Divestment Generation Mini Series - Episode 1

This is Episode 1 of the  “Divestment Generation” mini series, a five episode series exploring the 9 year campaign to win fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto! In Episode 1, creators and co-hosts Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva speak with “First Gen” divestment organizers - those who were active during the campaign from its inception in 2012 until 2014, around the time of the People’s Climate March in New York City. Our “First Gen” guests are Stuart Basden, Monica Resendes, and Milan Ilnyckyj. In our song segment, CJTO member Rebecca and participants from CJTO’s September 2022 Orientation lead you in the first two verses of a special adaptation of the movement song  “Which Side Are You On?”, originally by Pete Seeger. Stay tuned for further episodes in the “Divestment Generation” mini series to learn the rest of the song! This mini series emerges from Amanda’s doctoral research with CJTO, a two-year ethnographic community-based participatory research project tentatively entitled “Actualizing Everything: Affective Activism, Effective Politics, and the Future of Climate Justice Organizing in Canada”. Cite as: Harvey-Sánchez, A. & DaSilva, J. (2022). “Divestment Generation Mini Series, First Generation (Ep.1)”. Climate Justice Toronto.

EPISODE RESOURCES
UofT Fossil Fuel Divestment Timeline
Divestment and Beyond, Briarpatch Magazine Article (by Amanda Harvey-Sánchez & Sydney Lang)
Discovering University Worlds
The End of Protest (by Micah White)
Saving Us (by Katharine Hayhoe)

SONG

Adaptation of “Which Side Are You On?” by Pete Seeger 

LYRICS
Which side are you on now?

Which side are you on? (x 2)

Storms Surge and fires burn

but you don’t hear the call

‘Cause developers keep paying you

does it weigh on you at all?

SOCIAL MEDIA & CONTACT INFO
 Amanda Harvey-Sánchez: Twitter, Instagram, email

Julia DaSilva: julia.dasilva713@gmail.com

Climate Justice Toronto (CJTO): Instagram, Twitter 

CJUofT (formerly LeapUofT): Facebook, Twitter, Instagram 

2185 Art Collective: Instagram

CREDITS
Editing: Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Stefan Hegerat 

Original Music: Stefan Hegerat

Hosts: Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva

Guest: Stuart Basden, Monica Resendes, and Milan Ilnyckyj

Singalong: Rebecca and participants at CJTO’s September 2022 Orientation 

Producer: Climate Justice Toronto

Transcript

Episode 1 Transcript

This is climate justice radio 

Amanda: Hello and welcome back to Climate Justice Radio, a podcast by Climate Justice Toronto. Climate Justice Radio is a podcast that covers a wide range of issues connected to climate justice. My name is Amanda and I use she/her pronouns.

Julia: My name is Julia and I use she and her pronouns as well. 

Amanda: And we'll be your host for the episode. 

Julia: You're listening to our divestment generation miniseries, a five episode series exploring the nine year campaign to win fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto. Be sure to check out the intro to the series and linked resources in the show notes for more information on the campaign.

Amanda: Stick around for the end of each episode, where we'll lead you in a new verse to a climate justice organizing song, an important community building exercise in CJTO organizing meetings.

Julia: So in episode one of the series, we're speaking to divestment organizers who were active during the campaign from its inception in 2012 until 2014, around the time of the People's Climate March in New York City. Our guests guests are Stu Basden, Monica Resendes, and Milan Ilnyckyj. Let's have our guests introduce themselves. Stu, can I pass it to you? 

Stu: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, so my name is Stu. I was in Toronto 350, in those first three and a half years, I think. I've also gone on then to come over back to the UK where I'm from, in order to try and bring down the government, was the attempt. I joined Rising Up, which is the group that Extinction Rebellion emerged from, so I'm a co founder of that movement. And then since then, I've moved on a couple of things. I mean, the Defend the Sacred Alliance, and the being the change affinity network. And I'm also a student of process work. And I live currently in Stroud,

Julia: Amazing, and Monica.

Monica: Hi, thanks so much for having me on. I was also one of the first members of the group, for the first couple of years, as I kind of transitioned out from being a student into working and into having kids. I admit, I've been totally absent from organizing for the past six, a little bit over six years. But very, very grateful for those who continue on. Kids mostly has been where I've been focused in the past six years. And I've also–I've been working a bit in transition right now. I was at U of T, transitioned from being a student to staff member there, working as a researcher and program developer in the Education Department. And now I've since moved to New Brunswick, and I am kind of transitioning, still working in the same field with the same people. But we're working on setting up a private charity. So an educational charity out here, again, yeah, I feel that I'm hoping to come back in in this new city or town that I'm living in now with older kids to come back into, you know, what really was very important to me when I was younger, it was climate justice, organizing and environmental organizing. It's been difficult to kind of have little kids and be out of that in this stage because it's so, I feel like especially when you have little ones you're like, I feel like I've had to like go into forced denial a little bit and a little bit of forced like, don't tell me what's happening because it's so terrifying. But I'm so grateful for people that have been keeping up the work and I hope to rejoin now that I can do so a little bit more. So that's where I'm at.

Julia: Yeah, thank you so much for being here today. I'm gonna pass it off to Milan to introduce yourself as well.

Milan: Thank you. My name is Milan Ilnyckyj. I was born in Vancouver in 1983. I first became involved with the group Leadership Initiative for Earth, or LIFE, in 1995. And I did two lifeboat flotillas with them, which were tall ship conferences off the coast of British Columbia. As an undergraduate at UBC, I focused on environmental politics, but not particularly on climate change. And it was doing my MPhil at Oxford, 2005 to 2007, I really started to come to understand the degree of danger associated with climate change and how much action would be necessary to avert it. I joined the federal government to work on climate change policy, and I stayed for five years. But I was frustrated by the disjoint between what needed to be done and what we were doing and as a civil servant was prohibited from taking part in the public debate. So in September 2012, I started a PhD at U of T working on climate change, including in an activist capacity.

Amanda: Great, thank you so much, Stu and Monica and Milan, for being here with us today and giving us a bit of context of how you came to divestment work. Our first question to get us started is it's going to take us a little bit more to current days. But to get us started: last October, President Gertler announced the decision to divest UofT’s fossil fuel holdings. I’m wondering if you can each bring us back to the moment whenever it was, you heard the news, and what was your reaction to the divestment decision?

Monica: Of course, like any victory is a great is a win. But also there was the frustration, like this should have come five years ago, like it's late. So kind of both sides, I think, for me.

Milan: it was certainly a surprise for me, in particular, because I would say it was not the result of ongoing organizing or activist pressure. I think in a way, it's a question that risks confusing us, because there's a danger of bringing memories from late in the campaign to our interpretation of the early campaign. And there's also perhaps a misleading suggestion that the change was the result of campaign activity, which I don't think is particularly the conclusion we reached when we did a debrief on it.

Stu: And so for me, I was delighted by the news, I was a bit wowed, Oh, my goodness, it's, it's happening. And it's happening. We asked for them to divest gradually over five years, and then they decided to do it over one, which is quite an amazing thing. So yeah, there was a massive sense of joy. And for me, I guess there's, I have a sense that, and maybe it's around, we'll get into the theory a little bit, but when you push in one direction, as an activist, you almost automatically create a push back. And so there's now, there's two energies pushing against each other. And it's it often only once the activists have gone, unless the activists, can overwhelm the other side, but once the activists are gone, there can be a push,a sort of an energy flow, that allows the institute to step into the role of the activist. And so I don't think they would have divested without us. I don't know if it's useful to think of it in terms of cause and effect, but almost that by vacating the role of the ethical investor, that we'd created that role as activists, enabled the institute, UofT, to occupy that role and become the ethical, the more ethical investor that it has become today.

Milan: I think the best explanation that we came up with was that they were about to launch a big fundraising campaign, and they expect it to be criticized if they didn't divest beforehand, which demonstrates how not just Toronto 350 or the U of T campaign, but the divestment movement in general has shifted the view of institutional investors and the cultural conversation.

Julia: Could anyone speak to you chose this campaign in particular to work on, how the first core group came together, and just how would you describe the general makeup of the group? Who was involved at the time?

Milan: So Toronto 350, which maybe we'll be getting into in more detail, arose when 350.org, the mothership, as we called it, invited people from their mailing list to attend a Radiohead concert in Toronto, which was the one with the famous stage collapse and the drum technician’s death. So we established Toronto 350 as a UofT club, because it would have the least bureaucracy and kind of annoyance in setting it up. But then eventually, people thought that it was meant to be an all of Toronto organization, and it was too focused on U of T. So, it became not a U of T club, Toronto350. But then the people working on the divestment campaign wanted a group that was U of T focused. So U of T 350 got established, and U of T 350 operated until Gertler rejected divestment in 2016. And then subsequent to that there have been two new divestment organizations, the Leap Manifesto group and the Beyond Divestment group, which I think is mostly faculty, staff and unions.

Stu: So I joined about, I think, three weeks after the group had been founded, there was about five or six of us in the group at the time. So it was, you know, just starting as tiny, or the divestment took our imagination, because it seemed that it was something that was connected to this larger strategy that others had come up with, that 350 was supporting and Go Fossil Free was there. One of the things about climate organizing that I've come across is it seems so big and it's impossible to cover it all. And so there's, there's a paralysis that comes up. I don't know what to do. And divestment was a oh, here's something that we can do. That we can focus on the local, we can focus on some institution, we can use it to raise awareness, and we might be able to win a campaign and in that way, get hundreds of millions of dollars transferred from fossil fuel investments elsewhere. So to me, it was just that sense of okay, here's something in the impossibility of planetary paradigm shift, here’s something that we can do. And we were not going to be alone in it.

Monica: Yeah, I also think it was, it made sense in this fact that, like, especially in the beginning, we were all students. So this was a student-led campaign, we were, you know, playing in the playground of academia, we were going to be engaging with people that were part of the institution that we were part of, like so I feel like it was, it made sense in that, in that way, in terms of where we were, like, very early on, when it was a UofT club. And I think that there was, at least for me, there was a bit of excitement in terms of the organizing model and organizational model of 350 at the time, because in the past, in any sort of volunteering that I had done, it was more like show up, we'll debrief you about what this campaign is aboutm, but you're going to be the one like holding the petition in the parking lot, or, you know, so like, it was a little bit less, you had less agency in terms of organizing your own campaign, creating your own identity. And so for me, it was appealing in the sense that, you know, 350 was this global movement, and you could, you know, use media assets, and you could like build a name, and that sense we were a UofT club, but we were 350, as well. And there was their mandate that they had that we agreed on. And that made sense in terms of the campaign that we wanted to wage. So I think that that model of us being able to take those ideas and to really root it in our local context, and what we could push for in terms of U of T, and really be central players and determining how our group org functioned, what we were able to do, the agency that we had, that was really appealing to me, and it was very different, in a sense of how I've ever been organized before. And I said, you know, it wasn't a full time job. We were still students, and you might have been working on the side too. But this really gave you, I feel, a lot of—it was empowering at the time.

Stu: Yeah, for me, it was that sense of empowerment: here is somewhere that will allow my creativity, and in allowing my creativity unleashed a load of energy, a load of myself that I could now give to something that other organizations previously had just wanted me to play a tiny part. Whereas here something allowed me to use all of my like being, my intelligence, my body, my creativity, all of it, as well.

Amanda: Yeah. So I mean, this, this is another question we were we were curious about, like what made divestment and exciting campaign? Which you've, I think already touched on a lot. But also, I'm wondering if you can expand a bit on what, what the other that you're comparing this to was like. What was the other climate politics scene that was less exciting, and the state of climate politics at that time? Like what is the contrast there that partly made divestment so unique? Well, what else was going on at the time?

Stu: So I'd been involved previously in some, like anti-Monsanto organizing around genetically modified organisms, but that was really the March against Monsanto. And it was show up for a march, and I hadn't really found my way in to help organize that march. And then in my sort of, ah, I don't know how to get involved with this, and I can't do it alone, it's too overwhelming, I signed up to volunteer with with Greenpeace. And but, that meant, that was like Monica said, that was show up on a day, be told the messaging and my role for that day, do the, what they told me, be thanked at the end of the day and then go home. But what do I do in between, the two months in between, there was no space for creativity. So that was my experience.

Milan: I first became aware of 350.org while I was a civil servant around 2009, and I was struck by the ambition of their objective. To stabilize the atmospheric co2 concentration at any level, you have to cut fossil fuel use to zero, which was enormously beyond what the government was considering at the time, and I would say, probably beyond what even a lot of climate activists and 350 supporters realized they were actually calling for. In the summer of 2011, between when I left the federal government and when I started at U of T, I volunteered for 15 days with 350.org in Washington DC, photographing the arrests that they were coordinating outside the White House, which was pretty much a 24 hour a day job because people would start getting arrested every morning into the early afternoon. I’d rush across town to the Anacostia jail to get pictures of people being released. I was volunteering as a photographer. And then every evening there would be a training for the next day's people. And then you spent all night post-processing photos. I remember when we started Toronto 350 In 2012, there were a number of actions and campaigns we considered. There was always an anti-pipeline campaign, which initially focused on Enbridge’s Line 9. We organized an early film screening, and later the much larger Hot Docs screening, but we were also talking about winterizing Toronto homes, providing training in elementary and high schools, holding a public funeral for Arctic sea ice. There was a lot that we had been considering. But given that I was just starting as a UofT student and living on campus at Massey College, with 350 starting to promote divestment through things like Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone article and the Do the Math tour, it just became very obvious that this was a major initiative of 350’s that we were well placed to try and advance.

Julia: Yeah, so just to kind of fill in some, even some more context: fossil fuel divestment wasn't the first divestment campaign that started at UofT. So prior to this, there had been two successful campaigns related to tobacco and South African apartheid. So, could you talk a bit about divestment as a general political strategy with historical precedent there? And I'm wondering if you were drawing on knowledge or insights from those earlier divestment campaigns? And just more broadly, who or what groups were you primarily learning from as you were getting started?

Monica: So my memory about details that far back is pretty fuzzy. But I know that we did, we did a lot of work and a lot of research on, and incorporated quite a bit in terms of those past divestment campaigns in the brief that we created. So we certainly did rely heavily on the precedents, specifically within U of T when we were creating the brief for divestment. Milan or Stu I'm sure will be better with details on this. But just to say yes, of course, that played a huge role. And we were also very cognizant of the fact that anything that we could produce, working at U of T, seeing that it was a major institution with a Canada, one of the you know, institutions with the most money and the most, some of the most prestige in Canada, we knew that there could be a big precedent with this example. So we were also cognizant of what other, also globally, what other groups were doing around the world in terms of creating these briefs or documents to further the campaign. So I'll turn it over to Milan or Stu in terms of like details around tobacco, or apartheid and UofT.

Stu: I mean, I remember that it was repeated often in 350.org, that when Nelson Mandela was released and came to the States, one of the things he did is he thanked the students for running the divestment campaign around apartheid. And that was a massive thing of like, oh, wow, if Nelson Mandela is saying, is thanking the students, well, this stuff is really important. It's gonna work. I remember being really inspired by that. I do think, somewhat cynically, maybe, I think that the University of Toronto developed a policy around divestment as a way to sort of bureaucratize and deflate activism and movements and energy that was calling for them to divest from deeply unethical things.

Milan: I agree, I think the main way in which the prior tobacco and sorry, apartheid divestment campaigns were relevant was in terms of the written policies that U of T created in response, though, ultimately, the experience of the U of T campaign was that those policies don't really have much meaning or enforcement. Initially, the Ad Hoc Committee, which is part of the process set up in those policies, recommended divestment, but it was rejected by the President, which made us feel like given all the requirements of the policy, about how there has to be social injury and the frustration of domestic and international law enforcement, you know, with fossil fuel corporations, we could really tick all the boxes. So we felt like if the university felt they could reject it under their policy, even in that case, then there was no kind of divestment that would actually happen through that policy.

Amanda: Interesting. Yeah. It's, it's it is really fascinating how a prior social movement that had generated so much activism and agency and movement actually led to this kind of stifling and bureaucratization. I'm wondering if you can, like, kind of walk us through that for our listeners of like, what was it even like, first encountering all of these like processes that you had to go through? Like what—what is, can you give us a bit, paint us a bit of a picture of what the bureaucratic channels are that you have to navigate if you're trying to launch a divestment campaign for the very first time, at U of T,  post- apartheid and tobacco when this policy exists. So like, what is the policy? What do you have to do? Like, what was it like for the three of you and others in the campaign, just figuring out what the heck you have to do to try to win divestment?

Stu: What I remember is that they wanted us to write a brief, which turned out to be a not-so-brief 200 page document, where we made the case for it, and then submitted it. And then they would create an ad hoc committee that would consider the brief and then give recommendations to the President. In terms of advice for people who want to start divestment campaigns at U of T, I would say ignore that they've got a policy and go about it a different way. Because they’re clearly set on not using the policy and using it to deflate any kind of change. But having said that, one of the members of group took the brief that we did back to the UK where she was from, Miriam, what was her name, and she spread it around a lot of UK universities. And they jumped on it and use that brief in dozens of divestment campaigns, some of which were successful, which meant that even before U of T divested it meant our contribution, it could have already contributed to hundreds of millions of pounds, being divested. You know, not just that we did it, because there were whole campaigns, all of these universities around the UK, but it was a spin-off effect.

Julia: That's spectacular. I had no idea. 

Stu: Yeah, it was really big when I realized Oh, shit, I've been part of that.

Amanda: Monica, Milan, do you, do you have any memories of those early days of like, what it was like to even interact with, like administrators or try to move things forward? Did you have like a kind of political strategy for how to navigate the bureaucratic channels with the university?

Milan: There's a lot that could be said on the subject. Basically, the three big involved organs of the university. There's the Governing Council, which theoretically has the final say, though the university's policies on divestment had essentially delegated that to the Office of the President, which actually implemented their divestment policy in terms of receiving the brief and setting up the ad hoc committee. The third is the U of T Asset Management Corporation, which is the private wealth management company that manages UofT’s endowment and pension funds. And certainly one of the challenging aspects of the bureaucracy was the ad hoc committee agreed that they would keep whatever UTAM submitted to them secret. So we could never scrutinize or rebut it. I would say that based on the kind of counter-repertoires that university administration's in Canada used against divestment campaigns, delay and secrecy are pretty much their two big tools. And they understand that universities function on a timetable where you set a meeting three months in advance, and then you set the next one, three months after that, which is quite at odds with what students and activists want to do. You have to wait around for a really long time to get an answer from that kind of process.

Julia: Yeah, so as you're like working through that process, how would you describe the main tactics that you used, whether with regards to that bureaucratic structure or not? Could you talk about a tactic or a method that was particularly effective?

Stu: I mean, effective is the question. One of—probably the most effective thing we did was to back away from having a campaign and allow space for the university to step into that, that role of more ethical divest—investment, in that while there was opposition, they would have probably pushed against it, with the might that they had.  In terms of gaining momentum as a group, one of the most effective thing was to organize screenings of the Do the Math documentary, and, and marches, right, these created focal points coming together, mass collaboration as a group that we could really get behind and go out while we're doing something together, and we can all pour our creativity into that. But that's more about sort of movement building stuff. And I'd like, very much question the effectiveness of marches. I don't think that they really accomplish very much in the sort of context that we're now in in this post truth world and neoliberal politician. So it's, it's more about what helped us grow. And I think one of the things as well was around, focus on people, the people that came and organized with us, we went to the pub after meetings most weeks. And that was just to have social time and create, create our organizing around that sense of community. I think in the end, there's a lot of conflict. And that was because we didn't attend to the relationships in the group as much as was demanded of us. And so the conflict came in.

Milan: I think Stu is right to ask effective at achieving what? In my interpretation, there were three strategic objectives of the divestment movement. There was getting institutions to actually move their money. There was delegitimizing the fossil fuel industry in the eyes of the public and decision makers. And there was recruiting and training activists. And throughout these objectives were often in tension. Like what I was just talking about in terms of what activists enjoy versus how the university bureaucratic process functions. If you want to convince the university, you have to do a lot of tedious things that aren't very exciting, which don't do as much for delegitimization, or activist development. So when we're considering effectiveness, we need to think in terms of which of the multiple things the movement was trying to achieve.

Monica: I think what we did do successfully, and again, I don't know whether this is effectively but successfully was at least start like introducing divestment, and delegitimizing the fossil fuel industry and how the university is implicated in all of this through the divestment campaign, and getting engaged with not just the student body, but also the staff and the faculty at U of T, they were signing on to the campaign. So having that discourse, not just at the student level, but at the faculty level, as well, and at the administrative level, if not, you know, outside of the school organization itself. But also having like high profile alumni speak out in favor of the divestment campaign, was something also bringing it into the public discourse. So I think that we were successful at at least engaging those people. I mean, it's funny, because when I think about the beginnings of the group, it was very, like, I noticed, I'll just sometimes idealize things, but it was very, like it was very, there was a lot of camaraderie, it was like we'd have somebody would bring snacks into someone else's basement and the group would be there. And we'd be talking and like, as you said, we go to the pubs after. And then as it grew, you know, and we kind of were forced to formalize certain structures and ways of organizing as a group, I think it brought about some growing pains as well. But I do feel like you know, you, as a young activist, you, you might be excited about participating in certain types of events or activities, but then, you know, you encounter these campaigns and it what, what it might actually mean is helping to write a 200 page brief and making sure the footnotes are proper, and all of this, but it also is engaging when you have a community around you that believes in the work, and you know that it can make an impact. So the people that you're surrounded with I feel like played a huge part in what was energizing, you know, a task that you might not think would be so, you know, make use of a passion could do it, if you were working with a group of people in a context where you knew that you could make some sort of difference or some kind of impact whether it was immediate or long term. And I do think that like the, like any group, when you grow, when you are forced to implement structures, when you have to change the way that you organize, you do go through growing pains, and I'm not sure that those were ever resolved. But perhaps like,  this idea of new generations, I could not speak for second generation TO 350 because I wasn't necessarily involved, so I'm not sure how that transition happened. Yeah. And I see Stu wanting to cut it.

Stu: Yeah, so just thinking about the the objective of 350 of training up activists. I was not an activist. When I started at 350, I was working a full time job. And I started going a couple of hours a week. And it quickly became for me, the center of my week, and I dropped one of my jobs, so I could be in part time and I could focus more and more and, and this was where I cut my activist teeth. And so it—the campaign trained me up, so that when I then came to the UK and got involved in Rising Up and what became Extinction Rebellion, I knew a lot of the processes, I knew what worked, what doesn't. And so I'm one of the success stories of, I was trained up as an activist and that put me in a position where I could become a co founder of Extinction Rebellion, which I think has changed the global situation and narrative around the climate and ecological emergency. So I'd see that, you know, the whole of Extinction Rebellion is somewhat a bit of a spin off from 350. I mean, and in some way, it's not, right, just that it took me on my path through.

Milan: Particularly in the early period of Toronto350, It was very personal-initiative-based, kind of the philosophy was, if you want to do something that's compatible with what we're trying to do, you can go ahead and do it. And we'll help you. So if somebody was keen on setting up a film screening or on taking people to a march, that's pretty much where our early activities came from, from what somebody was willing to dedicate their time to.

PAUSE

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Amanda: Yeah, there, there's so many threads I wanna pick up on here, I'm like, not even sure where to begin, but I'm wondering actually, Monica, if you could, or anyone who feels comfortable, tell us a little more about the growing pains. Cause I think that's something so many activist groups struggle with. Like, could you, could you tell us a bit about what that entailed and how folks worked through that as, as the campaign grew and gained momentum?

Monica: I, I think from like a personal perspective, it seemed that, and I don't think this was like unique to our group, I think this happens generally often in, in groups that grow, it became, uh, necessary for us, I think, and first, like implicitly, I think people were thinking about this and it became something that was brought to the table that we had to reflect on our own internal ways of working with each other and communicating. How we worked together became something that we felt we needed to talk about or put on the table. And I, and I know this was coming towards like the end of when I was really, really actively involved, I just feel that, um, discussions became harder, which is not necessarily negative, it was, it was just sometimes, you know, we were like, well, we're used to working in a certain way. Now if there's a new dynamic or if there's a new influence or power, dynamics have shifted a bit, how do we deal with this? I think that was like a question that I know I had and a, a couple other members, you know, we'd have sidebar conversations, and it was just learning how to, how to deal with this.

Like, are we replicating some of the power dynamics we are opposed to in the actual group? Like, so it's just about human beings communicating with each other and how that impacts the efficacy of what you're trying to do, how that impacts the relationship of the group. So, I mean, those tensions, I didn't feel them at the beginning. We were, again, we were smaller and then we had like two campaigns, so it was a little bit more focused. Um, but I just, I feel like that was some of the growing pains that at least I experienced near the tail end of, of when I was there. And it in no way made me not want to be a part of the group at all, I think it was just what it was. Like, you just have to learn how to, how to, how to function, like effectively and equitably in different kinds of structures with the same and additional folks coming in. That was my experience. 

Stu: One thing that kept coming back to us was how to run our weekly meetings, because when it was five or six of us and we were just like, yeah, let's put on this film screening and I wanna do this other thing, and okay, go for that. There was enough time in two hours to talk about the different agenda items and, and go through them. But when you get bigger than six or seven people, you know, when you get 20 people coming to a meeting, you can't make that two hours useful for all 20 people just by going through a list of agenda points.

And, and that would be a six hour meeting or something. And so that, that was a, a massive growing pain around how do we make it useful when it is volunteer-based, so you can't rely on the people showing up each week to hold certain parts of it or break into breakout groups. Because it's all volunteers. But at the same time, you need to break into breakout groups and they need to be prepared for. How do you do that? And that became a really big thing. 

The other, I mean, sort of growing pain that I saw was the classic activist polarization, I guess, is around being and doing, right. We're activists, so we, we act, we do stuff. But that can mean sometimes that we step over each other and there's, you know, and maybe kick each other a little bit, metaphorically, as we do that. Or just set aside being in good relationship with the other people in the group because, hey, we've got this action that we need to do. We've got this time pressure thing that is coming up and that there being others in the group that are saying, slow down, slow down. We've gotta be, you know, together if we're gonna do this at all.

I, I've learned how classic that is, as an activist sort of polarization. It's almost, it's in the field of activism. We're not relativists, we act, we're activists by identity. Right? And maybe we need to become relativists, just to coin a term there, would be something that would, that would settle or change the dynamic in activist groups or relativist groups so that we're not stepping over each other and so that we're not creating the conflicts that then take up so much energy.

I think a lot of people dropped out of the group because they were just like, why would I come to a tense weekly meeting where a bunch of people dislike each other, uh, and don't really get much done? Right. That's one of the, the struggles of when you get into conflict, it's, suddenly you’re in something and then there's still people who are pushing ahead.

And I was one of those people that's, at various times I was pushing ahead into, no, no, no, but we've gotta get this done, we've gotta get this funding bid in. We've got a march coming up. And, and yet it was, it's not the fastest way to get those things to happen, to just push past the relationship part of it. The faster way is to focus on the relationship, early and often and that's, that's what my learning is from my experience.

Milan: I think you ideally want the, the decision making to be participatory, but also efficient and effective, but also democratic. And those things can be in tension, especially efficiency versus participatory/democratic. And I would say it emerged over time that people really had deeply different philosophies and perspectives on the root causes of climate change and the strategy for addressing it. So much of the group conflict became about trying to identify how we could work together despite those disagreements. 

Julia: Hmm. Yeah, I'm, I'm curious about that. Could you expand a bit on that, Milan? Just, uh, maybe give us a couple of examples about, uh, what those, uh, uh, kind of different philosophies were, um, that were coming into conflict. Or anyone, anyone can jump in.

Stu: Well, it's the one thing for me that came in is around the climate justice framing. When I started organizing, I was not a climate justice activist. I was a climate activist. I wanted, you know, parts per million of carbon dioxide to stabilize and decrease in the atmosphere. And when people started coming into the group talking about intersectionality and, you know, power systems, um, I remember there was one phrase that said building windmills, wind turbines on stolen Indigenous land is building wind turbines on stolen Indigenous land. It's like, oh, but I just thought we just needed more wind turbines.

But now I'm starting to see that there's a connected struggle here, where the fact that this land of so-called Canada is stolen from Indigenous people through genocide, that's connected, and is really important and isn't just a thing of the past, but needs tending to now as part of this campaign or you know, and needs to be acknowledged. And I think that was some of the split then because, the part of me that's just saying, and the part of the group, the people in the group who are saying, no, no, no, but we don't have time for that, we've just gotta build wind type turbines. And then there's the other part and the other part of me that's saying, hang on, but this is really important. We've got history of genocide here. We've got, you know, such massive issues around the destruction of the Indigenous people and cultures and you know, doing, becoming active in sort of allyship or becoming kin with Indigenous people, that in some way becomes where we should put our energy. And so working with Indigenous sovereignty movements becomes, becomes the focus.

Well, but you can only do so much, so you have to pick and choose which direction, you know, or individuals or groups within the group take to put their energy in. Do you, do you put it into windmills or do you put it into Indigenous sovereignty? 

Milan: I think there's also a fundamental question about Indigenous allyship that remains unresolved, which is how do you do it in a way that's not taking advantage of legal rights or political capabilities that Indigenous people have to advance your pre-existing agenda. Like what does it mean to ally to try and achieve a preset set of objectives?

Amanda: Yeah. They're really, I think, really important questions, and I think you're, you're right, they're, they're not entirely resolved or at all resolved in the climate movement even now, so questions that folks were dealing with in 2012 are still very much still relevant today. I think that this kind of prefaces one of the, the big questions we did wanna ask which is like, yeah, this climate justice piece. I mean, we're our, our podcast is hosted by Climate Justice Toronto, right? So for a lot of people who join CJTO, climate justice is the frame, right? But in 2012, and maybe even now, It's not always a dominant frame. There is still that kind of climate activist, climate justice activist divide. So I'm wondering if we could expand on that a little more too, of like, what does that, what does that mean for each of you? Like what is climate justice? If you had to define it, and, and walk us through a little bit of like, when it emerged for you in the divestment movement. Was it a new thing that was emerging towards the end or was it already the assumed framework in the campaign? Like when did that piece kind of come forward for you and, and where did you start to learn about it? Do you remember specific moments or workshops or collaborations, forms of allyship that kind of helped open that, that frame of, of thinking for, for each of you?

Monica: As you were talking, Stu, I was just agreeing with everything that you kind of said. Um, again, like coming into the divestment campaign, my role in activism or, or advocacy was like you said, you, you know, what's Greenpeace doing? How can I join this campaign or go out on the day? And, and so it was very much focused on the issue. So, okay, so we're gonna go and this is about, um, deforestation or this is about this, and it was, you know, sort of more of a myopic issues-based kind of action that I was taking. But growing with the divestment campaign, and again, we started very focused, this is about divestment, this is about U of T, this is what it means, 350 parts per million in the atmosphere, et cetera, et cetera. But going through and just, you know, being in collaboration with other environmental groups in the city, I think was really informative and helpful for us. We started that at, from the very beginning, from our first action. It was, we were partnering with other organizations in the city and just learning about what intersectionality means when you're entering it as a, you know, a white middle class student working on divestment. It was a learning experience and it, and it still is.

And I, I just think that climate justice, when I think about it, you have to, it was through my involvement with Toronto350 that I learned that it is much more than, you know, how, how are we gonna get below three or keep it below 350, like much more complex than that. And it was also, you know, reflecting on how you entered this campaign and this, this world sort of, of of climate justice organizing. And I think that was also reflected in, in, in the growing pains that we had. Like as we became involved in different campaigns and had more voices at the table, we had a board of directors when we were incorporated that we wanted to like ensure that we had a diversity of voices on that board of directors.

And sometimes I, I do remember, um, meetings being sometimes heated, in the sense that like issues such as like civil disobedience, are we, you know, when is the, when is the right time for civil disobedience? When is the right time for, you know, just, um, taking like a deescalated, uh, approach. And so that just the, the whole learning process through being involved with the campaign sort of broadened my understanding of what climate justice means.

And, you know, as Stu was saying, it's, it is about those, it's intersectionality and your placement within it. So I don't really remember like one particular instance, it was throughout the entire few years that I was involved in the campaign. 

Stu: Yeah, so for me, I remember there was a workshop that Ben DW ran for us that really talked about issues around power and place, and that was a, a wake up to belonging. And then as I mentioned, this conference in Halifax where they talked about the wind turbines and the Indigenous land. For me, it's a continual learning. Around the time that Extinction Rebellion was taking off, I did a process work seminar where a woman of African heritage has said, why would I join your climate movement? Even a climate justice movement isn't talking about the level of transition away from a global, industrial destructive system that I need. I'm still gonna be the screwed-over person and people group in whatever kind of transfer that you are asking, uh, or transition of, of society that you are asking in like even the the, the leading climate justice movements that I'm seeing coming out of like white society, I think.

And I think what's happening now in the UK, we've got Just Our Oil and we've go Insulate Britain, which are doing a lot of civil disobedience and they're using a climate justice framework. But I'm also organizing with African heritage elders who are saying, these are dangerous movements that are unconsciously white supremacists, that could either be used as a justification by sort of authoritarian governments to justify a clamp down on this activism, which again, always hits the communities of colour harder than it hits the white communities, or some kind of green savior could come along and say, we will solve your climate issues. We'll do something bigger, but there's gonna have to be an expense. We're gonna have to close the borders. We're gonna have to mine the cobalt in these African nations, or whatever it is.

And there's a sort of a, almost a fundamentalism, a climate fundamentalism like strand in some of these movements. That means, that, that seems to indicate that, that people would go, oh, phew. It's such a relief. You're doing something about carbon. We'd just go ahead with you. Even if you become a really dangerous authoritarian leader in government, and this is, I mean, they're pointing back to Germany in the 1930s, where there was a, you know, a socialist party that came into power and promised great things and promised to transition that country in ways. And then the Nazi party emerged in a, in a way that the German people went along with. And it's a similar sort of danger that is being seen and called out of these movements, even when they're using a climate justice framework. It’s like the work hasn't gone deep enough to see just how racialized as white we are in our white environmental movements. So for me, the work is continuing digging deeper and digging deeper. 

Amanda: Yeah, I'm, I'm glad you brought up the point too, around white supremacy, um, and, and whiteness too. I'm, I'm, I'm wondering too, if, like, I'm less familiar with the European context you're talking about here, Stu, but like, do you, do you see that the climate justice, are you saying that climate justice can still be like co-opted towards white supremacist ends? Is that kind of the argument you're making?

Stu: Yeah, that it's possible to use climate justice framing, well, because it's the, like, the more woke, the more fashionable language to use without having really done the, the work, the sort of inner transformation into seeing, uh, just how differently the, uh, African heritage brothers and sisters and siblings are experienced in the world. And, you know, really getting into the diff— and not just African heritage, but people from different cultures around the world, have these vastly different experiences and, and climate justice doesn't quite ring the bell. 

And we can see this as in terms of the, the climate justice movements in the West are not exciting the communities of color to join them on mass, right? There's still a struggle of like, can we get a few com, you know, people of color involved in these movements. If enough work was being done, then these communities, communities of color, would, would sign up and say, yeah, we're here, we're ready. We've been waiting for you to join this sort of decolonization for hundreds of years. But at the moment, the climate justice movements that are sort of led by white people haven't done enough work and so aren't exciting people from around the majority world. Um, and so people are not joining.

Amanda: I think, I think that's maybe one piece we, we didn't actually directly ask that we maybe could have asked, like at the time, um, that all three of you were involved, and I guess you can kind of see this in the makeup of who is in this podcast right now, but was the group led largely by white people and and do you think that that has changed in groups you're involved with now or, or are you still seeing mostly white people leading even so-called climate justice groups?

Monica: Short answer. I mean, I haven't been involved in organizing for a while, so the last part of that question I can't really address. But in the beginning, yeah, sure. Most of us were, I would say, middle class white kids, like students from U of T or affiliated with U of T somehow. Um, especially near the beginning. When we broadened from a U of T club to a Toronto based club, that changed a bit. I mean, that's, that's just that, that's, most of us were, it was very, it was a very white group at the beginning.

Stu: And Extinction Rebellion similarly was, it was mostly white middle class, with some working class background, with some people from, with various diasporas from around the world. Um, and those people also struggled in the movement and felt gaslit and marginalized and silenced, uh, repeatedly, and, and many of them have dropped out. So yeah, there's certainly work that sort of, those racialized as white need to do if we're gonna come into, um, a, a transcultural, you know, activism, relativism around the world. Which I think we need to do, I think it's the key in many ways of where to go next. And not everyone will agree with you as well. It's just my perspective and it's, you know, it's being called for in various places.

Julia: Yeah, so this is a bit of a pivot in taking us back a bit. One thing I am curious about is when I started getting involved in organizing around like 2016, it was kind of, uh, the, this, this big event in kind of the like recent Toronto activist past had been the People's Climate March. Um, it was something I heard about all the time and I was just wondering if you could tell us a bit more about kind of what that was, um, what that moment was like, and how divestment organizers, uh, were involved.

Stu: I think the People's Climate March kind of came along at a point where we'd submitted the brief, if I'm remembering correctly. And so we were sort of in a waiting period and there was a bit of a lull in the divestment campaign, and at the same time, this was the next big thing that the 350 mothership was pushing, was, hey, in six months time we're gonna have a massive climate march in New York. And so, you know, organize to come down to it. And we organized five coach loads of people from Toronto to go down for those days.

That, yeah, took quite a lot of the organizing capacity, certainly of me and, and certainly, you know, some of the others in the group, were heavily involved in it as well. Others didn't so much. I mean, in some sense it's a massive, pivotal, right, of this was the biggest climate march that has ever happened. And in some senses there was a like, and what did it do? I'm not sure. It showed us that we could organize five coachloads of people to go across a border and I think some, you know, Obama the next week contained something in his speech about climate. We were a bit desperate to find results maybe, um, of, of what was, what was the effects of that beyond sort of activist training and organizing.

Amanda: I, I'm sensing almost like, um, is it, is it disappointment, Stu? Like, um, I don't know, like how has your view on, on the People’s Climate March now versus then changed?

Stu: Yeah, I think the march itself was one of the big changes. I was, I was so massively involved in organizing this march.  It really consumed me for several months because I believed in it. And then afterwards I thought, well, what's the effect? And I, you know, saw the book come out, The End of Protest and well, I've never got round to reading the book, but I said it took the we the message away of like, yeah, look, the protest is diminishing in its effectiveness. And to me it seemed like, okay, we, we organized this march and not much happened.

You know, more people maybe identified with being, you know, part of a climate movement because they attended it, right. But the sort of, what, what's the effect on the world is, is more in sort of the memories of those attending it rather than like massive policy shifts or. Transitions and such. Yeah. So it was, yeah, disappointment and sadness there of like, oh, I put so much of my life into this thing and it, it wasn't that effective in my, in my view.

Milan: I remember the different groups taking part in the march before it started had all arranged themselves along the western edge of Central Park in Manhattan, and the Toronto350 group was about 80% of the way back. And the people at the front of the march started marching at more or less the appointed time, but it took hours just for the people at the back of the march to even start walking. I started with our group 80% of the way back, and with my camera, I made my way all the way to the very front of the march. Then I went all the way to the very back, and I came back to our group and just doing that took seven hours. So it, it was truly enormous. I've seen estimates of about 400,000 people, but, uh, I do agree with Stu. I would say even more when we later organized the March for Jobs Justice in the Climate in Toronto, which was just Toronto, but it was about 10,000 people and really filling the streets. I remember at our next planning meeting we were talking about how there wasn't a single story about it in the Globe and Mail, National Post and Toronto Star, all of which have their offices right here.

I wanted to make like a poster size print of the march to deliver to their Toronto news editor, but nobody else was on board for that. But I think Stu's point is right. There was limited mainstream media coverage, and I think there’s a tendency in the public to just take activism as business as usual. You know, every time there's a WTO meeting, there's gonna be a protest. Every time there's a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting, there'll be a protest. There just isn't a lot of general public interest in these kinds of activist efforts. 

Amanda: Yeah, it's, it's interesting though, because this is all pre-Climate Strike. You know, a lot of folks who maybe listened to this podcast didn't join the climate justice movement until like 2019. So they're coming in post Greta Thunberg. There were these massive protests happening, like, um, you know, much, much earlier. So there's been for a long time a lot of latent interest in something climate-related. But the, the, the crucial question we're all still grappling with is how to actually harness that potential into an effective, um, social movement. But, yeah. Really, really fascinating to get that glimpse from each of you.

Milan: I'd be interested to hear, including from the hosts about what they see as enduring hopeful aspects or bright spots in the movement. Like are there places we’re succeeding or promising things we've started to do?

Julia: Yeah, it's, it's an interesting—I think the, it does really, like hearing kind of, um, Stu and Monica, you, uh, both like talking about the like early days of like that, the way that the, the divestment model, like really empowered a lot of like new organizers, I really get the sense that like, that has, there's like this really kind of diffuse general like, sense of that kind of empowerment in like organizers, like, like at and on campuses and off, now, that doesn't, that isn't relying even on kind of like a model from 350. I don't know that, that gives me a lot of hope. 

Amanda: I was also thinking about something you said earlier, Stu, of like, or maybe it was Monica, I can't remember, of like, sometimes you, you don't know the cause and effect. Like sometimes the effect because it is so diffuse across time and space, sometimes the effect is that Stu became an activist and founded another group in the UK years after he left Toronto 350. And like, that's, that's valuable. That's hopeful. That's, um, to me a source of optimism. Even if the People's Climate March, you know, now with, in your memory is, is maybe a little bit of a disappointment, you, the activist, you didn't give up like, you're trying something else. You just, you try one thing and if it doesn't work, you try something else and you try something else and you try something else until you find something that's gonna stick. And I think that's what gives me hope is that there are still people who haven't given up and who are, um, trying to be creative, trying new approaches. Folks at CJTO are trying new approaches with municipal based climate justice organizing, which is a new area for me. So, yeah, just not being afraid to try a new thing. If the old thing isn't working, just what's the worst that could happen? Like, you fail.

We're already at like at the end of the world here. So in some sense it almost like to me actually makes me braver. Like, it's already so dire, so let's try something. And if we fail, well then we know that was not the most effective approach and we can try the next one. I don't know if that's like, maybe also depressing to say, but for me it's like also a sense of possibility.

Monica: I'm just gonna add too. Sorry. I know, cause I mentioned the example of, you know, going out into the parking lot with a petition and getting people to sign as like a negative, more of a negative experience or disempowering, but also just to try to end on more of a positive note, also, I do remember, um, like our first action that we did was I think on the, the anniversary of the, of the Kalamazoo oil spill and we were on Queen Street in Toronto and we had all of these big oversized images of the oil spill, um, on it, on poster boards on the street. And so I remember that time, specifically that action, having conversations with people that don't, weren't just like in the same mindset as I was, but really a whole broad spectrum of folks that were even, you know, contesting.

But like having those conversations and lengthy conversations on the street with people. Like I remember one gentleman in particular, you know, he had worked in the oil sands and now he was in Toronto and his perspective was completely different. But he spent like 15 minutes just talking with me on the street and I think that those, you know, if knowledge moves person to person or ideas can move person to person, those spaces are super important. And like those little local or community based events that allow those spaces for you to have those kinds of discussions impromptu with with, people that don't think and talk and, and you know, believe exactly like you do, those are still so, so important. And whenever you can have those spaces, wherever you can create those spaces where you can engage with folks, like that is like really, really important. And it does take a lot, you don't need a lot of money to do it. You don't need a lot of people to do it. So, so I also think like some of our, some of those more creative smaller actions that we did. Like Stu, do you remember dressing up the Santa Claus and going around the UofT campus? Like we were all dressed as selves and we were ridiculous. And like, it was fun. It was fun. And you could talk to people one on one that way. And so I think that, yeah, yeah, that sense, you know, you could really do that anytime. Um, and those spaces and those dialogues are really important. And they don't, you know, you know, they don't happen everywhere. So that's on, on the upside, I think that's one thing that can be, you know, that can, any generation from anywhere can do those types of things.

Milan: That's a really good point. One kind of area of work that I want to look into more when I finish the PhD, uh, Katherine Hayhoe has a book out called Saving Us about how you don't need to convince people to adopt your values to convince them that they need to fight climate change. You can show them how their values require them to act too. And if we could find that, that could be transformational. Like right now, the political right in the US, UK and Canada is kind of a monolith of opposition. So if, if there can be a way to split empiricists who are willing to notice that the glaciers are disappearing and the Arctic ice is going from, you know, pure fantasists who believe, who decide what they believe about the world based in their ideology, that split could, could maybe help avoid some of the policy reversals that have become so common, whether you're talking about Kathleen Wynn to Doug Ford in Ontario, or Obama to Trump to Biden in the US, or the Australian carbon tax being implemented and then repealed.

I think we need to work toward building that broader political consensus to entrench and, and defend decarbonization policies when we're able to put them in place. It's, my sense is, um, it's all learning, right? We are the universe coming to know ourselves and everything that we do is, is infinitely woven into all that happens.

And so there isn't failure. There isn't. You know, the least, like we could say, oh, that wasn't as effective as it could have been. But that was what it could have been. And we used our best awareness and body like senses at the time to do what we could. So it is always the best thing, but it’s possible. And like one of the big learnings for me from the divestment campaign is the importance of stepping back. Because I'm seeing so many activists who keep pushing and keep pushing and getting into an almost addictive place with activism that they burn out and then they drop out. Um, and then they can't do activism for years, decades, perhaps the rest of their life. 

And yet this like journey of liberation is a lifelong thing. And it's really important, I believe, to, to step back and to see how, you know, in this divestment campaign, a stepping back didn't mean that they never divested. A stepping back, I, I see it as it enabled a space for the divestment to happen and sometimes the hardest thing is to trust and let go. To trust that if I step back from the little bit of activism I'm doing, that you know, somebody will step in or just the, the stepping back is the right thing to do because we don't know what this larger mystery of life unfolding is, right. We don't know what the effects will be and sometimes, yeah, the best thing that we can do, is to step back.

Milan: In some ways, the U of T reversal is a, uh, it demonstrates the success of 350’s divestment strategy. I would say probably the biggest factor that changed the, in the university institution's position was seeing the changes in their peer schools, you know, seeing commitments from other prominent universities around the world.

So by creating a, a network of campaigns that could validate each other, where, you know, every university has other universities they look up to and if they're taking action, that's a form of pressure that universities are very sensitive to.

Amanda: Well, thank you so much, Monica, Stu, Milan, and my co-host, Julia. It’s been such a pleasure being in conversation with you. I've learned so much from this conversation and I hope our listeners on the podcast have as well. And yeah, I just, I can't wait to see what's next for each of you. Thank you so much.

Rebecca: Hi, this is Rebecca and you've made it to the song segment of Climate Justice Radio, where we teach you how to sing a movement song. Today we're actually going to use a recording from our in-person orientation that happened earlier this year in September. So we're gonna play that shortly, and basically I'm just teaching you as I teach the participants of our orientation how to sing this song.

Before we play that recording, I just wanted to give a bit more context for why we do this as the first episode of this mini series. So we usually sing songs at the end of our Climate Justice Toronto meetings for a few different reasons. The first reason is that it kind of sounds cool and is pretty powerful to bring all of our voices together at once. Another reason is that it's good practice and we usually tend to sing songs at rallies or actions, so when we have a chance to all be together, it's really good to learn new songs and then practice them. And the last reason is that it's really important to connect our current time to past histories and struggles.

So this song in particular, “Which Side Are You On?” was kind of formed around the 1930s during the coal mining organizing, and it became popularized during the civil rights movement. And there's been lots of different interpretations of this song since then, mostly in like folksy tunes. Um, so it's just really important to keep that in mind as you hear this recording and as I'm teaching you this song to connect ourselves to the past.

All right, so without further ado, let's teach you the song.

Okay, so it's gonna be, I'm gonna sing like repeat after me a little bit. I'll like indicate when it's your turn to sing. So the first part goes:

Which side are you on now?

Which side are you on?

Great. Then the second verse goes

Storms surge and fires burn

But you don't hear the call 

Cause developers keep paying you

Does it weigh on you at all?

That sounded pretty good so far, and those were just the first two verses of the song, “Which Side Are You On?” To learn the rest of the song, stay tuned for our future episodes in this mini series and we'll learn it together.

Stay tuned for episode two of the Divestment Generation mini series where we'll be speaking with divestment organizers who were active during the campaign from 2014 until President Gertler’s rejection of divestment in 2016. Climate Justice Radio is brought to you by Climate Justice Toronto. This mini series features original music by Stefan Hagerat and editing by Stefan, Amanda, and Julia.

The creators and co-hosts of the series are Amanda and Julia. The sing along was led by Rebecca and included participants at CJTO'S September New Member orientation. Special thanks to CJRU Radio and 2185 Art Collective for use of their recording space and equipment and to the Discovering University Worlds research team for funding to support editing.

You can find all our socials and a link to sign up to join CJTO at our website, climatejusticeto.com. The transcript for this episode as well as other information and links mentioned in the podcast will be on our episode description. Thanks for tuning in. Remember to hit subscribe to be the first to be notified when you drop a new episode, nd if you've been enjoying this podcast, feel free to leave a friendly review. In solidarity, Climate Justice Radio.