A diagram of the 'The Upside-down triangle'. An upside down triangle is held up by 3 logs on each side coming out of the ground. With out the logs holding it up it would fall.

Pillars Of Support – The Upside Down Triangle

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Introduction

Learn about power and the Pillars of Support also known as the Upside-Down Triangle. This article has been sourced from Daniel Hunter’s book published by 350.org called The Climate Resistance Handbook. Read below or see pgs 12 – 18 of the book.

The Upside-Down Triangle

The dominant view of power is that it flows from the top downward. A student does what their teacher tells them to do. The teacher takes orders from the principal. The principal takes orders from their administrator. And so on, all the way up the pyramid to the head of state.

On climate change, we might see fossil fuel companies at the top. They buy off heads of state and leading politicians. Those politicians oversee government commissions that are supposed to regulate companies but instead violate land and workers’ rights. Those commissions then approve the bosses’ plans, who then order workers to clear land and dig oil out of the ground. And so on. In that view of society, everyone below follows orders from someone at the top.

But there’s another way of helping groups view power: the upside-down triangle.

An upside-down triangle is always going to be unstable. An oppressive system that relies on destroying our planet is unstable. It’s not natural to burn this much carbon dioxide (CO2) and other green‐ house gases. The system needs to be held up by pillars of support.

The pillars make the structure seem legitimate and right. Pillars can be the laws, courts, media, and schools that train us to obey. Other pillars include people who may oppose the system but still help keep it running — including administrators, regulatory bodies, academics, and teachers — who refuse to speak out against what’s wrong.

This view reveals how much power we actually have. The most repressive Mongolian government is forced to the negotiating table if its youngest citizens refuse to eat. If we don’t comply, the system doesn’t keep going.

Groups can use this tool to look at their work and develop a more complex and accurate understanding of power. Being able to see the pillars of support that keep bad policies in place can help expand our sense of how we can make change.

A group of young people in Serbia nonviolently fought their powerful, ruthless dictator in Serbia. They required every person who joined their movement to learn the upside-down triangle. They led trainings to explain the concept and their plan to remove the pillars they saw. They explained it this way:

By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct trafc, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep food supplied to the markets, make steel, build rockets, train the police and the army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler through a variety of organizations and institutions. If the people stop providing these skills, the ruler cannot rule. – Gene Sharp from The Politics of Nonviolent Action

This approach was a key ingredient to their movement. And they were successful in overthrowing the brutal Serbian dictator. This is one of the key insights from nonviolent direct action. Huge amounts of power live in us.

We can make change by removing the pillars of support. When we remove our involvement, unjust systems become more unstable. And we can make them fall.

Analysing the Pillars of Support

Let’s look at the upside-down triangle of releasing carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases. We can examine lots of pillars of support.

A few might include:

The Agricultural Sector

Agriculture contributes to about 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The agribusiness industry is relentless in fighting for lower environmental and worker standards. Loss of forests is often caused by the pressure from agriculture and contributes a further 10% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Cars and the Transportation Sector

Transportation produces around 14% of all global greenhouse gases. This can also be a strategic issue. While people don’t see CO2 (or other greenhouse gases), they do see, smell, and taste pollution from cars and buses.

The Fossil Fuel Industry

Burning fossil fuels is the single biggest cause of climate change: It causes the majority of all global emissions.

Governments that benefit from keeping it going

They reduce or scrap environmental laws or allow companies to break them. They have the power to make large systems change but keep giving up this power.

The list can get long quickly.

The number of opponents can make us feel overwhelmed, even hopeless. And there’s a strategic insight here, too.

Rather than focusing on all the pillars of support at once, you can run a campaign — where you spend energy on moving one of them. Campaigns have the advantage of focus. In Serbia, the Otpor students ran campaigns moving key pillars of support they believed could move, including other youth, opposition politicians, and the police (!).

Focus is a gift of strategy. It helps us contribute our part, knowing others are doing other parts.

For example, 350.org has mainly focused on the pillar of the fossil fuel industry. We did so because the industry already owns over 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide in their reserves! That’s five times more than the most conservative scientists believe we can put into the atmosphere (565 gigatons) and maintain anything like the climate we’re used to.

If they burn what they already have, we will blow past any hope of climate recovery. And their stock reports keep showing that’s their plan. And even worse, they’re spending billions in search of more oil and gas. In other words, they are a threat to all life.

So we targeted the fossil fuel industry. We did our own analysis of their pillars of support. What keeps that industry afloat?

We identified a few pillars we thought we could make an impact on: social licence, access, political permits, and finance. Our work became organised largely around divestment — a tactic of getting schools, houses of worship, and even big banks, cities, and countries to remove their investments from fossil fuels. Nobody should profit from their exploitation. So this is about finance.

But the divestment campaign is also about social licence — removing the public’s acceptance by changing how the fossil fuel industry is viewed. Instead of seeing them as a needed profit-seeking company, the public is starting to see them as globally destructive monsters.

We also work to keep fossil fuels in the ground, allying with frontline communities globally who are protecting their lands. And then we keep hammering away at the social licence of the fossil fuel industry. They are not reasonable companies. They are entities willing to kill everything for profit. They should be thought of like slave traders and pirates — except neither of those ever threatened all life on the planet.

And what’s good about picking a focus is that by winning one pillar, you can make others easier. The fossil fuel companies buy of governments — and so in many countries, we’ve campaigned to stop politicians from accepting any funds from them. When we weaken the fossil fuel industry, we weaken their ability to buy land and pollute water that’s been care-taken by generations of indigenous peoples.

Winning one pillar can help make other pillars easier. Focusing on a pillar means you still get to talk about the whole system. But the focus means that instead of just asking “all the pillars to remove themselves” — you pick a pillar to really remove and crumble.

The Mongolian activists wouldn’t have won if they had targeted everyone at once. Serbian activists didn’t try to move all sectors of society at once — that would have spread them out too thin. That’s where it’s great to be aware that movements are an ecosystem. We get to play our humble part in all of that. A story from young people in Canada makes this even more clear.

Power Flowing From Below in Canada

A company called TransCanada was trying to build the Energy East pipeline. The proposal was to pump over 1.1 million barrels a day from the tar sands, one of the dirtiest sources of oil. If built, it would be 4,000 kilometers long, across six provinces in Canada.

By 2014, the government was speeding up the approval process. The last big hurdle was the National Energy Board (NEB), a government body that was supposed to regulate pipelines. But mostly the NEB gives a green light to any bad project. If people had accepted the power analysis of the NEB being the ones in power — then it was over.

But there was another way to think about the campaign: It’s the people’s decision, and we are the ones who decide if it goes ahead or not. A group of young people strategised and launched a campaign called the People’s Intervention.

The demand was simple: The NEB needs to consider the pipeline’s climate impacts.

The strategy was easily understandable, too: If the National Energy Board wouldn’t consider climate impacts, they (the people) would be forced to escalate with the People’s Injunction and prevent the hearings from continuing.

The simple demand and understandable strategy made it easy for people to join. Soon, thousands of people were writing to the NEB asking for it consider climate impacts in its decision. We call this an “if this, then that” strategy.

It’s different from just asking someone else to do the right thing. And different from waiting around for them to do the wrong thing. It’s taking the timeline into your hands — and explaining to everyone what the consequences will be if the bad policy happens.

It was also good organising, because people who were cynical about the government could sign the injunction. But people who trusted the government and believed it would do the right thing could join, too. And (this is important) they were signing up to do a riskier action if the NEB didn’t do the right thing.

And that action had to be carried out — because the NEB did the wrong thing. The NEB refused to accept people’s input. It rejected over 2,000 comments from people talking about climate impacts. A lot of new people were angry. Anger is good. And it needs a channel.

So at the next NEB hearing in Quebec, activists seized control of the meeting to plead for climate justice. Instead of letting the NEB tell people when they could speak, protestors stood up tall and shouted to make their voices heard. They were angry, and one person even threw themselves onto the table to halt the proceedings.

It was, after all, their government, and therefore their meeting. The NEB freaked out. It shut the meeting down. It refused to hold more hearings.

This sparked even more outrage — and other pillars of support crumbled. Journalists turned up evidence of corruption. Indigenous leaders who were the first to oppose the pipeline organised a massive pan-continental treaty alliance against oil sands expansion on their traditional territory.

The pipeline’s death was coming. Shortly after, the NEB collapsed under the pressure. It announced it would include climate impacts on the Energy East.

There was no way a huge pipeline could be called good for the climate. And TransCanada knew this. So three months later, TransCanada said it changed its mind due to “changed circumstances.” (No, they didn’t admit they changed their mind due to protests. They rarely do.)

The campaigners won — by removing pillars of support and seeing how their actions could undo the power of the (apparently) most powerful forces in Canada.

What they did, in essence, was run a campaign targeting a specific pillar of support (the NEB). And that helps us learn about the power of campaigns.

About Book

This article is from the Climate Resistance Handbook which brings together a wealth of learnings from the climate justice movement. It starts with breaking social myths about how social movements win. Then dives into campaign tools and frameworks you can use. It closes with how to grow your group and use creative, impactful actions and tactics. This book is full of stories of climate warriors from around the globe and historical movements. It’s filled with practical wisdom and inspiration to make you more effective, more active, and ready for what’s next.

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The Commons Library has featured parts of the book as separate articles.

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This article can be read in different languages. See pages 12 – 18 from the book links below. Please Note: With different translations these page numbers may vary slightly.

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