(click photos to enlarge)
The People’s Climate March brought together a hundred thousand folks from all over the country for a friendly, peaceful, festive but politically pointed demonstration intended to “sound the alarm” that necessary steps can and must be taken to reverse the already-alarming effects of global climate change. The protests are timed to coincide with an historic summit meeting on the climate change hosted by the United Nations. Will this march have an effect? We’ll see. People in the streets rarely have an impact on decisions made in the board rooms of oil companies. But the march can also be measured by its impact on participants. I kept thinking of the key point Al Gore made in his film An Inconvenient Truth, that it’s all too easy to go from denial to despair and bypass the step of action. Doing whatever it takes to get off your butt and join the motley crowds of citizen participants making noise in the street constitutes action.
I started out hanging with Code Pink, the always feisty and funny women’s action group
Dave met me and we spent three hours marching and mingling and contemplating how different our world would be if just ONE Supreme Court Justice had voted the other (i.e., the right) way in Bush v. Gore…
it was great to see the different ways people had of connecting the dots to climate change, including carbon emissions, gas-free transportation…
the vegans making the case for methane gas pollution…
lots of kids, lots of old people
all kinds of people you wouldn’t expect to encounter at political demos…
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