Author and activist Wen Stephenson speaks with the burning intensity of a 19th century abolitionist.
“At this late hour,” Stephenson said recently in Cambridge, “to be serious about our climate reality is to be radical.”
And to achieve that radicalization, he said it would take global action and total dedication.
“We have to acknowledge the fact that without immediate action at all levels to radically reduce greenhouse emissions and de-carbonize our economies by midcentury, requiring a society-wide mobilization and a thus far unseen degree of global cooperation…without all of that, the kind of livable and just future we all want is simply inconceivable,” he said.
Stephenson’s new book, What We’re Fighting For Now is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice, argues that climate change is too pressing to ignore and that it will require everyone to join the climate justice movement now just to avoid total extinction of our kind on the planet.
Stephenson also has ideas for candidates in the presidential race in the United States, and what he hopes leading candidates could say on the issue of climate justice before Election day.
“I want to hear an honest conversation on the left about what we’re actually facing,” Stephenson said. “About what the science says the situation really is. About what it would actually take to address it in a serious way, and then what the consequences are, the human consequences are, of our failure to do that.”
Stephenson also expressed his desire to see Democrat Bernie Sanders advocate better for the movement leading up to the party primaries in the spring of 2016. He brushed aside expectations for any Republican presidential hopefuls currently on the national stage. In fact, he placed them squarely in the political opposition camp when it comes to climate justice.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to convert the sort of ideologues on the Right, or even in the center, who are unwilling and unable to deal with this,” he said. “I think we actually have to defeat them. And the way we defeat them is we grow our numbers of people who are willing to struggle for this.”
From the pulpit in Parish Church, Stephenson reiterated to the audience of college-aged activists that the stakes of the global climate justice struggle are life and death. He made it clear that he wants them all-in on this fight. He sees his ideas for radically changing the climate justice movement as much more than introducing political talking points. He’s part of a new Moral Majority and he’s building his church.
Wen Stephenson’s Cambridge Forum discussion was recorded by WGBH ’s Forum Network. Watch the entire talk online atforum-network.org.
