The Sunrise Movement

If you want to understand the red-hot cutting edge of the state of climate change activism, you can do no better than to read the article Not Dark Yet from the New Yorker magazine. I got the March 7, 2022 issue in the mail today. I just read the entire 8 page article by Andrew Marantz.  The subtitle is The Sunrise Movement wants to revolutionize climate politics.

Oddly, the online version accessible from the link in the paragraph above has a completely different title and subtitle.  Bleeding edge!

The New Yorker magazine often carries articles from the best climate journalists, like Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben.  I've been a subscriber for years.  My mother told me that I learned to read from looking with her at her albums of New Yorker cartoons.  You can get various introductory subscriptions here.

I don't know Andrew Marantz yet, but he may be the next generation.  In fact, the article conveys the idea that the generations of climate activists are getting shorter and shorter.  The co-founders of the Sunrise Movement, Varkini Prakash and William Lawrence, connected in college in 2014, and cut their teeth on various climate change protest organizations until they founded the Sunrise Movement in 2017.  In November of 2018 they did their widely reported first major action: the occupation of Nancy Pelosi's office to demand that she support the Green New Deal.  If you recall, newly-elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined them there and spoke; about an hour after she left 50 of the protesters were arrested.  As one measure of success, the article reports that "In the next two years, Sunrise's budget exploded from fifty thousand dollars to more than ten million."

In September of 2021, at an organization meeting in Philadelphia, Marantz reports that "Sunrise's founders were in their late twenties, which, in youth-activist years made them movement elders.  The new team included a couple of holdovers, Prakash among them, but it mostly consisted of the next microgeneration of Sunrise leaders, several of whom were teen-agers."  To me, this captures one of the main limitations of youth-based activist groups like Sunrise and like Greta Thunberg's: when they are in school, they are just learning about the world and, by-and-large have no power other than their presence in mass demonstrations.  In college and young adulthood they organize and learn rapidly, and can do things like get arrested and undergo hunger strikes (did you know that 5 young people engaged in a hunger strike to get Manchin to pass the Build Back Better Bill last October?  After almost four weeks without food, and three of them hospitalized, they gave up the strike, after it was clear Manchin was not on board.  One of the strikers was just 18.  I don't remember this from the news).  Once people start having families their ability to choose to perform high-sensation actions like getting arrested and going on hunger strikes becomes severely limited.  Unless they actually work for climate activism organizations, they must devote a lot of time and energy to career-building; otherwise they risk becoming personally powerless for the rest of their lives.

The article goes into great depth in documenting the difficulty that a new climate activist organization composed mostly of young people has in creating and maintaining momentum.  I found it fascinating.