Welcome to the new Climate Disobedience Center website!
Welcome to the Climate Disobedience Center. We have been quietly telling people about the launch of the center for some time, but today we are excited to launch this website.
Please sign up for updates as new content and official social media channels will be rolling out over the coming days. We don’t want you to miss anything, and can use your help spreading the word.
Now to business! What is the Climate Disobedience Center? The following is a brief overview by Tim DeChristopher and Jay O’Hara.
OUR PRINCIPLES
The following are the guiding principles of the Climate Disobedience Center.
We aim to…
1. Use creative conflict to break up business-as-usual, forcing attention to the underlying, fatal conflict between global survival and blind adherence to fossil fuel powered mass consumption, and unrestrained economic growth.
2. Replace symbolic, mass, photo-op climate protests with peaceful confrontation at the point of injury in order to create moral clarity, cutting through the numbing tangle of climate half measures, deceit and self interest, as the lunch counter sit-ins clarified and elevated the civil rights struggle.
3. Engage individuals who see no alternative but to use our bodies in a final effort to avoid the abyss, who approach the task of re-centering society imbued with the hope, joy and serenity which only flow from living in the truth.
4. Create a community of climate dissidents who are engaged as whole people, bonded by love and trust, who have each other’s backs in this risky work, and who recognize relationships will sustain us now and as the crisis deepens.
5. Tell the devastating truth that the world is ending on our watch. We refuse to dumb down the problem or lie about the scale and speed of global response necessary to avert cataclysm and survive increasingly chaotic conditions. In this we find true hope, not a false hope based on the denial of the hard reality or the allure of easy solutions.
6. Challenge the leadership of the environmental movement and religious communities to serve the purposes for which those institutions were created; centered on moral imagination rather than policy and political feasibility.
7. Challenge the legal system – by offering the necessity defense at trial and other open, honest and transparent means – to grapple with the true questions of fairness, risk and equity confronting our society.
8. Engage everyone, even our enemies and opponents, with openness, tolerance and humor (because kindred spirits are found in surprising places), while remaining implacably opposed to the perverted systems of money, power and control which divide and exploit, and must be replaced if we are to survive.
9. Conduct ourselves with the understanding that no solution is possible without spiritual change and an embrace of ecological principles, though we understand that each individual’s beliefs will differ about about what kind of society is best (or even possible) if we survive.
10. Act for other species, wild things and wild places and the very web of life itself, understanding that climate is merely the gravest of a devastating onslaught of harms to the world.