Lessons on fighting for the climate while living under authoritarianism

This article Lessons on fighting for the climate while living under authoritarianism was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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In 2013, in the devastating wake of Typhoon Haiyan, Yeb Saño began a two-week hunger fast. Saño, then a diplomat and the head of the Philippines delegation at the U.N. climate talks in Poland, had watched as one of the most powerful tropical storms in history obliterated his hometown of Tacloban. Just a few days after the typhoon, a weeping Saño declared to the delegates in Warsaw that he would not eat again until meaningful climate progress was made. But the fast, which Saño now also calls a hunger strike, was not just a political move. 

Saño’s brother, who was in Tacloban at the time, had survived the storm and in the aftermath, helped gather the bodies of more than 70 people — friends, loved ones and neighbors. For those who survived, food was scarce and Saño felt it was powerful to stand with them, to act in solidarity with those most suffering from the consequences of climate change in the Philippines and around the world.

More than a decade later, as storms continue to devastate, wildfires burn through communities and environmental activists face increasing criminalization and violence, Saño’s role has changed, but his goal remains the same. As the executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, he works with teams across Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, often operating in countries with authoritarian governments — something Saño, himself, knows well. In 1971, during martial law, his activist parents were jailed and tortured under the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. — the father of the current Philippine president.  

When I recently spoke with Saño, in a near two-hour conversation, he frequently reminded me that he speaks from a place of privilege: He works for an international organization, he was once a climate diplomat and now he is, as he modestly put it — “the guy who attends conferences.” But Saño, who  occupied an oil and gas platform just last year, is still very much an on-the-ground activist and through his interactions with grassroots organizers, understands the challenges activists face under repressive governments and the opportunities borne from even “unsuccessful” actions.

The Philippines has essentially had back-to-back authoritarian governments, first under President Rodrigo Duterte and now under the current administration of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. For organizers, has anything changed from one administration to the next?

It’s hard to pinpoint the particular differences but, as many observers would point out, there was what I would consider a very severe, chilling effect during the Duterte time because of the sheer number of extrajudicial killings related to the anti-drug war. Now, I think in the context of grassroots activists and organizers, the military behaves the same, the police behave the same, the level of impunity goes beyond what is visible and the kind of patronage politics of the Philippines remains. It doesn’t change during a change of handover of power during elections. 

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Some people would say we have some allies in government right now under the Marcos Jr. administration with some key personalities in his cabinet, for example, being quite sympathetic to environmental issues. But I’d say, the difference depends on which level you’re looking at. If you are a grassroots organizer, especially in rural areas, I don’t think the arm of the law — or, I should say, the illegal arm of the law — changes. In that context, I think that both are dangerous in many ways, because even if you have a collateral chilling effect with the massive anti-drug war during Duterte’s time, now, you have a feeling that the military can do what they wish without much scrutiny. So there’s a lot of political noise, but all of what happens on the ground, I’d say, remains the same. 

What impact do such authoritarian governments have on organizers and activists in the Philippines?

When we look at how we do our work as organizers, there is the stark reality of the dangers that we  sometimes face. It could be a really blatant attack on people like what we’ve seen in the past decade. I am very familiar with the assassination of Gloria Capitan, an anti-coal activist in Bataan. And I had the honor of meeting Chad Booc, who was assassinated two years ago. His work was about providing an alternative way of learning for the Lumad [Indigenous people] in Mindanao, but there were a lot of climate justice aspects to his work. That’s only just scratching the surface with all the documented cases of killings of environmental defenders. We have to raise our voices around this issue every time we go to an environmental conference or a meeting. We cannot just talk about climate without talking about justice. We cannot talk about climate justice without talking about human rights. 

But there are a range of threats. A very close friend, someone who has been with Greenpeace, is being charged with cyber libel because we have been building up anti-mining resistance on Cebu island. This kind of threat is very real and it could really be very discouraging for a lot of us in the environmental movement. Because of this, many of us have decided to change our names on social media. Many of us hide behind cryptic handles on Facebook. And many of us have disengaged from social media altogether. Because we live in a digital world where a lot of connections and communication are done digitally, this can be very damaging to our effectiveness of putting our voices out there. 

In the Philippines, activists have a lot of distrust in these platforms. At Greenpeace, we evaluate every kind of messaging platform that we use not because we are doing anything wrong or because all of our conversations are secret, but who you associate with can make you unsafe. For example, if your friend is red-tagged [publicly deemed a terrorist, often by the government] there is a likelihood that you’re next. Red-tagging is based on the premise that if you have radical beliefs, you don’t have the right to exist, even if you’re not doing anything illegal. 

For me personally, red-tagging is one of the most tragic things in the Philippine context. I come from a family of activists and my parents were arrested, jailed and tortured in 1971 when martial law was declared under Marcos Sr. It’s quite depressing to think that now we’ve elected the dictator’s son and the majority of the electorate has chosen to forget about history. Now, when you’re someone who is raising your left fist, it’s dangerous to be doing that. 

How does this chilling effect — from extrajudicial killings to red-tagging — impact movement building and organizing?

I’m mindful that Greenpeace is not the most at-risk organization in the country. We work on big picture issues. We lobby a lot with the government, especially in the legislature. So our profile is a bit out there. But we do have staff and volunteers who work in rural areas organizing volunteers and recruiting volunteers as well. So it has an impact on our effectiveness in terms of our mission. 

Our theory of change is that we need to change the power dynamics. We have to confront the power dynamics that influence the way the environment is being damaged and that influence how policy is being created. Also, we’re changing the mindsets of people because that’s the best way to build your constituency and to believe in the position that you’re fostering. It’s been very hard because when you’re talking about environmental issues, people tend to treat that as less important than, for example, economic issues because of the many different kinds of noises we have to compete with. But we all know these are interconnected issues. 

Many, many people that I work with continue the work. We calculate our risks. We deploy people even during states of calamity, when there are a lot of typhoons. And I guess, for me, the biggest impact is how we’re able to coordinate amongst each other in the movement, because we’re very cautious about who we meet with. We’re very cautious about who we ally with because you never really know whether that exponentially increases the risk for your own organization or your staff. 

For me, that is one of the biggest impacts. It causes fragmentation in the movement, and we’re nowhere near as effective as a movement if we cannot even coordinate properly. Instead of us being able to focus on, for example, nonviolent direct actions or protest actions, we have to think not just twice, but four times before we even do it. We have to consider if the action is worth it and what kind of inconvenience or danger it might pose to any one of us. Your level of alacrity, in terms of protest, really gets affected. 

Are other countries across Southeast Asia facing similar repressive responses to environmental organizing?

You’re talking about Thailand and Indonesia — I don’t even know which country is worse than the other. At Greenpeace, we do a lot of protest actions. We do a lot of confrontational campaigns. So we face a number of lawsuits in Southeast Asia and these are often SLAPP suits related to defamation — such as when we utter something or even just like a post on Facebook. A lawsuit is a risk we can calculate, but direct physical harassment also happens to us. 

Two years ago when we were organizing around the G20 meeting in Bali, we had a caravan of cyclists riding bicycles from Jakarta to Bali. Our team never made it to Bali. We had to abort the caravan because they were being harassed by paramilitary elements along the way and they were threatened and were told if they continued the journey, they would face more threats. Despite that, we still felt it was very effective, and we continue to think these kinds of peaceful protests have a big place in reaching out to people. We now live in a digital world, so even if we don’t reach our ultimate physical destination, we still reach the hearts and minds of people. For us, that’s important. 

You mentioned lobbying earlier — how can organizers pair larger actions, such as protests, with more targeted political action?

We’ve seen a lot of nonviolent protests produce results for lobbying and, in Greenpeace, we do have a model for doing that. You don’t just lobby. You need to expose the problem first. You need to document the problem like a journalist would — and then protest action is just one element of it. It also depends on the scale of the problem. Generally, at the local government level, if you have 200 people mobilized in front of the city hall, that creates a response. Or 100 people outside the headquarters of a company we are campaigning against creates a response. But if you mobilize 100 people in front of the House of Representatives or the Senate, you’re just treated like a run-of-the-mill protest and most people in government would not pay attention. It’s just an ordinary day for them. These marches and mobilizations happen but more often than not, they fall on deaf ears. 

So when we do lobbying, we find champions, right? And then we work with them. There are still good people in government. There are still good people in Congress, and we lobby through them. They have a lot of issues in their hands. They have to take care of their own constituencies. Then you have these groups talking about big picture climate change, global issues. You need to find the right people so that they do listen. One of the things that we’re really proud of is that several times the Philippine Congress has issued a state of climate emergency, which is an acknowledgement of the reality of the problem and how it affects the country. 

One thing I think that works well, being a campaigner in the Philippines, is that we don’t have to deal with climate skeptics or people who deny climate change. Filipinos understand climate change profoundly because we experience it so closely. We don’t have to contend with people questioning the science. So I think politicians here understand that reality. And if they latch on to the issue, it gives them a bit of a good platform to campaign on every time they run for office. So it’s a mainstream issue now here in the Philippines, and I’m comparing that to when I started campaigning on climate 30 years ago — people did not listen to me. People didn’t even care. Now, it’s entirely different. 

You described yourself as the “guy who attends conferences,” but you’re still very much involved in actions. Could you share some of the details of your recent action against Shell?

In January 2023, we launched a global campaign called “Stop Drilling, Start Paying,” which is part of our “Make Polluters Pay” campaign. We organized a protest on an oil and gas platform that was being transported from China to the North Sea. We were calling out Shell on their deceit and for saying how they’re complying with the Paris Agreement, but in reality, they are actually doing the opposite. So we were on board the Greenpeace vessel in the North Atlantic, and we waited for this vessel. 

While we were planning this action we had some vague idea of what it looked like, but when we were there in the ocean on these small boats, it was very overwhelming to see this massive structure — around 65 yards wide, sitting on top of a much bigger vessel. It was moving very fast in very rough seas. Some of us were able to climb all the way up and occupy the vessel for 12 or 13 days, which we think is the longest occupation of a moving oil and gas platform. I tried to climb, but the vessel was doing these crazy maneuvers that they usually use for anti-piracy. We made it clear through radio that we were doing a peaceful protest, but we were being treated like pirates. 

That protest then resulted in a lawsuit. Shell claims we were harassing them, which is ridiculous, because how can six activists — some of us from developing countries who are experiencing climate impacts — be the ones accused of harassing the richest companies in the world? It’s obviously a SLAPP suit, one that is meant to discourage activists from doing protests at sea. But even that brief experience was exhilarating. It gave me a big sense of pride around how we are holding a big polluter like Shell accountable. 

How do you prepare for such a large-scale action?

I belong to what we call the action team. So we’re always ready to deploy. We are trained to climb ropes and be safe at sea, but we use this very strategically. Whenever we feel it could be a really big campaign, we try to find ways of spotlighting the company that’s creating the damage. To do these kinds of actions we need to understand nonviolence in a very deep way, and we often do that through trainings we conduct or that we share with many grassroots organizations. We do these nonviolence trainings because that is the underpinning of peaceful protest and how we become really effective in the long term. So my advice is we need to understand nonviolence and make it really integral to everything that we do as activists if we want to be effective, especially in these kinds of big confrontations. It also takes a lot of personal investment to do this. Just basic knot tying is essential to it. How you climb a rope, how you use the equipment, is something you have to practice on a regular basis so that you can be part of a team that does this. But, of course, there are other forms of protest that do not entail climbing ropes or boarding ships. 

Your fast at the 2013 U.N. climate conference in Warsaw was a groundbreaking moment that resulted in concrete progress. Do you think something like a hunger strike still has the power to effect change?

The answer is an easy yes. I always like to believe that nonviolent protest has the power to shift things. Sometimes you wake up and you think, you can be so cynical because political change is very difficult, but part of it is also the messenger, right? There have been a lot of people doing hunger strikes around climate conferences. For me, it builds power, it builds agency at different levels. But if you’re talking about some kind of big, iconic talk of the town protest, it really depends on who does it. If I do it now, it doesn’t mean a thing at the COP climate conferences. I did it as a climate diplomat. Obviously, that was different. 

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It created, I like to believe, an impact that resulted in one of the things we were hoping for during the Warsaw COP — the mechanism on loss and damage. That was groundbreaking, because loss and damage would never have been on the radar of the U.N. Now we’re talking about it. Now it’s a pillar of the climate convention. Now we have a loss and damage fund, which we hopefully can tap for vulnerable communities to respond to climate loss and damage. So there are incremental victories that you can have when you do these things, but you can never plan for this, really. You need to have an instinct of how to transform a moment into a movement. And it’s not easy to preempt that. It depends on the moment, really, and that’s what we need to learn as organizations and as movements. How to understand when those moments can happen and not let those moments pass you by. 

Could you share some of your insights from organizing with multi-faith groups and religious institutions?

When I did my hunger fast — and I called it a fast — it suddenly opened all of these doors to the interfaith movement. People from many religions and organizations approached me and said, “we want to join your fast.” I found that fascinating, but also, deeply uplifting that the climate message could resonate so much with religion. Then, after I stepped down as a climate diplomat and before I joined Greenpeace, I was working for an organization called Green Faith. We built a strong collaboration across the world from all of the major religions. The idea is that you have a lot of people who practice religion and almost all spiritual traditions teach stewardship. Therefore all religions should have a stand on climate and how it needs to be solved. We find that it resonates really well. 

At Greenpeace, Southeast Asia, we’re part of what we call “Ummah for Earth.” It’s an Islam-oriented environmental movement that we campaign on as Greenpeace in parts of the world where it resonates well. We connect with religious institutions for them to come up with positions on the environment, even for religious festivities such as the Green Ramadan campaign in Indonesia. 

Outside of Greenpeace I’m also the vice chair of the board of the Global Catholic Climate Movement, which recently changed its name to the Laudato Si’ Movement. You’re talking about 1.2 billion Catholics and how the structure of the church could really be effective in advocacy. Obviously, we need to do a lot more work, but that’s a structure that if you don’t tap, then you’re less effective. There’s a lot more work to be done to sustain the advocacy within the interfaith context, but I think it’s really important. And for me, it’s been a very fulfilling experience. 

On a personal level, how do you navigate being an activist while living under an authoritarian government?

You have to think about it at the personal level, and you have to think about how to live to fight another day. Then we have to think about family. You need a very high level of personal resilience and not everybody can offer that, especially if you’re trying to make ends meet for your family. A lot of people I know have tended to lie low and be safe rather than compromise their ability to be breadwinners for their family. Again, I’m mindful of my privilege, but I do feel I have the tools to manage the emotional and psychological impacts of this kind of milieu. It’s not easy and there are days when you wake up and wonder whether what we’re doing is meaningful at all, because that’s part of it. Being organizers, you have a theory of change and you want to see that change happen as fast as possible. When you face all of these different manifestations of impunity and maybe not even just physical threats but threats on social media, it makes you think whether all of this is worth doing. 

The way I think many of us are able to cope with it is by building solidarity. What I always think is that we have to build solidarity like we’ve never done before and create those support systems amongst each other in the movement. There are a lot of young people who have a lot of energy, so we want to draw from that energy. The youth climate movement in the Philippines is a very vibrant segment of the movement. And the more I interact with young people, the more I keep sight of the big picture. That’s very energizing. 

This article Lessons on fighting for the climate while living under authoritarianism was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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