A Sanctioned Grievance

Why the Climate Movement Must Run a Moral Campaign — and How

Executive Summary

Fifty years into the modern climate and environmental movement, by our own institutional accounting, we are on track for global ecological collapse. The Global Footprint Network’s Earth Overshoot Day has moved from December 29 in 1971 to July 24 in 2025. We are consuming the resources of 1.8 Earths annually; the accumulated ecological debt is 22 years and growing. The Global Footprint Network also publishes the math on what our most ambitious strategies actually accomplish, and the math is hard to look at: stack every climate intervention the movement has ever seriously imagined — fossil fuel emissions cut by half, a hundred-dollar global carbon price, food waste halved, meat consumption halved, transit replacing cars at scale, regenerative agriculture deployed worldwide — and the overshoot date moves later in the year but does not reach December 31. The current strategy, executed in full at maximum effort, gets us to a slower overshoot, not a one-planet economy. And this is not a problem more aggressive policy can solve, because the ceiling we are exceeding is on biophysical throughput itself, not on carbon alone; switching to clean energy changes the source of throughput, not the fact of it. At best we can say that we have been slowing the rate at which things get worse.

The reason is not contingent on the things we could fix by trying harder — better policy execution, stronger coalitions, more funding. The reason is structural, and it is the place this paper invites you to look. All social change runs through three institutional pillars — culture, economy, and politics. We have worked the political pillar and the economic pillar at scale. The third pillar — culture, in the working sociological sense of the institutions through which a society forms the character of its members: religion, family, education — we have hardly touched. Not because the work isn’t available. Because two specific fears have kept us away. We have been wary of religious organizing on church-state grounds, and we have feared that cultural change moves too slowly for the timeline. Both fears are mistakes. The first confuses sectarian religion with what Robert Bellah called the civil religion — the layer of shared American moral conviction that has nothing to do with establishing any particular church, that Lincoln and Roosevelt and King all spoke at, and that has been the site of every major moral grievance the country has eventually addressed. The second ignores that the Civil Rights Movement organized the Black church without hesitation and won at scale in roughly the same time-frame as our most ambitious current legislative goals. Cultural organizing in America is not inherently slow. It is slow when it is not organized.

Other American movements have made a moral case at this layer and won. Abolition. Suffrage. Civil rights. Marriage equality. Each was a moral campaign brought against the country at the level of its shared moral conviction — the civil-religious layer the Declaration of Independence pledges the Republic to honor. Each won by claiming the country was betraying its own founding promises to specific Americans denied access to inalienable rights. Successful American movements have, in this sense, always been the work of expanding access to the promises in the Declaration. Abolition expanded who has access to the right to life. Suffrage, civil rights, and marriage equality expanded who has access to the right to liberty. The third inalienable right — the pursuit of happiness — is the one we have never expanded. And we have not expanded it because, in honest practice, the pursuit of happiness has been the pursuit of the wealthy for the whole of American history. Happiness as the founders meant it — eudaimonia, the cultivation of a fully realized human life — requires conditions (time, education, community, a natural foundation that sustains) that the country has reliably provided only to those who could afford them privately. The working majority has been left with the truncated version of happiness Franklin’s ethic supplies. The climate movement’s sanctioned grievance, brought at the civil-religious layer, is that an economic system organized around infinite throughput growth on a finite planet structurally destroys the conditions for the pursuit of happiness, and stands in direct betrayal of the third inalienable right the Republic was constituted to protect. The grievance is sanctioned because the country, in its founding act, has already pre-authorized exactly this kind of claim. The pattern of how such grievances have been brought, and won, is established across two centuries of American moral progress. We have the case. We have not used the form.

The practice that sustains a campaign on the generational time horizon the form requires is mourning — the oldest practice human cultures have built for losses too large to bear alone, available across every faith tradition and to the secular on identical terms. We have a posture problem inside the movement that has quietly disabled us from running the campaign that could win. Jonathan Lear, in a short philosophical essay we walk through in Part V, names what that posture is and why it has us laughing ourselves into a stance from which we cannot mount the moral case the situation requires. Mourning is the practice that releases us from it. Not as a mood but as a structured communal practice: public rituals for what is being lost, calendars of grief observed annually, witnessing ceremonies for places and species, community mourning circles as a basic organizational unit alongside the chapter meeting and the campaign committee, and training organizers in the practice religious and indigenous traditions already have. A movement that mourns its losses retains its working relationship with what is worth loving, and that relationship is the precondition for every campaign worth running.

The integrated argument: reversing overshoot is the goal; moral campaigning at the civil-religious layer on a sanctioned grievance is the strategy; the recovery of the founders’ standard of human flourishing is the moral case; the expansion of the pursuit of happiness from the wealthy to all Americans is what the goal looks like when stated in the country’s own founding language; and the practice that sustains the campaign across the generational time horizon it requires is mourning. The political and economic work continues. What is added is cultural-pillar work, in two forms — moral campaigning that brings the sanctioned grievance, and cultural campaigning that builds the institutions to hold the moral ground after the campaign has been won. Both have American precedent. Neither has been seriously attempted by our movement. The case the paper makes is that running them now, with the resources the country’s own founding act has already given us, might give us a chance the current strategy cannot. The grievance is sanctioned. The door is older than we are. The question is whether we can walk through it together.

Part I. The Problem

A few years ago I was boarding an airplane. As I walked down the aisle toward my seat, I noticed a young woman in a middle seat, reading a book and crying quietly. Other passengers were settling into the rows around her, stowing bags overhead, pulling out laptops. She was not making a scene. The crying was contained, almost private, the kind of grief you do when you do not want to be noticed but cannot help it. As I got closer I saw the cover of her book. It was called Trash Vortex, a book about the plastics accumulating in the world’s oceans.

I had the impulse to sit next to her and ask if we could cry together. I did not act on it. I found my seat, opened my laptop, and worked. The moment stayed with me. A person was grieving, in public, for the planet, alone in a middle seat surrounded by strangers. Another person, me, recognized the grief and felt the impulse to share it. Neither of us had any structure in which the sharing could happen. The plane took off. The woman wiped her face and kept reading. I have thought about her a great deal in the years since.

This paper is about what was missing in that scene, and what would have to be built for it to not be missing the next time. The grief is real and the impulse to share it is real, but the climate movement has not built the cultural infrastructure that would let either one do its work. We have built campaigns. We have built coalitions. We have built clean industries and policy frameworks. We have not built places where a person crying over the planet can find a community that grieves with her, in a structured form, that turns the private grief into the moral fuel for the campaign that could win. That absence is the strategic problem this paper takes up. It is also, as the paper will argue, the most consequential unworked leverage point the climate movement has.