Matt Browner Hamlin is an activist, organizer, and writer residing in Washington DC. He is the Head of Engagement Strategy & Planning for Greenpeace International. He has previously worked as He is the Managing Director for Digital Strategy of Ethical Electric, a Senior Economic Strategist at Citizen Engagement Lab and an organizer of OccupyOurHomes.org. He was the Deputy New Media Director of SEIU, the Deputy Internet Director on Chris Dodd's presidential campaign, and the Internet Director on Mark Begich's US Senate campaign in Alaska. Matt blogs about politics at Hold Fast, cocktails, bars, and spirits at A Jigger of Blog, and travel and technology at Blogger Hamlin. He has also been a contributor at AMERICAblog. The views and opinions presented in Matt's posts are his alone. They are not representative of the policies or opinions of his employer or past clients.
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:07] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for joining the conversation on Colloquium. This episode is brought to you by Excelsior Capital, an investment platform focused on democratizing private equity by providing individuals access to direct opportunities. To learn more about the firm, please visit excelsiorgp.com and connect with Bryan on LinkedIn.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:07] BA: Welcome to the conversation on Colloquium. Today I’ve got an old friend of mine, Matt Browner-Hamlin with me. Matt, how are you today?
[00:00:37] MBH: I’m doing great, Bryan. How are you?
[00:00:38] BA: Good. I’m going to give a little bit of kind of the bio and then we'll get into some of the work that you've been doing. And as context, Matt and I went to college together a long time ago and was a good friend of mine in school. And then as many of us in our kind of pre-Facebook generation, just kind of lost track of each other frankly. And it's been probably a good 10 years since we last spoke. But it's fun to get reconnected. And you've been doing some really interesting things. So I’m excited to get into it.
So his background, Matt is an accomplished technology strategist, data-driven campaigner, digital marketer and writer. He is currently the interim chief technology officer at Greenpeace International. Greenpeace is a global independent campaigning organization with offices in 55 countries. Matt has previously worked for a direct consumer renewable energy startup, international human rights, labor economic justice campaigning context, as well as in American politics and presidential incentive campaigns, as well as some other interesting blogging and content creation that you've made over the years, which we'll probably get into.
But, first, I really want to dig into kind of Greenpeace itself. I think a lot of people in our minds think of the efforts they had against Japanese whaling and the kind of images of television. But it's actually a much older organization. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how you found yourself at Greenpeace and give folks a little bit more context about the originations of the organization and what the focus is today?
[00:02:11] MBH: Yeah, sure thing. And, first, thanks for having me on, Bryan, and it's great to reconnect on this occasion. It's been a long time. And I think a lot of us are using the COVID times to build back old bridges and have conversations that are probably long overdue, but easily slip past when it's hard in our regular life. So thanks for having me on.
[00:02:28] BA: Yeah. Absolutely, man.
[00:02:29] MBH: So Greenpeace is about to turn 50. I think in 2021 is our 50th anniversary. And the organization has its roots in anti-nuclear campaigning. And the story of its founding actually goes back to a bunch of activists in Canada who were really opposed to ongoing U.S. nuclear testing in the North Pacific. And what the idea of Greenpeace was really about in the very beginning was how do you do something so bold and powerful that it can inspire people to think differently about the world? And in this case it was a bunch of young, mostly Canadian activists, getting on a used fishing trawler and sailing it into the middle of a U.S. military nuclear testing zone and telling that story. Bringing with them videographers, talking to the press ahead of time saying, “We're going out into the middle of the ocean to sail into this area and we're going to make the U.S. military not test nuclear bomb,” by being there physically, by intervening at the points of ecological harm.
And having a big throw off concert before they go with a bunch of lefty activists musicians and crowds of people on the docks sending them on their way and not really knowing what was going to happen and telling a story, telling a story of this journey of confrontation and peaceful resistance. And it turned out that the world paid attention. And whether it was from press reports of the build up to this action, to the story of confrontations and with the U.S. military along the way and attempted interventions in the process of trying to sail to this nuclear testing site, people paid attention.
And what was I think really powerful for it was the idea, which we talk about internally of a mind bomb, of being able to take an action that sets a bomb off in people's minds. That changes the way they think fundamentally and inspires them to take action. And in this context it was ultimately unsuccessful, direct action, but one which inspired people around the world. And Greenpeace started from there as a really open source, what we would now consider open source movement. Offices sprang up in many countries around the world. There was no governance to it. There was no structure. And it became a vehicle as a concept of the pursuit of both a brighter ecological future.
Back in the 70s we talked a lot more about ecology, whereas today we talk about climate. But the idea that you know human impact on the world is something that we should care very much about. As well as a real resistance to the rise of nuclear weapons and nuclear power in the 70s, and obviously this is at the height of the Cold War. More and more countries were testing nuclear weapons. And it was this sort of dual connection of climate and ecology, environment and ecology on the one hand and peace, anti-weapons proliferation, anti-nuclear testing. And that was something that was resonant around the world.
And over time more Greenpeace offices popped up. It got to a point where there was a desire for there to be systems and governance and real organizational structure put into place. And from that, Greenpeace International eventually emerged. And today we have offices in 55 countries. Greenpeace International is based in Amsterdam, though I work remotely from Washington, D.C., and we have 28 national and regional offices around the world. And so our work still remains very focused on both climate and ecological issues very much related to stopping climate change. Influencing how we design and produce energy systems in the world. So whether that's increasing renewables or really trying to change the reliance and move away from fossil fuels like coal and oil, or look at political power and how the world functions based on who has what power and who listens to whom.
It's really central still on this idea that we can inspire people to act, to lend their voice to issues that they care about and change the power dynamics between government and corporations or people and individual people. So I think there's this through line in the work and what issues we work on, but I think most importantly this is really what you're asking about is, is how we seek to achieve that change.
[00:06:57] BA: And I want to dig into a little bit more about kind of how Greenpeace operates and the infrastructure that they've set up. But how did you find yourself there? I mean, you and I were the same class in school. Wesleyan is, for those who aren't familiar, a very active campus in terms of very passionate people about a number of subjects. And when we were there, that was no different. What inspired you to take this path that led you to Greenpeace ultimately?
[00:07:26] MBH: Yeah. So I have a photo that my parents have with me going to a Save The Whales Protest outside the United Nations in probably – I don’t know, 1984, 1985, 1986, something like that. It’s four, five-years-old, and it was a Greenpeace campaign around the fishing of wales and setting up global standard for what is and isn't allowed. And it was my first protest and I was there. And so it's sort of fortuitous that I ended up at Greenpeace, because that was definitely one of those things to have in the photo album that now looks really, really like something – A match made in heaven, something that was destined to be.
But my parents were both lefties growing up. My mom went to Berkeley and my dad was at Columbia in the late 60s, early 70s, which were both places where obviously there was a lot of campus activism and radicalism. And so I grew up in a household that was quite progressive. And prior to going to Wesleyan with you, I was involved in students for a Free Tibet, which was a part of the kind of mid late 90s anti-globalization movement, which saw many different issues from environments, to economic and labor rights, to human rights really get put into one basket of all these things that people see are wrong in the world and coming together at big marches and protests and rallies and that sort of thing.
[00:08:46] BA: I went to the Free Tibet concert in New York.
[00:08:49] MBH: Oh yeah?
[00:08:49] BA: Yeah. Back, I guess that was – God, it was in high school.
[00:08:51] MBH: That was ’96 maybe?
[00:08:52] BA: Yeah, it was like the late 90s.
[00:08:54] MBH: ’96, ’97.
[00:08:55] BA: Yeah, it was unbelievable.
[00:08:57] MBH: Yeah. And so for me, the issue that got me into the anti-globalization movement was Tibetan independence, because it felt like an issue that was encapsulating all the different things that came up as individual silos within the anti-globalization movement. There was questions of political freedom, religious freedom, environmental degradation, human rights and so on. And so that's how I got involved. But spent a number of years after college working for students who are Free Tibet on staff. And while I was there, this students for Free Tibet was an organization – Or is still active. It’s an organization that uses direct action. Non-violent direct action is part of its theory of change.
And what that means is doing things like direct interventions at the point of harm. And so this is the example with Greenpeace, of sailing a ship into a nuclear test zone, right? That is a direct intervention in the place that is going to be harmed. With the Tibet Movement, it's actually much harder to do the direct intervention at the point of harm because of China's occupation of Tibet. And so what students for Free Tibet would do is do actions that bring attention and visibility to the issue around things like when Chinese leaders traveled outside of China or when major corporations were doing business inside of Tibet. And so that would do things like hang banners off of buildings, block the transit of elected officials. Or not elected officials in the case of China, but officials, governmental officials to meetings that they're trying to go to.
And in this space of activism, of direct action activism, there's a number of organizations in North America that do that, that practice this type of work and type of intervention. And students for Free Tibet was one of them. And Greenpeace was another big one. And so a lot of times when we did trainings for our activists or when we did actions, Greenpeacers would come and help us train young people to climb buildings and hang off them by ropes and drop banners, or lock down in front of a building with different techniques to make it really hard for them to be moved without harming the activists and using this as a way to intervene, draw attention to what the issue we're working on is. And so I had a lot of friends at Greenpeace and I had a lot of appreciation for an organization who cultivated this type of activism and this practice of activism, non-violent direct action, is as central to how they tried to have impact in the world.
And so I moved on from students for Free Tibet. I got into politics. I got into the labor movements, and eventually I got burned out and ended up at a renewable energy startup because it felt like that was a different approach and something that we can talk about. But what always was clear to me when I left the progressive movement for the commercial side was if I ever came back, I wanted to be at an organization that used direct action as part of their theory of change. That said, in order to win campaigns, we can't just write nice letters or make phone calls to decision makers or try and elect certain candidates instead of other candidates. We have to actually put our bodies on the line as part of the theory of change, because I think that is a powerful way that non-violent change occurs. And it turned out that the place that I ended up back up at was Greenpeace. Again, in part, because of this years of history and appreciation for the organization's values and theory of change.
[00:12:27] BA: Can you talk a little bit about how Greenpeace thinks? It seems like it's a dual pronged approach, right? They appreciate the fact that they can't themselves facilitate this change directly, but they can be a catalyst for influencing culture by using this disruption. Can you unpack that a little bit more for us?
[00:12:48] MBH: Sure. So I think that the big question is what is power? There are different types of power in the world. A lot of the times the power that we see is really about who has money, right? Corporations have money. Wealthy individuals have money. That money enables them to access decision makers. It enables them to act with a different set of consequences for their actions. And by and large, it doesn't sound like what most non-profit organizations are, right? Most non-profit organizations don't derive their power from money. So what are the other ways that you can derive power?
You can derive power by representing people, right? So a lot of – In some ways, elected officials are powerful in part because they represent people, and those people give them the authorization to act in government. But lots of nonprofit organizations and campaigning organizations also build constituencies, right? So a good example is the AARP. The AARP represents millions of older Americans. Their power with businesses, with government, is derived by the fact that they talk to a lot of people every day and those people care what they say and will act if asked. And so the question for a nonprofit organization is how do you actually reach people, right? How do you build power by getting more people associated with you listening to what you're saying and then taking action when you ask them?
And over the last number of years at Greenpeace what we've tried to recognize is the greatest opportunity for reaching people. For having influence on what's happening in the world on the issues we care about is in really two settings. One is reaching people through culture, right? Culture is an incredibly powerful vehicle when it comes to how people think, right? So what is on TV? What are celebrities saying? What is the zeitgeist around certain hot issues? It's very much shaped by how people interact with things that are not directly that thing. So most people don't spend their days writing letters to the editor or calling up their congressmen, right? But they do spend their days consuming Instagram and Facebook and watching TV and Netflix and so on.
And so finding ways to use cultural avenues to reach people and have them think about environmental issues or think about political issues is one thing that we seek to do. And I'd say that is a challenging thing, right? But there's a reason why you see celebrities post about issues they care about, because they know that they are affected vehicles.
The other thing, which I think is a lot more, for lack of better word, something organizations can do with less dependency on a handful of influencers or cultural vehicles is be responsive in moments of disruption. We see disruptions happening around us all the time, right? They might be environmental disasters. They might be global pandemics. They might be economic upheaval. But there's big opportunities for change in these moments of disruption. And what we do as an organization to prepare for them is identify what are the things that would be most likely to enable a sea change in how people think or a sea change in people's interest and availability to take action on certain issues and then prepare for it and think proactively around what that might look like and identify what we have to scan for. What is the opportunity that we're waiting to see emerge so that we can reach more people? So that we can be the first people to invite people to take action when something happens in the world? And that's really critical. I think being able to be nimble and responsive to change that's happening in the world is a fundamental way that change – It's possible to create change. It's possible to build power by reaching more people.
[00:16:37] BA: Yeah. When I was doing my homework on our conversation, this concept that you referenced, this mind bomb, I'd never heard the term before. But my immediate response was this seems like almost in the 70s version of leveraging social media or Instagram to have a multiple effect on a number of influential people that could then create a larger system or cultural shift in a mindset.
[00:17:07] MBH: Yeah. I think it's exactly right. What are examples of that nowadays, right? So I go back to – Like we'll date ourselves a little bit, but like to when we were probably in high school or early college. I don't remember. And Ellen Degeneres coming out as gay on the Ellen Show and had playing a character who was gay on TV at a time when that was not a thing, right? That was not part of what the programming on networks was. It was not part of what public discourse was about.
And so there are ways in which certain things can happen, and suddenly this conversation shifts, right? Suddenly a different frame of references is there possible. And I
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