Standing Rock inspired Ocasio-Cortez to run. That's the power of protest

Press on for what you believe in – a young woman’s election to Congress shows climate activism can have unforeseen results

It’s hard right now to remember how hot it was last August on the long sandy beach where the Colorado River meets the Green River in southern Utah. I was a few days into a rafting trip through Cataract Canyon with a bunch of young climate activists, and one of them, Will Munger, was telling me that since his months at the Standing Rock resistance camp, he had been encountering young Native people whose experiences at the protest site had encouraged them to dream of new possibilities and take actions that might otherwise have seemed out of reach.

Wandering back and forth along the edge of the water, we began to discuss how, often, the consequences of an uprising or a movement are not linear. Success and failure are often premature measures and oversimplifications; actions, interventions and conversations change beliefs and create new values, alliances and possibilities. We’d seen this dynamic from many unanticipated uprisings and movements: the indigenous movement Idle No More that began in Canada in 2012, Black Lives Matter, the feminist insurgencies since 2013 and the anti-gun movement in the hands of the Parkland youth.

On a cold day this January, I was thinking again about that conversation as I contemplated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to run for office. “I first started considering running for Congress actually at Standing Rock in North Dakota,” she said late last year. “It was really from that crucible of activism where I saw people putting their lives on the line … for people they’ve never met and never known. When I saw that I knew that I had to do something more.”

In 2016, when LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and others launched the camps protesting the Dakota Access pipeline, they could not have known some of the indirect consequences of their actions – including prompting a young woman from New York City to run for office. Sometimes the results that matter are not direct or intended – though four tribes continue to litigate over the pipeline, and they had a modest court victory on 8 January.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/14/standing-rock-ocasio-cortez-protest-climate-activism

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Cataract Canyon is where the Colorado River pours into the reservoir of stagnant water backed up from Glen Canyon Dam. When Glen Canyon Dam was completed, a little more than 50 years ago, most people – whether they loved or hated this massive intervention in the wilderness – imagined that the reservoir would stand for centuries. But the dam is failing, thanks to over allocation of the river’s water and to the way climate change has reduced rainfall and snowfall in its watershed.

At the end of my journey with Will and the other climate activists, I saw over and over how the river was cutting new channels through the silt that had built up when the reservoir was higher; how what was stagnant was now active again. This was never supposed to happen, or it was supposed to happen hundreds of years hence.

“Let us never, ever, ever give up,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez the day after her swearing-in, adding “It wasn’t long ago that we felt our lives were over; that there were only so many do-overs until it was too late, or too much to take…. I honestly thought as a 28-year-old waitress I was too late; that the train of my fulfilled potential had left the station.” Climate change tells is there is no time to waste. But history tells us that social change works in indirect and unpredictable ways, and that it’s worth pressing on for what you believe in.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guadian US columnist, and author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions