Manifesto or Mission Statement

This passage is an excerpt from Sarah Jaquette Ray's A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety (pp 76-8), a book offering dozens of other practical strategies for students and climate activists.

Manifest(o)ing Your Yes

Social change work can be tedious, tiring, and hit or miss. When people who have been doing it for a long time come to talk to my students about how they rebounded from hopelessness, failure, and exhaustion, my students feel energized to dive back into their work, too. Knowing that this is how social change works helps us except its challenges and find some pleasure in the messiness of it.

The task of combating climate change seems huge. Your to-do list may already be so overwhelming that your pulse races every time you imagine one more thing to do to save the planet. A strong sense of purpose helps us filter out the tasks we can say no to. Believing that every demand for our attention is worth heeding is a recipe for burnout. Every committee needs more members, every protest needs more bodies, every person we know needs support, every representative needs to be called every day, every turn of events needs your social media exposure, every Facebook thread needs a comment, every email a response. The vast number of arenas in which we could show up and act is stupefying, and may feel even more so when we accept the principle that the frontlines are everywhere and that you can make differences in all kinds of places. The need for our energy and time is bottomless. What we do have control over is our ability to say no, so that when we say yes, we really know that the work we do is aligned with our mission and will reinvigorate us.

[adrienne marie] brown advises, “get really good at being intentional with where you put your energy, letting go as quickly as you can of things that aren’t part of your visionary life’s work. Then you can give your all, from a well-resourced place, when the storm comes, or for those last crucial miles.”  The self-study required to get good at being intentional with our energy takes time and is not a linear process. ... The first step is simply to take our emotional responses to climate change seriously instead of thinking we “should” be activists or politicians, or that we “should” do more.

INSTRUCTIONS

I make a practice of asking my students to write their own "manifestos," or mission statements, some of which are published on a blog called "Critical Hope" that I created for seniors as they prepare to graduate. Everybody should write a manifesto, and repeat as needed as your life advances. I invite you to write one now. Take 10 minutes to free-write about why you care about the planet, why you care about suffering, and what you personally are uniquely positioned by skill or passion to do in the world. Your declaration of intention and desire will be a beacon to return to when you feel lost or overwhelmed. The simple act of writing your eco-mission statement can move you in the direction of manifesting it. Once written, you can ask of every decision you make, "Does this choice serve my mission?" Rather than getting distracted by social media, procrastinating, or sabotaging yourself, you can make daily decisions that will cumulatively add up to creating the future you desire.

You don’t need to love animals or even like being in nature to make a difference in addressing climate justice. It’s not a prerequisite to helping save the planet that you be good at math or love gardening. You don't have to be more powerful than you already are. You can start simply by identifying and using the powers that you already have.

Whether we are “artivists” or trauma therapist or students or stay-at-home-dads, whether we work on reducing emissions (the science side) or on voter suppression, gerrymandering, or toxic citing (the social justice side), we have the capacity to address the social structures that create environmental injustice and aggravate climate change. The frontlines are the books we choose to read to our children, the pipeline being laid across our land, the social organizing we do among our coworkers at McDonald’s, the climate novel we have been fantasizing about writing, the campaign to elect a pollution-fighting candidate, or listening compassionately to someone with whom we disagree.

Climate justice needs all kinds of help. Scientists are only one part of the groundswell, just as we each are only one part. If the problem of climate change is wickedly complicated, we will need people everywhere and with every type of skill. Following brown, know that “uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once." What path will you walk?

From Sarah Jaquette Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety University of California Press, 2020. (pp 76-78)