After my work with 350Seattle.org and Faith Action Climate Team when I moved to Olympia I worked for two and half years for Thurston Climate Action Team (TCAT). TCAT is very focused on policy work and specifically on getting our county to pass a climate mitigation plan. What was exciting to me about this was that the creation of this plan involved the three tri-cities of our county and the county itself. This is unusual - usually only a city or a county makes a plan. There seemed a rare opportunity to do something much more effective. Unlike some plans that were unbenchmarked this one was intended to be benchmarked with implementable steps, and with an analysis of equity issues and the costs of various different steps in the plan. It was envisioned that this plan could be a model for other communities of this size which studied showed was the "sweet spot" in size of community (around 100,000 in population) for social change.
In reality as the process meandered on the hours and therefore the budget was used up so that the plan was created without benchmarks, implementation steps, equity analysis or budget analysis. Once all the jurisdictions finally passed it, the slow walking began. It had passed right after workplans and budget for the year had just passed and thus only one jurisdiction had hired a staff person to implement the plan and this hamstrung the other three throughout the year. As the year dragged on literally only 1 of the 72 items was implemented (by the county - an item which only they had to do.) As conversations took place between TCAT and local officials on policy items which were being acted upon which did intersect with the plan we found that the jurisdictions were on much of the same projectory that they were on before the plan was passed. Maddeningly one of the jurisdictions actually passed an "update" to one of the items in the plan which actually moved them backwards! This occurred with no recognition on their part that this had anything to do with the plan and when pointed out by the public this was ignored.
Thurston county is different than large county's like King county, elected officials here are unpaid and almost all of them hold other regular jobs and this is a part time and secondary job for them. What this means is that they rely heavily on the paid city staff to carry out and prepare the work of the jurisdiction. It also became clear that the unelected staff brought various biases and also business as usual ways of approaching these things. Both elected officials and staff are use to many steps and phases, intensive planning and a no deadline process for getting things done. At one point the consultant had said they would need to "aggressively" implement the plan and they were asked what that would mean? He said hesitantly "Well much more urgently that local governments usually do things." That was an understatement! This in fact became the central problem - despite 3 of the four also passing a climate emergency declaration at the same time....they do not act as if any emergency is happening.
This is in part why I left TCAT - it became too frustrating to regularly sit down like Alice in Wonderland to the Mad Hatter tea party. But I learned some important things from this experience. Fredrick Douglas famously said: "Power never concedes anything without a demand. It never has and it never will." Einstein also famously said: " We cannot solve a problem engaging in the same thinking that got us into the problem." I am crystal clear now having been through a similar story in the effort to get the City of Seattle to divest its pension, and to pass an ordinance protective of its trees that no matter how "progressive", nor whether local gov, county, state or national...our elected bodies are not going to make policies that change our climate picture until we as a people make a paradigm shift and then DEMAND a change. Until we as a people understand we are part of Earth, interdependently locked into the same reciprocal ecosystem we will not behave differently or make different policy decisions. The real work of climate activism - is movement building - is paradigm shift. It is helping us as a people move into relationship with our air we breath, our water we drink and our Earth we stand on and call home!
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