An activist's mural

As an aspiring environmental organizer, I have found it difficult to focus. Devoting my energy to one campaign, one cause has always felt narrow and limiting. Even though I know I’m acting in the context of a broader movement, being strategic has often felt single-minded and being exact has occasionally felt exclusionary.

I’d like to think of organizing and advocacy as an art form, and if activism is art, we want to do its inspiration justice. Sometimes, we as activists want to paint with broad strokes. We want murals – ones that tell the stories in full, that are as long as they are deep, that spare no characters nor causes. Its colors would bleed into one another: the greens of conservation, the blues of collared labor, the blacks of lives matter. Why the blur? Because it’s intersectional, complex, panoramic. Social change is not paint by numbers.

But that’s the big picture. To capture the details, we know we need to use the most delicate brushes, to zoom in with a macro lens and swivel away from the panorama. We save the 40,000-foot view for the birds; organizers are on the ground. Applying the finest strokes, we render a zeroed-in image of activism, our noses pressed against the canvas. Every activist has her own swatch of the mural. In moments of uncertainty, assertions lilt upward from “this is the most important work I can do” to “is this the most important work I can do?”

This is perhaps not a thorough, critical evaluation but rather a contemplation of my personal conflicts coming into being as an organizer. Of course, a focused and strategic campaign does not necessarily ignore interrelated causes and problems; a good one certainly does not. The solidarity work and movement-building happening to correct all types of injustices, understanding their common economic and historical roots, is inspiring. Still, how does one choose an angle and settle on a medium?

Here at Duke, I have chosen to direct my focus toward the divestment effort. Divest Duke is a campaign advocating that Duke University divest its endowment from the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies. To me, campus activism feels isolated at times — that it happens within our own blue bubble, even if its challenges and victories do have tangible effects on the members of the Duke community. In that respect, the Divest Duke campaign is exciting to work on because it is a Duke-oriented campaign working in concert with other fossil-free campaigns around the region, country and globe.

That coordinated effort is precisely the power of the divestment campaign, which is a moral and symbolic call to take our investments out of dirty energy. Last year when the Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility (ACIR) rejected Divest Duke’s proposal for divestment, the committee asserted that divestment would fail to have a direct, material effect on combatting climate change, which they cited “can only be mitigated through global action and will not be effective through local action alone.” Divest Duke agrees, which is why we’re just one local campaign chapter of a global movement to divest from fossil fuel companies. And we hope that Duke will be a leader in that international effort, joining the likes of divestors such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund and the World Council of Churches.

The Duke Climate Coalition is the umbrella organization for climate-related advocacy and education at Duke and in the triangle area. It is the funding body for the Divest Duke campaign and now, excitingly, a new campaign effort at Duke: Seize the Grid, which is calling for 100 percent of Duke University’s energy consumption to be powered by renewables by 2030. If you are interested in joining these national and international campaigns as well as working in solidarity with other justice-seeking individuals and groups on campus, you are invited to Duke Climate Coalition’s kick-off event next Wednesday, Sept. 16 at 6:30 P.M. in Social Psychology 130.

More generally, however, I urge current and aspiring organizers on campus to consider the intersection of their work with other groups. Many of us are working toward similar goals, and while strategically we may need to focus, it’s important to remember where our paths overlap. Share the tools, the brushes, the dyes — we’re painting on the same canvas.