If We Lose the Right to Protest, We Lose Everything — with Annie Leonard & André Carothers
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History has shown that authoritarian regimes can be toppled and social injustices can be eliminated if the public participates even in just one peaceful but powerful protest. But despite their noble goals, activism is often vilified and protesters are criminalized. Corinna Bellizzi is joined by Annie Leonard and André Carothers, two powerful souls who have spent their careers at the frontlines of activism. Together, they discuss why the public should never give up their right to protest, which is an essential “weapon” to voice out woes to those in power when all legal avenues of democracy have been exhausted. They also talk about the widespread impact of digital activism, the danger of overusing in-group language, and why protests can be effective even without resorting to violence.
About Annie Leonard
Annie Leonard is a lifelong activist whose work has taken her to protests, courtrooms, and congressional hearings around the world. As Executive Director of Greenpeace US from 2014 to 2023, she led one of the most recognized environmental organizations on the planet. She is the creator of The Story of Stuff — one of the most widely viewed environmental films in history — and co-launched the Jane Fonda Climate PAC. She has testified before Congress, appeared across major media, and been recognized by Time magazine as a Hero of the Environment. She received an honorary degree from Vermont Law School and has spent decades campaigning against pollution, waste, and unchecked corporate power.
About André Carothers
André Carothers is an activist, writer, and organizer with more than four decades of experience in campaigns spanning climate change, human rights, environmental protection, and nuclear disarmament. He worked for Greenpeace US for 13 years, including serving on its board of directors. He co-founded the Rockwood Leadership Institute, a training organization for activists, and consults as an organizational development coach for leaders across the social change sector. He has served on the boards of the Center for Investigative Reporting (which includes Mother Jones), International Rivers, the Center for Environmental Health, the Furthur Foundation, and Rainforest Action Network.
08:42 – Disability Rights Movement And Giving Funerals For Glaciers
14:49 – Common Trait Of Protests Regardless Of Issues Confronted
19:22 – How Protests And Protesters Vilified And Criminalized
28:37 – Where Does The Legitimate Limits Of Protests Lie
37:45 – How Stuff Welcomes Everyone Into The World Of Protests
42:44 – How Protests Can Actually Move The Needle
49:48 – The Widespread Impact Of Digital And Online Activism
53:12 – Balancing Clarity Of Direction, Discipline Of Movement, And The Diversity Of Humans
58:57 – Sustaining Oneself Emotionally Despite The Overwhelming Mission
01:03:18 – Seeing Protests In A Different Light
01:08:04 – Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
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If We Lose The Right To Protest, We Lose Everything — With Annie Leonard & André Carothers
Welcome, Regenerators. With each episode, we explore the intersection of sustainability, justice, and regenerative thinking through conversations with leaders who are doing the hard, necessary work of building something better. This conversation is one I’ve been thinking about for a while because it touches something I believe is foundational to everything we talk about on this show. That is climate activism, environmental justice, human health, food systems. Every gain we’ve made on any of these fronts has protest somewhere in its history. People who showed up, spoke out, and refused to be quiet. Right now, that right the right to peacefully protest is under attack in ways that should alarm all of us, regardless of where you sit politically.
My guests have spent their careers at the frontlines of activism.Annie Leonard is a lifelong Activist. She is the former Executive Director of Greenpeace USA, creator of The Story of Stuff, and the Co-founder of the Jane Fonda Climate PAC.André Carothers is an Activist, Writer, and Organizer with over four decades of experience spanning climate, human rights, environmental protection, and nuclear disarmament.
He Co-founded the Rockwood Leadership Institute, a training organization for activists, and has served on the boards of organizations including the Center for Investigative Reporting and Rainforest Action Network. Together, they’ve written a new, powerful book published by Patagonia Books,Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It. It’s available as of April 28th, 2026. With that, let’s welcome them to the show.
It’s so good to have you both here. What I’d like to do is start our conversation by first defining the word “protest.” Maybe you picture something specific, a crowd, signs, conflict but how do each of you define protest, and do you distinguish it from activism? Annie, let’s start with you.
I would say that protest is a subset of activism. There’s a much broader universe of ways that we can engage in our society, economy, and democracy as activists, but protest is the particular act of speaking up or speaking out, taking action which could be words, it could be physical action about something we care about.
It is not just marching down the streets with signs, although that’s often what people think about. It can be withholding our money from something, like a boycott, it can be refusing to eat, like a hunger strike, it can be singing the national anthem in your mother tongue. There’s a huge variety of ways. There are as many ways to protest as there are people on the planet. It’s simply about taking action for what we believe. Andre?
To add a little bit to that, when we were thinking about how to describe protest in the book, we really did take a very wide view. The inventory of possibilities includes everything from particularly now a policeman who’s charged with arresting a protester under some new, somewhat draconian law might choose to look away at that moment. A person who is in charge of the distribution of something commercially in a city might choose to slow things down a little bit to help the regime understand that there is non-cooperation at work out there. The on-ramp to being an activist is so wide. There are so many options available to you that we wrote the book with the intent of making sure that everyone knew that there was an entry point for them.
Just to add to that, some scholars and practitioners differentiate between the different kinds of protests, like Andre just mentioned. There’s protest and persuasion, there’s non-violent direct action and disruption, there’s economic boycotts. All of these. But we lump them all together and say broadly, they’re all protest as long as they are peaceful in both means and ends.
Now, in the book, you really do work to define protest as something that is fundamentally democratic, but some may view disruptive protest like blocking freeways or speaking out during a play negatively. I wonder what you might say to quell concerns of people in those circumstances.
That emerged as a really interesting piece of our research because what we noticed right off the bat is that people love protest in the abstract. They love it in history. They love thinking about their heroes like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Rosa Parks as historical figures that did something amazing in their time. What we all need to remember is, at the time, no one was happy with them.
“People love protest in abstract and in history. But back when it was happening, no one was happy with them.”
– Annie Leonard
Martin Luther King, when he was assassinated, was either disliked or much disliked by 60% of the American public. Now, when you look at the number of the streets, monuments, and other squares that are devoted to American icons, number 1 is George Washington, number 2 is Abraham Lincoln, and number 3 is Martin Luther King. He died with a disapproval rating that was higher than most people.
There is this cognitive dissonance between seeing something happen in front of you right now having your commute to work slowed slightly by a demonstrator and thinking, “Well, that’s not right, this is the wrong thing,” and realizing that a short 50 years ago, the person that the street you live on is named after was vilified by the American public and the government.
Democracy is messy. The goal of democracy is not always comfort. We have democracy so that different interests can struggle in the public square to advance their cause. It is through disruption and it’s through discomfort that often some of the greatest social progress has ever been made.
Martin Luther King wrote in his beautiful Letter from Birmingham Jail about how non-violent disruption non-violent civil disobedience seeks to create such a tension that the issue cannot be ignored. The protesters that we know, they don’t start with disruptive protest. We’d love to all advance all of the good things we want without causing disruption.
When we have exhausted the polite levers of democracy and we know what the science around climate says, we know that it’s wrong to see our immigrant neighbors having their families separated and parents hauled off. When we are so morally and scientifically compelled to disrupt, then that’s our right as residents of the United States.
Disability Rights Movement And Giving Funerals For Glaciers
I have a question that is for both of you which I think you’ve both partially answered already, but I want to put it out there so that we can perhaps use it as fodder to explore this a little bit more deeply. Your book offers a historical overview of protest as a righteous democratic tradition. I believe it starts in about 1780-something and then walks through year by year to present time, showcasing things that happened in 2025. Now, you’ve highlighted when peaceful protest brought about significant change. Perhaps you could each highlight a lesser-known example that may have surprised you, and one that exemplifies this idea of being able to push radical change.
There’s so many good protests. Someone asked me earlier, “What’s my favorite protest in the book?” and it’s just so hard to pick because I call it a “protest tasting menu.” The diversity of entry points is just so delicious. I think one of my favorites is the Section 504 Sit-in. This was a fascinating milestone in the disability rights movement. It really was the cornerstone of the movement. In this situation, a number of people who had all kinds of disabilities people with MS, people that were hearing or vision impaired, all different kinds took over the federal building in San Francisco. They were advocating for the implementation of some regulations called Section 504 that would prohibit discrimination against disabled people.
Now, you have to remember, at this point, doors were not wide enough for wheelchairs to go through, there were no wheelchair ramps, bathroom stalls were not wide enough. There were none of the accommodations that this movement helped to bring about. There was also not a cohesive disability rights movement, people were really differentiated by whichever disability they had.
All of these people came in, took over the building, lived there together, took care of each other, understood different kinds of disabilities, and created a collective identity. Their creativity in how they managed. Some of them had never been without their personal assistant, some of them needed special equipment to survive. The way that they managed was incredible.
One story that I just love, this was before the internet and cellphones, and the authorities cut off the phone lines so that there could be no communication between the protesters inside the building and the media or support team outside. What they did is they had hearing-impaired people sign updates from the window to people who could read sign language in the square, and then they would translate so they could continue their media work and their requests for support. It was a really beautiful, powerful protest that not only advanced the law but also advanced awareness and cohesion around disability rights. That was one of my favorites. The courage was just incredible.
As Annie said, picking your favorite is hard. I think I’m going to go with Funeral for a Glacier. In Iceland, glaciers are considered a cultural artifact. They are not only hydrologically important to the environment of the country, but there’s a mythological and cultural value that Icelanders associate with them. Late in the ‘80s, it became clear that the glaciers were melting and that certain glaciers, by scientific definition, could no longer be termed glaciers. They had to change their name. Glaciologists said, “We can’t put this in the inventory of glaciers around the world.”
The Prime Minister of Iceland and a bunch of luminaries went up to the edge of what used to be a glacier and now is a patch of ice on the side of a mountain and had a funeral. They had flowers and music, and cameras were there. They put a plaque up on the side of the mountain that said, essentially, “We put this here at this many degrees, this level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and if we make it, we make it.”
It spawned a very interesting collection of similar protests around the country. In Oregon, they had a funeral for a glacier at the capital, in Mexico, they had a funeral for a glacier. What this signifies, I think, for me and a lot of people, is that there is an emotional tone to seeing your beloved environmental things disappear. There is an imperative to honor ecosystems when they disappear in a way that meets the psychodynamic of the situation and really touches people in the heart. What the funeral for a glacier in Iceland did was touch off a wave of similar activities around the world.
Common Trait Of Protests Regardless Of Issues Confronted
Being someone who works for an Icelandic-based company and having been there, that story touches me perhaps a little more deeply than some. I’ve been to visit some of the glaciers, and there is a reverence that the Icelandic people hold for them. It’s the same in Alaska with the Native and Indigenous populations the tribes there view them with personhood. We’re living in tragic times in this way. Now, Andre, you’ve seen protest work across very different contexts, from nuclear disarmament to human rights and climate. What does effective protest have in common, regardless of the issue confronted?
What we discovered doing this research and in our lives as activists is that there is never a single protest that moves the needle on anything. Almost all the time, they are deeply planned events. There is an identification of a target. There’s an identification of the regulatory or judicial apparatus that’s around that target. There’s identification of the audience that’s going to be witnessing what you’re doing and there is the cataloging of all the things that you have done up to the point when you do the protest to satisfy your need to see stuff happen that doesn’t require putting your life on the line.
Protest comes at a point when things aren’t moving, typically, and when a slightly more aggressive tactic is required. What Annie loves to say and I love this metaphor is that protest is like building a garden path, if you have a stone, protest might be the 3rd stone or the 15th stone. It’s used very judiciously and strategically to get something into the public eye, or to demonstrate your moral authority and the lack of moral authority of your opponents.
Protest: Protests come at a point when things are not moving, and a slightly more aggressive tactic is required.
Also, to alert the public that there is something to be deeply concerned about. What I love about doing this research and living this life is that I can see the genius that a really good protest has behind it, the escalation, the tactic of moving toward the opponent in a particular way, and then harvesting whatever you got out of that protest to make sure that it moves the needle forward.
Now, you have both included several Voice of a Protester essays within the book, including Dolores Huerta, Jane Fonda, Peter Staley, and Nemonte Nenquimo, just to name a few. Do you have a favorite, and if so, why?
No, that’s too hard to pick. We love them all.
I love them all too.
We were trying to find people who would speak to different members of the reading community because we wanted people to see, “I can relate to that.” we have across issues and across regions. Nnimmo Bassey is in Nigeria and he’s been fighting for climate change under authoritarian regimes, he’s an anti-fossil fuel activist and a poet. We asked Nnimmo, “Can you share reflections on how we continue to advance climate change under an authoritarian regime?” which is very interesting. Everybody has a different perspective or reason we brought them in, but I just can’t pick a favorite. I love them all.
Also age and background and location. Enshrining these folks out of the hundreds of thousands that could be in the book was a way of really demonstrating to people that there are many on-ramps. Many ethnicities and genders that you can be part of to be an activist.
Yeah, and causes. The only reason I was familiar with Nemonte Nenquimo was because I hadPaul Hawken on this show when he came out with his bookRegeneration, and she had an essay that was featured there as well. That story was really impactful for me because she’s trying to save rainforests and Indigenous lands and preserve culture all of these things at once. This is really a gigantic challenge of the last couple of generations. We’ve seen shrinking rainforests and we see shrinking polar caps. These things affect our culture, our land, and our weather.
How Protests And Protesters Vilified And Criminalized
It all comes together at once, which is why I think climate activism is the home I sit in most comfortably. Now, both of you wrote this book in direct response to growing alarm about the vilification and criminalization of protest. Can you be specific? What are you seeing right now that triggered that alarm, and what does criminalization actually look like on the ground?
We had the idea for this book when I was serving as the Executive Director of Greenpeace, which I stepped down from in 2023. During my nine-year tenure leading Greenpeace USA, we had two multi-million-dollar SLAPP suits. A SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, and it’s really corporate legal bullying. It is a meritless lawsuit that is not actually designed to win in court usually not even designed to make it to court but they are enormously expensive lawsuits slapped upon critics that are meant to silence, scare, bankrupt, and intimidate them and everyone around them.
When we got the first one, it was a $100 million lawsuit. The second one was a $300 million lawsuit. That’s scary. Most organizations or an individual farmer who doesn’t want a pipeline going through their yard, when you get a $300 million lawsuit, you agree to be quiet because it’s scary. Greenpeace did not agree to be quiet and fought it.
In addition to the SLAPP suits, we saw a criminalization of constitutionally protected activity. What that means is things like trespassing near a pipeline. It’s trespassing. That part is already illegal, it’s a misdemeanor. They would turn it into a felony. Giving trainings on how to fight pipelines?. That’s free speech, we’re allowed to do that. That would become a felony. We saw an increase of charges especially around activists fighting fossil fuels.
When Greenpeace famous for doing non-violent direct actions that caused no harm, no violence, no disruption did things that would normally have been a misdemeanor, a slap on the wrist, we suddenly had activists facing years in jail, potential felonies, and loss of voting rights. Really out-of-control prosecution.
That got us thinking about this issue more, so we did a bunch of research. There are some wonderful organizations tracking this, if your readers Google “protest law tracker,” you will see a state-by-state tracking of the anti-protest laws that have been introduced in your state. These laws are really scary. They outlaw the things that, for example, the civil rights movement did, or the women’s suffragette movement did, tried and true peaceful techniques.
That’s what got us worried. The more that we dug into them, the more we saw that they start with the vilification of the protesters. We’ve seen this under the current political regime. The minute a protester does something, the administration will come out saying they were terrorists or domestic terrorists when there is zero evidence to back that up.
What they’re doing is trying to vilify peaceful protesters for two reasons. One is to take their demands and put them outside of the realm of normal political discourse. For example, if it’s a climate protester and they’re labeled as a terrorist, that means the accurate science they’re sharing the information that compelled them to act is totally waved aside.
The second thing it does is ready the public for accepting greater repressions on our rights. We’re very concerned about the vilification and demonizing of protesters, and that’s why we wrote this book, to push back on that and remind readers that protest has a long, righteous democratic tradition in our country and around the world. The people who engage in it are the heroes, even if they caused a traffic jam, even if they did something irritating and disrupted our reception at the museum. They are acting on moral and scientific clarity, and we should respect and honor them.
Protest
Another book I would recommend people pick up, if they haven’t already, is Tim Snyder’sOn Tyranny, where he specifically talks about not obeying in advance. This is essentially what you’re talking about, silencing people in advance because they’re afraid now of being villainized as Antifa or some domestic terrorist that is suddenly going to face time in jail.
Right, or getting a SLAPP suit. One of the things that Energy Transfer did when it slapped Greenpeace, it was so clever, the original lawsuit was against Greenpeace and a couple other entities, and it reserved a bunch of spaces for John and Jane Doe. What that meant is they were holding spaces to add other activists to the lawsuit later. That really did create a chilling effect because nobody wants to be added to a $300 million lawsuit.
They might be targeting Greenpeace but now they could just add specific names of people connected to the protest.
Right, because they’re trying to criminalize solidarity and collective action. One of the things they did originally with the lawsuit is they used RICO. RICO is a statute created for the Mafia, for organized crime, and they’re trying to attach that to environmentalists. They are trying to label environmental solidarity as a criminal enterprise. What that means is that standing in solidarity with others then becomes a crime. Imagine what that would do not just to the climate movement, but to everybody working for social and environmental justice.
How does this compare historically? Is this a new level of suppression, or is this something we’ve seen before?
Certainly it depends on what sub-population of the United States you are associated with. Black Americans, immigrant Americans, and non-White Americans have been vilified and persecuted both legally and extra-legally since the dawn of the country. It’s really important to remember that we are part of a community that has been the target of governments since day one.
I do think it’s important for everyone to understand the difference between then and now. Many years ago, I was part of a group that trespassed on the Nevada test site where they test nuclear weapons. Six of us walked into the site at night. We slept during the day to hide from helicopters. We moved into where they were going to blow up a bomb. We camped there, took the Greenpeace banners out, and took photographs. This was before cellphones, we took the film out, hiked to the nearest newspaper, and told them there were people on site and if they blew off the bomb the next day, they would be blowing people up or at least putting them in mortal danger.
The test was delayed. A month later, there was a big protest at the front of the site. There was a series of escalating protests through the ensuing several years, and in 1993, George Bush Senior placed a moratorium on nuclear testing. This is the pattern, using everything available to you, including non-violent civil disobedience, to produce a social good a result that we all want.
I’m trying to picture now if a group of activists trespassed on the Nevada test site under the current regime what would the language be, what would the prosecutorial strategy be and how would it be portrayed in the press? It gives me chills because I want to be able to exercise my constitutionally protected right, and I have zero confidence that we would survive a venture like that like we did many years ago.
Where Does The Legitimate Limits Of Protests Lie
You’re right, it’s chilling. I could see one labeled as enemy of the state in a case like that and then what happens? Now, there’s an argument and perhaps that argument is central when we talk about how the state might look at that type of action that protests can cross a line, that not all protest is peaceful or constructive. How do you respond to that, and how does the book handle the question of where legitimate limits should lie?
Our book is limited to non-violent protests, protest in which nobody was harmed. In cases where there is violence in our book, it was from the authorities or vigilantes going against the protesters. We’re limiting our discussion here to peaceful protests non-violent protests that are protected by the First Amendment and our right to free speech and peaceful assembly.
You make the case that if we lose the right to protest, we stand to lose so much more. What is that so much more in your minds, and how does that erosion of rights affect everyday people?
That so much more to me is everything. It’s everything that we love and care about. Imagine if we couldn’t protest when our neighbors were being abducted off the street. Imagine if we couldn’t protest when windmill projects were being shut down and fossil fuels were being increased against all of the science out there. It really is our environment, our values, our democratic norms, and our multicultural democracy. We really would stand to lose everything we care about if we cannot actively defend it.
I want to steal Annie Leonard’s metaphor for this. When people come to her and say, “We are fighting on the environmental front, we’re fighting on the human rights front, we’re fighting to eliminate plastics, and you want to add another issue to our plate?” Annie says, “Protest is the plate. The right to protest is the substrate from which all these things grow, or could grow.”
We do live in an intensely polarized time. The same person who sees one protest as righteous, might see another as dangerous. How does the book address this specifically, and how do you make the case for protecting protest as a right across all causes, not just the ones that we agree with?
Our book is limited to protest that’s peaceful in means and in ends. Meaning protests that advance a vision of a more healthy, fair, equitable, and sustainable future. That said, if people want to peacefully protest for a different opinion, that is their right. I have been at many protests myself where there were counter-protesters arguing different positions, and that is their constitutional right. When I see different opinions struggling with each other in the public square, I think that’s what democracy is for. That’s exactly what we should do.
The other thing that is fascinating about protest is that, for many people, they’re sitting on the sidelines. They have a concern. They want something to be different, but they’re not sure how their neighbors feel or whether it’s an issue anyone else cares about. What happens when you witness or hear about a peaceful protest a march, a rally, even people signing a petition or collecting money for something, it’s a signal to you. There are people that care about this issue out there, perhaps as much as I do. The on-ramp is, “I’m not the only one.” The next step is, “Well, maybe I will join this demonstration.” All of a sudden, maybe they’re marching with their neighbor.
“When you witness or hear about a peaceful protest, it is a signal for you to care about the issue.”
– Andre Carothers
What all the studies show is that if someone’s willing to put their toe in the water, the chances of them being knee-deep the next time they’re asked is significantly higher. What we love about advocating strictly for peaceful, family-friendly protest is that we know it builds community. It’s community that gives you the power to fight whatever issue you’re standing for.
Many people argue that it was the sinews and the cross-collaboration in Minneapolis that allowed them to have such a robust response to the ICE intervention, because not only did they have ties of community, but they also had this on-ramp of peaceful protest and so many entry points to being useful in that moment. Of the, what, 4 million people that live in Minneapolis, all of them were engaged in some way or supportive of what was happening.
That is such an important point. We limit ourselves to peaceful protest both because we don’t want to see people get hurt, but also because it’s more effective. It works more. The research shows that in terms of ousting authoritarian regimes, peaceful movements are four times more effective than movements that have violence and more lasting.
A big reason is what Andre just said, it lowers the barrier to entry. If we want more people to join us in advocating for a healthy, inclusive, multi-racial democracy on a sustainable planet, we don’t want to say, “Come join us and you can risk dying and live as a fugitive.” We want to say, “Come join us and be a part of this really vibrant community.” It allows us to scale and recruit more people if we are peaceful in our work. It’s more successful, it’s more likely to win. It’s better, really, on every account.
I was thinking of examples that may not necessarily be seen as overtly violent like, for instance, when vegan activists showcased against people wearing furs by putting paint on them. Those can be seen as violent forms of protest because you are damaging somebody or their belongings. I don’t know if you draw a distinction there, I don’t recall seeing something about that in the book.
Different organizations and groups have different places where they draw the line about whether property damage is included as non-violent. For example, Greenpeace does not do property damage because that doesn’t fall within their description of non-violence. Whereas others do. The Sea Shepherd will ram a whaling ship. Others will do property violence like the tree spikers and others.
We don’t get into that because what we’re really about here is recruiting more people to respect, defend, and use the right for peaceful protest. In our book, there is no property damage except one, which was the Boston Tea Party. When they entered the ships to liberate that tea, they were very careful not to cause any damage to anything other than the tea, because they didn’t want to be written off as just vandals. There was one lock that they had to cut that was property damage so the next day, they went and returned a new lock to the captain to show they were not vandals. They were making a political statement.
It was a powerful political statement.
It turns out it was a powerful political statement in history. The other interesting thing we discovered is that both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin condemned the Boston Tea Party because they thought it was overly provocative in that part of the political strategy that they were using to liberate the United States from British rule. Again, I’m trying to imagine what would happen if activists now took an imported product in Oakland Harbor and threw it into the San Francisco Bay.
Maybe also the news where we have people burning down warehouses. These are not peaceful acts. They’re very destructive. Some will see them as protest.
Knowing the history is really important. Knowing how history can change their current attitude or dealt with things in their own time is just a really illuminating intellectual process, and it came out in spades when we were working on this book.
How Stuff Welcomes Everyone Into The World Of Protests
I love the historical layout. It’s almost an epistemological review of the past to present. Now, I’d like to take a brief departure and talk about The Story of Stuff. This is an incredible work that you brought into the world, Annie. It became one of the most widely viewed environmental films in history. I’d love for you to help us understand what you learned from that experience, specifically with regard to how to move people because a film that reaches many people itself is a form of protest.
Some of the lessons from The Story of Stuff, I applied in this current project. I learned many things from making that film. For those of you who haven’t seen it, you can find it online. It’s a twenty-minute fast-paced animation about how materials move through our economy, which doesn’t sound very intriguing, but I promise it’s a good film.
The Story of Stuff is interesting because I didn’t think that many people would watch it. Overnight, literally, millions of people watched it. One of the lessons I learned is that if you use language that people are already using in their day-to-day life, they feel more welcome and equipped to join the conversation.
One of the things that activists do to our own detriment is use very expertise-driven or what we call in-group language. By using in-group language, what we do is signal to other members of our group, “Yeah, I’m in the right group,” but we’re inadvertently pushing other people away. I remember when I was the head of Greenpeace and I met a labor leader. I was very interested in how to build ties between climate activists and workers because, as we transition to a decarbonized economy, there’ll be so many jobs and we want to make sure they are good, family-sustaining jobs so we need to have more solidarity among activists and workers.
I asked the head of this union that I met for the first time, “Tell me how climate messaging is landing with your workers, and what feedback do you have for us?” the head of this major union said to me, “Could you stop saying ‘carbon’?” I thought, “I think actually my community is cognitively incapable of stopping saying carbon.” From a scientific perspective, carbon is the whole point. It’s so key to climate change.
However, if we’re using one of our primary words and it alienates, confuses, or turns off people that we need to bring into the conversation, then we have a problem. I learned in The Story of Stuff because I used regular words. Even when I made The Story of Stuff film, some of my super experts and material said, “You shouldn’t call it ‘stuff,’ you should call it ‘resources’ or ‘materials’ or ‘waste.’ It depends where on the system it is what you should call it.” I said, “This film isn’t for you.”
Protest: If we are using one of our primary words that alienates, confuses, or turns off the people we need to bring in to the conversation, we have a problem.
It’s the same thing with this book. Real experts in protest will differentiate between protest in a democratic context and non-cooperation, which is the main strategy in an authoritarian regime. They’ll even say, “Enough protest. We need non-cooperation.” I say to them, “This isn’t for you, this is for everybody. Most people call all these things in our life stuff. Most people call taking action upon your moral beliefs protest. We are trying to use inclusive, accessible language and not create linguistic barriers to joining us.”
You made me chuckle with that comment on carbon. Paul Hawken’s next book was literally calledCarbon.
We can’t help ourselves. One of the things about climate activists, I always say, is that we are trapped in the myth that the truth will set us free. We think if decision-makers just look at this study, and then the decision-makers don’t respond, so we’re like, “Okay, well here it is in 3D. Here’s a documentary about this study. Here’s a short form video about this study.” Really, what we have to look at as activists is power. It is not a lack of information that is obstructing solutions on climate. It’s a lack of our ability to effectively build and exercise power. That’s where protest comes in. Protest allows us to build and exercise power in the system to force the change that we know is needed.
How Protests Can Actually Move The Needle
I’d like to talk for a moment that’s a perfect segue to this about how protest actually works, strategy, tactics, and what moves the needle. The subtitle for the book is Respect It, Defend It, Use It. To use it, we have to understand it. I think a lot of people who care about these issues aren’t sure where to start, what do you offer them as practical guidance?
What’s clear from looking at the ecosystem the landscape where we are now is that there are so many ways to participate. If you look at what happened in Minnesota, not only were there people marching, but there were lawyers in their living rooms doing work for immigrants who were in legal jeopardy. There were tow truck drivers who would move the cars off the street after someone was abducted and their car was sitting there. There were people who had blankets and hot soup and they would meet immigrants who emerged from detention and gave them something to eat and a place to go.
There were drivers who would take kids to school because their parents didn’t want to leave the house and drive. There were other adults who brought food to those houses. This idea that there is some specific posture that I have to have to be of use in this struggle needs to be eliminated. Even simply being sympathetic and helping your neighbor make a sign is, in today’s environment, an act of protest.
Again, what Annie said earlier about lowering the barrier to entry is extremely important. Once you get adequate numbers of people to participate, then a numbers equation starts to take hold. There is, of course, a theory put forward by Erica Chenoweth, a scholar of social change, in which she says that never has an effort to reverse an authoritarian regime’s successes failed if 3.5% of the population is involved. By involved, she means actively and sustainedly participating in public protest.
Now, this analysis is in retrospect it’s looking at things that happened in the past, and it’s looking at specific national cases, it may not necessarily be applicable to the United States. The United States is an unusual situation. The point is to remind all of us that if there are a significant number of people who are willing to stick with it in a public way, and a significant number of people who are behind the scenes willing to support, we can successfully reverse the successes of this regime with a relatively small number of engaged people. That is something that we try to make plain when we’re talking to the public.
In terms of the different kinds of protest, first of all, you don’t have to start by planning it. There are so many great organizations to join. On our website theprotestbook.com, there are some great organizations linked. We recommend people join other protests before you plan your own. When you are planning a protest, you have to think about what the goal is. Is it to demonstrate public discontent?
There’s a little protest down the street from us every Friday, “Fridays Against Fascism” and about twenty people show up. It just warms my heart. They are clearly not adding pressure to decision-makers to shift, but they are providing what we call social proof to others. They are demonstrating that they are not happy the way things are going.
Is your protest to raise awareness about an issue or to model discontent with the way things are going? Is your protest aimed at bringing new people in? Is it aimed at stopping an actual harm like when Andre stealthed into the nuclear testing site and camped out there? That’s a direct action where you’re actually putting your body in the way. Another one is like Rosa Parks refusing to move. By her refusing to move from that seat, she catapulted awareness about the scourge of segregation in Montgomery. Are you trying to increase pressure on decision makers?
Figure out what your target is, what you’re trying to achieve, what is the safest way to achieve that, and what will the onlookers will think looking at it. It’s very important to realize there’s four parties. There’s the protesters, the target you are hoping to move, the audience watching and then there’s the law enforcement that may or may not intervene.
Scenario out what will happen, but in many ways, the most important party is the audience watching, because we are trying to build support for our movement. The ACT UP group that we profiled did a I think hilarious protest where they put a giant condom over Senator Jesse Helms’ house, the senator that was obstructing all kinds of solution about dealing with the AIDS crisis. The condom said, “Protection against deadly policies.” One of them said a great quote, “You have to do something creative and outrageous enough to get people’s attention, but not so outrageous that people hate you once they start paying attention.” You have to find that fine line.
Many climate activists feel such a sense of desperation and urgency, rightly so. You look at the parts per million of carbon that is increasing and it’s terrifying. The scientific information is an absolute code red alarm and our politicians are just stuck, especially in this country and not taking action. Some have decided they’re willing to risk public scorn and alienate the public by interrupting social events where fossil fuel sycophants are speaking or gluing themselves to roads or throwing tomato soup on protective cases around art. Some of them said they don’t care anymore if the public is fierce with them because it is literally an emergency. It’s a matter of life and death. Everyone has to make that calculation on their own.
The Widespread Impact Of Digital And Online Activism
How do you feel about digital activism, the use of social media? Do you think that qualifies as protest?
There absolutely can be online protest and, in some cases, it can be very effective. I would consider canceling Disney subscriptions when Disney capitulated to Trump, that was enormously fast and that was online activism. The ability to iterate and reach people instantly is absolutely beautiful. I remember when I was a young campaigner. I would make a one-page action about our issue and we’d have to make it relevant for six months because it was so much cheaper to print 50,000 of them once than 10,000 five times. The ability to reiterate, to learn, to give feedback, to reach people instantly is absolutely beautiful.
There are some risks, though, with online activism. Many people call it clicktivism. There is an illusion that posting on Facebook is actually doing something when it’s not actually building our power or growing our ranks. We have to not be lulled into meaningless things and use these tools in a way that helps us reach more people and grow and exercise our power. It’s a “yes, and” or a “yes, but” response to online activism.
There isn’t any group that I’m familiar with that does not have a well-thought-out digital strategy. It’s a necessity. Again, it’s a mixed bag. The atomization of where people get their media and the way in which people are exploiting their channels to make things up and create a social glue between groups of people is a challenge. It’s something we have to deal with going forward.
Activists talk about when you’re growing your movement, there are weak ties and strong ties. This is quite interesting because in your movement, you need to have both. Participating in a direct action together creates strong ties, very strong bonds. Strong ties are really important for keeping people sustained. However, it’s hard to grow your ranks if you only are limited to strong ties. Social media campaigns grow your ranks, but it’s weaker ties to people. The weak ties allow you to scale, the strong ties allow you to sustain.
As you’re developing your campaign, as you’re thinking of your protest and other activist tools, you want to make sure you have a healthy amount of both, sort of weak tie opportunities for people that just first come in and then strong ties opportunity to provide this social cohesion, sense of community identity that keeps people going through the rough times.
Balancing Clarity Of Direction, Discipline Of Movement, And The Diversity Of Humans
I love that concept. Now, you guys have both been in this activist world for a long time. I wonder if there are lessons you’ve learned about fighting at scale or fighting over a long period of time that you wish you’d known earlier or lessons that you have learned that you wish you had known earlier so that we could take that idea forward along with the book as a tool for individuals that are engaged with this concept of protest.
It’s an interesting question. One of the things I did, the pivot I made around 2000 was to start a leadership training organization. What I saw working for Greenpeace and being involved with other groups through the ‘90s and part of the ‘80s was that I was really eager to have our community build strong ties between themselves. I concluded those strong ties were based on communication skills, leadership skills, understanding your place in the environment, understanding the race and equity issues that surround our movement. I spent fifteen years of my life launching and building a leadership training organization.
I guess the thing I wish I had learned earlier was how to deploy that tactic inside of our community to make sure that we are aligned and firing all in the same direction. There is a lot of debate now around leadership. Are we a flat hierarchy group of people who are reluctant to take charge or to have hierarchies in organizations? Are we reluctant to build organizations that have clear leadership and clear direction? That’s part of the legacy of the last several years.
What I’m really interested to see what possibilities emerge from combining both our real respect for every voice in the room and our ability when the time comes to put a sharp point on it and allow for leadership to produce a result we need. That’s part of what we are all grappling with right now is where how do you balance clarity of direction, discipline of movement, and the understanding that we are an enormously diverse coalition of humans that have very different interests, backgrounds, and histories. How do we turn that into a movement?
When you asked this question I thought, what’s so fun getting old? I just love it. I love having these like decades of experience in this in this work under my belt so that we do have that perspective and I often think about what I would have told my twenty-year-old self. There’s a couple of things that come to mind. One is that um there is no glory in being like an email-exhausted sort of martyr of overwork.
There’s a certain culture in our community that that if you’re taking care of yourself or if you’re having fun, sometimes it’s seen as you’re not devoted enough, you don’t realize how serious things are. I want to say that actually having joy in our work and taking the time to have fun with our colleagues is in many ways the greatest act of resistance we can have. You know, the tyrants want us miserable, scared, and cowered. If we are dancing together and laughing together, it doesn’t mean we are being dismissive of those who are suffering.
It means we refuse to seed our joy to the authoritarians and oil companies and all the others who would just love nothing more than for us to be at home grinding our jaw in misery. One thing is to have fun and take care of ourselves and take care of each other. The other thing I really believe strongly is that we must be willing to make mistakes. We must be willing to fail. If we are afraid to ever fail, to ever make a mistake, then we will just sort of be stuck in this zone of mediocrity. It we have to be willing to make mistakes, I actually realized this once; I am a extremely mediocre skier, like extremely very mediocre and I can go down the hill the entire mountain without falling.
Which makes me happy because it’s such a pain when you fall. I decided to take a skiing lesson. The ski instructor said to me, “I want you to fall three times in the next hour.” at first I was like, “What are you talking about?” She said, “If you’re not willing to fall, you will never grow as a skier.” I literally was like, “She’s talking about climate activism.” I was like, “I have to go, I’m sorry.”
I zipped down to the lodge and sent a email to all my colleagues. I realized if we are too scared to fail, if we are too scared to make a mistake, then we’re just never going to evolve. I used to tell my team when I was at Greenpeace, the first time it’s not a mistake, it’s a learning. If you do it again, that’s a mistake. The first time it’s a learning and we have to be willing to try new things.
“If we are too scared to fail or make a mistake, we will never evolve.”
– Annie Leonard
Sustaining Oneself Emotionally Despite The Overwhelming Mission
I love that. I think it’s a skill of entrepreneurs and people talk about it a lot in business, but I think in order to succeed you have to be willing to fail because we learn so much when we do. Now, I want to ask you both something that I think often goes unspoken in activistic spaces which connects to your celebration and joy comment, Annie. How do you sustain yourself emotionally in this work over the long haul over decades? What you’re describing, things like the criminalization of activism, SLAPP suits, rollbacks it’s really heavy.
One of the many things that sustains me is first that I am part of a community of people. The friendships that I have, the fierce friendships that I’ve that we’ve all cultivated with each other over the decades means that we do have a network of support around us all the time. There are times when I am stuck somewhere or unable to think through a problem and I have a community of people to call on. One of the great things about this life is that you really are in collaboration with some of the greatest people. Some of the people that have a purpose and a mission that captivates them, and that energy is infectious. Being part of this community is what sustains.
The other thing that’s important is that we all have practices that keep us functioning. Going outside and exercising and being aware of the wear and tear that either being doom-scrolling all day or not taking a break can have on you. There’s no question that both being part of a community and taking care of yourself is what makes you more useful. When someone comes to me and says “I’m worn out,” I’m like, “Take care of yourself because we need you. We need you to be 100%.” whatever it takes to restore and repair, you should take.
That’s not just our lived experience; there’s a lot of science that backs us up about community. There are researchers who have looked into what are the contributing factors that most lead to happiness, and it turns out it’s not a fancy new car or a cool pair of boots or whatever. It’s very consistent once your basic needs are met. If you don’t have a secure place to live and food and basic needs, then actually the more stuff does make you happy.
Once your basic needs are met, across cultures, across economic levels, the things that most contribute to a real happiness are having a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning beyond yourself, having a strong social fabric, a strong sense of community, and the act of working with others toward shared goals.
“By joining protests, you can collaborate with some of the greatest people who have a purpose and a mission that captivates them.”
– Annie Leonard
It could be a sports team, it could be a artist group, or it could be an activist group. Think of how fortunate that is that the very things that will allow us to get back on a democratic path and advance climate solutions are also the very things that will make us happy. There really is no reason not to just come on in and join us.
Seeing Protests In A Different Light
Getting back to the book, you’ve described this as part of a campaign, not just a publication. What does that mean? What are you hoping happens after someone reads it?
I say that words have jobs. This communication has a job, and that the job that this has is to inspire people to rethink how they feel about protest. To respect it, to defend it, to get involved in actively protecting our right to protest and then to use it. The book is meant as an invitation. Actually, Andre said in terms of the 42 protests, he said it’s not an inventory, it’s an invitation. We want people to read it, we want to whet their appetite and think that they want to be part of this. We are not doing a normal book tour.
We are traveling around the country and we are partnering with an organization called the Freedom Trainers who are some of the smartest, most skilled trainers in how we understand the political moment we’re in and develop protest strategies to protect our communities and our democracy. Around the country we’ll be doing book events and then we are staying and the next day we’re doing an event with the Freedom Trainers. Everybody is welcome to come.
They are free, community-based trainings. You will meet other people in your community that also want to be a part of the peaceful resistance, and you’ll learn real skills and tools about how we respond if ICE surges our town like they did in Minneapolis. How we respond if the midterm elections are obstructed or stolen.
How we respond to increased restrictions on our First Amendment rights. All of the locations and signups are on TheProtestBook.com, and we invite people to join us. This is really our moment. I we like to call this our documentary moment. People who’ve watched documentaries about the civil rights movement or about the abolition movement or about fighting the Nazis.
If you’ve watched one of these documentaries and wondered, “What would I have done? Would I have been brave enough to take the hoses? Would I have been brave enough to hide people from the Nazis? What would I have done in that moment?” we don’t have to wonder what we would have done in that moment because this is our documentary moment. It’s our moment to summon that courage, get our friends and family and neighbors, and be part of the resistance.
Annie, you’ve just given me a couple of ideas. One, I’m happy to say that I will be attending your talk at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. I believe this episode will follow the following week, so who knows? I may add a little comment after the fact. I’m also thinking that I want to bring one of my friend’s high-school-aged child with me. I’m going to ask them if they’re willing to cut school for the day to do so because I think this is important.
I think that their zine, something that they’ve worked to create that is very climate-focused, could benefit from some of this conversation, this type of engagement. Going through a workshop will only help. I so thank you both for your time, for your work, for your leadership. Frankly, this conversation has been very enlightening for me as well. I’ve loved the book. I’m going to continue to read it. As Andre shared with me as before we began, I’m listening to both of your voices. I guess I didn’t look too closely when I downloaded the audiobook from PRH Media.
Protest: Once your basic needs are met across cultures and economic levels, you will start having a sense of real purpose.
Is audiobook available?
It’s not available yet, but to press people it is. I was able to download and listen to it. I’ve gone back and forth between reading and listening, so I’ve had you in my earholes for some time now. I thank you so much genuinely for this conversation. It’s reminded me, and I think all of our readers too, really, about our ability as individuals to speak, to show up, our own agency. That that in itself, taking that agency, can be a radical idea. Thank you so much for joining me.
It feels good too. It really feels good. Thank you for having us and for all that you do for this great show.
Thanks, Corinna. It’s been great to be with you.
Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
To everyone reading, the book, Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It, is out from Patagonia Books. You can find it and follow the campaign atTheProtestBook.com. I have links to everywhere you can engage with Annie and Andre, from their social links to of course the website. As always, this show is a proud supporter of our cause partner, Prescott College where future leaders are being trained to think systematically, act ethically, and lead regenerative change across communities and ecosystems. It’s where I’m earning my PhD in sustainability education. You’ll be hearing more about that.
Now, this conversation is exactly the kind of thinking that Prescott exists to cultivate. The right to protest is the right to imagine something better and to say so out loud. Don’t take it for granted; use it. You can do that through your voice, your presence, your social media, and the choices that you make every day. I hope you’ll share this episode with a friend or five to help this important interview and the concepts discussed reach more people. Pick up your copy of Protest or grab the audiobook published by Penguin Random House. Both are available April 28th, 2026. Together, we can care more and be better. We can protect the freedoms that make that possible. Thank you.
Corinna is a natural products industry executive who has earned a reputation for leading the development and growth of responsible brands (e.g. Nordic Naturals, iwi, NutriGold). In her professional life, she champions social benefit programs to enhance company impact while preserving and protecting our home planet. She’s presently working tirelessly on the development of a new pre-market that seeks to achieve a carbon-negative impact. In January 2021 she launched her show, Care More, Be Better: A Social Impact + Sustainability Podcast to amplify the efforts of inspired individuals and conscious companies. Through Care More Be Better, she shares their stories in an effort to show us all that one person with one idea can have a big impact. As part of her lifelong education journey, she earned her MBA from Santa Clara University, graduating at the top of her class with a triple focus in Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Marketing in June 2021.
