Over the last few months, I have accidentally engaged in an ethnographic study of grassroots ecological direct action movements.

The result of my encounter with such a movement has resulted in a torrent of ideas which I will now try to write up over the next few months. My influences range from my obvious overused ones (i.e. Ulrich Beck) to some new characters, in particularly, Nathan Sayre over at Berkeley UofC.

Before I go any further, I have to say I encountered a wonderful bunch of people who I all wish to meet again when I move back to London.

I identified a number of problems within these movements, and I’ll go through each of them, one by one, in individual posts.

Today, I want to look at group polarisation, which seems to be a major issue.

What do we mean by group polarisation? It’s a well studied phenomenon by which members of group adopt a more extreme position through deliberation than they would otherwise hold individually.

Talking to individual members did reveal a disparity between the group’s aims and individuals themselves who on the whole appeared less extreme.

So what exactly did the group in question believe? Well, nothing short of an anarchic revolution to solve the climate crisis. In later articles I may discuss my opinion that this would be ecologically disastrous.

However, it is not the group’s aim to foster polarisation – quite the opposite, the structure of meetings is designed to prevent such phenomenon. Most groups adopt a “non-hierarchical” direct action approach – there are no leaders and everyone is equal. But this denies the weighting of individual nodes within the social network of the activist groups that actually occurs. To have a network where all nodes have an equal weighting would probably not function at all.

The main problem is not even that the group goes for the most risky position, or decides upon the most dangerous action – but the inability to incorporate differing views into their network.

I made it very clear from the outset that I was no anarchist, but solely concerned with the potentially ravaging effects of climate change. I stated that my reason for becoming involved in direct action was to increase diversity in the overall push for sustainability with the eventual result of political reform. This merely provided an excuse to more easily dismiss my other views which did not stem from my political leanings towards liberal cosmopolitanism – namely that of ensuring scientific accuracy and remaining self-critical to ensure that the groups eventual aims would not be counter productive in affecting the global climate.

There seems to be no easy way to fix the problem of polarisation.

In my final post, I will try to present some solutions to the problems.