Emily Cunningham

I thought I’d share a different perspective because I feel pretty differently. What gets me excited and hopeful is the exponential nature of some kinds of momentum and all the invisible, HUGE impacts that we can’t see, but are nonetheless happening.

When we started our efforts at Amazon (the beginning of what would become @AMZNforClimate), there were about 5 of us that met in my living room. Then 16 of us co-filed the climate shareholder resolution in early Dec 2018 finally getting to 28 by Dec, 20th, the filing deadline...

We saw our internal list of supporters double literally overnight from 600 to 1200 when a worker who excited about the first draft of our open letter, sent it out more widely than we planned for. That lead to Amazon announcing Shipment Zero the very next week.

Amazon emailed us the very next day after Shipment Zero was announced asking us to withdraw the resolution. When we asked why? They said, because of Shipmebt Zero. So, we have receipts that show very clearly our actions prompted this announcement.

When we rewrote our letter incorporating both the Shipment Zero announcement and the reporting from @bcmerchant which came out 3 days after Shipment Zero and described how Amazon was in bed with Big Oil, we hoped that maybe we’d get 1000 signatures in a week or maybe two.

We were blown away by the response! 3500 Amazon workers signed our letter in two days asking for big changes including the ending of AWS contracts that accurate oil and gas discovery and extraction. By the end of the week we had over 6000. Now over 8300 have signed.

This lead to the action at the shareholder meeting in May. There were a lot of barriers to going, the biggest being shareholder paperwork proof which was confusing/difficult. (Btw, Amazon never required proof of shareholder ownership in the past. Badge was previously sufficient.)