7 - Changing the World

Summary

While morally important, individual action can only have limited effects on a global environmental crisis. This chapter offers ways to understand the collective dimension of environmental political action, distinguishing political movements in terms of their final goals, organizational forms, and methods of political activity. Lessons are taken from the history of other political movements (feminism, civil rights, union, gay rights, antislavery) and questions of reform vs. revolution, the role of violence, and the place of spiritual virtues in political organizing are addressed. An account of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust helps develop criteria for when environmental political action is an authentic response to the environmental crisis and under what conditions environmentalists with significantly different perspectives should cooperate.