This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
of virus. It turned out there were people all over America who'd seen Al Gore's movie [An Inconvenient Truth], who'd watched the ruination of New Orleans, and who wanted to do something more than change their lightbulbs. And so they stepped up to the challenge—by April, people in 1,400 communities organized simultaneous demonstrations. The rallies took place in all fifty states, and they showed a depth of creativity that blew our minds—scuba divers with underwater demonstrations off endangered coral reefs, skiers descending fast-melting western glaciers.
Not only that, but they worked. Our demand—80 percent reductions by 2050—had been radical when we began, but twelve weeks later, by the time we'd finished, it had been embraced by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who were vying for the Democratic nomination for president at the time. We hadn't succeeded yet, but we'd helped jump-start a movement.
Or so it seemed to us—we had a mostly bird's-eye view of the whole process, trying hard to help people spread across the nation but never really getting to do much on-the-ground organizing ourselves. I spoke in cities across the country; everyone else spent those three months hunched over laptops sending out information, coordinating press releases, answering questions. For us, this book is a particular treat—it lets us see more clearly what was going on in the communities where the actual organizing was underway. In a sense, we did nothing more than set a date—it was like hosting a potluck dinner, and the people described in these pages, and tens of thousands more, did the cooking.
Beyond providing a window in the local events that made up SIU, this book also advances social movement scholarship. The book's analysis of the digital nature of the movement yields contributions to how we think about the relationship between social movements and the Internet. It highlights the challenges and opportunities afforded by organizing a movement mainly through a Web site and theorizes about the implications of movement building in the digital age. Through an investigation of the open-source DIY model of the movement-building, the book also reveals the tensions that many movements face and the prospects for successfully organizing DIY movements. Each chapter in the book discloses