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Photo: Simon LiSometimes a decision forces you to think deeply about what you believe in and how you act on those beliefs. It happened to me when climate protection leader Bill McKibben asked me to sign a letter calling for civil disobedience to block the building of a pipeline designed to carry tar-sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. Opposing the pipeline might strain ties with unions that I’ve worked with and been part of for my whole adult life. And yet the pipeline might be a tipping point that could hurtle us into a desperate acceleration of climate change. Amid these conflicting pulls, what should I do? Having lived at the confluence of trade unionism and environmentalism, I struggled with the right course of action. What has my life’s work meant?

I was born into a union family. My dad worked in the steel mills in Lorain, Ohio and was a founder of the Steelworkers Union. My mom had been an organizer in the Clothing Workers Union in Cincinnati. I grew up near Cleveland and I walked the picket line with my dad during the 1959 steel strike.

My own trade union life began the day I walked through the factory doors at Capital Products Aluminum Corporation in Mechanicsburg, Pa.,  and I joined the United Steelworkers of America at age 17. That summer I engaged in my first strike. The following year, Hurricane Agnes pounded the mid-Atlantic states; central Pennsylvania was devastated, and the mill was flooded out. So I joined the Laborers’ Union and went to work on construction.

That’s where I first learned something about working on pipelines. I worked building the Texas-Eastern pipeline as it wound its way through the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania. Small teams of operating engineers, pipefitters, and laborers traveled across the state doing work we enjoyed and that we understood to be useful and important. (We didn’t know then what we know now.) It was a great job and I was a member of a great union, Laborers’ Local 158. We formed friendships and shared a solidarity that touched us all deeply.

On another job building a railroad bridge across the Susquehanna River, a buddy of mine got fired by a hubris-filled college kid. (The kid’s dad owned the construction company, so he had been made chief foreman over all laborers.) We struck and shut the job down. The operating engineers, carpenters, and ironworkers supported us. Without that support we would have lost, but we won and my brother laborer was hired back. 

These jobs helped me pay my way through college. They also taught me a lot about solidarity and trade unionism, and helped launch me on a lifelong pursuit of workers rights and jobs with justice, first as a local leader and eventually as an official with the AFL-CIO. 

I grew up along the banks of Lake Erie and I learned at a tender age about the possibility of human threats to the environment. I was there when they posted the signs telling us to stop swimming in the lake, and to stop eating the fish. I’d already eaten hundreds of Lake Erie yellow perch and swallowed more of that lake water than I care to think about. 

I also learned early about the potential conflict between protecting labor and protecting the environment. In the 1970s I worked on the concrete crew during the construction of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and my local union put out a bumper sticker that read “Hungry and Out of Work? Eat an Environmentalist.”

Since then I’ve devoted much of my life trying to bridge the gap between the labor and environmental movements. I’ve argued that both share a common interest in combining economic and social sustainability with environmental sustainability. I’ve argued that “jobs vs. the environment” is a false choice.

Climate catastrophe

During my years with the AFL-CIO, I served on the UN commission on global warming from its inception in the mid-1980s thru the ’90′s. I worked for many years to persuade the American labor movement to recognize the threat of global warming and to become a leader in addressing it. I witnessed how the labor movement — and our country — ignored the science and opposed efforts to reverse global warming. I’m glad that’s been changing — since that time, much of the country, including much of the labor movement, has recognized the reality of global warming and supported green jobs that help reduce it.

We’ve wasted more than two decades that could have been spent dealing with the problem. We’ve already warmed the Earth by 1.8 degrees F, causing floods, heat waves, forest fires, loss of food production, spikes in food prices, stronger storms, the loss of glaciers, arctic ice, permafrost, and snow-pack, and much more. 

The best science tells us that the carbon we’ve already put in the atmosphere will raise global temperatures by almost 4 degrees F from pre-industrial levels, even if we stop putting carbon in the atmosphere today. And this is very, very bad news for the planet and its people. We can, however, stop the increase from going to 7 degrees F, which would mean massive ecosystem collapse — if we radically cut the carbon we are putting in the atmosphere.

The Keystone XL dilemma

Bill McKibben’s letter pointed out that burning the recoverable oil in the Alberta tar sands by itself would raise the carbon in the atmosphere by 200 parts per million (ppm). It wasn’t hard to figure out that this would increase the 390 ppm carbon in the atmosphere today by more than half. Indeed, it would increase the gap between the current level and the safe level of 350 ppm fivefold. 

The letter called the pipeline “a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” It quoted the leading NASA climate change specialist Jim Hansen saying that tar sands “must be left in the ground.” Indeed, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over” for a viable planet.

It sounded like a pretty compelling case. But there was another letter that made the question harder for me. It was a letter from the General Presidents of the Teamsters, Plumbers, Operating Engineers, and Laborers unions, the last of which helped give me my start as a kid. Their letter enthusiastically supported the Keystone XL project, saying it will “pave a path to better days and raise the standard of living for working men and women in the construction, manufacturing, and transportation industries.” It will allow “the American worker” to “get back to the task of strengthening their families and the communities they live in.” I’ve dedicated 35 years of my life to those goals.

Their position reflects the absolutely critical need for jobs. The Keystone Pipeline will provide a lot of good jobs. (A company-financed study claims
it will create 118,000 jobs, though a government environmental impact statement says it will create 5,000 to 6,000, and only for the three-year construction period. Many would be well-paying, middle-class union jobs — the kind with health care and other benefits. And that at a time when the official unemployment rate is close to 10 percent and 2 million construction workers — one in five — are out of work.

A just transition to sustainability

In the long run, “jobs vs. the environment” is a false choice.  But the Keystone Pipeline reminds us of the painful reality that often, in our day-to-day lives, there are jobs-vs.-environment choices with real immediate impacts.

I’ve often pleaded with my environmental and sustainability friends to understand that for generations, for me and my family — indeed, for all working people — sustainability starts at the kitchen table. Every day we seek decent work so we can provide food, housing, and health care for our families and an education for our children. Any job that does that helps provide for our sustainability. But what are we to do if those jobs are also building an unsustainable future for ourselves and our children? 

There is a solution to this dilemma: Many of the jobs I had during the years I worked construction involved the kind of work that we need to make the transition to a low-carbon economy, from railroad repair to bridge construction. Today, such work can be a central part of building a new energy system, saving our water infrastructure, building a new transportation system, and constructing sustainable cities — everything that’s necessary to halt our destruction of the climate. We need to ensure that the transition to an economy that protects the climate is also a just transition that protects the livelihoods of those who, through no fault of their own, may have to pay the price of change.

The labor movement has become an enthusiastic supporter of “green jobs.” But by and large, it also continues to support jobs that will lead to climate catastrophe. There are many things that we should be building — but the Keystone XL Pipeline is not one of them. Every dollar we invest in fossil fuels is not only a dollar that goes to intensify the climate crisis; it is also a dollar that we should instead be spending for the transition to renewable energy.  

Labor has been critical of corporate short-term thinking — maximizing profits on a quarterly basis and not looking to the future. Yet labor is guilty of similar short-term thinking when it comes to decisions related to climate and sustainability. To be fair, the job of today’s labor leader is beyond difficult: He or she has to balance the needs of workers who pay dues today with those of the future, and people pay dues to unions to protect their jobs. But the truth is that this short-term thinking is bad for the planet and its people, and equally bad for the future of the labor movement. As we build a labor movement for the 21^st century, our self-interest is best served by building a labor movement that is a part of the sustainability movement.

Recently, West Virginians held a march on Blair Mountain to “abolish mountaintop removal,” but also to “strengthen labor rights” and invest in “sustainable job creation for all Appalachian communities.” I hope those who march to halt the Keystone XL pipeline will also march for labor rights and sustainable — and sustaining — jobs.

My decision

My mom and dad were proud of their contribution to building the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), one of the two predecessors to today’s AFL-CIO. They often referred to the CIO not by its cumbersome real title, but as “Community in Operation.” That broad vision of trade unionism as a force for social good — a force for the betterment of all people — was a strong part of labor’s past, and is what continues to motivate me today.

I believe in worker solidarity. I believe that today we must expand that solidarity to human solidarity. We must help each other protect and preserve this jewel floating in space – none other like it that we know of.

The famous labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” comes from the coal-mining organizing battles of “Bloody Harlan” County, Ky. The question then was, are you on the side of the bosses and the sherriff, or the side of the workers? That’s still crucial. But I believe that today, we have to expand our worker solidarity to human solidarity. That means acting together to halt climate catastrophe for all of us. 

What I will tell my friends

When Bill McKibben asked me to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, I was concerned what might happen if I did. I might look like an enemy of every worker who might gain a much-needed pipeline job — denying them the same opportunity that let me support myself and pay for my own education. I also feared it would strain my ties with some of the unions supporting the pipeline. But if I was silent, wouldn’t my silence equal consent to something I knew would be devastating to the planet, to its people, and to the labor movement itself? I was talking the talk, but would I walk the walk?

I’ve decided to walk the walk. And here is what I will tell my friends in the labor movement about why I am doing it: We can’t build our future by destroying our future. If labor is to have a sustainable future, it must be as a central player in the sustainability movement. We must fight for jobs for our members that will truly “pave the way for better days,” rather than destroying their and their children’s futures. Support deep reductions in the burning of fossil fuels, support the measures climate science says are necessary to protect people and the planet, and rebuild the labor movement around the jobs of the future.

To those who might get a job on the pipeline I say: We’re blocking the pipeline to save your future too. But I know I won’t be able to look you in the eyes if I and those I am marching with don’t fight to make sure there are decent jobs for you and your kids by building the kind of world we need.

To my friends in the climate protection, environmental, and sustainability movements I say: We can’t let climate protection make victims of the workers who happen to be in the way of changes that are necessary to protect the climate. Work with us in the labor movement to better understand that sustainability starts at the kitchen table. Support full employment policies, support the Blue-Green Alliance’s Jobs 21 campaign, support the AFL-CIO’s program for full employment, and fight for a just transition that protects the well-being of workers and communities who may be hurt by side effects of climate protection policies.

And to myself I say: I am marching not against the labor movement, but for the labor movement, for the labor movement to be what I have always, in my heart, believed it to be. To be the “community in operation” my parents fought for; the labor movement I have spent my life building; the labor movement that makes it possible for working people to fight for what they really need. 

The time to begin drastic reductions in carbon emissions is past — we haven’t a moment to waste. So, if not now, when? If not this issue, what issue?

See related slideshowThroughout history, artists have joined forces with political movements to battle injustice and demand a better and more beautiful world. Picasso’s “Guernica” captured the horrors of the German bombing of civilians in 1937. “Solidarity Forever,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “Give Peace a Chance” expressed the optimism and power of the labor, civil rights, and peace movements. Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” embodied the utopian fervor of the French Revolution. Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” silkscreen during the 2008 election captured America’s yearning for a more visionary politics.

Great upheavals demand great art. And now humanity faces the gravest of threats: climate change. The climate clock ticks ominously onward, but thus far we have been unable to marshal what Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein describe as the “bodies, passion, and creativity” required to avert impending economic and environmental disaster.

But passion comes from the heart, not the head, and climate activists have largely been targeting people’s upper organ, pleading their case with statistics, policy platforms, and poll-driven messaging. Maybe it’s time to aim lower. McKibben, the founder of 350.org, is one of the few climate activists thinking seriously about the relationship between art, activism and social change. He views artists as “antibodies of the cultural bloodstream” and key to social movement vitality:

[Artists] sense trouble early, and rally to isolate and expose and defeat it, to bring to bear the human power for love and beauty and meaning against the worst results of carelessness and greed and stupidity. So when art both of great worth, and in great quantities, begins to cluster around an issue, it means that civilization has identified it finally as a threat. Artists and scientists perform this function most reliably; politicians are a lagging indicator.

In its finest moments, art reveals our shared experience of pain and struggle, letting us know we are not alone. As Theodore Dreiser observed in 1917, “Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.” It has the ability to transform politics from a dry to a celebratory affair, using tools of laughter, sexuality, and beauty to coax people to cultural events where they experience, often for the first time, the power of social solidarity and political awakening. Art can help us digest and make sense of what is happening in our world — a process essential for spurring political action.

Deployed carefully, art can also provide a potent way to persuade troubled peoples that another world is possible. It appeals to our better nature, reminding us that love and joy are more powerful than hatred and violence. During times of upheaval, it appeals to our hearts, replaces fear with hope and determination, encouraging us to seek out new visionary ways to organize society.

In this 350 EARTH installation, 3,000 people in New Delhi formed an enormous elephant threatened by rising seas — a plea to world leaders not to ignore the “elephant in the room.” Credit: Daniel DancerBut our activist culture has largely forgotten how to fight political battles with cultural tools. At protest after protest, we haul out the same exhausted puppets, chants, and songs. Our slogans and imagery are flat, prescriptive, and literal rather than poetic and inspirational. Compare the “Green Jobs Now!” placards at climate rallies to the iconic “I Am a Man” signs of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. One demands policy action; the other beautifully evokes hundreds of years of struggle for racial equality and justice.

Sectors of the climate movement are trying to cure our cultural amnesia. 350.org has begun actively promoting and supporting climate change art, even retaining an official artist-in-residence on staff to coordinate climate art projects. Land artists around the world — who in the ’60s and ’70s sculpted landscapes to protest the artificiality and commercialization of art — have become prominent “messengers” of the climate movement, organizing massive land art projects in dozens of counties to communicate 350.org’s goals in Copenhagen and Cancun.

Other artists have begun to respond. There are now songs like “Melting Ice” by 10-year-old Lil Peppi, the “King of Eco-Rap”; or Jill Sobule’s satirical “Happy Song About Global Warming.” Using live collaborative online tools, art students in Colombia and Canada have produced a powerful stop-action video based on their personal reflections about the climate crisis:

At the same time, there is a new generation of artists who represent a revival of the arts and crafts movement of the early 20th century, but with a modern twist. In the face of the great upheavals of globalization and climate change, as well as the hyper-commercialization of the conceptual “high arts,” this “green arts movement” dedicates itself to creating art that is sustainable, handcrafted, and produced locally.

Rejected by much of the commercial art world, these artists sell their work at farmers’ markets, in abandoned city lots, and increasingly on DIY online venues like Etsy.com. They are less interested in the traditional art forms of painting, sculpture, and the like, and instead are creating a new form of political art that embeds the ethic of sustainability into every object they create. Obsessed with function, these artists are hell-bent on proving that building a localized, sustainable economy and culture is not just necessary, but possible. While others use imagery, metaphor, and rhyme to raise awareness about the climate crisis, these new green artists are living proof that we can build a more just and beautiful world.

This new generation includes artists like the Haitian designer Catherine Charlot, who handmakes dresses sewn from recycled umbrellas; Canadian designer Nolan Herbut, who uses discarded computer keyboards for his lighting designs; and New York artist Stephen Shaheen, who recently constructed a park bench out of 5,000 discarded MetroCards. Mike Thompson’s “Blood Lamp,” which is powered by a single drop of human blood, represents the dynamic outer fringes of the eco-friendly avant-garde:

Green artists are even setting up their studios in kitchens around the country. Our organization, the CultureWorks Collective, recently nominated sushi chef Bun Lai as our “Artist of the Month” because he embodies this new zeitgeist of sustainability. Lai’s dishes swirl with environmental awareness, economic justice, and mouth-watering sensation. He describes one dish, called Kiribati Sashimi, this way:

Kiribati Sashimi incorporates Kiribati sea salt. I use Szechuan pepper corns in my recipe, which creates an alternately hot and cold mouth sensation. I created it to raise awareness about global warming. At only eight to twelve feet above sea level, Kiribati may become the first nation to be engulfed by the ocean due to climate change. It is also one of the world’s poorest countries and is barely an afterthought in most people’s minds. I know my sea salt purchase is hardly an economic stimulus package for Kiribati but I am hoping that the awareness that my menu creates may be worth something in some unforeseen tangential way.

Bun Lai’s “Kiribati Sashimi.”Photo: Jean Paul VellottiThis new, dynamic generation of green artists see themselves as much more than a community of artists. They envision themselves as members of a growing public sphere and cultural economy supporting those who grow or make what they sell. They represent a generation of organic farmers, green designers, activist musicians, and others who have fully merged their lives, their activism, and their art into one identity.

If the climate movement is serious about crafting new organizing strategies around passion and creativity, we need to provide artists with resources and weave their work into our organizing strategies — rather than simply assigning them bit parts at political rallies. We need artists as movement strategists and tacticians. We need to seek out the new generation of green artisans and merge their culture of sustainability with the climate movement’s energy and militant activism.

At the same time, much of the arts industry remains oblivious to the climate crisis, let alone its civic duty to act. Humanity faces an existential threat while music and film producers dump billions into projects of little or no social value. Gallery and museum owners continue to view art through the narrow lens of conceptualism, marked by its rejection of craftmanship, aesthetics, and social use. In the face of mounting threats — ranging from worsening droughts and the northward march of climate-linked diseases to climbing food prices and rising seas — it’s time for the arts industry to do some serious soul-searching about whether it wants to sit this crisis out.

Let’s face it: As the world burns, the climate movement struggles to make its case. Climate legislation is dead in the Congress; global agreements seem less likely with each passing day. In 2008, 66 percent of Americans viewed climate change as a major threat; by March 2011, only 51 percent of the public was concerned. Millions of promised climate-reducing green jobs have not materialized.

We are mired in dark and cynical times, and left yearning for a ray of hope and vision. Artists see the world in a different light, a light we need now more than ever.

So we call on our fellow artists to join the climate movement and our fellow climate activists to embrace activist art. For, as the Bible says (Proverbs 29:18), “Where there is no vision, the people perish” — and so does the planet.

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To learn more about the green arts movement, read the “Green Art Minifesto.”

Also check out “Art in a changing climate,” a Grist special series.

A billion people participate in Earth Day events, making it the largest secular civic event in the world. But when it was founded in 1970, according to Earth Day’s first national coordinator Denis Hayes, “Without the UAW, the first Earth Day would have likely flopped!”

Less than a week after he first announced the idea for Earth Day, Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin presented his proposal to the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO. Walter Reuther, president of the UAW, enthusiastically donated $2,000 to help kick the effort off — to be followed by much more.  Hayes recalls, “The UAW was by far the largest contributor to the first Earth Day, and its support went beyond the merely financial. It printed and mailed all our materials at its expense — even those critical of pollution-belching cars. Its organizers turned out workers in every city where it has a presence. And, of course, Walter then endorsed the Clear Air Act that the Big Four were doing their damnedest to kill or gut.”

Some people may be surprised to learn that a labor union played such a significant role in the emergence of the modern environmental movement.  When they think of organized labor, they think of things like support for coal and nuclear power plants and opposition to auto emissions standards.

When it comes to the environment, organized labor has two hearts beating within a single breast. On the one hand, the millions of union members are people and citizens like everybody else, threatened by air pollution and water pollution and the devastating consequences of climate change. On the other hand, unions are responsible for protecting the jobs of their members, and efforts to protect the environment sometimes may threaten workers’ jobs. First as a working-class kid and then as a labor official, I’ve been dealing with the two sides of this question my whole life.

I was raised in Cleveland. It was a union town, and both my parents were trade unionists. We were going to the union hall all the time; that’s where the picnics and social functions and concerts happened.

At the same time, we kids were swimming in Lake Erie, and I watched them post the signs saying, “Don’t swim in the lake.” We were catching 50 to 100 perch every weekend and eating them until they posted the signs, “Don’t eat the perch.”

So we experienced this switch from where the smoke coming out of the steel mill chimneys meant bread on the table to a realization that we were messing up the lake that we loved and enjoyed.

I was there when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, and that was an alarming wakeup call. The burning river and the dying lake led the first Earth Day in Cleveland to be a monumental event. According to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, an estimated 500,000 elementary, junior-high, high-school, and college students took part in campus teach-ins, litter cleanups, and tree plantings. More than 1,000 Cleveland State University students and faculty staged a “death march” from the campus to the banks of the Cuyahoga River.  The headline in the Cleveland Press read, “Hippies and Housewives Unite to Protest What Man is Doing to Earth.”

After high school, I went to work in central Pennsylvania in an aluminum mill, and when the mill was flooded out by Hurricane Agnes, I got a job doing flood cleanup at Three Mile Island, which was under construction at the time, and joined the laborers union. That really got me involved in the labor movement. At 19 or 20, I became a full-time shop steward on safety and health issues. 

The environmental movement was protesting the construction of the power plant.

My local union had a bumper sticker that said, “Hungry and out of work? Eat an environmentalist!” I objected, and I went to the local and said, “You know, they’re not really our enemies. They’re protesting the construction of this power plant because it wasn’t built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. And the airport’s right there. So it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”

I’ve been making the same kind of argument ever since.