Chiara Rosselli, Executive Director, APROPOS Group
The other morning, I woke up to the sound of chainsaws.
Popping my head out of the window, I looked around and was abruptly confronted with a sickening spectacle. The elm trees lining the street were being savagely decimated into little more than stumps with arms.
I asked a few people on the street what was going on, and finding no answers, I turned online to a neighbourhood group I had recently joined.
Forty-eight hours later, I emerged from a deep dive into the health of trees—and of democracies.
This is what—I think—I learned in the process.
When it comes to political mobilisation, it's "no pain, no gain."
Immediately, I was sucked into the whirlwind of online activism because, ultimately, the issue mauled my heart. I was witnessing devastation unfolding in real time, right on my doorstep, with consequences that would last for at least a whole generation.
I learned on my own skin that it is a prerequisite for political mobilisation that we feel issues very deeply, that they hit us where it hurts—because the amount of inertia that we need to overcome to become engaged in anything beyond our immediate daily lives is truly remarkable.
Especially in an era of easy 'Instagram activism', and especially when 'care' and 'cringe' are such cosy neighbours in our vocabulary and our way of seeing the world.
Unfortunately, I found, the pressure from peer groups will also tend to push you back into inaction. Seeking assembly, speaking up on social media, and, more broadly, what I would describe as 'messy activism' are often frowned upon as embarrassing, futile, or overly emotional. So, the pressure mounts to step back in line, retreating into the learned behaviours of dignified and distant disgruntlement.
The uncomfortable underbelly of collective action.
Within the first six hours, I received two three-minute audio messages from an unknown number and a cryptic rendezvous request from another stranger: "9:25 tomorrow, Dunant Square."
In the hours that followed, I experienced firsthand the anxiety-inducing cacophony of an activists' WhatsApp group. I was introduced to fruitarianism—an even more radical take on veganism—by the older woman with whom I ended up patrolling the nearby streets in a makeshift two-person neighbourhood watch over the tree-cutting work sites. As we strolled, she pointed out edible species of weeds growing between the cracks in the pavement. I was attacked online. I was invited to a religious tree-hugging circle the next day. And so much more.
Warnings rang in my head, echoed by my social circle: What are you getting yourself into? Who are these people? Do you really agree with their views? Do you want to join them? And what's the plan, anyway?
The experience raised fundamental questions about politics—what it is, what it isn't, how it works. In particular, the issue of effort versus results: why does it so often feel like there's no sane trade-off between the two when it comes to collective action?
But the loudest question that broke through was this: To coalesce or not to coalesce?
The answer is as obvious as it is uncomfortable.
Of course, we coalesce.
Of course, we can only achieve shared goals if we are willing to shed the extremist purity and holier-than-thou attitude that characterise so many political stances today. I will not save a single tree if I insist on working only with people who think and behave exactly like me. For one, I haven’t found any in my neighbourhood.
So, barring the option of chaining myself to a tree—which I briefly considered but quickly realised I lacked both the courage and aptitude for—I’d say the question answers itself.
We coalesce.
We negotiate, with ourselves and with others.
We move forward—staggering and stumbling—but still, onwards we move.