Are you concerned about climate change? Would you like to learn how to address and respond to this challenge? If so, this course is for you. Act on Climate: Steps to Individual, Community, and Political Action is intended to help learners understand, address and respond to climate change as individuals and in partnership with their communities and political leaders. The course focuses on how to translate learning into action on climate change in the areas of food, energy, transportation and the built environment (cities). This course was co-developed and taught by Michaela Zint, Professor of Environmental Education and Communication, and University of Michigan Students. A range of academic climate change experts and professional leaders are featured. As a result of completing this course, you will be able to: 1) Identify individual, community, and political actions you can engage in to effectively address and respond to climate change. 2) Describe how insights from the social sciences can be employed to create change at the individual, community, and political levels. 3) Feel empowered to continue to influence how you, your community, and political leaders address and respond to climate change. Use #UMichActonClimate on social media to share what you're doing and connect with other learners.
Meet the Expert: Dr. Sara Soderstrom
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來自 University of Michigan 的課程
Act on Climate: Steps to Individual, Community, and Political Action
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從本節課中
Food
Food is part of our everyday lives. From breakfast to dinner, we make choices that affect the planet. This week, you will hear from Chris about his journey toward vegetarianism, and you will learn from Dr. Sara Soderstrom about social movement theory and food businesses in Detroit, as well as actions that you can take to make food choices that can mitigate climate change.
與講師見面
Michaela ZintProfessor of Environmental Education and Communication
Hi my name is Prisova.
I'm a graduate studentu at the University of Michigan and I'm
here today with us is Dr. Sarah SoriStrom,
she's a faculty member at the University of Michigan.
So, her research focuses on bringing change to businesses using
community level interventions such as those as part of the Detroit based Food Lab.
Thank you for being here today Dr. SoriStrom.
So, my first question is your research is unique in
that it studies how to create change through social movements and businesses,
to help frame our discussion today can you provide us with
a definition of what social movements are and under what circumstances they come about?
So, social movements occur basically when we're in a situation
where there is a grievance and when
we think about this from the lens of environmental issues,
climate change, the grievance can be that certain expectations aren't being met,
that there are issues around environmental justice or that people broadly feel
strongly about themselves as environmentalists
and are active in trying to make the environment better.
But there's this grievance that something should be
different than what it is today and we want to see that improved.
But it's not a solo actor working alone, it's a group.
So, social movements are when we see than mobilization
of people who are aligned about their grievance,
working to enact that change,
and they have a specific target.
So, they have another,
in my case I often see businesses or industries.
Historically when you think about
social movements people have thought about legislative change.
So, groups of people lobbying against business to try
to enact regulatory changes that protect the environment.
What we've seen more recently is movements actually working either
against or with business directly to try to address environmental issues.
For climate change we'll often see things like
shareholder resolutions that social movements work with shareholders to
petition businesses to say that they have to engage with
climate change through this activist petition.
So, we see social movements in
all different ways with how they target business, how they act,
it can be something from you get an email and you sign a petition,
it could be coming to an event to protest,
it could be actions that you take through your own spend.
So, things that you boycott and don't use and the work
that I look at quite a bit looks at how social movements are
influencing business decisions by bringing attention to
environmental issues and that can be again directly or indirectly
as how they make businesses more aware of
environmental issues were in the past we may have thought
of business and the environment as being contentious.
If you're doing something good for the environment it's bad for business.
Now what we're seeing is more of this integrated lens.
Not all social movements,
but some movements that are engaging with seeing how we can bring business towards
more environmental action and how social movements can help
businesses become aware of that and put pressure
on them to do more than what they might have been doing historically.
Thank you. Into that and can you speak to what are
the key factors in helping sustain and grow movements?
Yeah. So, it's hard often to think about what
this looks like from a sustained perspective
because you have this challenge of collective agency.
You need a lot of people working together in order to do this.
You need it continued,
yet movements are often voluntary.
Movements are often in addition to efforts that people do elsewhere.
So, people need to have a clear understanding of what can be the impact,
they understand what the target is and agree with that and feel like the commitment of
their time or money is worthwhile and moving forward in addressing those needs.
So, there are a lot of different mechanisms that movements do that and
often variety of levels of which people can be engaged.
When I'm just signing a petition that is potentially sustained engagement.
Now if I am contributing funds every month or every year,
that's an additional level of engagement in the movement.
If I'm showing up for planning meetings,
that's an even greater engagement within the movement and we see
mobilization at all of these different levels and you often need
to see that continued engagement across some really large groups of
people and sometimes smaller but more active groups
of people to sustain and mobilize that.
Movements use what we call framing processes.
So, ways of talking about the grievance,
ways of talking about how you mobilize,
and the outcomes that you're looking for too often frame themselves as
against someone who is in power and motivate action through those processes.
So, it's a combination of action and framing that work together over
continued time to see movements and if moving forward with
trying to achieve their goals and bringing people together in that way.
I think something that I didn't ask and that's coming up in your discussion
is the role that networks and partnerships play in social movements.
So, can you speak a little bit more about that?
What we've often seen in research around social movements and intuitively make sense,
is that people are mobilized to act through their personal networks and relationships.
So, if I get a random piece of mail in my inbox or my mailbox,
it's really easy to click Delete,
to send it to recycle, and to ignore.
Now, if someone who I know from work says, "Oh,
how this group is planning a protest this Saturday? You should go."
I'm more likely to go.
If my spouse or a close family friend
is talking about how they're going to a particular protest and I should come,
then you see even more motivation to act.
So, you see this process often of mobilization
through networks and that helps then drive growth of
the networks but one of the challenges that we can see in social movements is that
often also replicates a lack of diversity in movements.
So, if you start with a group that is really active but
reflects only women or only whites or only African-Americans,
their personal networks often reflect those same social identities.
So, it can be difficult if you're not thinking about something
like diversity whether that be race or gender, political party,
different interests or experiences that you then
see too much homogeneity within movement reflection itself.
For those who are interested,
Rosita Taylor here at University of Michigan does a lot of
research around diversity and social movements particularly in
the environmental movement and talks about this challenge of the benefits of
networks in building and mobilizing that some
of the challenges and risks that we see in that space as well.
You just spoke to this but can you describe
other key factors that help create success within social movements?
I think success in and of itself within social movements sometimes becomes
difficult to define and often isn't a unified view.
So, when we think about this from the lens of business,
if we were protesting a company that is using
a product that has a really bad implications in waste,
you think about something like PVC.
Is success getting one company to stop using that?
Is success getting a company to stop using that and
having an alternative that works successfully?
Is success stopping that at the industry level?
Is success educating people so that they understand
the risks of PVC and you see other alternatives coming in?
There are numerous ways of defining success.
What helps with the long term sustainability of
movements is having successes at various stages.
So, you'll see some movements that are active over long periods of time,
have multiple goals at various levels,
some might be local, some might be state,
some might be particular companies versus others,
and they continue to interact and engage.
Some movements have one specific goal and they
are in place to address that and when you meet that goal,
the movement actually dissipates.
So, it really depends on this question of what is
the movement's reason to be and how do you see the steps to get there,
how do you think about what success looks like in that lens and what does it
mean to succeed and be done in that space.
Thank you for that. You raised really important questions
when thinking about social movements and just to move forward,
so you've studied social movements within the context of Detroit based Food Lab.
So, first can you tell us what Food Lab is and how
its member businesses are addressing climate change whether directly or indirectly.
Food Lab Detroit is
this really inspiring non-profit that operates in the city of Detroit and is itself
a member organization and their goal is to build
an equitable and accessible good food market
within Detroit and when they talk about that,
they are addressing their grievance is around lack of fresh food,
healthy food, not prohibitive food within the Detroit city.
So, their grievance from that lens as saying,
we have an issue where there are thousands of people living in
the city of Detroit who can't easily access food that they can afford,
that is healthy, and that is environmentally safe.
So, they thought that the way of trying to
address that is partnering with business, in this case,
but helping businesses think about how they
can work in a way that they're developing products,
that they're operating, that they are partnering with
others who themselves reflect environmental goals,
social goals, higher Detroitors,
sell to Detroitors at a price point that people can afford.
So, they offer a number of
different resources to food businesses that want to become members.
Businesses pay a membership fee and then they can get training
from something as business oriented as how do I write a business case,
to as movement-oriented has how do I compost within my operation and they
have over 100 different businesses within Detroit who are members and
have a number of different programs that they offer
an intensive multi-week business development program,
we have monthly conversations
when people come together and talk about some of the challenges they're facing,
they have workshops that focus on
specific issues that are important to the entrepreneurs who are members,
and they have office hours where you can come in ask
whatever questions you might have and each year
they work as a membership to think about what is
one critical issue that we want to address this year.
So when we come back to this question of movements and what is success,
they have this long-term goal of saying we want
to see an equitable food system in Detroit,
but they also work to say what does that look like in pieces.
So, one year they were talking about how they wanted to
improve licensing processes for all of their members within
the city and they built out
a better understanding of if I'm a new entrepreneur and I want to start a business,
how do I get licensed in the city.
Well, now instead of trying to navigate this potential chaos on my own,
Food Lab and the membership work to develop a map of what you do,
they worked with the city to make some of the programs more accessible.
When it comes to thinking about climate change,
another here what they were working on is
this challenge where Food Lab members wanted to use
locally grown organic safe food but there were so many different urban farms,
there are so many different local agriculture spaces that
any one smaller scale entrepreneur couldn't make sense of
navigator understand when certain produce might be available,
how it might connect with their business, and use that.
So, Food Lab worked with other organizations and Detroit to build
this network that matched entrepreneurs with locally produced food.
Now, entrepreneurs wouldn't say that they were doing this to address climate change.
Entrepreneurs were doing this to support
Detroit businesses to get things that were fresher,
more healthy produce, to get
produce that they felt had a cleaner environmental footprint.
But by doing that they were decreasing
their impact on climate because they were buying local,
they weren't having pesticide space.
So, all of these things were more of an indirect impact and I think it
brings up an important point when we think about social movements,
is that often we see social movements
that themselves sound like they have distinct goals.
Right? Food Lab saying that their primary focus is around a good food system in Detroit,
climate change activists talking about addressing
climate change at a potentially global or national or state level.
But we might have overlap in what is success for both of those in actually achieving
some overlapping goals and so as people are involved in
different activists roles as people are climate change activists,
recognizing and seeing where there might be overlaps and interests,
where a dressing two ways of success,
actually can help to better both movements and not
needing to see them as two separate spaces but two complimentary areas.
So, finding this space of shared interests becomes really key and I think we see that
particularly with issues like climate change that are so large,
can at times feel incredibly overwhelming,
connected a global scale,
and where there's not necessarily clarity on what
is success and if we only are looking at success,
it has not rising above two degrees,
that's really hard for people to wrap their hands around.
So, finding some of these smaller accessible goals
makes this seem like a movement I can take action around,
I can inform and as one person I can still make an impact.
Just to explore that a little bit further from what
you've learned through Food lab about social movements,
what can be helpful for our learners in thinking about
social movements and Food Lab when it
comes to climate change, adaptation, and mitigation?
One of the important things to recognize is
that there are lots of different ways that you can attack a problem
and I see too often an approach in movements
where people end up all wanting to
address climate change but fighting over my way is right.
"No, my way is right" and then not moving either way forward, right?
So, you could have imagined a scenario where
Food Lab because their engagement with climate change
was viewed as more indirect rather than direct.
Was perceived negatively.
I don't think that many food lab members would say that they
are engaging in climate change activism.
But by being more inclusive in how we view the movement,
we think we can help move that forward.
But there's also a space and a time and an impact of being much more aggressive.
So, some other relatively recent research that's come out of Michigan hereby Andy Hoffman
at Ross and Todd Schifeling who used to be
a post-doc here at Michigan and is now faculty at Temple University,
they studied the organization 350.org.
So, this is a social movement organization launched by Bill McKibben who
is amazing climate change activist.
I think he's brought this issue to the table for many conversations,
but many view him as more extreme,
that his message around divestment from oil and gas,
his expectation or hope that universities like U of M would
divest might have been viewed as
failure because even though here at the University of Michigan,
we had a student petition around to fester,
it was supported by our Central Student Government,
it went up to the administration,
it was not adopted.
We did not divest as a university.
Well is that a failure?
But what was interesting in Professor Hoffman and
professor Schifeling's work is that they were able to show that just
by being part of this broader conversation around
climate change and being really aggressive about what their expectations were,
350.org moved the dialog around climate change and opened up the view
of what we can do to tackle this wicked problem into a more aggressive space.
That impacted the whole group of
social movements that were talking about climate change and
it helped push the envelope even
though from the lens of 350.org and what they initially outlined as goals,
you might have said that it was failure, right?
Some universities adopted this but not many,
some other investment groups adopted this but not all yet when
you see about an indirect effect on
the broader movement and conversation around climate change.
They've had a huge impact and I would argue a very significant success.
Thank you for that. I think something that's related to
our conversation is talking about the triple bottom line.
So what does that refer to?
So if you can provide us with a definition,
and how might we think about it within
the context of climate action and social movements?
Great. Triple bottom line stems from
a business norm I think of a single bottom line being economics.
So, in general, a business is only operating if they make a profit.
So that's your economic bottom line.
Am I getting enough revenue without paying too much in costs that I have a profit?
The idea behind a framework of a triple bottom line is to say,
yes we want to focus on that economic bottom line but we also want to
be thinking about what is our environmental impact and what is our societal impact.
There may be ways that businesses can both increase
their profits and be more environmental or be more social,
maybe they're in conflict but if we're at least thinking about all three,
we can be much more strategic in understanding where there
are potential trade-offs and how we address that.
From the lens of climate change,
this is a space where there are so many easy wins.
It's better for our climate if we have a more efficient distribution network;
fewer trucks making fewer stops without as much
of a round about to it and it costs less because we're not buying as much fuel,
we're not paying for as much time on the roads,
it's a win win,
good for environment, good for climate, good for finance.
Similar with what we see often around all of these energy efficiency changes.
If we're paying less for our electricity because we're using less,
we're spending less money and we're making less of an impact on climate.
So, I think the triple bottom line framework can help us think about these issues.
I think movements play an important role similar to what
350.org did around the movement movements do for business, around the triple bottom line.
So, movements help to make it so that businesses have to be thinking about environment,
they have to be thinking about society.
20, 30 years ago,
there were companies who were talking about in reporting on environmental issues,
but it wasn't the majority, it wasn't the norm,
and now it's hard to find a company that is in the Fortune 500,
operating in Europe or North America or
Australia who doesn't issue a sustainability report,
who doesn't talk about
their environmental impact and their societal impact of their business.
I would posit that that's due in large part to
social movements indirectly changing expectations for society that
businesses are playing a more positive role indirectly through their boycotts and
protests and partnerships with businesses in thinking about that.
Thank you. Then just to conclude our interview,
if you can give one piece of advice for
learners about how they can mobilize collective action for
social movements within their community in
collaboration with or without businesses to address climate change,
what would that advice be?
I think mobilization processes in
your communities come towards understanding what is the grievance that exists,
and you can't understand that without listening and engaging with those who are impacted.
I think too often people might look at a grievance from a more academic lens
and not actually engage with the community outside of their own personal network, right?
So, recognizing again this connection
about how we often see our own network but not others,
how do we recognize what that grievance
is across a number of different potential stakeholders?
How do we engage to understand their grievance
to think about different ways that we might see success,
different impacts that we might have as a movement,
and then consider who do you partner with and try to mobilize to target that change.
When might be something like a petition sufficient?
When do you need a protest?
When might you be able to cooperate and work
together in a way that is potentially not as contentious?
I think the other piece outside of the lens of again listening and
engaging respectfully with others is really
a part of recognizing that with an issue as challenging as climate change,
we're going to need a lot of people attacking this problem in a lot of different ways.
So, rather than getting into a philosophical debate about what is best and what is worst,
tackle it, move forward and as we see some wins,
they mobilize other wins and we need a lot of
people addressing this in a number of different ways,
and so the more the merrier rather than only one sheep going in that direction.
Well, that concludes our interview.
Thank you for sharing your expertise with us doctor SoriStrom.
Your research on community level interventions and food systems is truly fascinating.
Learners also are able
to gather from your insights and apply that with other beings in our modules.
We really appreciate your insights and again thank you for joining us today.
Thank you for having me.
