Left Forum 2015 - The Climate Mobilization: A Route to Reclaiming Democracy and Preventing Ecological Collapse

 

This is a panel from Session 2 of the 2015 Left Forum, held May 29 -31 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The conference theme was "No Justice, No Peace: Confronting the Crises of Capitalism & Democracy."

From the Organizers:

Without a decisive break from business-as-usual politics, scientists warn that accelerating global warming threatens both economic and ecological collapse in a matter of decades. To secure a climate that supports organized human societies for the rest of the 21st century, it will now take nothing less than a rapid, wartime-level economic effort to transition the world's nations to 100% clean energy, adapt to unavoidable disruptions, and begin the long process of withdrawing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Whatever we call this response to our unprecedented crisis — a Green New Deal, a Marshall Plan for the Earth, a WWII-scale Climate Mobilization — how can we build the critical mass of public will that makes a just post-carbon transition possible in the United States? Is it possible to mobilize an intense bloc of citizens behind such an ambitious platform by 2016? Panelists will discuss The Climate Mobilization, a growing national campaign to accelerate the American climate movement toward the mobilization we need.

Margaret Klein Salamon, PhD, is co-founder and director of Climate Mobilization. Klein earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Adelphi University and also holds a BA in social anthropology from Harvard. Though she loved being a therapist, Margaret felt called to apply her psychological and anthropological knowledge to solving climate change. Her writing can be viewed at The Climate Psychologist