I Eat Green

Guest: Joshua Kahn Russell

Joshua Kahn Russell is an organizer, facilitator, civil disobedience coordinator, campaigner, and trainer with the Ruckus Society. He has trained thousands of activists, and currently is a national organizer with Tar Sands Action, a campaign to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. He is the author of Organizing Cools the Planet, and works at the intersection of ecology and social justice.

Joshua Kahn Russell is an organizer working to bridge movements for ecological balance and racial justice. He is a strategy and non-violent direct action trainer with the  Ruckus Society, and serves communities directly impacted by fossil fuel extraction.

Joshua offers workshops, training, consulting, facilitation, and action coordination to groups and organizations.

He has authored chapters for several books and numerous organizing manuals, most recently  Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections to Navigate the Climate Crisis, with Hilary Moore, on PM Press. Joshua is a regular writer for the blogs Znet,  Grist, Rabble.ca, WireTap, and It’s Getting Hot In Here, and his articles have appeared in Yes! Magazine,  Left Turn Magazine,  Peacework Magazine, Upping the Anti, and Z Magazine, among others.

Joshua has worked internationally with civil society groups at United Nations Climate Negotiations and has been a leading voice in the International Youth Climate Movement. Joshua spent four years as Rainforest Action Network’s Grassroots Actions Manager, helping to win campaigns to stop corporations from fueling our addiction to coal and oil, and helping transform Wall Street with successful campaigns that shifted six banks away from financing fossil fuel projects.

Joshua has coordinated and helped build numerous civil disobedience actions, including the 4,000 person Capitol Climate Action in 2009. Recently he was a trainer for the Tar Sands Action which mobilized 1,250 people including scientists, senators, Indigenous leaders, farmers, teachers, mothers, religious leaders, students and celebrities to participate in 2 weeks of daily sit-ins at the White House. He has served on the steering committee of the Energy Action Coalition, a youth-led coalition of over 48 groups spanning the environmental spectrum, and helped found the “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a national multi-issue youth & student group, which in less than a year grew to over 250 chapters and nearly 3,000 members nationwide. He helped revitalize the Activist Resource Center and other student groups at Brandeis University, where he coordinated university-wide student walkouts in 2003 and 2006. He was awarded a fellowship from the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life; The Elise Boulding Sociology and Social Activism Award; and the Karpf Peace Award. During that time he has done international solidarity work in Cambodia, Jamaica, and Mexico with groups such as the Womyn’s Agenda for Change and the International Jamaican Council for Human Rights.

His artwork has appeared on the cover of books authored by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, and Noam Chomsky, smartMeme, and in the Celebrate People’s History poster series.