by Anjali Vaidya, originally published 26 December 2024 on Los Angeles Review of Books, accessible here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/snowflakes-that-start-an-avalanche/
I REMEMBER THE light bulb moment when I realized that my understanding of the American political landscape had some gaping holes. After Donald Trump’s 2016 election left me (and many others) scrambling for answers, I began reading up on the 2000 US presidential election. I had always regretted having been too young to vote then, since Al Gore had promised to fight the climate crisis before that crisis became dire. In my memory, Gore lost due to some combination of lack of charisma and Florida’s faulty voting process. When I read up on that election fiasco, however, I was flummoxed that none of the narratives I’d been exposed to ever mentioned that West Virginia had largely voted Democrat until it voted for George W. Bush. Bush brought the state to his side by convincing coal miners that Gore’s plans for climate action were a death sentence for their livelihoods and way of life. In the end, West Virginia gave Bush the five electoral votes that won him the presidency. As I read about this in 2016, what struck me was that Bush had been right.
In December 2016, I had the harebrained idea of traveling from California to West Virginia to talk to the coal miners who had voted for Bush and now Trump, so that I could write a narrative that filled the gaps in my own. Inspired by Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011), which describes how fossil fuel workers, through their long fight for rights, have shaped democracy as we know it, I wanted to talk to coal mining communities about climate action and how they proposed to tackle a climate crisis that impacts us all. I hoped to see how these people who had shaped democracy could also be brought on board to help shape a livable future. I even pored over online maps, planning the route I would take through the mountains of West Virginia, the stops I’d make. I never went through with my plan because a) I was pregnant, b) I couldn’t drive, and c) at the end of the day, I do have some sense.
But the wonderful thing about good ideas is that, often enough, somebody else had them first.
The concept of a Green New Deal dates to the late 2000s. The name is meant to evoke FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s, which met catastrophic environmental, social, and political circumstances with an equally strong government and grassroots response, leaving behind a legacy of—among other things—Social Security, economic regulation, and two billion new trees. A “Green” New Deal would aim to be just as transformative, if not more so, meeting the current calamitous moment with a multipronged approach that combines climate action, environmental justice, and a transition to clean energy that ensures that nobody, including fossil fuel workers, gets left out in the cold. Such a program recognizes that human beings are an integral—and precious—part of the environment that we hope to save. It also presumes that, whatever else we disagree about, every person on this planet can find common ground in the fight for a livable future.
Proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey in 2019, the Green New Deal for the United States was shot down in the Senate that same year and hasn’t been resurrected since. One could be forgiven for wondering why anyone is still talking about it. But that’s the other interesting thing about good ideas: they may be suppressed, but they don’t die. Failure is seldom what it looks like, and likewise with success. The only real failure, in this context, involves not learning from the past and then trying again.
The malleability of such failure is one of the more remarkable messages I got from Jeremy Brecher’s new book The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy. This slim but dense book covers the spread of local climate-related efforts across all 50 states, many of which—though not all—were directly inspired or galvanized by the nationwide plan that “failed” in 2019.
The Green New Deal from Below is not a comprehensive account of these projects, nor does it touch on developments outside the United States. Instead, to use a quote Brecher repeats throughout the book (attributed to Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu), the book’s aim is to shift “the sense of what is possible.” To that end, from a large constellation of local Green New Deal efforts, Brecher—co-founder and senior advisor to the Labor Network for Sustainability—has selected a few dozen bright stars to illuminate and connect.
Some of these I’d never have thought to connect myself, or to classify under a “Green New Deal.” For instance, Brecher’s examples of how California and Boston are, independently, providing universal free meals for kids in school might not have immediately signaled climate action to me before I read this book. Nor would I have automatically put school lunches in the same category as a fight for affordable housing in Chicago, where residents successfully lobbied to have a parking lot bordering a major transit center torn up and turned into roofs over their heads. Or the program in Philadelphia, PowerCorpsPHL, which has been providing green job training to the recently incarcerated since 2013, significantly reducing their chances of returning to jail.
What connects these projects is an intersection of goals: to fight, simultaneously, for the environment and for social justice. And by and large, The Green New Deal from Below crafts a coherent narrative from these ventures, though smoother connective tissue could at times have helped: I found myself flipping back and forth to keep track of the many community initiatives, city projects, state laws, and union resolutions described here. Put together, they seem like the snowflakes that start an avalanche: a program in Washington State that has been giving kids free bikes since 2022; an Indigenous- and women-run seaweed farm off Long Island trying to replace chemical fertilizers with kelp; efforts to bring extra resources and job retraining to communities in Colorado, Illinois, West Virginia, and beyond that have been hollowed out by mine and power plant closures.
One of the book’s strengths, for me, is its ability to move across scales, making connections between disparate projects while also focusing on the particulars of local initiatives. Each must be designed with the local context in mind, because different localities have different needs and opportunities. For example, the details of Boston’s plan for free school meals show how many problems a Green New Deal initiative can tackle at once. By sourcing the meals from a local, Black- and employee-owned company that itself sources food locally, Boston’s initiative fights climate change (reducing transportation’s carbon footprint by keeping food production local), uplifts communities of color, and supports workers’ rights, in addition to fighting food insecurity and all the current and historic social injustices that represents.
Brecher also pays attention to the long view: the extended negotiations that go into Green New Deal efforts, the manner in which minds do and don’t change, and the surprising ways distant projects connect. I was fascinated by his account of the afterlife of Washington State’s failed Green New Deal initiative. Years in the making, the measure to put a fee on carbon failed at the ballot box in 2018, but it went on to serve as a blueprint for similar, successful proposals in California, Colorado, and Illinois. Colorado’s Just Transition Law, passed in 2019 with ideas borrowed from Washington, provided resources to coal workers and communities in order to help them transition to and thrive in a clean energy economy. The initiative encountered opposition at first, but in practice it changed minds. Brecher describes how a Republican state representative who had voted against the 2019 bill was among those who argued for investing more in it three years later, arguing that these funds were a good start toward the help needed by the coal communities he represented.
Though it makes the changing of even a single mind seem magical, The Green New Deal from Below also makes clear that piecemeal strategies like those described above can’t change the world on their own. Local projects can interlink and inspire at global scales—for instance, the Under2 Coalition that connects more than 270 national and subnational governments. Small initiatives can also form the building blocks for larger-scale ones; they can make good ideas contagious, thus “shifting the sense of what is possible.” But sooner rather than later, individual nations and international alliances have to get on board. And when they do, they will have access to blueprints from thousands of smaller-scale movements that came before, showing that it is possible to build a more just and sustainable future.
I say “when” nations get on board rather than “if” with some hesitation. As I write this, Trump will soon resume power, and once more withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. It’s an odd moment to be reviewing a book with the sheer energy and optimism that suffuses this one. The Green New Deal from Below is not an unrealistic book, but its political realism is still a far cry from the pessimistic dirge into which Western environmentalism so often slips. Cynicism can be oddly comforting. Hope is painful because it makes you open your eyes. It is striking, and invigorating, to see how many people in these pages don’t just hope but also act, taking the contagious idea that none of us is saved unless all of us are, and putting that idea to work. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know it needs more of this.