What threshold must be reached before ordinary people decide it’s necessary to break the law?
Throughout history, people have resorted to means beyond the law in order to advance moral causes. In fact, there’s hardly any major struggle in history that didn’t involve breaking with the established legal logic of the time. The law often changes in response to law-breaking, and the cause becomes a celebrated one.
Whatever that threshold is, it has now been reached for the venerable Sierra Club, the USA’s oldest and largest conservation organisation, with 1.4 million members. Michael Brune, the Club’s Executive Director, announced last week that they will support civil disobedience for the first time in their 121-year history. This is significant far beyond the limited coverage that the announcement was given.
Brune stated, "For civil disobedience to be justified, something must be so wrong that it compels the strongest defensible protest...For Thoreau, the wrongs were slavery and the invasion of Mexico. For Martin Luther King, Jr., it was the brutal, institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South. For us, it is the possibility that the United States might surrender any hope of stabilizing our planet's climate."
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