ACTIVISM - Democracy in Action

Social and environmental (or green) activism is the combined political force of people who take direct actions to protect or change the social or physical environments and how they are managed. It describes all of the actions mentioned above. We need to follow the advice of Mahatma Gandhi, 'be the change you want to see', and work to bring our vision of a better world into reality. Sometimes the actions we need to take involve personal risks and bring no material rewards.

Environmental activism emerged as a widespread movement in the 1960s, when problems such as nuclear technologies, chemical pollution, and over-exploitation of natural resources became obvious. Although much of the early activism originated in the West, developing country citizens quickly gained international attention for their actions, campaigns and protests - many of which have been successful in stopping or preventing social injustice and environmental degradation being caused by capitalistic Western interests.

An example of how developing countries have taken on the activism banner is seen in the numbers of NGOs operating in these countries eg 1 million in India; 210,000 in Brazil; 96,000 in Philippines; 27,000 in Chile; 20,000 in Egypt; and 11,000 in Thailand.

It is difficult to gauge how successful the work of activists has been. Despite many achievements, if their success is measured in terms of progress towards the common goal of protecting the environment, the history of success is not as strong.

Much of activism is to influence politics, and here too we could say activists have had only limited success. Environmental advocacy is often only damage control, initiated after a proposal for action or commencement of action, and resulting in stalling the activities. Looking at the results in this way, could make us question if it is worth the effort. But what would life be like if we didn't do anything to stop the injustice and destruction? Clearly, we have to take action, and if enough of us take action, we can change the world.

What can we do to change the way things are? We can act individually to change the way we do things! We can act within a group to change more things! And we can become involved in broader scale activism! We can direct our action to the local, national, regional or international level.

There are a wide range of effective strategies that activists can employ to create or influence change eg consumer campaigns, cyber strategies, media strategies, political lobbying, demonstrations, creative action.

If our aim is to attract a large number of activists to the cause, we need effective publicity. Most people suffer information overload, so to get people's attention we need to use creative advertising, something that will grab people's attention, if only for a few minutes.