Small Wins & Big Victories
The Understory: Issue Twenty-Three
I’m pleased you found The Understory—my biweekly essays with critical perspectives on the climate emergency. If you’re here for the first time, hello! Enter your email below to get issues to your inbox, free.
On December 19, 2008, Tim DeChristopher boarded a train for downtown Salt Lake City to attend a protest at the regional Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office. 150,000 acres of land near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks had been divided into 77 parcels. This land was being auctioned despite an injunction filed by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance that the BLM had failed to analyze the impacts of air pollution on nearby national parks. According to a mix of testimony on DeChristopher’s website and reporting by Outside Magazine, when arriving on-site, DeChristopher decided the protest needed to be moved from outside to inside the building. He entered the BLM offices and approached the registration desk. DeChristopher was asked if he was there for the auction and if he would be bidding. He said yes and yes, and signed a registration form. DeChristopher was handed a sign bearing the number 70—a number that would soon become synonymous with not only DeChristopher but also the climate justice movement he inspires.
For 30 minutes, sitting amongst the other bidders, DeChristopher watched the auction aghast. He recounted looking across the room and seeing his friend, Krista Bowers, weeping. This is when he decided to start bidding. In his discussion with Terry Tempest Williams in Erosion: Essays of Undoing, DeChristopher was frank,
“I felt that so strongly sitting there at the auction, watching parcels go for eight or ten dollars an acre. I mean that's why I first started bidding—just to drive up the prices—because I had this overwhelming sense that this is not acceptable."
DeChristopher hoped to increase the price to purchase land and strip the underland. To his surprise, DeChristopher started to win parcel bids. He ended up winning 14 parcels totalling 22,500 acres with $1.8 million owing. BLM special agent, Dan Love, pulled him aside and asked whether he intended to pay for the parcels. According to Outside, DeChristopher said under oath “no” and told Love that it was an illegitimate auction that threatened not only his future but the future of his generation through shale oil extraction.
Once it was revealed that DeChristopher did not intend to pay, the auction room erupted. Because he has so greatly inflated the prices for others and won 14 parcels himself, the auction was shut down. The newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, dismissed the auction the following month, declaring that the BLM had not appropriately taken the climate into account before auctioning off public lands for energy development.
Over the next two years, DeChristopher’s trial was delayed nine times by the prosecution. When he finally went to court 2,000 protestors showed up. According to Outside, Judge Benson declared the following at the start of the trial:
“First, DeChristopher’s attorneys wouldn’t be allowed to use a necessity defense—the argument that he had to disrupt the auction because of his beliefs about climate change. Second, the defense couldn’t bring up the fact that DeChristopher had actually raised money to buy the land; the court’s view was that, by then, the fraud had been committed. Third, the fact that Salazar had removed the leases from auction wasn’t admissible. Finally, the defense could not inform the jury that past bidders had not been able to pay for their parcels either.”
Removing those defences at the beginning of the trial sought to eradicate the context for DeChristopher’s behaviour. On March 3, 2011, the jury convicted DeChristopher of two federal felonies. At sentencing there were 26 solidarity actions at federal courthouses across the United States in addition to the Salt Lake City courthouse with protestors carrying signs reading, “We are all Bidder 70.” DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary, a $10,000 fine, and three year’s probation. Less than a month after sentencing, the BLM distributed a memo that 14 parcels of land would be up for auction in Central Utah starting at $2/acre. Six of them were from the 2008 auction.
Issue Twenty-Three unfurls two contrasting theories of change to understand how we can rebel effectively for a healthier living planet. It occupies the space of tension between working within the existing cultural, economic, and legal paradigms for small wins and the pursuit of big victories by shifting paradigms as DeChristopher attempted. We consider the various structures available for resistance, and what social science research reveals about the efficacy of different methodologies. This essay continues where The Understory began with Issue One; asking us to consider what actions we might take as our personal cups of endurance flow over.
Our Time is Now
The entire planet is now in a shared race against time to prevent further warming. Humans radically sped up the geological clock over the past century by saturating our air and seas with carbon. Geological time scales are compressing and accelerating to more closely resemble human time. As Andri Snær Magnason shares with Emergence Magazine, the change taking place is mythological in scope—bearing greater similarities to the Old Testament story of creation in seven days or Prometheus coming down from the mountain with fire than to the timescales of planetary change for most of human history.
We are being called upon to act incredibly fast. To do the seemingly impossible by halving our global carbon emissions by 2030 and go to zero emissions by 2050. Which begs the question—what approaches to change are available to us? With a clock that is merging human and geological time, can we patiently operate within the domains of small wins (transition) or should we move into the domain of big victories (transformation)? Issue Twenty-Three is an invitation to wade into the paradoxes of our climactic urgency and our possibilities for action in response.
At sentencing, DeChristopher shared a long statement recalling similar statements by Mahatma Gandhi that differentiated between law and injustice:
“The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice...The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together.”
DeChristopher seeks to remind each of us that laws are a representation of what citizens collectively decide is lawful. He asks us to consider in the era of climate breakdown, how should our laws and behaviours be revised to reflect the shifting moral compass in response (see Issue Thirteen).
Two Structures of Resistance
Hardly a day goes by without encountering the quote: "we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” As is the case with many quotes that enter the mainstream vernacular, it was not a direct quote from Einstein but rather an amalgamation of his statements about the importance of higher levels of thinking and ethics that were called for in a newly atomic age. If we ascend to a higher level of consciousness, we find ourselves embattled between our conscience and the society we live and function within.
Resistance on the path to rebellion is not prescriptive, but rather a creative space for collective imagination. As described by Anton Törnberg in “Prefigurative Politics and Social Change” (2021), Gandhi identified two branches of Satyagraha or civil resistance. One branch is the “obstructive” program which is what is most often attributed to Gandhi where human bodies are put in direct opposition to what is being protested. Think of Gandhi’s burning of the registration cards in South Africa or the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights era. But it is the other branch—what Gandhi called the “constructive” program—that he believed was the more powerful form of resistance. Constructive resistance creates structures, systems, and processes that are living alternatives to current systems of oppression.
Constructive resistance was evidenced in the mixed class and religious communities Gandhi created at multiple times in his life (South Africa 1904 & 1910, India 1915). As James D. Hunt recounts in “Gandhian Experiments in Communal Living,” Gandhi would often take colleagues to the nearby gates of the Sabarmati Central Prison as a contrast in freedoms:
“In our Ashram there are no walls. The only walls we have are those of the Ashram disciplines. But unlike the prison walls, they do not imprison, but protect us and release us into greater freedom...Imprisoned, we shall miss no flights of the palate or any other physical indulgence, having accustomed ourselves to plain fare and the simple life...When the whole of India has learnt this lesson, India shall be free. For, if the alien power then turns the whole country into a prison, it will not be able to imprison its soul.”
Gandhi recognizes that through the constructive program of changing the perception of needs, people could discover their personal freedom. In 1977 Carl Boggs named the constructive rebellion approach “prefiguration” whereby a group constructs an immediate change by creating “local collective structures that anticipate the future liberated society.”
Prefigurative politics creates a new world within the shell of the old with autonomous zones. As Törnberg writes, it is this means-ends consistency (transition) that provides the ability for rebels to live within their desired future while still existing in the time and structures of the untransformed society. Gail Bradbrook, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, foresees prefigurative politics as essential to a sustainable movement with the question (Episode 24 of Outrage + Optimism): "How do you meet the domination paradigm—the kind of control patriarchy—how do you meet it and oppose it in a way that you can sustain?" In each act of resistance, Extinction Rebellion creates autonomous zones that exemplify the means-ends consistency of the future they are fighting to create.
Landscape of Rebellion
When I reflected on past issues of The Understory, I realized there was a thread of rebellion narratives running through many of them: Black Lives Matter protests (Issue One), Patagonia’s opposition to growth (Issue Two), Mahatma Gandhi & his influence on Martin Luther King Jr. (Issue Eight), Freedom Summer volunteers (Issue Nine), UK Ramblers Mass Trespass at Kinder Scout (Issue Ten), the invitation of Fred Rogers to François Clemmons (Issue Twelve), Extinction Rebellion (Issue Fourteen), George Hayduke, Earth First!, and the Zapatistas (Issue Fifteen), Berkeley Free Speech Movement (Issue Sixteen), and Vandana Shiva’s fight for the commons (Issue Twenty-One).
While I find inspiration in many of these figures, in actuality, very few of us are Bidder 70 or the other rebels seeking big victories. Most of us recognize that we are unwilling to shoulder the responsibilities, anxieties, and losses of these leaders, and instead opt for the domain of small wins. We may carry DeChristopher’s conviction but would recoil from this type of boldness for fear of what we might lose.
Reading the stories of rebels and their rebellions can do more than help us imagine possibility; they can also move us to help create it. As Wendell Berry says, "a man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility." DeChristopher describes his own psychological turn from moving beyond the concept of sacrificing his freedom to the self-determinism of being unwilling to let go of it. He found the path to emerge from despair by imagining the path beyond loss.
In recalling what gave him the courage to enter the land auction, DeChristopher told Williams of his insecurity about the future. In March 2008 DeChristopher attended a lecture with one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, Terry Root, where she shared emissions data indicating that we had already passed the warming point of no return. She put her hand on DeChristopher’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” From this point forward, he realized that there was nothing more for him to lose by fighting back if a kind of “normal future” was lost to him anyway. DeChristopher found comfort in knowing that things would fall apart because it freed him to pursue transformative change:
“If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn't mean the end of everything. It means that we're going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that's certainly not hopeless. It means we're going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one.”
DeChristopher processed his own grief and overcome one of our greatest barriers to change, loss aversion (Kahneman & Tversky), by which fears of loss outweigh potential gains. DeChristopher realized that power emerges from the threat of and ability to take things away that are important to someone. By overcoming his fear of loss and being willing to lose what he felt like has already been taken, DeChristopher shifted the power dynamic to embolden himself for the pursuit of big victories.
DeChristopher believes it is “oppression by consumerism” that is one of the impediments to broad climate action. In countries with the highest levels of consumption, citizens are oppressed through their own comfort. Terry Tempest Williams quotes Breyten Breytenback on pairing these two concepts: "You Americans, you've mastered the art of living with the unacceptable." Many of us live with morally unacceptable behaviours, laws, and institutions because we are unwilling to forgo the comforts currently supported by their acceptance.
Small Wins
For as long as I can remember, I’ve oscillated personally and ideologically between strategies of small wins and big victories. It was in a fireside chat that I recently led with Andrew Hoffman when I was jolted back into this state of precarity. Hoffman brought into the conversation Debra Meyerson’s research on “tempered radicals” in the workplace, suggesting that his business school students often find solace in her notion of small wins at the margins rather than in the centre. Being “tempered” allows budding leaders to balance their desire and possibility for change with the comforts afforded by conformity. They can achieve concrete outcomes of moderate importance without ruffling (many) feathers.
I admit to also being seduced by this same belief during my MBA and for subsequent years in projects and enterprises demarcated as “social.” But two summers ago I had my bubble popped by Anand Giridharadas when reading Winners Take All. Giridharadas dissuades us of the illusion of win-win’ism (Issue Nine) that we can help others while simultaneously helping ourselves.
Management literature is populated with evidence supporting the small wins theory of change. In “We Don't Need Another Hero” (September 2001), Joseph L. Badaracco writes of the “extraordinary achievements” of “quiet leaders” due to their approach of modesty and restraint. He found that quiet leaders pursue four consistent paths when facing ethical challenges:
They buy more time when things heat up. This allows situations to diffuse.
They carefully calculate political capital losses before embarking. This calculus of loss versus return is constantly running in the background of their decision.
They bend rules rather than seeking to break them.
They seek out compromise.
These are not the traits we conventionally associate with rebels, but rather those who follow in the long shadows of others and rarely emerge from it. However, it is exactly such traits that Meyerson similarly reveres in the tempered radicals she studied:
“Tempered radicals bear no banners; they sound no trumpets. Their ends are sweeping, but their means are mundane. They are firm in their commitments, yet flexible in the ways they fulfill them. Their actions may be small but can spread like a virus. They yearn for rapid change but trust in patience. They often work individually yet pull people together. Instead of stridently pressing their agendas, they start conversations. Rather than battling powerful foes, they seek powerful friends. And in the face of setbacks, they keep going. To do all this, tempered radicals understand revolutionary change for what it is—a phenomenon that can occur suddenly but more often than not requires time, commitment, and the patience to endure.”
For those committed to both the existing structure (organization, economic system, government) and a cause that is possibly at odds with it, Meyerson offers an olive branch for quiet change within a system rather than the need to disrupt or stand outside of it. In “Radical Change, the Quiet Way” (2001), she describes that organizational change can happen through either drastic action or evolutionary adaptation. Her research reveals that evolutionary change (small wins) can produce a broad and lasting shift with far less turmoil than drastic action (big victories) with its characteristics being gentle, incremental, and decentralized. “Like drops of water, these approaches are innocuous enough in themselves. But over time and in accumulation, they can erode granite.”
Can small acts of nonconformity actually result in substantial change? Could this approach nurture our personal convictions rather than having them wither on the workplace vines? Is the workplace context different in how we should consider manifesting change?
Meyerson’s tempered radical was informed by Karl E. Weick’s “Small Wins” (1984) that suggests these incremental, rarely noticed small wins cumulatively build into a bigger “package” of change. Had the big package of change been initially proposed in its entirety, it would likely have been rejected as too threatening. By breaking change into parts that are built over time rather than thrust upon an organization at once, they not only have a higher rate of success, but they also endure. Weick finds that once a small win is achieved, the conditions become more favourable for future small wins. Over time small wins enable change agents to attract a growing group of allies while simultaneously deterring opponents. With each subsequent attempt at change, the resistance lessens.
Unlike the autonomous zones of prefigurative politics, tempered radicals do not live with means-end consistency in their professional lives, but rather a nomadic existence by being inhabitors between worlds. They are insiders and outsiders; proponents of the status quo and its demise; advocates for stasis and change. Meyerson suggests that “tempered radicals operate on a fault line” between assimilation and separatism. According to the research of Meyerson, Scully, Weick, and Badaracco, it is this ability to maintain one's balance along organizational fault lines that can be attributed to the success of quiet leaders and their strategy of small wins.
Quiet leaders/tempered radicals are much like ballerinas en pointe. It takes years of training before attempting this somatic feat. Even then, ballerinas must remain in perfect form as they straddle the fault line between safety and injury. Being en pointe demands patience of form. Perhaps just as most of us are unable or unwilling to go through the rigorous training to be en pointe, too few of us also have the patience, long-term commitment, and time to strategically approach slow change. Thus, the question of how each of us brings forth change may have less to do with a deliberate decision and more to do with our natural gifts and proclivities.
Conclusion
Rebels work in small wins and big victories to bring forth the change they hope to see in the world. They push for change from the inside, the outside, and from the margins. What we can glean from the big victory theory of change is the speed at which it can ignite a movement to overturn the status quo. While the small wins approach effectively creates a package of cumulative wins that can gradually turn tides.
Through stories ranging from Tim DeChristopher to tempered radicals in the workplace, we can appreciate that visibility should not be taken as a proxy for efficacy. While some rebels and their approaches are hard to recognize, others are visibly building movements and autonomous zones before our eyes so we can envision a changed future in real-time. As Annie Dillard said, “sometimes you jump off a cliff first, and build your wings on the way down.” While other change agents calculate precisely their every move.
The accelerating urgency of climate change is calling for more of us to act and to do so with greater efficacy for the health of our living planet. The world we’ve been imagining in preceding issues of The Understory point towards rebellion. Restoring not just our ecosystems but also our interrelationships with the natural world is a rebellious act that is at odds with forces undergirding society. As DeChristopher says:
“You can't move the center from the center. That if you want to shift the balance—if you want to tilt that scale—you have to go to the edge and push. You have to go beyond what people consider to be reasonable, and push...the center is always going to be less than what's required for our survival.”
Small wins and big victories can both bring forth greatly needed change. From what point will you begin pushing from?
Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead.
Adam
If you liked this Issue, please subscribe. The Understory is free and will come to your inbox weekly.
In between issues I share my own reflections and those I have heard from readers. While the term community is often overused and thus abused, The Understory is a community of readers who value the comments of others. Please reply to this email or leave a comment on the website with any reflections you feel comfortable sharing 🙏.
Why I Write The Understory
We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The scale of the issue demands not only continuous focus but also the courage to take bold action. I've found that the persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause.
The Understory is my way of organizing the natural and human-made curiosities that capture my attention. Within the words, research, and actions of others lies the inspiration for personal and organizational journeys. I hope that my work here will help to inform not just my persistent consciousness, but yours as well.
That's a great article Adam, again well researched and presented. I feel comforted by the fact that my age and stage makes it a lot easier to take the Small Wins approach and not to feel too guilty for being unable to effectively contribute to Big Victories. I am heartened though to see the Big Victory path that President Biden has set the USA onto. His leadership gives me growing confidence that global Climate Change Action can progress much more rapidly now, and we can individually contribute our Small Wins to the cause. This hope can be incredibly transformative for a family, a community and a nation and will result in real change.
Adam to support the points you are making in this issue, I would like to offer the following poem by Jane Hirshfield; it was part of my event last Saturday and generated great exchanges on the same topic of "small wins vs. big victories". Enjoy!
(NO WIND, NO RAIN) BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
No wind, no rain,
the tree
just fell, as a piece of fruit does.
But no, not fruit. Not ripe.
Not fell.
It broke. It shattered.
One cone’s
addition of resinous cell-sap,
one small-bodied bird
arriving to tap for a beetle.
It shattered.
What word, what act,
was it we thought did not matter?