Practical

What does this look like on the ground, and what are people doing about it now?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

The climate crisis is a fight over particular pipelines, refineries, forests, farms, and floodplains, and over who decides. This lens brings the theme down to the ground: the campaigns to stop extraction, the struggle over what a “just transition” means and for whom, the movements led from the frontlines and from Indigenous land defense, and the mutual aid that meets disaster when the state does not. It asks what it takes to build power against the most powerful industry on earth.

Anchor questions

• What is the fight over energy, land, or water where you live? Who is on each side?
• What is a “just transition,” and just for whom?
• What can direct action stop that a petition cannot? What has it stopped?
• What is the Green New Deal, and what do its supporters and critics on the left say?
• What are people building now to survive and resist, in mutual aid, land defense, and cooperatives?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. Several of these documentaries and toolkits are free online or with a library card.

Journalism and reporting

• Grist (1999 to present). The largest dedicated climate newsroom in the US, nonprofit and paywall-free, focused on equitable climate solutions and environmental justice. Free: grist.org
• Inside Climate News (2007 to present). A nonprofit, nonpartisan climate-accountability newsroom with sustained focus on how climate harm falls on communities of color and low-income communities. Free to read: insideclimatenews.org
• Atmos (2019 to present). A nonprofit magazine bridging ecology, culture, and environmental justice, with sections on climate solutions and ecological wisdom. Free: atmos.earth

Practical handbooks and how-to material

• From Banks and Tanks to Cooperation and Caring (Movement Generation, 2017). A 32-page popular-education zine, in English and Spanish, laying out the shift from an extractive to a regenerative economy, with curriculum ideas and framework diagrams a group can work through section by section. Free: movementgeneration.org
• Grounding in Just Transition (Climate Justice Alliance). Three Freirean popular-education curricula for frontline organizers, with stated time, materials, handouts, and a community-driven transition-planning guide. The most turnkey folk-school toolkit here. Free: climatejusticealliance.org
• Climate Resistance Handbook (Daniel Hunter, 350.org, 2019). A short, practical, Creative Commons guide to movement strategy, campaign design, and escalation for climate organizers. Free: commonslibrary.org

Food sovereignty

The climate argument is usually had about energy. It is also an argument about who grows food, on whose land, with whose seeds, and these movements are the largest in the world by membership and the least known in this school.

• Forum for Food Sovereignty, Declaration of Nyeleni (2007). Five hundred delegates from eighty countries in a Malian village, defining food sovereignty as the right of peoples to decide their own food and agriculture rather than have markets decide it for them. Written by peasant, fisher, and Indigenous movements themselves, and short. Free: nyeleni.org
• La Via Campesina. Roughly 200 million members across 81 countries, the movement that coined food sovereignty. Its Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology (2015) is the sharp one: agroecology is not a set of techniques that industrial farming can absorb, it is a claim about who controls seeds, land, and knowledge. Free: viacampesina.org and the agroecology declaration
• Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement has settled hundreds of thousands of families on occupied land and become the country’s largest producer of organic rice, which is land reform carried out rather than legislated. Free: mst.org.br

Energy democracy

• Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, Transition in Trouble? (2022). Community energy in Europe has stalled, and TUED’s argument is that decentralized ownership cannot carry a transition without public power behind it. It is here as the counterweight to community-solar enthusiasm rather than a reinforcement of it: a union network making the case that who owns the grid decides what the transition is for. Free: tuedglobal.org

Films and documentaries

• Gasland (Josh Fox, 2010, 107 min). The Academy Award nominated first-person road trip through communities poisoned by fracking, a key organizing tool for the anti-fracking movement. Fox released Gasland Part II himself but not this one. Where to watch: justwatch.com
• Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock (Myron Dewey, Josh Fox, and James Spione, 2017, 89 min). The water-protector-centered account of the NoDAPL resistance camps, co-written with Standing Rock resident Floris White Bull. Posted free in full by co-director Josh Fox. youtube.com/watch?v=G5EWZxII52c
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber, 2022, 104 min). A narrative thriller adapting Andreas Malm’s book, dramatizing young activists debating and undertaking sabotage of oil infrastructure. A sharp way to open the debate over tactics. Free with a library card on Kanopy, otherwise paid: justwatch.com

Podcasts and interviews with organizers

• Green and Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals (Bob Buzzanco and Scott Parkin, 2020 to present). Co-hosted by a labor historian and a veteran climate organizer, covering anti-capitalist environmental politics and fossil-fuel resistance. Free: greenandredpodcast.org
• Drilled (Amy Westervelt, 2018 to present). An investigative “true crime” climate-accountability series documenting how the fossil-fuel industry engineered decades of denial and delay. Free: drilled.media
• Rebel Steps (2018 to present). A how-to organizing podcast on direct action, mutual aid, solidarity, and building movements, made for people new to grassroots work. Free: rebelsteps.com

Video

• “How To Build Radical Community” (Andrewism, 2025). Roughly 27 minutes, about 89,000 views. A practical sketch of rebuilding community and mutual support against social isolation, the ground of any local ecological resilience. Shared with Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration. youtube.com/watch?v=1-Xl6dhDV3Q

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, Power to the People? Toward Democratic Control of Electricity Generation (2013). The energy democracy argument set out at length: who owns the grid decides what the transition is for. A union network’s case for public and social ownership of energy. Free: base.socioeco.org
• Zinn Education Project, Teach Climate Justice. Role plays and participatory lessons, including the Climate Change Mixer, built for classrooms and easily adapted to a study circle. The strongest source of participatory exercises for this theme, and it teaches the politics rather than the chemistry. Free: zinnedproject.org

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially accounts from groups that have run local sessions, and disaster mutual aid. The food sovereignty and energy democracy material here is movement-issued and reads as such; first-person accounts from people inside an MST settlement or a community energy project would be worth more than another declaration.