Strike Back for the Climate

Text for a flyer being handed out today at #ClimateStrike actions from an autonomous anti-capitalist position.

Download and Print Flyer HERE

The Storm is Here

The world stands on the brink. Temperatures rise, storms batter coasts, fires sweep the hills, and plastic rains down invisibly. Even the optimistic promise a future of hardship: food scarcity, water shortages, extreme weather, economic crash and social turbulence. Funerals for glaciers. Mass extinction as the ruling class rains destruction on the planet like a meteor. Our generation comes of age in a time when every certainty is evaporating. Anxiety is baseline. Grief, what we all bear. We ache for what is already lost, for how much more we stand to lose. Why demand the government save us, when they’re the ones who have consigned the planet to oblivion in the first place? Let’s be real. We are the only ones who can get us through this.

World’s Worth It

We know what their vision of the future looks like. Migrants detained at borders, the remains of the Amazon set on fire, a remorseless economy swallowing the last shreds of nature. If they get their way, we’ll blow past 2°C like it was nothing. We’re here to put a wrench in their plans. We know what they offer us – and we refuse their blackmail. We refuse their world where money decides who has a say in the future, where the vulnerable are sacrificed to the rising seas. We refuse their world where we watch helplessly as species disappear forever, where our last best hope is to blot out the sun. Today we announce our rebellion and together declare: the world’s worth defending, the future worth fighting for. The battle won’t be easy, but the stakes are clear as can be. It’s the earth or nothing.

Fight for the Future

They say we have ten years left to alter the trajectory of the climate, a single decade to decide the fate of the planet. There can be no more waiting. This week we must change the course of history. Every sign points to the coming revolution. Our time is not one of apathy or resignation, but an outpouring of dignity and rage. From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to Standing Rock, we know what popular revolt looks like. From Paris to San Juan to Hong Kong, we know what it means to challenge those who rule. We need a mass movement of scale and duration, of ingenuity and determination. We need everyone who still believes in LIFE to fight for its future. We are already millions. Now we must discover our power to act together.

Dare to Seize Power

A rebellion must know where to set its sights. It’s no longer enough to march, to demonstrate, to demand. We have to strike where power truly resides: not the halls of government, but in the very means through which society functions. Financial hubs and datacenters, energy plants and powerlines, interstates and ports. All the infrastructure that keeps capitalism going while setting the earth ablaze. All the systems that spell collective doom if we allow them to keep running a single day more. Our rebellion is on the right track. We must physically disrupt the concentrations and flows of power around us, wherever we find ourselves. If we stand together, we can shutter every energy company’s HQ, block every major intersection, occupy every fossil fuel plant. We can take the bridges, overrun the airports, and turn the valves. We can shut the whole system down.

Lights out, all out!

Imagine what we’re capable of. Thousands take over downtowns and turn them into 24/7 festivals, celebrating life in all its vibrant forms. In the  suburbs, abandoned shopping malls become community hubs and rooftop solar farms. In the countryside, neighbors band together to stop  pipelines and welcome defecting workers into thriving encampments. Assemblies gather and decide how to feed people, how to heal the land. With capitalism out of the equation, there’s enough food, water, shelter, and medicine for everyone. It turns out abundance is a mindset as much as material fact. Resiliency is in our relations as much as our resources. In the breach between eras, new possibilities of collective life are discovered. Happiness is only a strike away.