Fewer than a hundred people attended each of last week's much-heralded Occupy Earth protests on a knoll outside the Durban convention centre, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)'s COP17 negotiations were being held.
Despite the fact that the events were organised and advertised weeks in advance, more civil society leaders and journalists showed up than ordinary citizens.
The low turnout created a surreal air as the Occupiers performed the human microphone, chanting in unison whatever was said by the speaker for the benefit of the few dozen attendees who could hear it perfectly well the first time round.
At least Saturday's Global Day of Action against Climate Change was better attended, with an estimated 5000 marchers, but still fell far short of the 10000 predicted.
These cases highlight the difficulties of criticizing the COP17 process for not being radical enough. The very belief in man-made global warming remains a minority issue for many, if not most, residents of the highest polluting nations.
According to the Pew Research Center, the number of Americans who believe there is solid evidence for man-made global warming fell from 50 percent in 2006 to 34 percent in 2010.
The situation in South Africa, where the conference is being held, is not much different.
A 2008 study found that only 45 percent of South Africans felt that global warming was a major problem.
In China, a Gallup poll from the same year showed the number of people aware of climate change who see it as a personal threat (21percent) dwarfed by those who don't (38percent).
Of course, the scientific consensus on global warming – that man-made atmospheric emissions are causing an unsustainable rise in the Earth's temperature – overwhelmingly pronounces the activists' right and the skeptics wrong.
Yet the above surveys do raise questions about activists' ability to embody the popular will, a problem for any self-described mass movement. "Civil society's legitimacy comes from mobilising," says the Durban based intellectual Ashwin Desai.
"They say, 'we are the people, and those over there are the elites'.
"But when they can't mobilise people, then we must ask hard questions about whether their message means anything, whether they have any legitimacy".
How have forces claiming to represent the 99 percent found themselves stood up by their professed base?
One reason may be that they're not doing enough to make their message accessible and relevant for ordinary people in South Africa.
"The language with which civil society conducts itself, the kind of mega and meta-solutions that it offers, don't make sense to people in the everyday circumstances in which they find themselves", argues Desai.
most people are anti-capitalist now
For example, maximalist demands such as calls to shut down the polluting oil refinery in Durban's so-called "cancer valley" overlook the fact that, in addition to causing massive health problems for the local community, the plant is also one of its only sources of employment.
A further problem is that, among the more radical wings of the environmentalist civil society, strict ideological litmus tests serve to keep out all but the most committed.
"You can't be a real environmentalist if you're not an anti-capitalist", one environmental researcher and activist told me recently.
"When I asked whether such thinking might alienate potential supporters, she replied that "most people are anti-capitalist now".
Political fragmentation has split the movement's already modest support into the age-old, mutually antagonistic binaries of reformism and revolution; their various exponents are often more interested in undermining each other than forging a common front against climate change denialists.
The decision by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to participate in the COP17 negotiations has incensed more radical climate activists who view attempts to target climate change within the capitalist system as hopelessly mainstream or outright collaboration.
"I don't think any reform of this process is possible," says author and activist Patrick Bond, a professor at Durban's University of KwaZulu Natal, "because each of the negotiators is coming with a lot of political will from their national business blocs, and none of them have the interests of the climate or the people at heart; their interests are profits".
Bond dismisses those inside the negotiations are representing "the 1percent", sentiments echoed by Peruvian environmental campaigner Yvonne Yanez, who believes that the climate change negotiations are simply a smokescreen for corporate interests.
"The banks, corporations and governments are colluding in this totally illegitimate conference. They should be denounced and deligitimised", she says.
Bond, Yanez and others have condemned carbon trading, a central mechanism proposed by conventional climate negotiations, on the grounds that it is both ineffective and unethical to use market mechanisms and commercial incentives to regulate emissions.
Yet former Bolivian ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon, whose delegation was the only one to reject last year's Cancun accord for replacing binding with voluntary cuts, feels it's essential for civil society to be involved in the negotiations while remaining critical.
"Without pressure from civil society, there will be no possibility to have any agreement (at COP17)", he says.
"But you cannot reach an agreement to stabilise temperatures if that agreement is not between states.
"We would love it if it were only between social movements, but it won't take effect if states don't ratify the agreement." Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo also defended his organisation's presence inside the conference centre, even as it participates in protests outside.
"We put more efforts in on the outside, but we are inside (the talks) supporting small island states who don't have the huge negotiating numbers that the rich nations have", he says.
"The value we add to supporting developing countries and small island states is critically important and I'm happy that we are doing that". Durban-born environmentalist Sven "Bobby" Peek, of Friends of the Earth and GroundWorks, a South African civil society organisation, agrees.
"It's critical to have a community voice on the inside to keep on pushing the politicians to make sure that they hear us and hear society," he says.
"It's not easy, because there's a whole lot of corporate capture going on inside, but we're there to push back and stop some of the bad things that can happen".
Because COP17 is already under attack from the international right for being too radical, social movements that also reject the current negotiations, albeit for the opposite reasons, risk playing into conservative efforts to undermine any attempts at climate change mitigation.
Nevertheless, other groups are standing their ground in boycotting the negotiations, even if it means making playing into the hands of conservatives who also oppose the talks (but on the grounds that they are too radical, rather than not radical enough).
"It's impossible to regulate carbon within the terms of the capitalist economy. It can't be done", says Joel Kovel, a left-wing academic and father of the eco-socialist movement.
"If somebody wants to call that view vanguardism, they can say what they want; it's a free country.
"But the matter is just too serious and tragic, and I'm not going to hold back on telling the truth."
The question is, who will be there to listen?
