Unveiling the Power of Activism in The Climate Crisis: A Talk with Chuck Collins

What if our individual actions and social movements could change the course of the climate crisis? Today's enthralling conversation with Chuck Collins, a prominent campaigner and author, challenges us to contemplate this very question. He shares his wisdom on the power of activism, the importance of building resilience, and the urgent need to take action in our fight for environmental justice. Through his new novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun, he prompts us to consider the moral and ethical implications of our current climate predicament.

In this conversation, we challenge the unchecked authority of the fossil fuel industry and its impact on our society. We delve into potential forms of resistance like physical disruption, capital divestment, and the exposure of dark money. Our discussion is not just about the global stage, but also about local action. We discuss the commendable sustainability endeavours of Sonoma County, using it as a beacon of hope for other communities. The intricate web of corporate power and money is laid bare as we scrutinize the influence of the Koch Brothers on our political landscape.

Join us as we dig deep into the issues surrounding the climate crisis and the struggle for environmental justice. We navigate through the convoluted realms of corporate power, while also gratifyingly highlighting the power of individuals and communities in this battle. So, tune in as we explore the importance of stepping up where we have agency, taking bold action, and driving towards a more equitable society. Chuck Collins' insights are sure to spark your resolve as we strive towards a greener and fairer future.

Chuck Collins is a campaigner and storyteller who has worked for decades on environmental and economic justice campaigns.  He is the Director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org.  He is cofounder of DivestInvest.org, a global movement to divest from fossil fuels and invest in climate solutions; and trustee of the Post-Carbon Institute and Resilience.org. 

Author of several books on wealth inequality, including most recently, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions -      His first novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun has won high praise. 

If you enjoyed this show, please leave a positive review and share with your friends. Thank you! Osha

Transcript

Osha Hayden: 0:09

As you witness the mounting destruction caused by global warming, while the drilling for fossil fuels continues unchecked. In what ways are you feeling called to act? On our show today, Chuck Collins raises some provocative questions. In his new novel Altar to an Erupting Sun, we will discuss some important moral and ethical questions regarding what brought us to this juncture and what measures we might take. This is Aspire with Osha, art, nature, humanity, and I'm your host, Osha Hayden. It is my great honor to have Chuck Collins here today to talk about his important new novel.

Osha Hayden: 1:00

First, a bit about Chuck Collins. Chuck Collins is a campaigner and storyteller who has worked for decades on environmental and economic justice campaigns. He's the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits Inequality. org. He's the co-founder of DivestInvest. org, a global movement to divest from fossil fuels and invest in climate solutions, and he's trustee of the Post-Carbon Institute and Resilience. org. Author of several books on wealth inequality, including most recently the Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, Alter to an Erupting Sun is his first novel. Welcome to the show, Chuck Collins.

Chuck Collins: 2:03

Hey, thank you for having me, Osha.

Osha Hayden: 2:05

So your work has been focused on income inequality and the growing wealth divide in our country. How is this novel about the climate crisis related to your work on income inequality, or is it?

Chuck Collins: 2:20

Well, I do think it is connected. I think both extreme concentration of wealth and power and the fact that we're locked into a trajectory toward growing ecological distress are connected. In my mind, it's always been connected. I've worked primarily on issues of wealth inequality, but I've also, for 15 years or so, been very attuned to the rising amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the future potential disruption and the challenges that presents for all of us. So it's really very much interconnected for me.

Osha Hayden: 3:02

The timeline of your story begins right now, in 2023, and then it ends in 2030. Why center the novel in today's world rather than in some future time?

Chuck Collins: 3:16

Well, in part because we are living now in the critical decade. Scientists tell us that we're sort of the first generation to fully understand the gravity of the ecological and climate crisis. We're also the last generation to really be able to meaningfully shift the trajectory, and a lot of future fiction and a lot of science fiction looks out 50 or 100 years, but, to be honest, we really don't have that long for humanity to get our act together. So I wanted to tell a story that talks about how people in one community and different places are acting today. In the short term, in the next seven years, what is it we can do to sort of shift the direction of where things are going?

Osha Hayden: 3:59

I think a lot of people will see themselves, perhaps some part of themselves, and these characters, because the timeline is so current. You know, it's our timeline. Although you begin this story with the main character, Rae Kelliher and her death, most of the book explores the arc of her life and the people and experiences that shaped her, which helps explain an otherwise inexplicable act. Can you, tell us a little bit about that backstory?

Chuck Collins: 4:31

Yeah, and it's not a spoiler alert to readers to know that the main character, , lifelong of human rights and environmental activist, very rooted in nonviolent and pacifist traditions, has lots of elders and important people in her life who sort of taught her along the way.

Chuck Collins: 4:53

But at the end of her life, you know, close to 70, she is diagnosed with a terminal illness. She doesn't have long to live, she only has months to live, and she decides to take her own life and, in a shocking act, take the life of the CEO of an oil company and in the process also killing several innocent people. She engages in a shocking action which takes place, as you say, right around now. Then the book leaps ahead seven years to sort of think about, well, what's been the impact of that, the negative blowback, but then goes backwards in time to well, what formed her. And you know, in great religious tradition people talk about formation and you know what are the forces, the individuals, the influences that shape each of us? And that's what this book is about. It's really about a person, how they're formed, not just by elders and books, but about shaped by social movements the movement to stop nuclear power plants, the movement to discourage US intervention in Central America and movement to address climate disruption. So those are all the things that form her.

Osha Hayden: 6:06

Her first protest in the book came when she was eight, and it involved removing wooden stakes that construction workers had laid out to indicate which trees were to be cleared in her beloved forest to make way for a housing development. So what's seeds did that action plant?

Chuck Collins: 6:25

Well, she, you know, she grew up in Southern Ohio in a working class community but she had a wonderful big brother who just took her out into nature and taught her mushrooming and took her to kind of some magical places. And so as teenagers they're walking along and they see the destruction of this forest, they see that it's been marked up for development, and I think a lot of readers can probably relate to this. That you know, if you're over a certain age, you probably grew up in a place that later became a subdivision or later became bulldozed for something that humans were building. And it just sort of viscerally struck Rae and her brother Toby and they engaged in, you could call it a minor act of eco-sabotage. They sort of pulled up the stakes that had been put in place to plow a road and started to cut down ribbons on trees that were destined to be cut down. So in a very early formative level she took an action to stop harmful development to a precious and important ecological place for her.

Osha Hayden: 7:29

Yeah, I think a lot of people can probably relate to that, especially now. So Rae drops out of Amherst University to join a community farm and it was there that she received, I think, her real education, from the likes of Sam Lovejoy, Wally and Juanita Nelson, and Chuck Matthei. And while the protagonist, Rae, is a fictional character, many of the key characters, along with the setting and the pressing issues, are very real. What formative lessons did these luminaries provide for her?

Chuck Collins: 8:06

There's a couple of things going on there. For me, one is the book as an altar, so in a sense recognizing these real people. My hope is that readers, if they're not familiar with them, will learn about their real historical legacy. But what they taught to Rae was the importance of taking a longer view and persisting.

Chuck Collins: 8:29

Sam Lovejoy, who is fortunately still alive, was part of stopping a nuclear power plant in his rural town of Montague, Massachusetts, and he did it through an act of sabotage. He cut the cables on a tower that the nuclear power plant industry had put up in order to get their permits. They had to do some weather monitoring and he knocked the tower over and turned himself into the police and stood trial, eventually was acquitted. But Rae was witness to all of this and I think that what she saw was, first of all, individuals can do bold and important things, but together you can form social movements, and sometimes it just feels like you're not making an impact. But I think what she learned from these elders is you sort of do the work anyway and sometimes it makes an impact, and sometimes you need to take the longer view that maybe you won't win this battle, but maybe you can make bigger changes. So I think it gave her a sense of agency, that she herself could be an actor on history, could make a difference, and that people coming together are what changes history.

Osha Hayden: 9:38

And, like others of her era,Rae went to Nicaragua and El Salvador to volunteer and she was there helping to harvest the cotton crops. But she thought, what good am I really doing? And then a priest told her that the real purpose there was accompaniment. Can you say more about that?

Chuck Collins: 10:01

Yeah, and again during the 1980s, as the US was sort of saber rattling and threatened to invade Nicaragua and was funding right wing death squads in El Salvador, a lot of Americans became engaged and actually went to those countries as kind of expressions of friendship. And this was very formative for Rae. And in one case, as you described, she's literally part of the cotton harvest, picking cotton in Nicaragua. But she says to her friend, a Roman Catholic priest, she says boy, we're terrible pickers, maybe we should have just taken all the money we spent to get here, maybe we should have just sent some doctors. And he turns to her. He says well, our role here is to accompany people, to be witness, to show that we're acting in solidarity and friendship and that our government's actions don't speak for us.

Chuck Collins: 10:59

And I think that's true for a lot of situations where we can't always fix things. Somebody you know maybe struggling with addiction or other family issues. Sometimes we come up against the limits of how can we help. And I think Rae's lesson is well, sometimes you can't just fix it, but you can accompany the person, or in this case, you can accompany the people of Nicaragua in their own journey for liberation. It's not necessarily your role to fix it even, but you want to be present to that and that's an important lesson for her as she goes through life. You can't always fix it, but you can be present and try to do what you can.

Osha Hayden: 11:41

She later became a trainer and leader of the School of the Americas Watch, and your own Institute of Policy Studies lost two members to the School of America's violence, and your group presents the Letelier- Moffitt Human Rights Award in remembrance. And I know, on a previous podcast in July of 2021, I interviewed one of your colleagues, John Kavanaugh, on his book, The Water Defenders, and that features a story of one of the murdered recipients of the award. So defending the earth is really dangerous work. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Chuck Collins: 12:21

Absolutely. I mean defending the earth, standing up for human rights, you can risk your life. One of the water defenders, who was recently mentioned in that book, was abducted and kidnapped in the last month. Oh no, so defenders of the earth are really courageous.

Chuck Collins: 12:41

This is where Rae Kelliher is spending time in El Salvador and she realizes, okay, the US has a training facility at Fort Benning, Georgia, where they train these militaries to do interrogation and torture, and they call it the "School of Torturers, what was called the School of the Americas.

Chuck Collins: 13:04

So she becomes involved in that effort to shut it down. And it becomes personal for some of us, because we learned later that the Chilean hit squad that murdered our colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, Orlando Letelier, was trained at the School of Americas in Georgia. So sometimes we as Americans forget we have so much power in the world and our military and our foreign policy really does sometimes affect who lives and who dies around the world. And so they're really bringing that witness home by protesting and calling for the closure of the School of the Americas. This kind of national embarrassment, or what Rae would say, a national outrage that we're training these military officers. So it's part of her recognizing that we live in an interconnected world and that those of us who have US passports have a lot of responsibility for the power that's wielded in our name.

Osha Hayden: 14:07

Yeah, and a lot of times that power is wielded in our name in order to extract fossil fuels, minerals, et cetera, mining gold. One of the things that is interesting in this book is that the economic meltdown in 2008 inspires Rae to create these mutual aid societies and resilient circles. So what lessons learned there can be applied to the shift that we're going to be seeing as climate disruption and economic collapse become more pronounced?

Chuck Collins: 14:41

Yeah, I think that Rae is somebody who's sort of watching the signs of the times and in the late whatever 2008, 2007, like a lot of people, you could kind of see housing bubble about to burst and the fact that the people were getting access to easy debt and that that led to this economic meltdown. And Rae and others ,looking forward, say, well, we're heading into disruption, we're heading into a disrupted future, both the ecology, food systems, weird weather - those of us in New England just lived through a week of smoke from the Canadian fires coming down - and then that will have economic impacts that will affect and ripple through the economic stability that we often take for granted. So part of Rae's approach was well, we need to help each other out, we need to form mutual aid groups. We can't necessarily wait for government to show up and fix things. We ourselves may need to take care of one another and we should start practicing that.

Chuck Collins: 15:47

And she would even say look, our mutual aid muscles are badly out of shape. We don't know how to ask for help. We don't know how to offer help - not everybody, but often people in the middle class sort of living, this notion that, well, we're all self-sufficient here. All of a sudden that breaks down, and it did break down in that fall of 2009. And people had to look to their neighbors and look to one another, and I think that's, in Ray's view, part of how we're going to prepare for the coming decade as well. We need to know our neighbors and create local economies and provide mutual aid and support to one another when we do hit the bumpy road.

Osha Hayden: 16:33

That reminds me of something we have here in my neighborhood which is called Meet your Neighbors, but it's basically for responding to emergencies, you know, getting to know your neighbors and having everybody on kind of a call list so that we're connected to each other and we can meet and talk about how we'll respond if there's an earthquake or another wildfire. And we've been evacuated twice here for nine or 10 days at a time due to wildfires. So that's in a way kind of like a resilience circle, but there's more formal information about resilience circles and how to form them. It's resiliencecircles. org. Is that right or resilience. org?

Chuck Collins: 17:20

Resilience. org is a great resource and, as you say, it's actually kind of common sense. The first step is knowing your neighbors, knowing what each of you has in terms of needs and tools. It's not unusual for people to live in communities where they literally don't know their neighbors. They don't have a sort of ability to call each other for help. So yeah, meeting neighbors and sort of taking inventory well, let's say, the power goes down for a week, who has a generator? Who has first aid skills? Who can help who? Who has an elderly family member that's going to need some help, or whatever Sort of mapping and knowing. That is just common sense, good neighborliness, but we're going to need to do it for the long term as well. So, forming resilience circles or self-help groups and actually coming out of the pandemic there's a whole lot of mutual aid practice that developed in a lot of communities.

Osha Hayden: 18:20

So, in a way, we're all really in the preparation mode for building our skills and our resilience and getting to know our neighbors and forming networks for what is to come, because it's going to be a pretty bumpy ride.

Chuck Collins: 18:37

Yeah, and part of what was important for me in writing Altar to an Erupting Sun was to look at all the things that people are doing at the local level that that could help us prepare.

Chuck Collins: 18:50

So probably where you live and where I live, people are thinking about relocalizing food systems, not having your calories come from more than a hundred miles away, ideally within five miles, looking at how to create affordable housing and share access to land and housing for food and shelter, welcoming immigrants, welcoming newcomers.

Chuck Collins: 19:13

You know, as as we deal with a disrupted future, some people are gonna have to move and some people are gonna have to make room for others. That's a challenging practice for a lot of people, but that's part of how we prepare and thinking about how we think about the end of our lives as well. You know, Rae Kelliher is a death doula and she really thinks about that. Part of looking and facing the future is also facing our own mortality and thinking about how we want to live as well as how we want to die and how we want to honor ancestors. So all those things are interwoven for her and in her community in southern Vermont. They're trying to put into practice all these ways to build a resilient community To face whatever comes their way.

Osha Hayden: 19:58

Well, let's take a short break and we'll be back in just a moment with more from Chuck Collins and his book, Altar to an Erupting Sun. Do stay tuned. In case you're just joining us, this is Aspire, with Osha, art and nature Humanity, and I'm your host, Osha Hayden. I am here today with Chuck Collins, who is the author of Altar to an Erupting Sun, and we're talking about resilience, the importance of incorporating our attitudes towards death, we're talking about the climate crisis and how we might approach that, and some important questions that we probably need to ask ourselves. Let's talk a little bit about some of the people who influenced this character, Rae: Brian Wilson, Norman Morrison and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. What context does that give to those trying to understand her final act using her final moments of her life, as she was about to die, to blow herself up along with an oil baron as an active protest, and so how do we make sense of that?

Chuck Collins: 21:31

Yeah, one of the Influences on Rae early on is she she meets a man named Brian Wilson, no connection to the singer of the Beach Boys, but Brian Wilson who was a Vietnam vet who spent time in Nicaragua, you know, kind of trying to discourage the US invasion of Nicaragua, and actually lost his legs. A train ran over him as he was trying to block an arms shipment that was sending arms to the Contras in Nicaragua. And Brian is still alive, he's still making it around pretty ably on prosthetic legs. But he introduces Rae to another set of witnesses around the war very early on. She says she he has a picture on his wall of a man named Norman Morrison and he explains that Norman Morrison was a Quaker who in protest of the Vietnam War, self-emulated himself on the steps at the Pentagon, outside the window of Secretary of War, Robert McNamara, and Brian was shipping off to Vietnam and he thought, wow, this is, this guy's a nutter. You kind of his reaction. But after a couple years in Vietnam, Brian is souring to the the mission. He thinks the US role in Vietnam is wrong.

Chuck Collins: 22:54

His job is to go into villages after US bombing raids and see what the impact is. So he sees the impact of bombings on civilians and elders and children. At one point he goes into a village. The village is empty, everybody's fled, but there's a hut and in the hut is an altar, kind of a traditional Vietnamese Remembrance altar, with burning candles still on the table and there are pictures of some of the family members. But on this altar is a picture of Norman Morrison, an American Quaker, whose witness was very like some of the Vietnamese monks who also emulated themselves in protest of the war.

Chuck Collins: 23:35

So that was just a huge impact on Brian and later on Rae. You know what kind of witness would that be? And then she also learns about the work and life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a German theologian, who was a pacifist but during the rise of Hitler became very outspoken against the Nazi regime and in the end joined a unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and was later executed for it. So these are, you know, these are some of the saints and elders in Rae's mind, people who who made tremendous sacrifices. And I think at the end of her life she starts to think well, maybe this is a Bonhoeffer moment in the struggle to defend the earth. When it comes to this fossil fuel industry, she, she believes they are an incarnation of evil, they can't stop themselves and they need to be stopped, and that's sort of how mentally she comes to that, that understanding.

Osha Hayden: 24:44

Right, and I mean it took her a bit to get there, it seems, because her life was one of nonviolence, of being a pacifist, although you know, engaging in some acts to help preserve the earth. But that was a pretty radical departure for her.

Chuck Collins: 25:03

It was a complete departure. Yeah, this is not really in her nature. Her husband, who is named Reggie, reflecting back, says he remembers how she would take him out at night to help the salamanders cross the road, because it was so upsetting to her. Any loss of life was upsetting to her, so for her to take a life would be completely out of her character and out of her 70 year life. And yet at that end of her life, she's becoming more and more upset, but she's physically ill. She knows she's going to die and she's also gotten very steeped in understanding of how powerful the fossil fuel industry is in shaping the trajectory that we're on. So it brings her to that break with her own tradition and past.

Osha Hayden: 25:51

Though some argue that all of us in the global north are responsible for the climate crisis, a proposition that Rae accepted to some degree, she laid primary responsibility on the doorstep of a small number of powerful people and industries that have actively blocked meaningful responses. So can you say more about those who have locked us into this destructive trajectory, and how do we hold them accountable?

Chuck Collins: 26:23

Yeah, we probably still agree that, you know, those of us who live in the United States and in the global north, who live middle class and affluent lifestyles, have a lot of responsibility. We're the big consumers, we're consuming the minerals and resources and the fossil fuels from around the world and we're burning way more carbon than most people. So she would still probably say, yeah, most of us are some degree responsible. But over the last 10 years of her life she kinds of gets a crash course in just how powerful the fossil fuel industry is. She's personally involved in a fight against a pipeline, a fracked gas pipeline that's coming into her Boston neighborhood, and she sees how the game is pretty rigged, that the sort of government regulatory apparatus is entirely captured by the industry. And then she starts to read you know some of the recent reporting on, oh well, Shell and Exxon.

Chuck Collins: 27:22

These corporations actually knew 40, sometimes 50 years ago about the harms that were going to be caused by the burning of greenhouse gases, and yet they chose not to do anything. In fact, they chose to use their power initially to fund sham science and climate change denial. They worked to sow doubt. They worked to block alternatives. So the fact that there's not a train from San Francisco to LA is largely because of the lobbying of the fossil fuel industry to not allow there to be alternatives to fossil fuel and then to delay, to essentially run out the clock.

Chuck Collins: 28:06

And here we are sitting here even as we speak. You know Congress in the last month debated how to raise the debt ceiling. As part of that deal they approved a new pipeline fossil fuel infrastructure project in Virginia. So you know, what Rae was seeing is wow, these folks are incapable of stopping, and it's really a couple dozen corporations and a handful of leaders of those companies who basically, again and again, make decisions to extract more fossil fuel, build new infrastructure and kind of blow us past the carbon and methane limits to the atmosphere. So she starts to believe we're all responsible, but there's some people who are very responsible for locking us into the trajectory that we're on.

Osha Hayden: 29:01

So let me ask you this so, with Rae's murder of what she calls a carbon baron, do you think the moment has passed for nonviolent action alone? I mean, are those who are capable of making the changes necessary the oil barons, etc. and governments, corporations are they impervious to reasoning? I mean, are they beyond reason?

Chuck Collins: 29:27

Well, I think that Rae, given the confluence of her own experience and sort of that sense that her own physical body is under attack, kind of comes to that Bonhoeffer conclusion. Now actually, and you know, the other characters in the book argue that that we're not at that point and you know, I think it's hard to imagine the US Congress and its current formation being able at all to respond to the gravity of the situation, so that that looks kind of like a dead end. But there are other pressure points, there are other places where we have agency that I think are worthy of attempting, and it will require disruption of the fossil fuel industry. You know there are many people who have literally physically tried to stop the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure and I think those struggles will continue and will get more militant as time goes on.

Chuck Collins: 30:25

I do think that there are people who are calling for moving capital, moving banks and investment out of the fossil fuel industry. So cutting off capital to the fossil fuel industry, boycotting the banks. You see a group called Third Act is out there doing that divestment movement, congregations, individuals, foundations around the world, taking capital out of the fossil fuel industry, redirecting it to a clean energy economy. So there are abundant other pressure points, but it's clear we need to focus on the power of the fossil fuel industry. Actually, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse just did a congressional Senate hearing on dark money and the role of the fossil fuel industry in funneling money to climate denier groups and lobbying groups.

Osha Hayden: 31:19

I saw that.

Chuck Collins: 31:20

Yes, and that's exactly what I would call for is like it's time to do kind of a both at the global level the United Nations or other global bodies and in the US we should have tribunals that looks at the influence and corruption of our democracy by this very narrowly focused fossil fuel industry, and we should treat them kind of like narco-traffickers. They should have the same esteemed place in our society as the Sacklers and the Opioid epidemic, and these are folks who profit from the destruction of our habitat and our future and they should be held to account.

Osha Hayden: 31:59

I really believe that in the future, these people will be considered criminals because they have committed crimes against humanity and they are continuing to commit crimes against humanity when they take us to a place where we cannot have a sustainable planet anymore. We've all seen the destruction that is happening around us and the death that is happening and the whales and dolphins that are coming up onto the beaches dead and all of these things, not to depress you, my listeners, but we are seeing these things. So I think we have to really look at things, take another lens in terms of looking at things and holding people accountable who are taking us down a very, very dangerous path, and I love it that Sheldon Whiteh ouse is looking at the dark money. That's the kind of expose we need to go forward from here. Okay, I guess I'm not neutral at all here, but that's okay.

Chuck Collins: 33:09

Howard Zinn would say it's hard to be neutral on a moving train.

Osha Hayden: 33:12

It is, it is, it is.

Chuck Collins: 33:16

But I do think you're right that 20 years from now, if humanity is around to celebrate and some form of humanity will be, most likely, that we'll look back and say, wow, how did we allow that to happen? How did we? There are things each of us can do, and there are places where we have some agency about our own lifestyle and standard of living. But in some ways that becomes a distraction when you realize the folks who are really driving the train to the cliff are kind of impervious to political influence at this point. And so that's where that laser focus on the small group of people who are responsible and should be held to account, and that's where I think, like a model with a narco trafficker, you know, you should we should say well, look, this is criminal. Politicians accepting money from these organizations should be against the law, if it's not already. And we should look at ways to create public authorities to acquire the assets of these fossil fuel companies and stop the drilling, stop the extraction, stop the new construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, when every scientist that is credible is telling us we have to rapidly move, yesterday, to a different, alternative energy system and we have to consume less. We can't consume more, we have to simplify and consume less.

Chuck Collins: 34:46

But you know, some people say well, we're all, you know, we're just like the users and the fossil fuel industries, the dealers. You know, it's really us. That's the problem. Well, the fossil fuel industry has kind of warped the menu, if you will. You know, there's only like three things on the menu coal, gold, gas and oil and a few other other side dishes. In terms of energy policy, if we, if you and I, had known what Exxon and Mobile had known 40 years ago, and if our elected officials had known, we would be in a much better position to face the future than we are now. But they have run out the clock and narrowed the options. So now the option is the choice extinction events or bad catastrophes. Which one do you want? You know, and there are people who are responsible for putting us in this pickle.

Osha Hayden: 35:38

It sort of reminds me of when you're diagnosed with cancer and you have choices you need to make about your treatment, but there are no good choices, right? None of the choices are very good choices because it's all toxic and all can pretty much lead to your death. But one of the things I wanted to bring out is how you have this in your book in terms of the divide that happens between Rae and her brother, Toby later in their life, when Toby gets involved in listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching, Fox News, and they become really separated by a pretty wide divide, which is what's happening in this country right now. So to what degree do you think that the fossil fuel companies have some responsibility for the huge divisions that are happening in our society now?

Chuck Collins: 36:34

Well, it's very interesting. I think they're one of the major players If you actually go back and look at the role of the oil industry in US politics in funding the most extremist white supremacist groups and fueling division and funding conservative media. Fossil fuel, money, oil, gas and big coal all are huge regressive players in our social system. So some of that polarization - and I try to tell the story about Rae and her brother, Toby - because it's so emblematic of so many families that have seen this polarization. You know at one point Reggie, Rae's husband says, "our brother's mind has been occupied by Fox News. And Ray says well, that's how he looks at us too and, to her credit, she tries to stay connected to her brother, even when they're arguing. A lot of families just splinter apart and stop talking to each other, but Ray insists on staying connected to Toby, even when it's not always a happy conversation.

Chuck Collins: 37:38

I think that we think, oh, we're sort of a polarized society, but how did we get there and who funded us? I mean, maybe there's Russian money too that's trying to accent all of our differences. But I think a lot of that's self-inflicted and a lot of that comes from the most regressive political organizing and funders like the Koch brothers. I mean think of the Koch brothers as a big oil and gas industry infrastructure company who've put, organized, a billion dollars to fund right-wing politics in this country, so that polarization isn't just an accident. It's how the oil industry protects its interests.

Osha Hayden: 38:18

There's a significant focus in the book in Altar to an Erupting Sun on changes that are happening in the wider society and on local action, what Rae and Reggie's local Vermont community is doing to be a part of the change. So why focus on local action? I mean, don't we need society-wide systemic change, which is that?

Chuck Collins: 38:48

Yes, yeah, absolutely. But I also think we have to act where we have agency, and oftentimes that's locally. Local food system, growing our own food. Looking at our regional energy where does our energy come from? Can we reduce our regional dependence on fossil fuels? Can we build good transit infrastructure in rural and urban areas? Can we relocalize the economy, produce more of what we need at the local level? There's both stopping the bad, but there's also building the alternatives, and I think we kind of need to work a multitask if you will work on both levels without yielding the larger system change.

Chuck Collins: 39:34

That's a problem. It's just that most of us wake up every day and think, well, where do I have any power to affect that larger political system when our congressional US Congress, is completely, mostly captured by the fossil fuel industry? That doesn't mean give up. It means plug in where you can and work to get people elected who understand the gravity of the climate crisis and are not taking donations from the fossil fuel industry. So there are things we have to work on at the systemic level, but I know each of us, every day, need to do things that are kind of move us forward, that are life affirming and where we get to live our lives the way we want to live. But it's a global matter too, and sometimes realizing we in the United States, at least in the Northern United States may feel the full brunt of climate disruption much later than people in other parts of the world. So our hearts need to be connected across borders as we understand and take action around these problems.

Osha Hayden: 40:38

I have to say that I'm just gonna do a little shout- out here to Sonoma County, because Sonoma County is one of the greenest, most sustainable counties, I think, in the country -definitely in California and that's because of a lot of local action, people really getting involved and making sure that that happens. So there is a huge case to be made for acting at the local level to change things and then become a model for other communities. Those are some places that I look to see how we can make a change that will then perhaps catch on in other areas.

Chuck Collins: 41:19

Yeah, I was just gonna also shout out to Sonoma County that some of the Transition Town Movement and a whole bunch of experiments and resilient living and the Post-Carbon Institute used to be based there and it's exported great ideas to the rest of the US and the world. So those of the people who are toiling at the local level can be exemplars and inspirations to other communities on how to live into the new future that we need to live into.

Osha Hayden: 41:50

I wanted to say, because of this book and the act of Rae Kelliher, taking the life of an oil baron and his family out as she also dies, you want readers to be shocked, right? Even repulsed, by her final act? But not only that, how else do you want readers to engage in this story? I mean, what would Rae be doing today if she were still here among us?

Chuck Collins: 42:20

Well, I think she would say what bold action are each of us called to in defense of Mother Earth, our holy home? Really, that is going to be different for everybody. It's interesting there's a group that's formed called Third Act, which is people over 60, Bill McKibbin and Akai Winwood and others have said look, folks who are older, who don't have their whole lives in front of them, have maybe some sense of some skills and some security and some financial well-being. We should be taking the risks, we should be stepping up, we should be stepping in front of the bulldozers and risking jail time and risking our comfort so that other people can have a chance to have the same life, qualities of life that some of us had. So that's an interesting witness. That's a group saying bold action as you grow older. It's not a young person's problem, it's all of our problem, and some of us are in a very good position to take action.

Chuck Collins: 43:21

People have access to capital and you're in your money or you have a credit card at Chase Bank or whatever. Well, they're one of the biggest investors in fossil fuel infrastructure. Move assets, move money out. The insurance industry is starting to say well, maybe we should stop insuring some of these fossil fuel projects, we'll put pressure on those players. So look wherever there's a pressure point, and that sometimes might mean putting your body out there, direct action or blocking the doorway or refusing to move to the back of the bus. In whatever that means in the context that you're in, it's a time for courageous reflection and action.

Osha Hayden: 44:07

Kind of like the line, the wall of mothers and grandmothers at the protest, the George Floyd protest, who would get right out in front?

Chuck Collins: 44:18

Exactly. The Granny Brigade.

Chuck Collins: 44:20

Yeah, In my community there's a group that, as an alternative to policing, say send in the grandmothers, send in these wise elders, these wise women to solve problems. And I think we're going to see part of what's going to happen is the climate crisis is going to become more severe. We're going to have more hot days and disrupted food systems and smoke and droughts and floods, and that will mean more people waking up. Oh, climate change isn't something 100 years from now or 50 years from now. It's happening now and we will see the failure of our political system. And so I think we'll see an escalation of tactics and that could be everything from like Extinction Rebellion, people saying we're going to be disruptive, you're not going to like it. We're going to your Harvard / Yale football game. We're going to go out on the field and be part of the halftime show Sorry, but you can't ignore this problem anymore.

Chuck Collins: 45:27

And we're going to see Norman Morrison witnesses. He saw a man named Wynne Bruce last Earth Day, two years ago, immolated himself on the steps of the Supreme Court over the court's rulings on climate change. That kind of witness around the world is not unusual when a situation is grave and serious and we may see additional eco sabotage. There's a new popular film out called how to blow up a pipeline, which is a fictional film about eight young people who come together to blow up a pipeline in Texas. And again, I'm not, you or I are not advocating this. I think we should just understand, when a system is not responding to the overwhelming majority of people, it's going to lead to desperate action and militant action, and so I think we're going to see the pressure growing, given how the fossil fuel industry basically gets its way right up to this very moment as you and I are talking.

Osha Hayden: 46:34

And I'm going to put some links in the show notes here for the podcast on resilience. org some information about forming resilient circles, divestinvest. org, which really can help you to figure out how to divest from fossil fuels and invest in the climate, and Institute for Policy Studies, where you work, the Post-Carbon Institute. There are a number of links that I'm going to load up at the bottom of the podcast here so that if people want to go and have a look and of course it will also be a link to your website, chuck, it's chuckcollinswrite s. com, and they'll be able to go there and look at your book and some of the other work that you've been doing for, wow, pretty much your whole life, and kudos for that, by the way. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Osha Hayden: 47:31

So I'll put all these links in there and it's going to be a rich little feast of places you can go to get some ideas about how you might want to act to help move the trajectory into a better direction at this point. So I want to thank you so much for coming on this show today, Chuck.

Chuck Collins: 47:52

Thank you for having this conversation and I thank your listeners for listening and being open to the conversation.

Osha Hayden: 47:59

Yeah. So, to my listeners, I hope we've given you some juicy things to think about and perhaps some different perspectives, and so, as you go forth, have an inspiring week and live your joy. See you next time.