The first thing I do when I find a new place to fish is study the shoreline. When I first started fishing I’d just show up, cast out anywhere and catch nothing, then watch as other people reeled in fish after fish. Now I’ve learned to hold back and look. Where are the shady spots? The water lilies? What trees have fallen in at the pond’s edge that provide good cover for the fish? If I am fishing surf side I look for sand bars and troughs and cuts where the big fish might be hunting baitfish. Studying the fish’s environment, and working with it instead of casting about blindly, means catching more fish.
The first rule of guerilla warfare is to know the terrain and use it to your advantage. For the Cuban revolutionaries, this meant knowing the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. For the Vietcong, it meant the jungles and deltas of Vietnam. Most activists won’t find themselves fighting in mountains or jungles, but the principle is sound. What is the environment you are operating within? In our activism training workshops, we spend an afternoon mapping out the terrain, filling up poster-size sheets of paper with details in the political, social, cultural, demographic, and even geographical topography. Even for those activists who have worked in the same area, on the same issue, for years, this mapping reveals features that they had overlooked. It’s only after we have cataloged and studied our terrain that we turn to strategy and tactics.