Social Movement to Address Climate Change: Local Steps for Global ...

action reports describing local events and sharing photos were uploaded to the national site.

Considering SIU: A Case of Movement Building

The Web site provides one account of SIU, one way to see and experience the national day of action. Rather than relying on the Web site alone to tell the story of SIU, the contributing authors to this book attended local actions as participant researchers. We heard speeches about the importance of action on climate change—the power of individual action, the promise of legislation, the potential of collective action. We asked participants questions about why they came to SIU actions, what they thought SIU was, and what the next steps should be. We interviewed organizers to gain insight into how actions were organized and what they were attempting to accomplish. We wrote our observations about what we saw at local actions and what we sensed was missing from them.

We did all of these things because we believed that SIU was an intriguing moment in the national discussion about climate change. We attended SIU actions because we wanted to be part of a potentially historic effort to address one of the most pressing environmental problems of the twenty-first century. SIU represented an overt attempt to spark a movement, to push for political action, to organize people across the nation, to demand that politicians step it up. It attempted to do all these things with a Web site and three months' time. We wanted to understand SIU. We wanted to see how it worked, whom it attracted, whether it succeeded and why. We approached SIU as researchers because we thought that it could provide insight into efforts to build social movements on climate change and other social issues. Taking the opportunity to study a movement from the beginning, we sought to learn about the implications of using new media technologies to organize a decentralized movement.

This book focuses on SIU's effort to create a national movement for climate-change action through over one thousand events that took place across the fifty states. Drawing on this case, we explore the question, what does it take to build a social movement in the twenty-first century?