Getting to Know the CMAP: Union Mobilizing for the Climate (Part 1)

In the Fall of 2019, during a chapel service known as ‘Plant Chapel’, the Eco-Justice Caucus publicly asked Union to declare a climate emergency. The caucus subsequently put their charge into writing, which they submitted to the Board of Trustees on December 9, 2020. 

Ten days later, on December 19, Union’s Board of Trustees officially approved this resolution, and on February 10, 2021, Union officially declares a climate emergency. As part of the declaration of ecological and climate concern, Union resolved to formulate a 10-year Climate Mobilization Action Plan, also known as CMAP.

In the Spring of 2021, a community assembly was convened with the goal of articulating initial policy recommendations for adoption by Union leadership. This community assembly included students, faculty, and community leaders, all who came together asynchronously online on April 5th through April 16th, to discuss the details of the initial proposal. 

On April 23rd, following a panel presentation with expert consultants the day before (Earth Day), the community assembled CMAP was finalized by democratic consent for submission to Union’s executive team. You can read the final version of the CMAP here. This plan, with updates, was then presented in 2022 by leaders of the Eco-Justice Caucus, Ben Stegbauer (MA ‘22) and Suntina Spehar (MA ‘22), to Union’s leadership. You can see their presentation here.

Where are we now, in 2023, three years on?

This year, the Eco-Justice Caucus will have a CMAP report, presentation, and celebration on Thursday, April 20, 2023. The event, titled Responding to Our Climate Crisis, will be the first public update regarding the CMAP since its inception. 

Throughout the next few days leading up to this 2023 CMAP event, we would like to present to you interviews with students who have been involved in the creation and maintenance of the CMAP. 

In this first interview, we visit with Ryan Felder, who was an organizer of the original CMAP.

AN INTERVIEW WITH RYAN FELDER

What is your name, year (or year of graduation), degree and concentration of study? If you have graduated, would you mind sharing what you are doing now?

My name is Ryan Felder (they/them), I graduated from Union in 2021 with a Master of Divinity. My concentration was interdisciplinary: social ethics and education. I’m currently a Master of Sacred Theology student at Yale Divinity School (2023) and a program manager at Blue Mountain Center.

What led to declaration of climate emergency at Union? Who all was involved in drafting and publishing the declaration? 

The climate emergency declaration has roots in the Green New Deal Working Group, which emerged from Jan Rehmann’s Marxism, Postmodernism, and Critical Theory course in the Spring of 2019. This group re-inhabited the Eco-Justice Caucus in the Fall 2019 and asked Union to declare a Climate Emergency at the Plant Chapel. Leader-participants of the caucus at the time were Roger Reisman, Dörte Mohme, Lukey Ellsberg, Fynn Adomeit, Kelly Crouch and others.

The Declaration of Emergency was a response to what was a trending demand other activist groups were asking governments and institutions at the time – perhaps popularized by the Extinction Rebellion. After meetings with administrators, the drafting process began in the Spring of 2020 with VP Fred Davie, Lukey Ellsberg, Kelly Crouch, Jennifer Helminski, and Ben Stegbauer. The organization The Climate Mobilization also acted as a consultant and ally throughout the process. 

When and how did the idea for the CMAP originate? 

The CMAP was always the next step after the Declaration and is borrowed from the demands of the Extinction Rebellion and eco-socialist demands of the time. For me, the sole purpose in demanding an emergency declaration was the built-in demand for a directly democratic mobilization process which presented the administration with a policy proposal while strengthening our communities' ability to conceive of, plan, and respond to the emergency on our own terms. 

How did you come up with the format of the CMAP as a ‘democratic process’ via Community Assembly? What principles guided your organization?

The CMAP as a democratic process was my deepest dream from the beginning and my motivation for trying to pull it off. The primary principles here being to present a viable democratic and horizontal alternative to top-down, institutional planning and present an overwhelmed and under-resourced Union administration with participatory models for addressing problems facing the seminary. Because the ecological crisis is a deep-seated social crisis stemming from racial capitalist and colonial modernity it was imperative to prioritize principles that undo that modernity. Subsequently, other principles are commitments to direct democracy, indigenous epistemologies, eco-socialism, and eco-liberation theology. The format was an adaptation of the citizens’ assembly model popularized in Europe and a facilitation method called sociocracy. Principles for the actual process included: accessibility, paying participants a living wage for their time, equal access to information, and consent-based decision-making. 

How did the pandemic inform or affect the CMAP approach? 

Before the CMAP began to be planned, the early days of the pandemic and quarantine showed us what actually responding to a crisis feels and looks like – albeit, it showed us what responding to a crisis looks like in a neoliberal society whose trust in government has been rightly eroded alongside our ability to actively participate in community decision making in ways that are actually meaningful. I wanted to CMAP and our decisions actually to be meaningful and not just another “event.” 

The most drastic impact the pandemic had on our planning and approach was that suddenly everything was remote. This allowed us to meet with a variety of people to gather advice and feedback – I’m thinking here of the Democracy Collaborative, The Climate Mobilization, the Green Seminary Initiative, and all of the people who would become our panel of experts: abby mohaupt, Rev. Dawrell Rich, Petra Thombs, Geoff Brown, Dean Cooper-White, Karenna Gore, Steve Dennison Smith.

Likewise, this meant that our community assembly would also have to be on Zoom, which presented its own challenges and opportunities. The challenge was that none of us had ever organized a community assembly to draft a community mobilization action plan, online or in-person. It was daunting to imagine how it would all unfold in a completely online space. 

We knew quite well that people were very burnt out from being on Zoom, and keeping people online for longer than a few hours was more and more undesirable. However, being online opened up new possibilities for us well. It allowed us to expand the CMAP process via platforms like VoiceThread, which made the policy review and exploration portions of the process more accessible and deliberative. I still think about how programs like VoiceThread can be used in directly democratic policy drafting processes – the possibilities here are so cool and intriguing. Of course, being online helped us reach a wider audience and allowed our scattered community to gather in ways that wouldn’t have been possible. 

What did you hope the CMAP, with its Community Assembly process, would generate?

First of all, the CMAP and community assembly was a pedagogical exercise. It was for us organizers and participants to learn what it is like to do something like this. With stuff like this, I would wager that many of us haven’t had the experience of engaging in direct democracy in settings where our decisions have meaningful consequences. It was my hope to make this more of a reality and for participants to get a taste of what an alternative counter-institution could feel like. I believe in a concept called dual power – or a concept that we can self-organize and articulate and implement our demands without, alongside, and with more entrenched systems of power. My hope was to foster this in an organized way amongst students and stakeholders at Union. Subsequently, it was also my hope that Union’s administration would adapt this type of process as a way of operating and implementing policy moving forward. As a continuing process of implementing change and reviewing those changes as a community, ideally, the CMAP and community assembly is a way of holding Union accountable while adapting to the reality and constraints we encounter while implementing policies. 

Do you feel like we are on track? What improvements do you wish to see?

It’s hard to say. Of course, none of us are on track to meet the realities of the climate crisis and while we should be critical of our sense of urgency to do this, we should be earnest and brave when it comes to having conversations about why we are failing to do this. There are two improvements I’d like to see: 

1) A buy-in on the part of the Union administration on the CMAP process. I don’t think Union’s administration completely gets and is in solidarity with the directly democratic process. The implications it bears on how we should operate as a community – it really demands a revolutionary change in how we operate as an institution. Namely, instead of a back-and-forth between students and administrators, the greatest improvement would see administrators and students acting as colleagues, collaborators, and community members. I think we are far from that.

2) The implementation of an annual Community Assembly to review, adapt, and expand the CMAP. This improvement relies on the former – both students and administrators are overwhelmed by work and scarce resources, but administrators hold the key to continuing institutional memory and legacy. Greater institutional support for the CMAP process would keep us on track, but I think this means administrators converting to the process and seeing its intrinsic value. 

After observing the CMAP continue, now in its third year, have your expectations changed? If so, how?

They have changed in a way that makes me appreciate how change happens. The greatest insight we can gain from directly democratic processes is a keener grasp of the reality of our communities – we get to know what we are good at, what’s really going on, what we are not so good at, and where we are failing. This is profoundly ecological – getting to know where power is, how it is used, and what the flow of power through our community is. But in some ways, my expectations haven’t changed. I always expected us to fail forward and learn how to build the road as we walk it.

What would you like incoming Union students to know about the CMAP?

That it belongs to them and that they are a part of building the Union’s institutional memory, keeping it alive, and transforming the institution. Also, do not be intimidated by the CMAP or the community assembly process. The whole point of any directly democratic process is, to be honest about where we are at, both individually and communally, and learn to act and build on our limitations through collective imaging and action. Also, there are many who can help you through this process – myself included. 

How do you foresee Union’s future and/or engagement with our climate emergency? 

By nature and temperament, I’m what you’d call a utopian pessimist, and this comes from my deep Christian and eco-liberationist values. In its current trajectory, I see Union remaining a reactive and not proactive institution to the emergencies and crises of our age. This isn’t necessarily anyone's fault. We’re a declining institution and the people holding Union together are doing the best they can, but I think being really honest about this is the way out. 

Students who come to Union want to participate in the types of opportunities and horizontal political formations that the CMAP and community assembly represent. The success of Union, both as an enduring institution and in responding to the climate emergency, depends on the conversion of Union administrators to the reality of their students and the reality of the institution beyond the typical pathways present to institutions of higher education in our late-stage neoliberal society. An influx of gentrification capital to the endowment is only a short-term solution and isn’t an effective response to the crises of late modern life but only contributes to our own alienation. 

We need a renewal of life in Christ and Christ is crucified in the breaking of our world. No amount of op-eds about a supposedly resurgent liberal Christianity in the New York Times can save us, only a deep renewal of community life at the social ecological level can. 

Anything else you'd like to add?

I’m proud and grateful for those who have continued this work – keeping things alive, whether that be religious tradition or the mandates of a community assembly, is one of our greatest calls as religious leaders. Bearing witness and testimony to the renewal of life amidst death and decline is so central to the Christian faith. 

Also, thinking back to the Declaration and CMAP process, I’m so stunned that we managed to pull something off. We paid all participants a living wage for their time, constructed a 10+ page document together, and put in a ton of unpaid hours to help pull it all off. 

There are so many people to acknowledge for this and if you in some way touched this process and contributed even an admiring glance, I want to thank you for your support and solidarity.