Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: a political ecology of change

Applying an ecological perspective to movement organizing challenges the ways in which we understand our friends, our opponents and the tendencies of motion of our political environment. Let's tease out some of the implicit assumptions in this view and then see how they could translate to the street.

1) People naturally gravitate toward the most hopeful option they can see. Left and right wing movements have in their ranks people who started out on the opposing side. They do not generally switch sides due to a change in their fundamental values but rather they change their minds about what political current can best fulfill those values. They share such basic aspirations as providing safety for our children, being rewarded for our efforts, experiencing pride in our identity and looking toward a future brighter than the past. Political movements provide differing narratives as to who will help us reach that future and who stands in the way. Our task is not to change who people are but to offer a vision large enough to include them.

2) How we frame our struggle determines the size of our circle of solidarity. I was privileged to work in the 1980s with a Midwestern farmers' movement that was protesting a high voltage power line being built, without their consent, across their fields. This movement became the nucleus of a three-cornered regional alliance with urban environmentalists and the American Indian Movement. That happened because they defined their struggle as one of national energy policy rather than local property rights. That meant that federal attempts to exploit uranium on Native land, the shift of coal mining from the unionized east to the non-union west and the erosion of democracy in rural electric coops all became part of their world. White farmers who had shown little sympathy during the civil rights movement were now studying its tactics, blocking roads and driving long distances to support Native American political prisoners.

The trajectory of Malcolm X's thinking, from a street paradigm of "each-for himself" to one of Black self-sufficiency to one of broad solidarity might seem to have been a meandering route through mutually contradictory visions but actually represented a continually expanding view of what is possible, each opening on a larger circle of solidarity.

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