and 370,000 premature deaths that year. The credit card in my wallet, the trousers I wear to class, and even my right to work are all fruits of the women's rights movement.

It’s easy to forget these changes are the result of deliberate effort, because they feel so normal now. Yet they all shifted social structures that felt unshakable at the time; and losing sight of this makes the world seem more inflexible than it is.

Women suffragettes holding placards with political slogans in 1920. Photo by Everett Collection

Here are two important pieces of good news I think we learn from history. First, we don’t have to wait for dramatic moments to make a difference. Everyone in the U.S. knows Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech; but the work that brought a quarter of a million people to the Lincoln Memorial in the Civil Rights Movement’s biggest march is often hidden. So are the phone trees and car pools that turned Rosa Parks’ courageous moment on the bus into an effective boycott and then built it into a Supreme Court case and school-district-by-school-district work of petitioning, local politicking, and acts of student courage that actually desegregated U.S. schools in the 1960s.

So if you can’t imagine yourself as an eloquent orator, don’t worry! There’s still plenty to be done, from talking to neighbors to showing up to municipal meetings. History shows us how crucial changes come from the cumulative effects of local efforts that, on their own, feel too small to accomplish anything.

Second, we don’t have to spend years convincing an entire movement to pull in the same direction. Indeed, we shouldn’t try. Every major successful social movement has been made up of dozens or hundreds of different groups with interests, ideas, and tactics that only sometimes align. The “environmental mainstream” of the 1970s was made up of thousands of different groups, whose disunity and capacity for independent action arguably allowed these groups to accomplish more, not less.

A single group could never have coordinated the disparate moves that campaigned against nuclear fallout, battled against the detergents destroying Lake Erie, and developed new legal strategies for holding polluters to account. Big moments like the first Earth Day helped to coordinate and energize these groups, but didn’t require or create unity.

History is clear that there are lots of things to do! What’s most needed is lots of different doers: some of whom coordinate, but others of whom use their own initiative and energy to simply do what needs doing.

History also illustrates some of the profound challenges of social movements to catalyze change.

First, they’re messy and imperfect! A unified movement composed only of saintly leaders, with clearly workable, agreed-upon, centrally-coordinated plans would certainly be easier—but when has this ever happened?

People are not perfect. Leaders are not saviors. Groups make mistakes, and the best course of action is sometimes impossible to know. If you’re going to do movement work, an activist I recently interviewed reminded me, you are going to get frustrated with other people and yourself. It’s important to know that frustration is not a sign of failure--but that doesn’t make it go away.

Second, movement gains require maintenance. The environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s created vast new policy infrastructures for protecting human and environmental health, from the EPA to landmark legislation like the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. But we can’t leave environmental protection only in the hands of bureaucracy and lawyers. As Katharine wrote last week, these gains have been eroding in recent years, and have come under direct threat recently. The EPA is being dismantled from the inside at a time when, as she says, “new research highlights the benefits of implementing new or even stronger standards for pollutants.” Past gains must be not only maintained, but built upon.

And lastly, we must make sure the solutions are solutions for everyone. In the 1970s, for example, many of the anti-pollution measures won by the largely-white environmental movement shifted toxic pollutants towards Black communities. This happened most famously in rural Warren County, North Carolina in 1982, where contractors dumped tons of toxic PCBs illegally along roadsides, creating even more tons of toxic soil, which ultimately was stored in a PCB landfill, also in Warren County, far from the source of the pollution.

What made this moment iconic was the response. Local Black leaders trained in Civil Rights organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality coordinated the largest civil disobedience action since the Civil Rights Era kicked off. This led to what pioneering sociologist Robert Bullard named the Environmental Justice movement. Since then, decades of work has taught us to pay attention to the winners and losers in environmental policymaking. That work continues and it needs to be part of climate solutions today.

I encourage you to learn from the playbooks and pitfalls of past social movements! What can you do today that people have done before—actions that might seem small and insignificant today—but which history teaches us ultimately add up to societal change at the scale we need to tackle climate change?

Learn your community’s history of social movement action: What groups in your city or area are already pushing in the direction you want to go? What have they already tried? What projects and struggles are they in the middle of? What do they need?

Think about what you have to offer to an organization: Do you have networks? Do you have skills? Do you have resources? Knowledge? Listen to others, learn from them, but bring yourself and your abilities.

Think improvisationally: The past has a toolbox for us to tap into, but new moments sometimes require new tools. We can be inspired by our predecessors’ improvisations as well as imitating their tactics.

👋 Katharine here:

I’m often asked whether we need systematic or individual change: and my answer to that question is YES. How does a system change, other than when individuals catalyze that change?

As I wrote here, “The world has changed before and, when it did, it wasn’t because a president, a prime minister, a CEO or a celebrity decided it had to. People who had the courage of their convictions, who used their voices to advocate for the systemic societal changes needed, are the people who changed the world before ... and who can change it again.”

History has a lot to teach us about how individuals like us can change the world. Thank you for getting us started on that journey, Emily!

To keep up with Emily and her work, follow her on Bluesky or visit her faculty page.

Fri April 4 at 7pm ET - Climate change, faith, & culture with Wayne Presbyterian Church - in person in Wayne, Pennsylvania; livestream information to come

Sat April 5 at 10am ET Breakfast and Q&A with Wayne Presbyterian Church - in person in Wayne, Pennsylvania; registration required

Tues April 8 at 11am CT Posey Leadership Award with Austin College - in person in Sherman, TX, free

Weds April 30 at 8pm ET - Don’t Say Climate? Bridging Divides with Katharine Hayhoe a fundraiser for the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America - virtual, $35