I traveled across the country at the end of 2015 in a small pickup truck and camper to write my new book, The Revolution Where You Live: Stories from a 12,000-Mile Journey Through a New America. I visited eighteen states, five Native American reservations, and more than a dozen cities and small towns, and we launched the book the week after Donald Trump’s Inauguration.
During these travels, I saw stark levels of economic hopelessness. I spent a lot of time in the Rust Belt, in the mountain West, in Appalachia, and in the South.
I didn’t predict Trump’s victory, but I could see why folks in these regions felt alienated by Hillary Clinton’s statements during the campaign that the economy was doing well. So many people are saddled with debt. They’re working several jobs to make ends meet, if they can find jobs at all. They can’t afford to send their kids to college. Many lost their homes and all their net wealth during the recession that began with the crash in 2008. It’s true that President Obama kept the economy from imploding. But he poured a tremendous amount of money into shoring up huge financial institutions—the ones that caused the crash through their reckless investments—while the people who lost their homes didn’t get bailed out at all.
So offering more of the same was not a popular prescription for those people.
My focus during the four months I was on the road, though, was not on the election. I was talking to people stepping up to make much deeper change, people who were taking on wealth inequality, the environmental crisis, and racism in their own communities.
I came to believe that people who are “of a place,” who know their places best and are the most committed to their quality of life, have more power than they know.
I came to believe that people who are “of a place,” who know their places best and are the most committed to their quality of life, have more power than they know.
I visited southeast Montana, a conservative area where ranchers and native people were fighting to stop a huge coal mine. The ranchers I interviewed spoke with deep respect about the long history of native peoples in that region. But both groups, native and non-native, care deeply about the quality of the water and of their lives, and they want to pass those treasures down to future generations just as they had received them intact from previous generations. They were willing to do some extraordinarily hard work to fulfill what they saw as a sacred responsibility, and to work together, over many years, to fight that mine.
These are not powerful people, and they were up against big corporations and their Wall Street backers. Yet they won, and 1.2 billion tons of coal will stay safely in the ground. That’s a huge win for people in that region and those along the rail lines, who would have had to deal with years of coal dust pollution. It is also a win for the residents of the Asian cities where that coal was destined—thousands are already dying from air pollution. And it’s a win for all of us since our atmosphere is saturated with carbon and our climate is in crisis.
That was one of many stories from my road trip that made me realize how powerful we are when we assume our rights as “we the people” and work together for the well-being of our communities.
After I finished writing the book, I made two reporting trips to the water protectors’ camp at the site of the Dakota Access pipeline. The movement there started with young people from the Standing Rock Tribe, who had very little, really only their bodies, to use to stop the pipeline that threatened their water. So they ran—literally—to Washington, D.C., a 2,000-mile journey.
Their run galvanized the tribe, and when Standing Rock put out the call, Native Americans from all over, and then non-native allies, joined them.
There are so many stories to tell from Standing Rock—I think it has changed so much for native people and for how we conduct social movements. Here’s one story: The clergy—hundreds of them, representing many denominations, were called to Standing Rock by a local minister. While they were there, they burned the Doctrine of Discovery—the legal framework, based on a fifteenth-century papal bull—which has justified the taking of native lands throughout the Americas. The genocide that resulted is one of the foundational traumas of our society. These clergy repudiated that doctrine, and apologized, and some even went to the North Dakota state capitol to pray with the governor about protecting the water, and a handful were arrested.
The ripple effect from this stand for justice, and the other actions at Standing Rock, will, I believe, be felt in our culture for generations to come.
The ripple effect from this stand for justice, and the other actions at Standing Rock, will, I believe, be felt in our culture for generations to come.
When organizing is grounded in local communities—like on the land of the Standing Rock Tribe—it is more real. People at the local level better understand the value of the commons—that there are common assets like public spaces or clean water that can’t be replicated within a private sphere. Those are tangible and meaningful assets, not abstractions, and people are prepared to defend them.
I believe the progressive movement has relied too much on experts in nonprofits and on their elected officials, thinking the common good will prevail if we make compelling arguments. But that mindset leaves out the fundamental question of power. Right now, with wealth so concentrated, power is not equally distributed among us.
If we want to make change, we have to build power, and that requires sustained work in place-based communities. Instead of mobilizing every four years during the presidential election, we need to run candidates up and down the electoral ladder.
But beyond elections, there are so many questions that are better handled locally. There is the question of how to rebuild an economy so that jobs can’t be easily picked up and moved to another country, or how to stop a Walmart from undermining a downtown. We need to rebuild our economies so that they are locally rooted—drawing sustainably on the natural resources where we live, but also protecting those resources and building opportunities and fairness in our communities.
Likewise, I found on my road trip examples of ways communities are taking on the structural and cultural foundations of racism, and of the climate crisis.
Some of the most creative solutions originate at the local and regional level. Canada got single-payer health care not because the whole nation had an epiphany, but because one province instituted this policy and it worked so well that it spread across the country.
For my next project, I’m going to be developing an online platform for people in communities across the country so they can teach each other how to make change where they live. We’ll include simple things: How do we have really good meetings so folks can make decisions and, instead of feeling exhausted and flattened at the end, leave energized and ready to step up? How do we talk with people from different backgrounds, even when we don’t agree? And there are the more complex things: How do we organize to stop a pipeline?
Too many people at the grassroots believe that smart, educated people in Washington, D.C.—who work either for government or for nonprofits—are going to bring about much-needed change on our behalf. All we have to do is write a check or sign a petition.
But that isn’t where we get our power. We have to get involved and cultivate grassroots leadership. Peer-to-peer training can help us change the story about where change comes from, so people can see that folks in other communities who look just like them are making change. And these trainings can build the confidence and skills people everywhere need.
If people in communities learn together, connected via the Internet to trainers in other cities, the skills that have been developed in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Detroit, Michigan, or in rural Montana can spread, and our society can be transformed by “we the people,” taking power from the grassroots up.