This Earth Day AND Every Day, organizing, not greenwashing is what wins!

This earth day, more than ever, we need to focus on organizing political power for the grassroots. This is the only way we have ever won anything.  Environmental battles- from climate change to fracking to mountaintop removal to toxins that harm adults and children to pollution are never won by buying into the systems that seek to oppress and harm us, but by fighting back.

The major corporations that control social media, the mainstream media, the economy and our political system are causing our health and the planet irreparable damage.  The only way we win is to create a mass movement.  This earth day I am pledging to help organize wherever I believe that real frontline activity is happening.

I have always made my films as tools for the grassroots.  The GASLAND films were targeted at the burgeoning frontline anti-fracking movement, so were How to Let Go and Awake.  This year I hope to offer more films that will be distributed free of charge so that people can use them to bring communities from awareness to action.  I hope that these films can be a service to front line organizers as they always have been.  For the last decade or more these movies have helped to ban fracking in dozens of countries and states and thousands of towns and municipalities.  But all of that credit goes to the organizers who brought people to the frontlines, who spent thousands of hours bringing their communities out so that they could outweigh the powerful fossil fuel interests that have always sought to destroy nature and our health for profit.

But I am deeply dismayed at how Earth Day and environmentalism is portrayed on social media.  There is rampant consumerism, blatant capitalism, obvious and insidious greenwashing.  Hawking products online may be good business but it is not good for our movement or the planet.   Period.  There is no “product” that is for sale that can help us now.  None.   That’s just more business.  And it is the system itself which is destroying us.   It is a huge waste of our precious precious enthusiasm, time, and energy to puruse any sort of consumer based strategy.   When I see that happening, I just see people who are actually investing in the system that we are trying to dismantle, not doing the hard work of dismantling it.

When we prioritize consumerism and narcissism in our environmental “activism” we are telling the wrong story.    The story of celebrity, consumer based activism is one of wealth and power. Of fame and image. Of posing rather than creating change. I can’t see how any of this helps. Jeff Bezos named his arena “Climate Pledge” arena in Seattle. All the while his company, Amazon, opposed real climate legislation and action while conducting massive wage theft.   Amazon’s space program will drop an enormous amount of black carbon directly into the stratosphere.  Now Bezos is giving billions to so called green organizations.  He knows exactly what he is doing.  He is creating a generation of so called “activists” who now feel beholden and indebted to him.

Consumer and celebrity environmentalism is a kind of narrative theft.  It is the theft of the real world in favor of the fake. It tells the tale of the primacy of money and power over organizing and action.,  That robs us of understanding the political realities at work here. With the wrong stories, we greenwash the mind- not just in fake environmental “products”, But in the consciousness that it’s all about the other kind of green- money. We need an alternate system. Not double down on hero worship and capitalism.

We need to focus on policy.  Buying solar panels, beauty products, so called less toxic shampoos, and an electric car may feel good on an individual basis.  But what we need are millions of joyful screaming activists in the street to end and dismantle the fossil fuel industry.  We need policies that end subsidies, that stop investment in fossil fuel expansion, that bring green energy to the masses.  We need a green new deal.  We need real policy change to ban single use plastics.  We need new toxics laws that prevent harmful chemicals from entering our bodies and our environment.  We need laws that govern transport of toxic chemicals by rail, truck and barge.  We need real penalties for fossil fuel companies' pollution.  We need to shout so loud that we drum these industries out of business forever.  We need public transportation, carless cities (not cities full of electric cars), community and public space and urban planning.  These things take organizing power, not purchasing power.

I want to live to see the end of the fossil fuel industry.  I don’t have time to waste.  If the fossil fuel industry doesn’t end in the next 30 years, the planet will.  It’s going to take everything we’ve got.

We have learned so much as a movement over the last decade.  Standing Rock showed us that 500 years of colonialism, racism, genocide and brutality would roar back to life when indigenous sovereignty activists, climate activists and environmentalists came together across racial and class lines to fight together.  But we learned that standing together, we are more powerful than our history, we are stronger than the powers that be.   It was a beautiful lesson for all of us.  Never forget, that we WON at Standing Rock-only to be completely subverted by the election of Donald Trump.  That's why we always have to focus on politics, on the bigger picture.

But the cops and the colonialists, and the fossil fuel industry learned the lesson too, they became more reactionary than ever, more punitive, more violent and more repressive.

I see that same spirit I saw and documented at Standing Rock at the organizing that is taking place at COP CITY.  Protestors are uniting across racial and class lines to stop a project that is deeply racist and environmentally disastrous.  This is the kind of intersectional action we need.  What is the result?  Police brutally murdered climate activist Manuel Teran and have subjected dozens to terrorism charges simply for showing up to protests.  And yet, where is the mass media?  Who is covering this assault on our first amendment rights?

So now we see an insidious new trend emerging on social media- greenwashing and narcissism.  These distract us from real way to win which is and always has been- organizing.  The consumerization and greenwashing of environmentalism has gone hand in hand with the criminalization of activism in the USA.  Protestors are being subjected to terrorism charges or even worse, beaten, shot and murdered while “climate influencers” are telling us to buy a different shampoo.  It goes beyond simply being misspent energy, it’s a strategy used to take our power.

Making media is also organizing.  So let’s focus on really challenging power instead of buying into it.  Greenwashing Earth Day is not just a distraction, it is an actual attack on the very ideals that environmentalists must hold.  We are sucked into a bogus consumerist narrative that fuels narcissism.  This pushes us out of the spaces, in media, social media that our outrage must occupy.  It is a stolen narrative designed to confuse and manipulate.

So please, this Earth Day, think about frontline organizing and let’s all find opportunities to really come together and fight for our forests, climate, earth and public health.  Find ways to support the organizing against COP CITY.  To fight fossil fuel expansion, to work for meaningful policy change.  To politicize our movement, not consumerize it.  We need you more than ever.

love + revolution,

Josh Fox