The Historical Roots of the Occupy Movement

Posted in The Strategist on November 25th, 2011

George Santayana famously observed: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”. I’ve thought about those good words during much of the Occupy movement because it seems to me that too many people cannot remember the events that brought us to this moment. And so it is that the protestors have been criticized for lacking a coherent narrative, and moved out of the spaces that were their metaphorical beachhead. The forces of the ruling empire want us to believe that the protest movement is in fact not that at all; it is nothing more than a disorganized group of disaffected youth and any pretentions to a movement are misguided. I think not. The Occupy movement may well be characterized as an international protest directed at economic and social inequality, but I see it as something more – as a profound meditation on how human society lives, works and plays and how we came to this hinge point of history. Let me explain.

Interest in and concern for the outcomes of human interaction with the natural world and with each other is not new. Among other reference points, the earliest recorded story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, commented on the dire social and environmental consequences of forest depletion. Flashing forward through history, that most vexing of terms, “sustainable”, was first used in Germany in the 18^th century to describe a long-term perspective in forestry. The emergence of industrial society in Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries sparked debate, especially by the Romantics, who were appalled at the “soulless mechanism” of the new age and the human consequences of industrialization. Charles Dickens’ portrayal of “Coketown” in his novel, Hard Times, was a stinging indictment of rapidly industrializing England, and John Ruskin went so far as to coin the term “illth” to describe the side effects of the emerging economic system – poverty, pollution, despair, and illness. In North America, several initiatives at this time, notably the Regional Planning Association of America, expressed concerns about sustainability–even if this precise term was not yet used. And of course, the muckrakers of the early 1900s did work that is too often forgotten, but that provided an intellectual and moral foundation on which current efforts are built. I would argue that there is a century-long cord connecting the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, with Ida Tarbell’s groundbreaking work, A History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, and Upton Sinclair’s account of the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, published in 1906. If we are to truly make sense of the Occupy Movement, we need to remember that it is not the latest jeremiad of the modern environmental or labor movements, nor is it a clever marketing campaign dreamed up by an ad agency. The fact is, the seeds of the Occupy conversation were sown long ago and unless we remember this, learn from this, and make conscious changes now we will walk ever deeper into the maze and further limit our capacity to find a way out.

In 1909, the North American Conservation Conference resulted in a Declaration of Principles that called for “legislation to preserve and protect wildlife, to prevent soil erosion and water pollution, and generally to manage renewable resources in such a way as to ensure their continued productivity in the future. Sadly, WWI, the stock market crash and Great Depression, and WWII overwhelmed any consideration of how we might adopt such a forward-looking perspective. It is only in the post-war economic boom that society remembered the dark shadows at the edge of prosperity.

A reactor fire in 1957 at the Windscale nuclear power plant on the northwest coast of England sounded a cautionary note about human use of the environment and especially the dangers of a technologically advancing civilization. The fire was shortly followed by evidence of atmospheric contamination in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Denmark. The nature of the contamination was such that over an area of 500 square kilometers, milk from farms was declared unfit for human consumption.

TheResources for Tomorrow Conference in 1961 marked the beginning of a meditation on conservation and environmental management that in many respects continues today. A year later, Rachel Carson would publish Silent Spring and it is important to remember that entrenched interests fought very hard against the message that Ms. Carson delivered. Nonetheless, the era of environmental protection legislation was being birthed. Significant examples include The Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Air and Water Acts. In the early 1970s, the Man and Resources conference provided a platform for discussion of a theme that would permeate environmental discussions in Canada and elsewhere for the next two decades, “integrated resource use”. In hindsight, this can be viewed as the conversation that prefigured what we now see as the Occupy Movement because it sought to advance a worldview that might achieve “the best possible balance between social and economic demands and ecological implications in the wise use of natural resources”.

The escape of toxic gas from a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India in 1984 that killed over 6,000 people, and the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer in 1985 were two moments when it seemed as if the world’s ruling class might press “pause” and shift to a different trajectory. An additional, and galvanizing spur in this regard was the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear station, an event that underscored humanity’s interconnections and interdependence. Following this accident, in an all-too-familiar echo of the Windscale incident 40 years earlier, grass eaten by lambs in Wales, milk drunk by Poles and Yugoslavs, and air breathed by Swedes were all contaminated by radiation. In the wake of Chernobyl incident, the World Commission on Environment and Development report, Our Common Future, sparked debate about the synergistic relationship between economic development, social justice and environmental protection. This debate would build to a crescendo at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, at the time the largest-ever gathering of heads of state. The key trends that coalesced in the run-up to UNCED were:

Increasing world population, especially in the southern hemisphere, and an associated increase in the demand for goods and services
Increasing concentration of world population in cities
Increasing demands on a limited natural resource base, and the resulting pressure to improve resource productivity
Increasing access to information on the environmental and social costs of development
Increasing public concerns about the deterioration of the environment, and the ramifications this has for economic and social welfare

How familiar these trends feel some twenty years later. Our inability to both remember the historical roots of the challenges we face globally, and to take right action, have brought us to this moment, this moment when nearly 3,000 cities worldwide have Occupy protestors gathering in a courageous show of defiance at the rulers who have failed them. Why should we be surprised?

The historical tour I’ve just summarized is an attempt to both remember and recapture the context that we should hold when we talk about the Occupy movement. There is something important happening here; on the surface it might seem to be many loosely connected things, but if you listen you can hear a plea for a meaningful conversation about how we raise global consciousness and the capacity to endure and thrive. You can hear a plea for communities, governments, NGOs, businesses and individual citizens to operate not at the expense of the future, but in favor of the future. This will require a fundamental change in awareness and consciousness with respect to our relationship with nature, and with each other. Long-held assumptions, especially in the west, about profit maximization, fiduciary responsibility, the role of government, and the responsibilities of individuals – to cite some of the more prominent examples – must be challenged if we are to truly operate in favor of the future and truly honor what I see as lying at the heart of the Occupy movement.

Contact Rob Abbott at rob@abbottstrategies.com and follow him on twitter: @rma1962