Scientist Rebellion Turtle Island’s April Salon used the upcoming 55th anniversary of the first Earth Day as a catalyst for deep conversations around mass mobilization and movement building during this unprecedented moment in time. With about 2100 protest actions in February alone, and estimates of 3 million participants in Hands Off! actions on April 5th, activism is exploding all across the US. Individual numbers at events are growing fast, and boycotts and union actions particularly are expanding rapidly. Even self-proclaimed “moderate conservative” pundit David Brooks is calling for an uprising!
In our Salon, we reviewed the historical context of the mass mobilization on the first Earth Day, and discussed how building coalitions could help us create momentum for peak events that would engage over 3.5% of the population.
Earth Day in Historical Context
The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970; it was the largest environmental mass mobilization the world had ever seen. The first Earth Day took place against a back drop of rivers so polluted they burst into flames, cities shrouded in smog from belching smokestacks and leaded fuel in cars, and workers exposed to toxins from mercury to uranium with no protections or health care.
On the first Earth Day, 20 million Americans came out for the planet (10% of the US population at that time). Four months later, then-President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency by Executive Order. Learn more about the context and history of the first Earth Day in our background resource list, available on CryptDrive or as a Google Doc.
Protests in Washington DC on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970
The Relevance of Earth Day for Mass Mobilizations Now
In 2025, many of the achievements of the activism of the 1970s are suddenly under threat again, but we are seeing other mass mobilizations emerging. Now, Executive Orders are used to tear down instead of protect the very fabric of US society. The 31-rule rollback last month by Trump’s EPA are indeed a “dagger straight into the heart of the climate…” and the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history” (as Trump-appointed EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said, while boasting about the rule changes). It is also projected to cause 200,000 deaths in the near future.
Evidence continues to reinforce our determination to act.
“Protests can persuade people, and maybe even change how they vote… A new review of 50 recent studies finds that protests tend to sway media coverage and public opinion toward the climate cause, without appearing to backfire, even when disruptive tactics are used. The researchers, from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, found that collective action sometimes influenced elections by shifting people’s voting behavior… parts of the U.S. with lower levels of protests during the initial Earth Day in 1970 had higher levels of air pollution 20 years later compared to places that had better turnout”
How do we use this moment to galvanize people everywhere and bring 10% of the population into the street, engaging in a mass mobilization, civil disobedience, non-compliance and direct action for a liveable future? What is the role of Scientist Rebellion Turtle Island at a time like this? For our Salon on April 13th, we broke into two small groups to look at these questions from slightly different perspectives: 1) Coalition building for effective protest, and 2) How do we get to 3.5% mobilization (12M people activated)?
Coalition Building for Mass Mobilizations
It’s clear that a truly large mobilization requires massive coalition building. As a relatively small organization, SRTI’s role is less as lead organizer and more as a strategic partner to our allies, facilitating further collaboration, amplifying calls for action, executing complementary parallel actions, or contributing in specific roles (several SRTI people spoke during the recent Stand Up for Science rallies, for example). However, this breakout discussion focused mostly on the big picture, debating the nature and challenges of large scale mobilizing.
How to avoid the all too common issue of fracturing in coalitions as they grow? It is natural for conflict to arise as more and more people come together. However, focusing on a common goal, a shared vision, and not allowing smaller differences to divide us, is key to coalition building. It has been said, “if you are completely comfortable at the table, your table is too small.” To grow truly big, we must embrace our differences. And yet, passions run high in many of these groups, for good reason, and often it seems there is a “purity test” to ensure everyone is perfectly aligned. In that case, perhaps rather than attempting to coalesce to a monolith, it makes sense to maintain relatively small, autonomous groups, which agree to work together. This is the concept behind affinity groups, a common organizing model in self-organizing systems like Scientist Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion.
Mass mobilizations are most effective when sustained over a long period of time, ideally with escalating tactics of engagement. To ensure that a mass event like April 5th’s Hands Off is not just a “one-off”, the messaging and the bigger goal must remain relevant for a large number of people. This requires a broadly shared vision, one that people recognize in their lives: economic impact, for example. Ensuring people understand how the goal will improve their lives in a tangible way is a great way to get, and retain, buy-in for the long-term.
There are good examples of “big tent” organizing efforts with varying degrees of success and longevity. Unions, of course, are logically at the forefront these days when the current regime is decimating jobs. Occupy! was a powerful movement for an extended period of time, although it ultimately lost longevity. Other localized efforts with successful outcomes include the Portland Clean Energy Fund Citizen’s Initiative. The Green New Deal, with its strong focus on worker justice, has potential for broad support, although what we got with the Inflation Reduction Act was a pittance of the full concept. The common denominator in all of these is economic justice.
Getting to 3.5%
Why is 3.5% Important for Mass Mobilization and Movement Success?
“The “3.5% rule” refers to the claim that no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it during a peak event.”
The number of people actively participating, all at once, in a peak event, be it a mass demonstration, mass noncooperation, a general strike, a battle, or some other show of resistance to authoritarian regimes, creates momentum that generates more activity. In Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Chenowith and Stephan (2011) review 323 mass mobilizations aiming to overthrow a government or gain territorial self-determination that happened between 1900 and 2006 (whether nonviolent or violent). They found that every peak event mobilizing over 3.5% of the population succeeded (though recent revisions yielded two exceptions). They also show that nonviolent resistance campaigns were more than twice as effective as violent ones.
Recent Mass Mobilizations in the US
The actions of the Trump/Musk regime so far in 2025 have sparked many protests, though few reached the numbers of the estimated 4 million-plus participants in the Women’s March of 2017 (1 – 1.6% of the population). The “Tesla Takedown” movement has grown organically and created momentum. Now MAGA counter-protesters are harassing Tesla Takedown activists, trying to force a reaction they can capture on video (the advice has been not engage or confront, but simply turn away from the counter-protesters at these events).
The April 5th Hands Off protests across the US appeared to emerge from real grass roots organizing, brought together by a coalition of left-leaning groups like Move On, 50501, Indivisible, Women’s March, Working Families Party, and Public Citizen. It was not on the radar of some politicos like Pod Save America who said “that came out of nowhere.” Mainstream press gave it little coverage, despite massive nationwide turnout, with organizers estimating 3-5 million participants across 1,300 locations.
It was unclear (at the time of our Salon) whether “Hands Off” and other anti-authoritarian mass mobilizations would have momentum; would the next ones be bigger or smaller? April 19th was smaller (though still quite large), but there are more actions in the works, and it seems like mobilizing for May Day may bring even bigger numbers. Farther into the future, there is collective action working on a true General Strike on May 1, 2028. A number of union contracts expire simultaneously, and this long range plan is coming from labor unions.
How can Scientist Rebellion Meet the Moment?
What we are seeing now, across Turtle Island and around the world, is an uprising that is not primarily about climate, but more broadly about stopping wholesale destruction brought on by oligarchy and authoritarianism. Some of the current struggle has echoes of the Occupy! movement, and provides an opportunity to reignite the “We Are the 99%” perspective. How does Scientist Rebellion relate to the concerns and demands of 2025?
Philosophically, Scientist Rebellion does have a large tent , encompassing degrowth, systems change, democracy, academic freedom, freedom to protest, and defending science fact. Scientists are a small percentage of the population, so Scientist Rebellion will never be huge, but the presence of our “labcoats” brings legitimacy to civil resistance actions, and that can help normalize protest by groups not expected to protest. This is part of our Theory of Change. So we can proudly join pro-democracy and social justice actions and broader mobilization efforts, and build our numbers to participate across a wide spectrum of issues.
There is a tension of wanting to broaden our reach, having the niche of doing civil disobedience and similarly confrontational actions (NVDA), and trying to recruit people who are reluctant to do NVDA. As we seek to bring more scientists into activism, we need to highlight “resistance science” that shows how and why confrontational, radical flank actions are effective. But we also need to remember that we are academics, so teaching is part of our figurative “DNA.” The first Earth Day was primarily a teach-in on the environment.
Today, academia and the planet are under threat. As we face the seizure and deportation of student activists from US campuses, and similar authoritarian moves against research and free speech, what can we learn from other Scientist Rebellion groups around the world, in places that have been dealing with government crackdowns (and the unjust devastation of climate change) a lot longer than us in Turtle Island?
Historians will look back at the actions of 2025 as a critical turning point for the United States, with repercussions across the world. It is our chance to get this right. We are not going back to the days of oil spills, whale deaths, and rivers on fire. We do not accept arbitrary deportations and snatching students off the street for expressing their rights to free speech in the US. We are not willing to slide quietly into repressive authoritarianism. Mass mobilizations show that we have the numbers. Mass mobilizations can remind us that we have the power to create the change we want. Scientist Rebellion is ready to catalyze this change. Stand up and speak out with us!
