Urgency, part 2

Above, guerilla art that appeared during the XR actions in London, April 2019. Banksy? Not Banksy? Matters not, the message is clear.

Since crossing paths with Extinction Rebellion in London a couple of months ago, I have been raptly following and quietly funding those activists as they target one institutional enabler of environmental destruction after another. I have also been trying to join them but until recently have failed: they would call an event, I would mobilize my young troops, and we would arrive only to find the event over and the last of the rebels walking off. But our luck changed recently when, this past Father's Day, I and the family aboard a rented boat joined an XR parade. The experience was moving and uplifting, and more than that, it was seemingly effective:

**BREAKING** The city council of @AmsterdamNL is the first in The Netherlands to declare a climate and ecological crisis. A large majority of the Alderman voted for the motion. Great job @XR_Amsterdam and all Rebels. #ExtinctionRebellion #RebelForLife #ClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/aYla4fUcMM

— Extinction Rebellion Nederland (@NLRebellion) June 20, 2019

I was unable to attend the actual debate in the Amsterdam city hall--work commitments, don't you know--nor was I able to follow the activists to their next major action in this part of the world: the occupation of the RWE coal mine discussed in my previous post. Indeed, I was not even aware of this action until Twitter blossomed with reports of the multi-day occupation of this coal mine and of the technology feeding it, the same monstrous machine at the center of the small controversy I was then busy writing about. Let's be clear: I was thinking and writing while others were doing.

For me, this is an apt summary of the change I am witnessing: it is time for action. Where the climate is concerned people, and young people in particular, are done admiring the problem (a favorite Autodesk idiom), and certainly done bewailing the fact that we are failing notably to solve it. Where the climate is concerned the first and immediate order of business is to cease being destructive. The action of the tens of thousands of people--and certainly of the people in white suits storming the coal trains and the bagger supplying them--involved in the Extinction Rebellion and related movements is a reflection of this imperative. In this it reminds me of that most famous statement made by Mario Savio, a civil rights activist, at a protest in Berkeley in 1964:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

 Mario Savio, in a speech at Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley, 12 February, 1964

Savio's words, spoken as metaphor, are now being taken literally by larger and larger groups of people in more and more places around the world. More and more of us are becoming sick at heart as we learn to connect our own experiences--heatwaves, springtime without butterflies, ridiculous avocado prices, what have you--with global environmental catastrophe. And more and more of us are going to put our bodies on and in front of the many, many machines that are driving that catastrophe.

To return to the topic of my last post: companies do not have hearts and cannot become sick at them therefore. But it is companies that make and it is companies that operate the machines that must be stopped. If you, too, are feeling sick at heart go place your body on a machine--you will feel better for having done so, I promise!--but go look at the company for which you work, too, and examine its role in enabling the machines. Then take action.

Urgency, part 1

Autodesk's statement of sustainability, June 2019

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I work for Autodesk, and am happy to do so. In contrast, I've also posted previously about how unhappy I was to be working for some other companies in the past. One of the most important distinctions between then and now is that I see my current employer as a "good" company. Autodesk espouses values I share, is active in good works, and is avowedly intent on helping our customers do more, for better, with less (a pithy rewording of our corporate mission statement). We even have our own Sustainability group, populated by smart, committed, overworked people. It is disturbing, therefore, to find us being called out on Twitter by an artist/environmental activist as a contributor to the on-going cultural and environmental destruction around one of Europe's most hellish coal mines.

An aerial shot of the RWE excavator 290, borrowed from @JoanieLemercier's Tweet; click through to see how enormous (and thus enormously destructive) this mind-boggling machine is

The question of corporate responsibility is much on my mind. I support those who are holding tech to account for its heedless dissemination of flawed facial recognition, mistruth engines, and other technologies inimical to the health of society. I am horrified by the fact that the US government, long since fundamentally compromised in its execution of its democratic duties by the influence of big business, is now directly controlled by the very worst of those business people. And I have come to realize that the climate crisis in particular is the fault not of each of us and the every-day decisions we make individually but, fundamentally, of a small number of predatory corporations led by a coterie of people whose business models feed on the destruction of the planet.

Autodesk is clearly no such predator, but do we enable those bad actors in their work? Joanie Lemercier, the artist/activist mentioned above, accuses us of just this, noting that Autodesk software is used to maintain the gargantuan excavator you see here. Our CEO, to his credit, replied to Lemercier's call for Autodesk to stop supporting the coal industry:

We give our software and guidance for free to startups (and other efforts) that are working on clean/sustainable technologies. Beyond it being impossible to police all the uses of our software (and judge which are good and bad), I believe this is the more impactful approach.

— Andrew Anagnost (@andrew_anagnost) March 30, 2019

In my work for Autodesk I am responsible for building analytics systems that translate data about product usage into judgements about that use, and I agree with Anagnost, we cannot feasibly police our users as Lemercier proposes, even if such a thing were permissible. But we could do something much simpler: we could stop doing business with the world's largest carbon emitters.

Autodesk, like all US-based companies, operates with export controls and related restrictions that require us to evaluate purchase orders and to build business processes to select among them. Furthermore, within certain limits (of which I admit I do not have a complete understanding) we are allowed to choose with whom we do business. And, like all businesses, we routinely make decisions that show a preference for certain industries and certain types of customers within those industries. The idea is practical. Beyond that, it is very much in keeping with the times. Zurich Insurance Group, one of the hundred largest companies in the world, has just announced such a decision:

Zurich generally will no longer underwrite or invest in companies that:

• generate more than 30% of their revenue from mining thermal coal, or produce more than 20 million tons of thermal coal per year;
• generate more than 30% of their electricity from coal;
• are in the process of developing any new coal mining or coal power infrastructure;
• generate at least 30% of their revenue directly from the extraction of oil from oil sands;
• are purpose-built (or “dedicated”) transportation infrastructure operators for oil sands products, including pipelines and railway transportation;
• generate more than 30% of their revenue from mining oil shale, or
• generate more than 30% of their electricity from oil shale.

s://twitter.com/Lucie_Pinson_/status/Auhasdfdsttps://twiIf Zurich can know this about its customers, Autodesk can too, and if they can so discriminate then--again asserting this within my limited knowledge of the differences between Swiss and American corporate law--Autodesk can too. And if we wish to continue to be a "good" company then we should.

A policy of this sort requires careful thought--some of these companies are also working on clean energy technologies, for example, and very likely use our software in those initiatives--but I say this to my colleagues: it's time to put in that thought and, having thought, to take action. Indeed, it's past time, because in the meanwhile events have moved on, drawing increased attention to the particular coal mine Lemercier visited and, potentially, to the role of any company that plays a part in its continued operation. For more on that, please read Urgency, part 2.

Extinction Rebellion

Yesterday the international protest movement Extinction Rebellion staged an event in Amsterdam in which costumed mourners transported a coffin, on foot and by boat, to the Amsterdam city hall. This was one effort among many of theirs to pressure the city to declare a "climate emergency." Using the rare declarative power bestowed on me by Father's Day, I insisted that my family join me in supporting this effort. To that end we rented a boat and set off in search of the protesters. We found them, we borrowed from them a very large banner, and we then toodled around for a couple of hours displaying that banner with great success (the second boat in the video above is us!). The banner made it difficult to see while steering and served as a very effective and generally unhelpful sail, but one can hardly expect the path to a clean and just economy to be entirely free of obstacles. Felix took the helm and helped raise and lower (for bridges and near collisions) the banner. Gideon, occasionally (though not in this video) revisiting his opossum imitation, was our symbolic child robbed of a survivable climate. Talia, clutching a bouquet, stood as mourner and lookout. And our visiting friend and long-time activist, Catherine (hidden behind banner), provided helpful moral backbone and additional banner handling expertise.

It feels very good to do something.