Lessons from Parkland: Making the Environment an Electoral Issue

On July 21, thousands of students and adult allies marched and rallied in over 20 cities around the world as part of Zero Hour, an international movement to combat climate change. The impressive turnout seemed a testament to young people’s hunger for environmental action. Yet already the movement is threatened by a loss of momentum. Translating the spirit of mass action into a sustainable campaign for policy change requires redefining national political discourse, as the student movement for gun control did following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In the lead-up to the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election, activists have a prime opportunity to learn from the gun control movement’s success and make the environment an electoral issue.

The teen activists behind the gun control movement did far more than grab media headlines when they staged national school walkouts and marched for their lives. They used these attention-grabbing demonstrations to push a clear legislative agenda that supporters could bring directly to their representatives. By late March, the growing movement had already spurred federal and state policy change. The Department of Justice proposed banning bump stocks, while Congress lifted the CDC’s funding freeze on gun violence research and sought to bolster school safety funding in a $1.3 trillion spending bill. States and cities of varying political stripes have also enacted broad reforms to their gun laws. Rhode Island and New Jersey have passed “red flag” laws enabling courts to temporarily restrict the possession of firearms by persons deemed potential threats, while Vermont and Florida have raised the minimum age to purchase a firearm and, along with Connecticut, Washington, and the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, implemented their own bump stock bans.

The gun control movement has illustrated that young people have an impressive capacity to drive policy change. There are several ways students can hone this potential to advance environmental politics as they head to the polls in November.

Single-Issue Voting

“Vote them out!” That rallying cry, led by survivors of the Parkland school shooting, was echoed by hundreds of thousands of supporters across the nation’s Capitol at the March for Our Lives earlier this year. By challenging elected officials to support gun control or risk losing office, Parkland activists leveraged their peers’ unique voting power to drive legislative action. With limited-to-no publicly accessible voting records or established relationships to incumbent representatives, young people represent an enigmatic demographic for political candidates. “You’re not automatically going to be swept up into these campaigns’ target universes,” Nathaniel Stinnett, Founder and Executive Director of the Environmental Voter Project, told the HPR. “[That] means you can come out of nowhere and completely change an election.” Tying the youth vote explicitly to one issue, as Parkland students did with gun control, amplifies the imperative for a legislative response from representatives seeking to secure young voters’ support for future elections. This fall, students can apply the same political pressure of single-issue youth voting power in order to further an environmentalist agenda.

Single-issue voting could prove especially impactful for the environmental movement due to environmentalists’ historically poor voter turnout records. According to the Environmental Voter Project, more than 15 million environmentalists eligible to vote did not cast ballots in recent national elections. That includes over 277,000 environmentalists in Massachusetts who did not vote in the 2014 gubernatorial election, an amount over six times greater than the election’s 44,000 vote margin of victory. In addition, young Americans, the group most likely to report environmental protection and global climate change as policy priorities, often display the lowest voter turnout. A survey by Pew Research Center found that 22 to 29-year-old voters comprised only 6% of “consistent” voters in national elections from 2012-2016. In the hotly contested 2016 general election, less than half of eligible voters ages 18 to 29 actually voted.

“We have this silent green majority in the country and if we started showing up on Election Day, it would be impossible to stop us,” said Stinnett. “Voting is the… most important way to create real political action because, at the end of the day, politicians go where the votes are.”

As historical non-voters, young people are uniquely positioned to put the environment on lawmakers’ political radar by turning out in force as environmentalists at the ballot box. Just as refusing to accept donations from the NRA has become a staple of a politician’s commitment to progressive gun politics, signing the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge has become a clear signal of candidates’ commitment to protecting the planet. “You can’t just be like oh, they’re a Democrat, so automatically they’re taking climate action,” explained sixteen-year-old Jamie Margolin, founder of Zero Hour, in a recent interview with the HPR. “You have to dig a little deeper than just what party they are.” For Margolin, being true environmental voters means expecting candidates to go beyond severing financial ties to the energy sector. To earn young people’s support, candidates need to “walk the talk” on environmental action by having comprehensive environmental platforms, including a commitment to ending the current development of fossil fuel infrastructure.

Calling Out Lawmakers

$1.05. That figure—a creative per capita representation of the $3.3 million spent by the NRA to support Senator Marco Rubio’s political bids based on Florida’s student population—became a fixture of post-Parkland protests, with students wearing ‘$1.05’ price tags in an effort to shame lawmakers like Rubio for playing special interest politics at the expense of student lives. This creative and provocative approach to exposing hidden political agendas allowed the Parkland students to effectively raise public scrutiny of representatives and magnify the media resonance of their larger political message.

“There’s something powerful about being direct,” noted Margolin in a recent interview with the HPR. “People are tired of people dancing around the truth.”

Environmentalists need to adopt a similar brand of political guerilla warfare to hold representatives accountable for their environmental records. If environmentalists were to follow the Parkland students’ price tag model for calling out lawmakers, they could relate constituents’ lives to campaign contributions from the dirty energy sector. For instance, Massachusetts students could represent the value of their lives in terms of Governor Charlie Baker’s $67,410 of campaign funds from the Oil & Gas industry. Directly linking lawmakers’ relationship with the dirty energy industry to their investment in his constituents’ futures calls into question their commitment to the public interest and demands a justification of their political priorities to voters.

Parkland survivors also used public forums and media events to petition lawmakers for action.

In a live CNN Town Hall last February, Parkland survivor Cameron Kasky asked Marco Rubio if he would refuse to accept any more campaign donations from the NRA. The exchange went viral, inciting new criticism of Rubio and garnering more attention for the gun control movement in the month leading up to the March for Our Lives. Environmentalists can also use public confrontation to their advantage. Already, members of the youth-led climate activist organization Sunrise Movement are pressuring policymakers to reject fossil fuel money at public events and demonstrations, and then documenting and sharing their exchanges online. Last July, Sunrise member Rose Strauss confronted Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner about his ties to the fossil fuel industry. After Wagner called Strauss “young and naive,” a video recording of their exchange went viral; it has since received over seven million views on Facebook. A month later, over 60 Sunrise members staged a sit-in at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office, with their livestream of the demonstration reaching about 100,000 people across Facebook and Twitter, according to Sunrise Co-Founder and Managing Director Sara Blazevic. The group’s media-savvy strategy, similar to that of the Parkland students’, has allowed its young participants to produce compelling public testimony on their representatives’ environmental records.

Broadening Environmentalist Appeal

Rather than ignore the role that race and class played in the widespread media coverage of the Parkland shooting, student survivors confronted evidence of white privilege head-on. They extended their national platform at the March for Our Lives to students with first-hand experience tackling the impacts of gun violence on diverse communities. There, the Parkland teens not only showed a commitment to facing the reality of the unequal effects of the nation’s gun epidemic but also presented the fight for gun control as one in which all Americans had a stake. This conscious effort at intersectionality bolstered the public appeal of their movement.

Like the Parkland teens, young environmentalists must ensure their public demonstrations and policy demands reflect an open and intersectional movement in order to build a united voter base. “We need to be clear in our strategy and in the story that we are communicating in the public that these crises are intertwined and that means that the solutions need to be intertwined as well,” said Blazevic in an interview with the HPR. Both she and Margolin affirmed the importance of emphasizing a just transition to renewable energy that accounts for the needs of marginalized and low-income communities. Such a socially conscious platform will not only attract more voters but also open new pathways for partnership with social justice groups.

Parkland students also broadened the public appeal of their movement by bridging the generational gap and speaking to the shared value of public safety, framing their fight as one to protect students’ lives and preserve the sanctity of schools as centers for learning, free from violence. Resonating deeply with parents, this message effectively mobilized an army of adult allies whose voices lent new credibility to the student-led movement. The intergenerational alliance demonstrated to lawmakers that they would be held accountable for their positions in the gun control debate by broad swaths of their electorate.

Young environmentalists can use similar appeals to mobilize adult allies by presenting their calls for environmental justice as fundamentally about defending Americans’ lives and livelihoods. Students can also engage older generations by relating the climate movement to national political trends; with health care ranked as a top electoral priority for American voters heading into the 2018 midterms, young environmentalists could effectively market a campaign against the air and water pollution of the energy industry as a campaign for protecting public health.

The success of the student-led movement for gun control provides important lessons on how to mobilize American voters, ones the environmental movement can benefit from adopting. With 2018 midterms around the corner and the upcoming 2020 presidential election, young people have a unique opportunity to put the Parkland activists’ model into practice. Students have the know-how to effectively exercise their voting power and make the environment an electoral issue; whether they put that knowledge to use is up to them.

Image Credit: Lorie Shaull / Flickr

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