 Thank you. Thank you all for being here today. You folks hear me in this microphone situation a little bit. I appreciate everybody spending your Saturday inside listening to me and listening to each other rather than being out there enjoying the beautiful leaves. I certainly appreciate it. And I appreciate that introduction as well. It's always interesting to see ourselves reflected back by someone else. I learned a lot that way. I recently had that very opportunity to see myself reflected back. And when I came across my own words quoted by the author, Wynne Stevenson, in his new book called, What We're Fighting For Now is Each Other. The quote was from an interview that I did with Wynne a couple years ago when Wynne was talking about the useful fictions in the climate movement that we tell each other to remain optimistic. These useful fictions are all about how we can avoid severe or catastrophic consequences of climate change. And when he was saying this, I quickly retorted, there are a few things that make me more hopeless than a movement based on useful fictions. Now, those strong words were a quick response fired off in conversation which, admittedly, as words were recorded and transcribed and published in a book and then republished in an Asian magazine, then I had to actually ask myself if I really believed those words, if I really meant what I said. There are a few things that make me more hopeless than a movement based on useful fictions. Aside from my work on civil disobedience, probably the central focus of my climate justice activism has revolved around questions of hope and optimism and hard truths and useful fictions. Since 2010, I've spent a lot of time encouraging the climate movement to grapple with what it means to be too late to stop the climate crisis. Over that time, this question of optimism has increasingly been a salient and defining question in our movement. On the one hand, there have been frequent assertions about why we must remain optimistic despite the circumstances. These arguments often rest on the assumptions that if we lose optimism, then we'll sink into a permanent and paralyzing despair. On the other hand, there have been doomsayers like Guy McPherson who assert that if things are not going to be okay, then all is lost and we should grieve for near-term human extinction. And somewhere in the middle of those are people like Joanna Macy who suggest that we are capable of handling the complex paradox of losing the world as we know it while still fighting for all that we love that we can hold grief and gratitude at the same time. These are all positions from people who care very much about climate change. But because they involve such deeply held beliefs, they've become pretty divergent camps within our movement. So as we become increasingly polarized around this question of optimism, I think it's worth asking ourselves what's at stake in this question? Now it does seem like a lot of the champions of optimism are usually trying to maintain funding for an organization. But surely there is something deeper at stake as well. Certainly my instinctive and perhaps hyperbolic words a couple years ago about useful fictions indicate that at a gut level I felt very strongly that something significant is at stake here. This summer I received an email from an online global advocacy organization that does a lot of work on climate change. The opening line of this email proclaimed it to be possibly the most important email they've ever sent. The email then launched into the sobering story of methane releases in the Siberian Arctic Ocean increasing by orders of magnitude this year with methane plumes a kilometer wide bubbling up through the ocean where before only methane plumes of about a meter wide had been witnessed. And this methane of course is a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2 and it's one of the tipping points that scientists have warned us about for a long time. So very rightly the email then stated this could be what the experts have warned us about as the earth warms it creates many tipping points that accelerate the warming out of control. Then the email swings into this with bold letters we can stop this if we act very fast and all together the hour is late but it is again with bold words still absolutely within our power to stop this catastrophe simply by shifting our economies from oil and coal to other sources of power. As online advocacy groups go I happen to like this group and I'm excited to see where their new commitment to more real world direct action leads. I know that with quite a few of their staff but I think that most of the climate campaigners at this organization knew that that email was alive. If the methane releases in the Arctic are the tipping points scientists have warned us about then we can't actually stop this. That's literally the definition of a tipping point. It's the point of no return at which runaway climate change gets out of our control. That methane can't be put back certainly not just by simply shifting our economies from oil and coal to other sources of power. This email focused on the Paris negotiations but there's nothing that's even been discussed at the UN talks that could prevent catastrophic climate change. There have been some theoretical frameworks from how an all out global effort aided by some technological breakthroughs could give us a 50-50 chance of avoiding that key indicator of two degrees of warming but nothing that would justify an assertion that it's absolutely within our power to avoid catastrophe. Furthermore, this particular organization which has a strong presence in the global south where most of the already 400,000 deaths a year from climate change are occurring this organization certainly knows that climate catastrophe is already here for far too many people. The staff at this organization probably knows that their bold type of optimism was dishonest but they seem to be operating on the movement and conventional wisdom that people need optimism about things turning out okay in order to have motivation to do anything. A few days after that email I got another one from a different national climate justice organization that began what will your community look like in 2050 after we've stabilized the climate? It invites people to participate in their big visioning project all of which is based on how we've stabilized the climate in 2050. This organization also does great work and I know lots of their staff and I'm pretty sure most of their staff know that there's about a 40 year time lag between carbon emissions and impacts on the climate which means that a stabilized climate in 2050 would have required us to almost eliminate industrialized CO2 emissions by about 2010. That was five years ago. We didn't do it and they know that. This organization I think has been one of the best national climate organizations for years so why are they basing one of their major campaigns on what they know to be a lie? Now there are plenty of mediocre groups that say misleading things or blatantly dishonest things about climate change because they don't know any better or because they're scared or because they've sold out the corporate interests and I frankly try not to waste my time critiquing those groups but both of these groups that I'm talking about are none of those things. These are serious climate organizations so why are serious climate organizers lying to the people that they're trying to organize? Now they might seem odd to talk about the climate movement being dishonest when our opponents that we normally identify like Exxon are lying in such dramatic and blatant and destructive ways as we've seen in a lot of revelations over the past month. That's why Bill McKibbin got arrested over in Burlington a couple of days ago for calling out Exxon for blatantly lying about the basic reality of climate change and that's not what's going on here but I think that we would be in a stronger position to hold down accountable if we address our own inclination to avoid some inconvenient truths for ourselves. Based on my conversations with movement leaders and with a lot of climate scientists as well the basic perspective is that people can't handle the truth. If we told people to pull through then they would give up and give in to despair or fatalism or hedonism. Sarah Van Gelder, the editor of Yes Magazine expressed this best to me in a conversation in February of 2014. She said, if we tell people that it's too late then what's to keep them from giving up on their values abandoning the struggle for justice and being as hedonistic as possible with whatever time they have left. I didn't have a good answer at the time so all I could say was that our movement had to find an answer to that question or risk becoming a relevant. So since then I've spent a lot of time thinking about a question. One of the big obstacles here is the easy dualism between things being okay and the end of the world. I believe there's a great deal of space between utopia and apocalypse but it can often seem like a sparsely populated territory. Too often those who critique the dishonest optimism of the mainstream climate movement fall into genuine fatalism like Guy McPherson, formerly of the University of Arizona who bases his certainty of near term human extinction on unsupported assumptions about the limits of human adaptability. But that kind of fatalism is bolstered by the scale of the crisis that in many ways seems to exceed the capacity of human reasoning. The scale that we're talking about is really beyond anything that I think we could wrap our heads around. Consider that by 2050 we'll have about 9 billion people on the planet. Over the next century after that catastrophic line change could possibly force human population down to 19th century population levels of 2 billion or less. That would mean losing 7 billion people or what we now think of as the entire human population. Tell me losing what we consider to be the entire human world. But there would still be as many people remaining as there were from most of human history. So there would be a whole human world there after we've lost a whole human world. This is the scale that I think challenges our ability to comprehend. In this paradox, a whole world to lose and a whole world left to fight for are both very real at the same time. So that may be asking a lot of the masses to hold that kind of dynamic tension in their minds between two very challenging ideas. This requires us to simultaneously hold a deep grief for what we're losing and a fierce love for what remains to be fought for. Even very smart people are sometimes paralyzed in action by the emotional weight of this reality that people can handle that kind of complexity might seem unreasonable to a lot of folks. Perhaps the Jack Nicholson's of our movement, the You Can't Handle the Truth, folks, aren't correct in thinking that people just can't handle that complexity of truth. And the sad reality is that in our consumerist culture of sound bites and self-interest, most people probably can't handle the truth. Empty rhetoric designed to tell people what they want to hear often seems to win the day. And the most successful political discourse often involves scapegoating people against one another with simple either or kind of thinking. Question is whether that simplistic thinking is human nature or something imposed by a power structure that profits from an ignorant and disempowered citizen. What is at stake in this question is our fundamental view of human nature. If we answer that people would give up the struggle for justice without some rosy future to look forward to, then we're making some pretty harsh judgments about human nature. That answer promotes the view that people are selfish and motivated only by rewards suggests that people can't handle hard truths and will be paralyzed by desperate situations. If this is true, it doesn't bode well for a future in which we will have to deal with real hardships. If we're clinging to optimism to avoid pushing people into their natural state of apathetic hedonism, then we're simply using optimism as a veil for a deeper hopelessness about humanity. And maybe that's why I had that knee-jerk reaction that said there's nothing that makes me more hopeless than a movement based on useful fictions. Because those useful fictions can be used as a mask, as optimism to veil genuine hopelessness. After all, if we believe that people can't handle the truth about our situation, what does that mean about their ability to handle the actual situation itself? The road to survival will include plenty of opportunities to give up. If we accept the negative view of human nature, we perpetuate an ignorant and apathetic society that is dangerous to manipulative, that is dangerously vulnerable to manipulative leaders. This is critical to handling the complex challenges we face. Because climate change, in reality, the threats that we face from climate change are not just environmental problems. The threats that we face from climate change are environmental triggers for our already existing deep social problems. To take one example that I'm familiar with from where I've spent a lot of my adult life in the American Southwest, the Colorado River is drying up right now. The Colorado River is the lifeblood of most of the states in the Southwest. It provides the drinking water for 40 million people. And it's drying up. It's already overallocated. It rains about 100 miles from the ocean. It just disappears into the desert because every single drop of the river is already used and the rainfall is decreasing pretty rapidly in that area. But that's not the only thing that's happening in that area. Of course, we have the social factors that are occurring in that area as well. One of those phenomena in the Southwest is what we call the Minimet, which are very different than the kind of Minimet that we used to be familiar with here in New England. It's a different breed of Minimet of the white men who armed themselves and formed individual anti-groups to go out to the border with Mexico and shoot immigrants trying to come across the border. And this cultural phenomenon of the Minimet grew without any real insecurity going on. The only insecurity that the people becoming men face is this phony insecurity of white men seeing their position in the world shift a little bit. And just that degree of insecurity leads to that kind of desperation of going out and shooting immigrants in the desert because there's already this narrative that encourages them to blame all of their problems on immigrants. That's the cultural dynamic that is going on in the Southwest, which is simpler than looking at the real reality of the legacy of patriarchy and white supremacy being shifted just a little bit in our society today. So if we believe that people will always choose the simple answer over the complex truth, then that becomes a pretty hopeless situation because those who seek to scapegoat certain classes of people in order to maintain the status quo will always have easier answers than we will. Assuming that the current level of apathy and simplicity displayed in our society is due to human nature is actually the most pessimistic view that we can have. The only way to navigate such situations will be with an expansive view of human nature. One that recognizes that spark of divinity within every person that gives them the infinite potential to transcend their situation with love. This is what we'll need to step into situations like we will see in the Southwest with the Colorado River when they face actual insecurity, when there are real hardships, when there are rolling water shortages, and that sort of thing that lead to actual insecurity by folks. And at the same time, they'll be seen far more refugees streaming into the country from places that are more scary to their mind than in Mexico. So we will need this positive view of human nature in order to step into that kind of situation. We believe that people have an unmeasurable power of love through the spark of divinity that they carry. That situation starts to become less hopeless. We can then envision people who are not paralyzed by that desperate situation but are driven by that spark within themselves to step into that crisis of hostility as a witness for peace. Those are the people who respond to despair with courage and love rather than paralysis. But to do so, they'll have to begin building up that courage right now by practicing the honest dialogue about the threats that we face. To even discuss such a situation requires that we let go of a certain degree of optimism. But to have faith that we can get through it requires a deeper hope than optimism. It requires a deep faith in our human potential. If we believe that spark of divinity is not just in those heroic witnesses for peace but in all people, then we can see the potential for the minute men themselves to be moved by the act of witnesses of those who step in as witnesses for peace and see the potential even for those minute men to see the humanity of a whole class of people who they would rather stake out for their problems. And that's when truly revolutionary change becomes possible when the deep ingrained injustices, the deep social problems that our society has long been facing when even those become something that we can overturn and overcome that injustice. Paulo Freire, the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wrote that trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. And this is true in our situation as well. If we actually want to have that kind of revolutionary change that overcomes these deeply embedded injustices in our society, it begins with trusting the people to be able to handle the real truth of the threats that we're facing. Because even if we can envision that revolutionary change, the massive hardships are still there. Our modern industrial civilization may still crumble. But in the crumbling can be a revolution of love by connecting those parts of divinity that were hidden away in our secure world. The perspective that is often overlooked is that letting go of optimism doesn't have to mean giving up hope. But rather, it can mean a transformation into a deeper hope that is less dependent on outcomes and more firmly rooted in our faith in one another. Optimism is only one kind of hope, and it's a fickle and fragile kind of hope that is dependent upon our circumstances. But there is a deeper hope. A deeper hope that is based on our faith, our faith in one another, a kind of hope that is not based on avoiding hardships, but a hope that is based on that those hardships will make us into who we were meant to be. Now I'm preaching here, and this is where I start to lose a lot of the folks in the climate. They argue that we need to be reasonable and pragmatic. We don't have time. Revolutionary idealism about the parts of divinity and the entity of the situation demands the expedient manipulation of people with useful fictions, right? Did I say manipulation of people? Something that doesn't imply that creating people as if they're expendable resources for our movies. But of course that's there, isn't it? And in these calls for pragmatism reveals the ethical question that lies hidden beneath this question of optimism. If we sacrifice our faith in one another and embrace a negative view of human nature in the name of expediency, how far will we go before those people become expendable? And this is what I think motivated me to say such strong words about those useful fictions. Is the feeling that those useful fictions based on expediency and a negative view of human nature put us down this road of treating people like they're expendable? And that's I think when we get to really scary things about our future. If our current urgency is enough to forget those parts of divinity in the people around us what will the challenges of tomorrow justify? I'm convinced that the struggle for peace in a world of climate chaos will be waged over who is deemed to be expendable. And I think this has always been the case. When we look at our history at the great atrocities it's not just the direct impacts that created such atrocities. It's who we were willing to save as expendable. Who we were willing to sacrifice. When Germany had a great economic crisis in the 1930s the great atrocity wasn't just the impact of high inflation. It was who they were willing to scapegoat. Who they were willing to save was expendable in order to return some sense of normalcy to their lives. In a dark war in the 1990s and early 2000s when they had a massive water shortage that may have been caused by climate change it wasn't just the water shortage that was creating the atrocities and the hardship for people. It was the way in which they were willing to turn against one another and deem certain classes of society to be expendable. That's some of the biggest threats that we face at this point. Remember the threats of climate change are not environmental problems. The threats of climate change are environmental triggers to our pre-existing deep social problems. One reason that is critical for us to have this conversation in an open way and to openly address the inevitability of serious climate chaos is that some people are already privately addressing. Here's another example here from far away from what my experience has been. 2009 was a key milestone in our failure to mitigate the climate crisis. That's when we failed to enact national climate legislation and failed to negotiate the global treaty. Look, Copenhagen, while there is still a huge difference between continuing to burn all of our fossil fuels and keeping them in the ground. After that year it became pretty clear that places like Bangladesh were going to go under water. Once we knew that the place would be lost the question became what would become of the 160 million people in Bangladesh about half of whom lived less than 10 meters above sea level. Experts told us that we weren't supposed to actually talk about that for fear of discussing that adaptation undermining the efforts for mitigation that remained to be done. But shortly after that leader's signal in 2009 India began constructing a border fence all the way around Bangladesh a 1,790 mile partially electrified fence. So we avoided the question of what became of the 80 million Bangladeshis but clearly not everyone avoided that question. Some people decided on behalf of all of us in the global community that we would keep them right where they're at so that they don't inconvenience for the rest of us. So in the absence of an open dialogue about how we can design an adaptation in line with our shared values we're allowing an adaptation policy of quiet genocide to be implemented. Certainly there are no easy answers here. We're witnessing that lack of easy answers in our current refugee crisis as people fleeing Syria from their civil war which was triggered in large part by climate change induced drought. But just because there are no easy answers doesn't mean there's not a path in which we can hold on to our shared values. But in order to get to that path in order to put ourselves on the path that holds on to our shared values we have to have that shared conversation. We have to be discussing these deep hard threats outside of just an insulated group of officials. We have to invite everyone into this conversation but inviting everyone into this conversation that carries so much gravity, so much hardship requires a huge trust in all those people. It requires a trust that people can handle those hard truths that people can handle that complex reality and that they're not going to be paralyzed by it but that it will bring out the best in them. That it might crack them open. It might reveal vulnerabilities that they had always been able to keep inside and certainly for a lot of us who are doing this work that's been true for us that grappling with that despair has cracked us open and revealed our vulnerability. But that vulnerability then just creates the ground for deeper connections, deeper relationships. Once we're cracked open we can see that spark of divinity within one another and we can be building that kind of trust in one another and that's where I think our real hope will come from is in those deep trusting mutual relationships with one another, with one spark of divinity connecting in a genuine way with another spark of divinity. And that was articulated best I think by someone that I consider to be the best theologian of the 21st century, a poet named Andrea Gibson. She has a poem about grappling with despair called The Nutritionist and in that, towards the end of the poem she says here we are together at the window aching for it to all get better but knowing there is a chance our hearts have only just skinned their knees knowing there is a chance the worst day might still be coming. Let me say right now for the record I'm still going to be here. You stay here too, okay? You stay here too. If the only thing we have to gain by saying is each other my God that is enough. My God that is plenty. People of faith, I think that can be the grounds of our hope. Not that everything will be okay but that we will remain and we will hold on to one another and in that we will be who we were meant to be. We will honor those sparks of divinity within ourselves by connecting with one another and trusting one another to handle the depth of this situation that we're in. So with that I'm glad that you are all here today to begin that open dialogue that you're all representatives of your communities to go back and beacons up that dialogue and invite that open dialogue with others trusting that we can handle the depth of this situation that we are in at this point in time. So about 10 minutes for questions. Any of you like to follow up? It's going to disappear, transition and still recognize that spark of divinity. That seems to me that's going to be almost a greater challenge than just dealing with the ecological changes at least surges. Yeah, I agree and I don't know and I see a little bit of hope actually in our Syrian refugee crisis where a lot of our officials in charge like the type of state John Kerry and his equivalent of a lot of other Western European countries are saying well looking at so many folks like we can take 100,000 folks in the United States a lot of community voices whether that's mid-sized town mayors or church leaders or just citizens and community leaders are raising their voices and saying well no, we can handle more than that we can take more than that share in our community we can find a way to make it so I think what we're seeing is that you can't see a way to make those voices are brought into the public discourse we find that we have a much higher potential than we thought we did that's what we need here's the solution for how we can make this work but many more voices in that public discourse about how we make it work I think it also depends on what we mean when we say to me I think my hope is based on us being able to hold on to our community as we navigate that period I think there's not a lot of good measurements with like a technocratic society to measure like how many lives are saved and that sort of thing like an illusionary framework because we stand to lose seven out of nine lives the reality is we're actually going to lose nine out of nine lives actually everyone's going to die and that's always been the case so any sense of meaning that is based on some kind of ultimate outcome has always been a little bit misleading that our values and our meaning has always had to be based on the here and now or best on the short term of what this means in our close lives of how to that our challenge has never been to save the world our challenge is to love the world and part of the reason I'm increasingly moving towards working with faith communities within the is that I think they're closer to understanding that as people of faith we're closer to understanding that our job isn't to save the world it's to love the world would you say some more about that it wasn't true? yeah the question is so I use that as an example a lot because it's one of the densest populations that is at one of the lowest lying periods in terms of sea level so it's facing a dramatic threat and it's people without many resources to be able to adapt so it's not the kind of place like man happened to build a big sea wall and a system of pumps and that sort of thing that can adapt to the feet of sea level lines and so there will be massive migration but because the countries are densely populated already there's really not much area for them to migrate to within their own country and so I think there will have to be migration outside the country and and I don't think there will be any key turning point where folks say okay now the desperation that we're seeing in Bangladesh is climate change now like there's no sort of danger there it kicks in some kind of global response so I think that conversation has to be pushed to start addressing it immediately already places are going underwater already areas their water is becoming salinated which is what happens before their homes actually go underwater their water source becomes salinated and so already that's happening on a significant scale in Bangladesh and and so there has to be a willingness to to invite refugees to other places and unfortunately probably the last significant development in the UN treaty process negotiations leading up to Paris the last significant development was that the the relocation fund was removed from the treaty process they had not only relocation fund but a relocation kind of agency that created that global dialogue about the best way to deal with with low line areas that needed to be relocated that was eliminated in significant part because of the pressure from Australia and Australia felt that way because they feel like since they are the most developed country in the region of the South Pacific all of those refugees are going to end up in in Australia so again you know it's it's Australia kind of reacting to the lack of an open discourse where other developed countries can reassure Australia that they're not going to be the only one taking refugees that other countries are willing to do that as well it's sort of this catch point too where we need initiative to begin that global discourse it seems like it's very complicated because I saw something yesterday and I don't remember the dates but it showed the gradual innovation of those lines and this was from a reputable scientific source in places like Tokyo, Shanghai, most of the Chinese coast basically much of our coast, you know by 2050 or 2070 is going to be significantly unindated we're going to have New York, Boston I mean our whole coast having to move from infrastructure like sanitation resources, etc with climate change in terms of farming and all that so there's a huge conversation that has to happen which those things in our own country make it even harder to respond so we can't think just short-term we have to think about what are we doing here when the ice sheets go under water with 100 foot rise we need to think ahead too yeah and I think the more that we think ahead we can put ourselves in a position to navigate that situation while holding on to our values I remember reading something one time about ships that go down on the ocean and ships that sink very slowly like the Titanic that can go down over 10 hours or something can have this pretty civil kind of response where they make kind of equitable decisions about who gets into the life boats and that sort of thing but the ships that go down extremely quickly is a much more like the strongest survive and at the expense have in a way the strongest are pushing the we got away and that sort of thing climate change is like that situation kind of really large we wait until New York is actually in and they go all street bankers in Manhattan buying up all the resources for relocation you know and a lot of folks I think will be forgot in that process or as if we put into place responses now we can put those into place in a much more equitable kind of way you obviously put a lot of thought into this I'm just wondering the implementation of your idea which is to really confront people with the stark realities and sort of as you said crack open and see if they respond I'm just thinking my own congregation my own community and how hard it is for people to hear these truths they're already so scared that they're just putting their heads in the sand so in New York speaking about this working on this what's been the response so far from people to your ideas well I'll say that in my experience the two most effective tools for having that conversation are civil disobedience and music civil disobedience I think is a way of initiating the conversation by saying here's what I have to tell you it initiates the conversation by taking one's own action by demonstrating what we feel called to do and inviting others into questioning why we would put ourselves in harm's way questioning why we would do something so drastic and in my experience people react to that from a different place within themselves than the mere sort of intellectual inquiry when they see someone putting themselves in harm's way I feel like there's an innate human desire to understand why somebody would do that and so in my experience even in conservative Utah I found a lot of folks even from the opposite end of the blood of the spectrum would approach me with a genuine human desire to understand why I was doing that and then that would give me the opportunity to talk about where we're at with the threat of climate change why I feel called to take this kind of action and I would see that getting through them in a different way than any of the information I would try to give them in any different kind of forum you know there's a lot of folks that kind of have this intellectual barrier with climate change you know the conservatives have their intellectual barrier they're like ooh climate change that's a liberal issue I don't want to hear that liberals actually have an intellectual barrier that can be just as strong it's like no no no I changed my light bulbs and I vote for democrats so I'm good I don't need to hear anything else and so they shut down but trying to understand another person who's vulnerable invites their own vulnerability and creates a deeper connection that gets past that intellectual barrier and and I think part of the way that in the context of taking action about with civil disobedience part of the way that we can talk about these really hard truths is that we're demonstrating with our own action that we're not being surprised by this we're demonstrating that that even acknowledging and accepting these hard truths is not hopeless we're still acting we're still moving forward and we're demonstrating that with our actions and and I think that's perhaps why music has that same power because there's something inherently hopeful about singing and even when we sing about really bleak hard sad things there's something inherently hopeful because those because sad songs say we can look at at the worst ugliness in our society and make something beautiful out of it and so I think there's something inherently hopeful in singing those sad songs except those are my two recommendations yes thank you I have been reading quite a bit about mostly in the economists about some of the current issues of relocation and what they have argued is that huge moments of people into other places like Europe this time will bring about very substantial economic benefits to everybody concerned both the migrants and the host countries and they cite lots of evidence that I think is very well analyzed and then if you can just look at another situation in which the nearest things that we probably have to the current catastrophes which we're going to have to deal with would be the Second World War and especially its effects on relative to the United States but its effects on Britain and Germany to continental protagonists those countries were left terribly destitute at the end of the war yet both totally transformed their economies Britain got rid of all of its empire it changed its social order and so did Germany and both of those countries have emerged remarkably stronger as a result of these terrible catastrophes and I'm not only stronger but that's society, more just society I think I think that's true that's not a question something should be wrong I think the lesson is that there is tremendous potential for transformation on the part of it the key question is who is steering that transformation who is in control of that and that's part of why I want to see a more open and participatory and democratic conversation about what kind of transformation we really want to see a conversation that's not about clinging to what we've had but a conversation that's about how we navigate that transformation because what scares me is going through a transformation under our current system of corporate control and corporate ownership of our government because as the Exxon revelations have shown corporations have been thinking seriously about climate change for a long time and they've been looking at how they can use it as a way to exploit others so there's a lot of corporations that force about climate change and so they're probably going to deal with it they're looking at how they can use it to their advantage so to take an example like Miami in this country is going over water right now and there's no way that that can be stopped because Miami is built on porous limestone so even if they built seawalls around it so there will come a point where Miami won't be able to be rebuilt where a big storm surge or something will come in and then we'll proceed and I think it could be fairly quick where it becomes obvious to a tipping point of people that this can't be rebuilt and probably a lot of major corporations and that sort of thing will say like no I don't want to rebuild my hotel in Miami I'll just take the insurance money and the FEMA money and go invest that somewhere else and I would bet that when that happens we'll start to see some corporate think tank groups that we've never heard of that pop up in a place like Philadelphia where the labor movement has been doing some very strong grassroots organizing unionizing a lot of the the airport shops and the other porous benefit industry facilities in Philadelphia a lot of that the service industry in Philadelphia is making progress towards unionizing I'll bet that we would see a corporate group with some friendly sounding name like worker solidarity alliance or something like that that pops up with all the the business leaders of Philadelphia already signed on that says oh well those like you know there's like 5 million people in Miami and a lot of them are in the hospitality industry you know like all those displaced hospitality workers we can take 30,000 of those hospitality workers in Philadelphia we've got this whole plan to unroll it and to provide jobs for all these displaced hospitality workers in a community situation so we have to implement it really fast and that gets rushed through and you know oh by the way it'll completely wipe out all the unionized shops that have been made in progress in Philadelphia and further increase the power of executives over the workers there are things like that that I think we need to be prepared for you know if the unions in Philadelphia are just surprised by this plan all of a sudden to import 30 workers and undercut their unions they're not going to be able to respond in any way that seems like oh we don't want those outsiders to come in here which won't be acceptable in a time of emergency we're going to need to have dialogue about that and about who calls the shots for that transformation who steers that transformation so the majority of fossil fuels that are still in the ground need to stay there and it seems to me that the way to love the earth and everything that lives here is to do everything we can to leave those things those fossil fuels in the earth and that there's a hope if they're left there and not burned it won't be as bad and I just want to say that next Saturday we have an opportunity right here in Montpelier to help keep some fossil fuels the gas in the ground by not allowing pipeline that is being proposed and being built by civil disobedience here next Saturday 11am and I really think that we have to do that action that's what gives me hope when I come together with other people putting myself at risk and others that we can love one another we can sing together and we can hopefully stop the burning of that