Annie Leonard: About 20 years ago, I was with an intergenerational group of activists. There were contemporary climate activists, and I was in the younger group at that point. Then there were older activists from the civil rights movement, and the gathering was specifically for us to ask each other about lessons learned in their work, or to try to understand each other. We had so many questions for these older civil rights activists, and they had one question for us. They said, “Why don’t you sing?” It was so interesting. When we asked them questions like, “How did you sustain yourself when your colleagues were shot and killed? How did you sustain yourself when your houses were bombed?” They kept saying to everything, “We sang. We sang. We sang.”

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the newscast, we speak with Annie Leonard and André Carothers. Leonard is the former executive director of Greenpeace U.S. and spent 17 years with the organization. Carothers spent 13, and both have decades of experience in advocacy. Together, they are the co-authors of the new volume from Patagonia Books, Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It. In this conversation, I ask Leonard and Carothers why they wrote this book. They explain that the ability to protest today is under attack in a way it hasn’t been before, and how and why they urge people to defend the right to protest. Additionally, they stress that protest works, how exactly it works, and many of the ways that it has worked over the course of history. They also share their advice for those who are new to protesting. Leonard explains that they wrote the book for the protest curious, but they have also received very positive responses from veterans. One part of this conversation that really stood out to me was when the two explained that, at the inception, protests are often unpopular, not just with the general public, but sometimes with adjacent advocates. Carothers outlines the criticism Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. faced, not from those who opposed him, but from those in his inner circle who felt he was too impatient. They both draw parallels between the protests of the past and those of the present, urging listeners not to take for granted many of the rights that they have today, which partly came at the expense of these protests and the risks that people put themselves in to fight for the environment and human rights. Annie Leonard and André Carothers, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.

Annie: Thank you.

André Carothers: Thanks for having us.

Mike: Can either of you describe, or both of you, in your own words, why you’ve written this book?

André: Several reasons. The book is important now because we are experiencing what some people call a shutdown of the public square in the United States, and around the world, but we’re focusing specifically on the United States. What we mean by that is that there is a combination of bureaucratic, legal, and all sorts of pressure tactics to make it extremely difficult to make your voice heard. There is lawfare, what they call lawfare, against protesters, making it very difficult to protest in ways that we used to a generation ago. We’re experiencing vilification of protest, meaning that anyone who puts their neck out for something they believe in is called a terrorist, or a troublemaker, or, in the case of Donald Trump, a low-IQ maniac. So one of the reasons we wrote the book is to make sure that people understand that we are in a critical moment where our ability to make our voices heard is being curtailed.

Mike: Annie, did you have anything to add to that?

Annie: Yeah. There are two reasons. One, which André captured, is that we wanted to push back against the vilification of protesters. But the second thing is we wanted to remind readers about the role protest played in gaining a lot of the progress that we take for granted today. I was giving a talk a couple of years ago, and I asked the crowd, “Who here likes the weekend?” Everybody raised their hand, and I said, “Thank a protester.” “Who here likes the fact that wheelchairs can go up curbs? Who here likes the fact that your middle schooler is in school instead of a factory? Who here likes the fact that in that school, Black, brown, and white kids sit together and use the same drinking fountain?” Anyway, you can go on and on, and every time I would say, “Thank a protester.” I was so surprised how many people came up to me and said, “I never thought about that.” I realized that in our history, we often ignore, invisibilize, and write out the role that protests played in getting us a lot of the things that we really value today. So we wanted to remind readers of that history and raise the alarm about what’s at stake if we lose this right to dissent and peaceful protest.

Mike: We’re definitely going to talk about the ways in which protest has helped safeguard some of the rights that some of us have taken for granted. But the first thing I want to talk to you about, and I think this is a great place to bring it up, is the ways in which you feel that protest, or even the right to free speech, is being attacked. Obviously, you have some experience with this. So can you outline for our audience some of the most salient or prominent ways in which you think that protests or the right to free speech are being attacked?

André: I think it comes from stories. We hear stories now. There was a demonstration last year on the Golden Gate Bridge where some demonstrators came together to briefly block the bridge to protest what’s happening in Gaza. This is exactly the same protest that took place 15 or 20 years ago around the AIDS crisis. People go up, they block the bridge temporarily, and people are inconvenienced, and public light is shone on the issue. Twenty years ago, the protesters were given misdemeanors, the bridge was cleared, and the whole thing was over in a matter of hours. There’s a woman now who helped organize that protest, who was in a wheelchair, by the way, on the bridge, who is being prosecuted for selective, for imprisonment, involuntary imprisonment, because there were some number of people who were inconvenienced in their cars.

Mike: The number of protesters and demonstrators who blocked lanes was actually 26. Among them was Sarah Cantor, and she faces up to 15 years in prison on felony conspiracy charges. This was reported by the San Francisco Standard.

André: This is one of the tactics that’s being used. It’s called lawfare. It’s called charge aggregation, where you pile on all these different laws and make it so that a person who would have gotten a misdemeanor 20 years ago is facing years in prison.

Annie: Yeah, that’s one form of attack on protesters, and I’ll just run through a couple of others. It starts with vilification, and you see this with government officials and some corporate executives who call protesters terrorists, enemies of the state, and other things that André already mentioned. Vilification is really the first step in the attacks on protests because it does two things. It places the protesters’ demands outside the scope of legitimate discourse. If you can attack them because of their tactic and call them terrorists, then whatever they’re asking for, whether it’s racial justice or sane climate policy or whatever, is delegitimized. But the other benefit, for the anti-democratic forces, of vilifying protesters is that it readies the public to accept more draconian repression because you’ve already vilified them. So there’s vilification. There are SLAPP suits. SLAPP suits are, that’s an acronym, it stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. It’s a kind of bogus, meritless lawsuit that’s not designed to even make it to court or win in court, but is often hundreds of millions of dollars, and is really aiming to silence dissent, chill dissent, intimidate, and bankrupt people. I’ve actually been SLAPPed. I got a $300 million lawsuit.

Mike: A U.S. court sided with fossil fuel pipeline giant Energy Transfer and ordered Greenpeace International and Greenpeace entities in the U.S. to pay $345 million. This was reported by Gabby Flores of Greenpeace on February 20, 2026. The initial lawsuit was for over $600 million but was reduced to $345 million.

Annie: They offer to make it go away if you stop their campaign, and it’s really tempting for a lot of people to say, “Okay.” There are these new anti-protest laws, and I’ll tell you, a lot of those are happening in Australia and the U.K. too. It’s not just in the U.S. They criminalize peaceful protest and free speech. There is violence against protesters, which again is not new, but the scale and the breadth and the openness of it are new. And then there’s also an element of self-censorship, that some protesters themselves are silencing themselves because of fear of all of these things. So the accumulation of all of this is a real threat to our right to free speech and public dissent.

Mike: Thank you for outlining that. I guess this is maybe an obvious question, but what is the antidote to that vilification? How does one get behind it and stop it before it even takes hold?

Annie: We wrote this book for that very reason. We have 42 stories of protest, and then we have 12 guest voices of protesters around the world, and we really sought to humanize the protesters. We have loads of quotes, firsthand experience. We want to remind readers, remind people today, that the people who are standing up, who are risking their safety, sometimes their lives, to protect the environment, protect racial justice, protect their immigrant neighbors, protect their democracy, they’re doing the same thing that our heroes of the past were doing. They’re regular people who stepped up at a moment of courage, and they deserve our reverence, just like we revere Gandhi or Martin Luther King from long ago. It’s the same thing today. So that, pushing back on that, reminding people of the role that protesters played. And if you hear somebody condemning these protesters because they caused a traffic jam or whatever they did, remind people that protest is patriotic. Protest is part of our democracy. It’s how we make our voices heard to promote positive change.

André: What else was interesting when we were writing the book and looking for these examples was that we discovered just how vilified protesters that we’ve come to honor and feel were heroes were at the time. Americans grew up on the Boston Tea Party, the iconic moment when the Sons of Liberty planted a flag to liberate this country from British rule. The Boston Tea Party, first, was a pretty radical act of property destruction. Some $2 million worth of someone else’s tea was dumped in saltwater and ruined. The second thing that’s interesting about that is that both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin disapproved roundly of what the Sons of Liberty did.

Mike: Yeah.

André: Benjamin Franklin offered to pay back the East India Tea Company for the money for the tea destroyed. Same thing with Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King was at the center of the civil rights battle in this country for 15 years, and never did his approval rating go above 50% in this country. In fact, the year before he was assassinated, when he turned his attention to the Vietnam War and to economic justice, 62% of the American public disapproved or very much disapproved of what he was doing. And so today, we’ve got three people who are honored with memorials and bridges, and they’ve got schools named after them and streets named after them. In order, number one is George Washington, number two is Abraham Lincoln, and number three is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So there’s something about the gymnastics of history that allows us to honor these people well after they’re dead, but not when it’s happening right in front of us.

Mike: Yeah, I was going to ask you about this because you bring it up in the book, and I have to admit, I didn’t know that about Benjamin Franklin and the Boston Tea Party. But the sort of strange cognitive dissonance of people lionizing protests of the past while condemning ones in the present really seems to be a strange phenomenon. I was going to ask you, do you think, or hope perhaps, that in 20 years, 50 years down the line, people will be looking at the climate protests of today as they look at the protests from the 1950s and 1960s?

Annie: I think there’s no doubt they will. The science on climate is so clear. The trajectory is so scary. The window to avoid worst-case climate scenarios is shrinking, and the people who are putting themselves out there demanding action, inconveniencing folks now, will absolutely be the heroes of, hopefully, very soon, but definitely of the future.

André: We also want to give a shout-out to the people who are responding in an appropriate way right now. There is an actor named Jeremy Strong, who’s very well known. He was in a bunch of movies and TV shows that people love, and he was on stage in New York last year playing the title character of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which is a story about a whistleblower trying to draw attention to chemicals in the water of a resort. Climate protesters stood up in the middle of the show on Broadway and started to interrupt it. You can imagine, the audience went berserk, and people were yelling at them to sit down. Jeremy Strong stayed in character in front of the room and said, “Let them, let their voices be heard.” Afterward, he was interviewed, and they said, “What were you thinking?” He said, “Look, I don’t blame them for standing up and making hell, making a ruckus in my play. It would be hypocritical of me not to honor them, especially when I’m in the lead role of An Enemy of the People.” So there are signs that people are understanding the crisis and are responding appropriately to the protesters, but we’re still a long way from ending vilification now.

Mike: There’s a quote in the book that says, “Any message that’s worth delivering can be amplified with art.” I absolutely love this quote and agree with it wholeheartedly, but I think it would be beneficial for us to discuss this. What are some of the most significant ways in which art is amplifying and successfully aiding environmental advocacy? What are some examples that stick out in your view?

Annie: That quote is from Shepard Fairey, who made a beautiful piece for the book. If we’re going to move enough people to take action bold enough to address the many crises we’re facing right now, we have to move their heads, and we have to move their hearts. It is with the facts, the rational self, that we can move their heads, but it is through art, through music, through singing, through dance, through culture, that we move their hearts. Over time, I’ve seen in our country, when social movements have won a policy change, if they haven’t first embedded that policy change in culture, if they haven’t celebrated it through art, through song, through stories, the policy is much more vulnerable to backsliding. But if you use culture to reach and engage and inspire people and help them imagine what’s possible, the victories that you have, whether you’re working on same-sex marriage or climate solutions or anything, those victories will be more deeply embedded in society and will be much harder to backtrack.

Mike: André, do you have anything to add to that?

André: I’m a guitar player, and so I love the power of song. We put together a set list for some of the events we’re doing where I collected all the protest songs and put them on a streaming service so we could listen to them. Music in defense of democracy and human rights is a long tradition, going back to Woody Guthrie and then, of course, the Spanish Civil War. There’s something exhilarating about listening to that music and playing it again and having it revived right now by musicians who are re-recording old songs. Music is really powerful.

Annie: I’ll tell you a quick story that I thought was so interesting. About 20 years ago, I was with an intergenerational group of activists. There were contemporary climate activists. I was in the younger group at this point. Then there were older activists from the civil rights movement. The gathering was specifically for us to ask each other lessons learned in their work, or to try to understand each other. We had so many questions for these older civil rights activists, and they had one question for us. They said, “Why don’t you sing?” It was so interesting. When we asked them questions like, “How did you sustain yourself when your colleagues were shot and killed? How did you sustain yourself when your houses were bombed?” They kept saying to everything, “We sang.”

Mike: I’m just sitting with that. That’s so incredibly insightful. The power of song, as you mentioned, André, is really potent. I am curious, is there something you wish that popular culture would embrace more of right now?

Annie: I would like to see popular culture reflect the kind of courage that we saw in Minneapolis. We’re seeing some people starting to, like Bruce Springsteen. He is standing up with such courage and such decency, and has written a song that’s a tribute to the people of Minneapolis, and he has been threatened and maligned by the president of the United States, and he is not slowing down at all. Courage is contagious. The more that we can integrate stories of resistance, the more that we can model courage, and also the more that we can bring joy to this. The anti-democratic forces want nothing more than us to be alone, scared, silent, and miserable. So it’s a form of resistance to do the opposite. We’re going to be together. We’re going to sing. We are going to march together. We are going to withdraw our cooperation from the authoritarian regime. And in doing so, we’re going to take care of each other, and we’re going to win.

Mike: Yeah, you’re not the first activist who’s been on this podcast who’s mentioned that joy is essential in the movement. So it’s really interesting to hear you echo that. There’s a part in the book where you write about Dr. Martin Luther King, who wrote a letter from a Birmingham jail, and I want to quote him really quick. He said, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to dramatize the issue so it can no longer be ignored.” I reflected on that because, at times, the tactics that are used in a protest often receive criticism, as we’ve discussed here, whether it’s throwing soup on the encasement that is on the outside of a painting, or blocking a pathway or a road. These tactics may seem unpleasant, but they’re elevating something to a wider public consciousness. I wanted to discuss the importance of the nonviolent aspect of this because you’ve definitely highlighted that these protests are nonviolent in your book. So can you both explain the importance of this?

André: Before we get into that, I just want to remind everyone that letter was not written to Martin Luther King’s opponents. It was written to his friends. There were clergy and other activists, commentators at the time, who criticized him for being overly aggressive and being insufficiently patient. So that letter was designed to alert everyone that, for him and for Black people in the South and across this country, this was a matter of great urgency. What he’s reminding us of is that there is a persecuted population that is making its voice heard any way it can, number one. And number two, the genius of that is that when you take a really bold and sometimes maybe even outrageous, by conventional standards, position, you are creating political room for people who, you’re covering the left flank, and you’re creating political room for people to take action, to make decisions, to vote for things that they wanted to vote for but felt exposed until someone like Martin Luther King or the current climate protesters took a stand and did something that appears on its face to be radical.

Annie: I just want to say, having protested now for four or five decades, it’s not fun to have a lot of people mad at you. Nobody does that lightly. Nobody says, “I’m going to go cause a traffic jam for a fun way to spend an afternoon.” It’s just all that rage coming at you. People don’t make those decisions lightly. They make those decisions and create that tension that Dr. King talked about when they have exhausted the polite levers that our democracy offers. We would much rather simply call a polluter and say, “Could you please stop polluting in that river?” That would be much, much easier. But when we’ve gathered our petitions, done our research, done our lobbying, had our permitted marches, when you’ve just exhausted them, sometimes people are morally and scientifically compelled to put their bodies on the line in ways that do create that tension, and that tension motivates action. So if people don’t like activists throwing paint on cases around paintings or causing traffic jams, then let’s fight for climate progress. Let’s protect our democracy. Let’s solve these problems so that activists like us and others do not feel morally and scientifically compelled to be disruptive. But when we are, we have that right, and we should not enter it lightly, but nor should we have that right taken away from us.

Mike: Hello, listeners, and thank you for tuning in. As I always like to mention, Mongabay is a nonprofit news organization. We rely on funding from listeners like you. So if you’d like to support the podcast, go to patreon.com/mongabay to become a monthly sponsor of the show. If you want to find where you can purchase a copy of Protest, head to theprotestbook.com or click on the link in the show notes. Now back to the conversation with Annie Leonard and André Carothers. I want to dedicate some time in this interview to talking about something that I think can be difficult for people who don’t engage in protests regularly to fully understand, and that is the amount of bravery that it takes to be involved in a protest. Both of you have extensive experience and decades of experience protesting, and without invoking too many painful memories for you here, obviously, can you discuss just how scary it can be sometimes and the amount of bravery it takes to do what you do?

André: I mean, it’s important to remind everyone that Annie and I are American-born, white, almost senior citizens, and so we have enormous privilege in the arena called protest. One of the things that we are encouraging is that those of us with access to the levers of power, with privilege, with the economic ability to function, have a greater obligation to go out and do stuff that folks without the resources, that might be immigrants, that might be people of color, don’t have purchase to do. So what you’re asking reminds me just to make sure that people understand that there is a class division and a rights division and an access division in this country that demands that people like me and Annie do a little bit more.

Annie: Talking about fear and protests is interesting because, first of all, there’s no line in which protest is scary or not scary. For some people, joining a permitted march that has lots of escorts and is totally fine could be scary. For some people, speaking up at the dinner table or at work, the workplace, to call out an injustice is scary. There are all different lines for people. I was the executive director of Greenpeace in the U.S. for nine years, and our climbing team would regularly rappel off bridges or buildings and say they weren’t scared at all. So there’s no line of what’s scary or not. But what I will say is that something happens when you step into your power as a change agent. Something takes over the fear, or the fear is there, but something else is stronger, and that’s the sense of power and agency and commitment to the issue. That’s one reason why I think it’s very important, if there’s something you care about, to first try these polite levers of democracy. Because when you’re doing those things, it builds your conviction so that when you finally get to the point of putting your body on the line, you can do it without fear. There’s an interesting essay in the book by a woman named Ieshia Evans. There’s a photograph of her right next to the Shepard Fairey piece because it was a treatment of her photo. This photo went viral during the Black Lives Matter protest, so maybe some of your listeners have seen it. There’s a photo of Ieshia, a young Black woman in sandals and a flowing summer dress, standing directly in front of a line of heavily armed police at a protest about racialized police violence. It was the first protest she had ever attended. She’d never thought of herself as a protester. I talked to her about what was happening in that moment in this incredibly graceful and powerful photo. She said she’d never been to a protest, never even thought about it. She heard the news about one more Black man being killed by police, and she’d just had enough, and she got in her car and drove hours to this protest. When she arrived, the police were yelling at the protesters, who were doing nothing wrong. And she said she was so angry. They should have been protecting these people. She’s a nurse, so she has a real sense of protection and health and safety. So she walked right up to the police and looked them in the eyes. I said, “Were you scared?” Because it’s scary to be a Black woman in a summer dress in front of all these heavily armed thugs. And she said fear was totally absent from her body. Her whole body, just courage took over, and she just wanted to look them in their eyes. I thought that was incredibly courageous. But there have, all of us in different ways, whether it’s raising an issue at the dinner table, or the workplace, or joining a march, or hanging off a building, all of us have had that moment where you lean into your fear, and it just evaporates, and something else takes over. It’s been interesting as we’ve been going around and doing book events because we thought about this book as being for the protest curious or the protest adjacent, the people who really were like, “What is this thing, protest?” And that it might invite them in. But we’re getting a huge response from people who are longtime protesters who are just so happy to see this validation of what they’re doing.

Mike: Let’s talk about that really quick. I’m actually interested in the response you’ve gotten from the protest curious, as you say, and how that maybe differs from the longtime protest veterans.

Annie: We’ve done a number of book events, and we’re going on a national tour where we’re doing book events and also trainings in effective resistance all around the United States. When we made the book, we were thinking of it more for people that I call protest curious or protest adjacent, who maybe were looking at this and wondering about it or not quite sure who Gandhi was and what he did, but were interested, and we’ve definitely gotten that. But what surprised us at the book events is it’s about half longtime protesters who know in their hearts, and also by the data, that protest works. It’s not just that we like it. It actually really works. There’s lots of data about that. But you don’t hear that in the mainstream narrative, so they’re so happy to see recognition of something they know. So we’ve had about half longtime protesters. Then we’ve had about half people who come up to us and kind of lean in and whisper and say, “I’ve never protested before, but I’m starting to feel like I need to.” That for the first time, some red line has been crossed where they just know that silence is no longer acceptable.

Mike: Why do you think that is? Why do you think that more and more people are starting to see that some sort of red line has been crossed?

André: I think one of the reasons is that we all grew up assuming the traditional toolbox that we had, write your congressman, make sure you show up at the voting booth, maybe give testimony at a local city council meeting, or even just write a letter. All these things that we thought were the ways to open up space in the public square are no longer working as well as they used to, for obvious reasons. I think it’s becoming clear to all sorts of people in the United States that the palette of tactics that we are used to using isn’t working anymore, and we need to add a few. Those include protests, those include non-cooperation, those include mass action, and it’s become clear to a lot of people that’s the game going forward.

Mike: Yeah. In the afterword to this book, Robert Reich says that there are five key pillars for society: universities, science, the media, the law, and the arts, and that authoritarians are going after these institutions. It feels like there is an attack on the things we once took for granted, that would always be there. So I’m wondering if you could comment on that and offer your thoughts on how that’s affecting the public consciousness.

Annie: In the United States, a really core part of our national identity is that we are a democracy. We are a democracy, that we have free speech. Now, it was an imperfect democracy, for sure. I think it was more of the promise of a democracy than a fully inclusive one. But we have positioned ourselves nationally and globally as the model of democracy, and we all grew up believing that. So now when people are being punished at work for a social media post that they put up critical of an administrative policy, or critical of a deadly genocide that the United States is helping to fund, when people are now getting in trouble for these things that were not just laws and rights, but are so core to our national sense of identity, it’s very jarring for people. Everyone’s just waking up and realizing, “No, this is not who we are.” Eight million people just marched in the largest political protest in U.S. history under the slogan “No Kings.” This country fought to be a democracy. Again, it was an imperfect one, but we take that stuff seriously. And a lot of people feel not just, in the short term, repressed, but wounded at the very core sense of our national identity here.

Mike: So you both have stated in this interview, and obviously in the book, that protesting works, and you outline a lot of examples of how it does. But right now, given that it feels like there’s a lot of assault on our rights and our speech, are there any movements that are happening now that are actually working that you want to emphasize for listeners?

André: What I’m particularly interested in, and Annie has lots of other thoughts that she’s going to share, but for me, what I’m noticing is that it’s become a numbers game. The ability to affect those pillars that you just mentioned, to peel people away so that the supports that the regime right now has become weaker, is about numbers. When you have a government that’s willing to divide in order to get its way, that’s willing to vilify certain subpopulations of the United States, numbers are going to help with that. So what I look at is groups like Indivisible and all the local groups that are setting up mailing lists and having weekly conversations online, and are alerting people on a weekly basis that, “This is what we’re going to do next. This is why we’re doing this. This is why it’s important.” That feels to me like the way to move. I want, before the midterms in this country, to have so many people online understanding what’s required to make sure that the election goes well, to make sure that the administration backs off what it’s doing. I want those numbers to be so high that it becomes irresistible.

Annie: Like Hungary.

André: Right.

Mike: One protest movement that you write about in the book that is still currently ongoing, and that really struck me, is the, and I don’t know if I’m pronouncing this correctly, the Stop EACOP coalition. The protesters of this movement, as you describe in your book, are facing really harsh threats. I think over 40 NGOs were banned by the Ugandan government, and student protesters have been arrested and beaten. But there’s been a remarkable response internationally from financial institutions, and it appears the media coverage and the exposure of the movement appear to be deterring banks from underwriting that project. I personally think that is a really compelling example of how protest is working in a way that is really effective. So what do you think society can learn from this movement, which is still currently ongoing?

Annie: The media coverage helped for sure, and pretty much every case that there has been repression against peaceful protesters there, it has backfired. Whether you’re talking about Gandhi in India, or the women suffragists, or the incredibly brave students in Tanzania and Uganda who are fighting that horrific pipeline. But the media coverage is great, and the other thing that’s great is the international solidarity. You see the same thing happening around these protests as in the section on fighting South African apartheid. There were limits to what the activists in South Africa could do, so international activists organized to get their institutions to divest. The same thing is happening with this pipeline. So if we’re far away from Tanzania and Uganda, and we see the environmental damage this pipeline is going to cause, and we see these young students literally being beaten and jailed because they take actions like delivering petitions to a bank, we don’t have to just feel empathy. We can make sure that our financial institutions are not investing in them. There are lots of levers at the site of the protest, and then there are lots of levers all around the world.

André: Understanding the supply chain, if you will, of what allows a pipeline like the one discussed in the book to even be launched and started and considered involves international financial institutions. It involves local authorities who may be corrupted. There’s a collection of legal and financial weak points or vulnerabilities that, when you have a nationally organized, well-informed group of protesters, they can apply their energy at different places along that supply chain, the insurance companies, for example, and all of a sudden the whole thing is available to be collapsed.

Mike: So you’ve mentioned that protest works, as I’ve already discussed, but what are some examples of specific environmental victories that people even right now might be taking for granted that you want to highlight, that are the result of a protest?

Annie: Protest works. A protest works to raise awareness about an issue. It works to strengthen the commitment of the activists. It works to add pressure on decision-makers. It works to provide cover for the good decision-makers. But protest seldom works alone, so I don’t want to give the impression that if you protest today, tomorrow the government will stop burning fossil fuels. I like to talk about making change as like laying a stone path through a garden, and protest might be every fourth stone, or eighth stone, or 200th stone, but at certain times when you’re stuck, that can really move you forward. But you need other tools as well. Think about the largest protest in the United States ever, which was Earth Day. This was before Facebook events, before Twitter, before instant communication. Still, in 1970, 20 million people participated in Earth Day around the country. They were all over. It wasn’t always marching in the streets. Sometimes it was turning a vacant lot into a garden. But in some way, 20 million people woke up that day and took action to demand environmental change.

Mike: It should be noted that at the time, in 1970, 20 million people was 10% of the entire U.S. population.

Annie: If I were to read the list of environmental laws passed in the decade following that Earth Day, it would take up the rest of our time together. I sometimes do it in public talks, and it’s awkward how long it takes. Environmental laws around protecting species, around protecting forests, around reducing waste, everything, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s what happens when you get 20 million people collectively demanding things. I live in California, and California is one of the biggest fossil fuel production states in the country. Even though we have a reputation for solar panels and electric cars and all being granola hippies and all that, we have enormous amounts of fossil fuel production. The local communities where these are sited, which are always low-income, predominantly Black and brown communities, have been protesting so much that they successfully got, for the first time ever, a 3,200-foot health and safety buffer between the oil wells and their homes. There will be millions of kids in California who will breathe cleaner air because of the success of this protest movement, and that was just last year. But every year, there are so many examples where protesters shut down polluting factories, ban dangerous products, and advance solutions. It just works.

Mike: So you’ve already alluded to this, but it’s also mentioned in the book that protest is not enough. So if protesting is not enough, are there a few tools or keys here that you would ask listeners and readers to consider and do in addition?

Annie: For lawyers, there are lots of opportunities around litigation. For writers, there are lots of opportunities around public education. For artists, we need songs and poetry. We need to remind people what it is that we’re fighting for, not just against. For anybody who ever spends any money on anything, every time you’re about to buy something, you have a choice to prioritize a corporation that’s part of the solution or prioritize a corporation that’s part of the problem. There are lots of different ways that people can engage.

André: There’s a quote in the book from someone who said, if you’re like a small-town administrator of some kind in a public-facing entity, whether you’re a lieutenant governor or you’re part of the energy commission, if five or 10 people show up at a hearing, for them, that’s a mass demonstration. It indicates that there are people out there who care. So just showing up at every opportunity you get to make a case for clean energy or for civil rights, down ballot, way down the stack of elected officials and public-facing officials, you’re doing something important.

Annie: Also, just talking to friends and family and coworkers. A lot of us suffer silently with our concern under the false impression that we’re the only ones so concerned, so normalizing conversation about these issues is really important. The other thing that’s really important, that is so uninspiring to say, but is really important, is to vote. It’s uninspiring because often we don’t have a super compelling option on the ballot. But the way that democracies turn into authoritarian governments now is very different than it used to be. In decades past, the way an authoritarian would take over democracy was overnight. You’d have tanks rolling down the streets. We’ve all seen this in documentaries and movies. The way that current authoritarians take power is through elections. You see this in India, in the Philippines, in Hungary, which, good ending there, but also in the United States. It’s less jarring, and a lot of people don’t realize that we’ve actually had an authoritarian breakthrough in this country. So we have the midterm elections coming up, and one of the things authoritarians do once they do have a breakthrough is they try to dismantle the electoral system that could hold them accountable. We have to just flood the polls with voters, just as they did in Hungary, so that the victory is so resounding that it can’t be challenged. I know it’s hard. Sometimes you’ve got to plug your nose and vote, but you’ve got to vote.

Mike: Yeah. For listeners who, I’m assuming that a lot of listeners are probably aware of this, but the Voting Rights Act was just overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Note: The US Supreme Court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act this past April by significantly weakening Section Two. I’d like to remind you that this act has been around since nineteen sixty-five, so the US Supreme Court’s decision flies in the face of over sixty years of established legal precedent. But the result of this is stripping the protections for minority communities to be adequately represented in the House. As I speak right now, Tennessee Republicans have carved up District Nine In Memphis, which is a majority Black city, separating the city and Shelby County into three different districts that stretch hundreds of miles long, attaching these community members in Memphis, which is on the Mississippi River, to the same district of those that live in an affluent community in middle Tennessee.

…and that’s going to allow states to gerrymander and redraw districts. So that’s an effect of that. I may insert a fact-check note on this just to add more detail, but I wanted to plug that for listeners. What, if any, words of advice would you have to people currently who are thinking of protesting or already people who participate in protests? Are there things you would generally discourage or advocate for?

Annie: The number one thing I’d advocate for is get some friends and do it with a group or friends because it is safer, it’s smarter, and it’s more fun if you’re doing it in a group. You don’t have to face these things alone.

André: The second one is militantly nonviolent. The press will take full advantage of anything that looks like a burning trash can and characterize and protest-shame the entire enterprise. So not only do we have to pledge to be militantly nonviolent, but we have to police militant nonviolence, because it’s not unheard of at a demonstration that an agent provocateur will try to upset the optics of the event in order to justify a crackdown. So nonviolence historically works, and in the current media environment, it’s a necessary component.

Mike: So the book Protest is available now from Patagonia Books, but Annie and André, where would you like to direct listeners to learn more about the book or your work?

André: We have a website, www.theprotestbook.com, and what it does, which I am enjoying very much, it has a link called Join Us. On the Join Us page is a set of links to videos, books, articles, and websites of other activist groups that gives you the sense of the current state of this country. It also links listeners to the mailing list of Indivisible and the No Kings Network and other networks that are organizing people to have a coordinated response to what’s coming up next. It also has a link to our book tour, which starts tomorrow, I believe, and we’re going to at least 10 cities around the country and doing book events that are associated with resistance, nonviolent resistance trainings, so people can get up to date on what it looks like to be effectively opposing what’s happening in this country.

Annie: I just want to add a quote that’s also in the book. You might have seen it from Timothy Snyder, the historian. He said, “If you protest now, you will be able to protest later.”

Mike: I think that’s a great place to end the conversation. Annie Leonard and André Carothers, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure.

André: Thanks for having us.

Annie: Thank you.

Mike: If you want to find where you can purchase a copy of Protest, head to theprotestbook.com or click on the link in the show notes. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you want to help us out, we do encourage you to spread the word about the work we’re doing. And I also encourage you to leave a review. Doing this helps elevate the profile of our show. And as I mentioned earlier, you can support us by becoming a monthly sponsor. Go to our Patreon page at patreon.com/mongabay. We are a nonprofit news outlet. So when you pledge even just a dollar per month, it does make a big difference. It helps us offset production costs and hosting fees. So if you’re a fan of what we do here, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. You can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s Frontline at mongabay.com, or you can follow us on social media. Find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News and on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok, where our handle is @Mongabay, or on YouTube at Mongabay TV. Thank you, as always, for listening.