Search Results

Three general steps move civic ecology practices from small local innovations to broader policy innovations: giving a label to the phenomenon (in our case “civic ecology”); becoming more effective as local providers of ecosystem services and contributors to community well-being through partnerships with scientists; and government and larger NGOs formulating policies that allow civic ecology practices to spread. Civic ecology practices are small social or “social-ecological innovations,” whereas larger NGOs and government agencies are policy entrepreneurs who shape the policy environment. Policy entrepreneurs can also bridge between multiple civic ecology practices and larger management initiatives to form regional adaptive and collaborative resource management systems.

Opening with The Murder of Emmett Till, which launched award-winning Firelight Media’s long-standing community engagement enterprise, Chapter 3 serves as the heart of the book—the theoretical and pragmatic backdrop to today’s participatory civic media culture, positioning documentaries and parallel public engagement work as forms of cultural resistance, civic imagination, and social critique. Documentaries play an active role in democratic practice through their functions as civic storytelling—as counternarratives, monitors, mobilizers, and artistic interpreters that can reveal the depth of a social issue and strengthen civil society through collaboration and partnerships. Simultaneously, grassroots activism has changed in the networked era. Examples and initiatives help bring documentary functions to life, including the international Good Pitch program, and films like Whose Streets?, When I Walk, An Inconvenient Truth, Minding the Gap, Newtown, Strong Island, Surviving R. Kelly, The Armor of Light, Unrest, and The Pushouts.

Chapter 5 introduces three civic aspirations that move us closer toward a world of Confident Pluralism. Tolerance is the recognition that people are for the most part free to pursue their own beliefs and practices, even those beliefs and practices we find morally objectionable. Humility takes the further step of recognizing that others will sometimes find our beliefs and practices morally objectionable, and that we can't always “prove” that we are right and they are wrong. Patience points toward restraint, persistence, and endurance in our interactions across difference. Importantly, we can pursue these aspirations without agreeing on the reasons for doing so. If enough of us embrace them, we may be able to sustain Confident Pluralism even as we disagree about the underlying justifications.

Confident Pluralism argues that we can, and we must, learn to live with each other in spite of our deep differences. It requires a tolerance for dissent, a skepticism of government orthodoxy, and a willingness to endure strange and even offensive ways of life. Confident Pluralism asks that those charged with enforcing our laws do better in preserving and strengthening our constitutional commitments to voluntary groups, public forums, and certain kinds of generally available funding. It also challenges each of us to live out the aspirations of tolerance, humility, and patience in our civic practices. The Conclusion sketches a vision for how we might go about pursuing that possibility. It focuses on the possibility of civic engagement over hashtag activism. It also includes a story of finding common ground in a commitment to the public forum in the recent Supreme Court decision, McCullen v. Coakley, involving protesters outside of an abortion clinic.

Chapter 7 considers the role of collective action (including boycotts, strikes, and protests) directed against our fellow citizens. Collective action reveals an inherent and perhaps irresolvable tension for Confident Pluralism. On the one hand, Confident Pluralism encourages collective action to resist and challenge forms of majoritarian power. On the other hand, collective action directed at other private citizens and their institutions exerts a kind of power that may be inconsistent with Confident Pluralism. Chapter 7 explores these tensions by considering a civil rights era boycott in Claiborne County, Mississippi, and the more recent Internet boycott of the Mozilla Corporation over its hiring of Brendan Eich. The aspirations of tolerance, humility, and patience do not point to a bright-line rule for our collective action, but they do offer some guidance. Let's call this the Collective Action Imperative.