More thoughts on Sarah Palin and "Responsibility"

For the last week I've been on a wilderness canoe trip without any phone or computer or cars or humans other than my partner. It was the first time I've been without contact to the rest of society in...as long as I can remember. It's been a new attempt at finding balance in my life - something every organizer I know is desperately searching for, since organizing is a thankless endeavor that takes over your entire life, to the point where you eat, sleep, and breathe the work. The pressure of striving to do your best to have your work guided by deep accountability to the communities or folks you work with is a tremendous responsibility that doesn't seem to be in the lexicon of our elected officials.

I just stepped into a canoe lodge on the Canadian/Minnesota border, and the first thing I hear about the outside world is a vice presidential candidate dissing community organizing (and Giuliani too!). I've heard a lot of really foul things come out of the mouths of politicians from both major parties. It's expected. But this time I was just surprised. Community organizing, whether on the Left or the Right is the lifeblood of this country and the engine of change.

Jay Smooth from Illdoctrine put it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAc0OmQ1PpY

I just got back from seven days that reminded me why youth are gonna save the world. I had the privilege of helping train and learn from 200 brilliant young organizers in Minneapolis Minnesota at the Energy Action Coalition Power Vote camp.

It was the most fluid and well organized training I had ever been a part of. More striking than the hard organizing skills, the web2.0 tech saavy, the smart message, strategic approach or visionary ideas, was the overwhelming sense of being called to duty.

Over and over again I heard college students telling stories about how something deep inside of them is telling us that our planet - our ecosystems, our economic, and social systems - is on the brink of collapse, and that it's our generational challenge to steer our society and world back to sanity.

One of the most enduring metaphors of the week was shared by a young organizer: when a caterpillar is about to encase itself in a cocoon it becomes over-consumptive. It eats more than its share of leaves on the tree and grows fat and sluggish. At the moment of its developmental excess, a group of specialized cells called “imaginal cells” gravitate toward one another and find each other. Even though they are in the minority, they flow through the “nutritive soup” that has become of the rest of the caterpillar, and then they steer the caterpillar’s development until it eventually breaks through its cocoon as a butterfly.

This blogpost was co-authored with Amy Ortiz.




This past weekend, April 4-6th, something historic took place in Memphis, Tennessee. During the same few days where people from across the nation gathered in the place where Martin Luther King Jr’s was assassinated forty years ago to honor the man, his legacy, and his dream for America, a thousand people, the majority of them people of color, came together to take part in rebirthing MLK’s vision. At The Dream Reborn, visionaries, artists and leaders came together to “create ecological solutions to heal the earth while bringing jobs, justice, wealth and health to all our communities.” We saw environmentalism re-defined, re-vitalized, re-energized and re-imagined, and witnessed not just the rebirth of MLK’s dream, but also the birth of a transformative movement with the power to bring the kind of change that we so desperately need.


The Dream Reborn was a weekend charting a new environmentalism that isn’t so new: the marriage of movements for social justice and the environment. Environmental Justice and other groups have been working at this intersection for years. Racial and Economic justice organizations strive to put an ecological lens on their organizing, just as Environmental organizations strive to put a racial and social justice lens on their work. But this weekend was the birth of that organizing with new language that is gaining influence in the mainstream of society, energy around program such as Green Jobs, and forcing major institutions and even presidential candidates to take notice. In more ways than one, the time for a new environmental movement, one for justice for both people and the planet, has come.





We spent our time at Dream Reborn coordinating and participating in Rainforest Action Network (RAN) – and it’s youth arm RAN Youth Sustaining the Earth (RYSE)’s youth delegation. 13 amazing people aged 13-22, along with 4 RAN staff, came together from across the nation. We represented many different communities, ages, and interests. We came to Memphis to connect, learn, grow, share and ultimately leave with the tools and the inspiration to go back to our communities and build a just, sustainable future. It was a chance not only to bring diverse youth to the table as stakeholders in conversations around green jobs and movements for environmental social justice, but to offer ideas and leadership to RAN’s growing network and the evolution of RYSE.


Click below to read more!