1315 Events planned in 50 states
This April ... Red + Blue Go Green
By Bill McKibben
April 9, 2007
IN THESE TIMES
This article is permanently archived at:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/3079/
Everyone's got a metaphor, and ours was the potluck
dinner. If we were going to build a climate change
movement, and we didn't have any money or any
organization, how could we do it? We decided to throw a
party. Invite our friends. Have them invite their
friends. See what happened.
And you know what? It worked. On April 14, people
around the country will call for the United States to
"Step It Up" and reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by
2050. This will be the largest coordinated
environmental protest since Earth Day 1970 heralded the
onset of a new mass consciousness about the fragility
of the planet's ecosystem. This is the emergence of an
actual movement against global warming, something
that's been missing for the two decades we've known
about this problem--a movement that, because of the
nature of the problem, will need to go deeper than
environmentalism has gone before. Techno-fixes only go
so far with climate change; this movement will need to
take on culture, lifestyle, economics. There is no
guarantee it will triumph, but it's almost certain to
be interesting.
---------------------
Last summer, I found myself despairing. True, Hurricane
Katrina had blown down the door and Al Gore had walked
through it with An Inconvenient Truth. More people now
knew about climate change than ever before. But it
wasn't changing the politics of the issue. In
Washington, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair of
the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change and
Nuclear Safety, said global warming was a "giant hoax."
In a July 2006 interview with the Tulsa World, he
compared environmentalists with Nazis and their use of
"the Big Lie." "You say something over and over and
over and over again, and people will believe it, and
that's [the environmentalists'] strategy," he said.
"Everything on which they based their story, in terms
of the facts, has been refuted scientifically."
I had been writing and speaking about global warming
since 1989, when The End of Nature, my first book on
the subject, came out and was serialized in the New
Yorker. But I was struck by how little those of us who
cared had accomplished--Americans have continued to
increase their carbon emissions about a percentage
point each and every year. Meanwhile, the scientific
evidence was increasingly dire, the degradation of the
earth's physical systems accelerating.
In my despair, I called a couple of old friends who
live near me in Vermont. "Why don't we walk up to
Burlington?" I asked. "We can sit in at the federal
building and get ourselves arrested, and maybe it will
make a little noise in the newspaper, and at least
we'll have done something." They were good friends, so
they agreed to go. But one of them bothered to actually
call up to the Burlington Police department, only to
find out that in that mellow outpost there was no
chance we'd get arrested. They'd let us sit there on
the steps forever. Maybe if we set something on fire
we'd get the attention we sought--but, oh, think of the
carbon emissions!
Anyway, we decided to convert our little tantrum into
something a bit nobler: a march, or, better yet--a
climate change pilgrimage. We'd march on the shoulder
of the two-lane highway; we'd hold meetings every night
on town greens; we'd camp in farmers' fields along the
way. And so we started asking people if they wanted to
join us. In early August, a team of Middlebury students
started doing the down-and-dirty,
where's-the-porta-potty type of organizing. On Aug. 31,
we stepped off from Robert Frost's old writing cabin in
the Green Mountains. There were 300 of us that first
day. Five days and 49 miles later, when we reached
Burlington, we'd grown to 1,000, an impressive turnout
in the nation's second smallest state.
This was enough to change the dynamics of the issue.
Everyone running for Vermont's open Senate and House
seats, from socialist Senate candidate Rep. Bernie
Sanders to his right wing opponent, Vermont's richest
man, Richie Tarrant, publicly endorsed legislation
sponsored by then-Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.) that
calls for 80 percent cuts in emissions by 2050--the
most ambitious climate change legislation yet proposed
on Capitol Hill. It reminded us that you don't need 51
percent of the people supporting something--you just
need an organized group of people who really care.
But here's the shocking part. The newspapers said that
the thousand people we'd assembled was the largest
gathering that had ever happened in the United States
about global warming. Yes, you read that right. Global
warming is arguably the biggest problem we now face,
and almost nobody in the United States had done
anything political about it.
Not because people didn't care: Everyone we asked to
march said yes. It's that no one had ever asked them
before. The climate change movement is peculiar. It has
scientists and engineers and economists, all of the
wonderful superstructure that a movement requires, but
no mass mobilization to support them. That's what we
need to change. Observers have always said that an
uprising about climate was unlikely because few
Americans were direct victims (yet) and all of us were
in some sense beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel. But
what the march in Vermont told us was that the times
had changed.
---------------------
In the months that followed, a few of us--me and six
newly minted Middlebury grads--began trying to outline
a national action. We considered a march on
Washington--but, once again, the carbon emissions! Our
experience in Vermont helped us understand how powerful
it was to speak to our senators and representatives in
their districts. So we hatched a plan: We would get
people to stage rallies in the places they lived, or
the places they loved, on the same day. Not Earth Day,
April 22, because we didn't want to step on the
inspiring work people were already doing for that day.
Instead, we'd start the weekend before, as a kind of
lead-up--and as a reminder that we need more than one
day a year to think about the planet.
Those actions would take place in city parks and on
church steps. And some would be staged in truly iconic
places, which would remind anyone who heard about them
of what was at stake. We raised enough money to build
our rudimentary Web site, www.stepitup2007.org, and
then, in mid-January, started sending out e-mails. Our
fondest hope? That by April 14 there might be a couple
of hundred rallies scheduled around the country.
I'm writing these words on March 15. After 10 weeks of
organizing, we have more than 900 Step It Up rallies
scheduled, a number that increases by the hour.
What happened? We merely sent out invitations to a
potluck. But people, desperate to do something,
anything, to start stemming the tide of the coming
environmental disaster, responded with not only their
heads, but their hearts and hands.
---------------------
First to step up have been the national environmental
groups. There's been a lot of talk in recent years
about "the death of environmentalism" and the big
dinosaur green groups. Some people complained they had
turned into mere fundraising machines, or become
captives of the Beltway. But that is simply not true.
The Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council,
the National Wildlife Federation, among many others,
have all committed real efforts to organizing Step It
Up rallies, engaging regular people rather than just
making technocratic recommendations.
Local environmental groups too--the wonderful stew of
"Save the _____" groups that have done such powerful
work over the years--understand that the future of the
places they love can't be guaranteed by them alone.
Raise the temperature a few degrees, bring the ocean a
few feet higher, and the bay/swamp/forest is going to
be wrecked no matter what.
But it's not simply traditional environmental groups
who have joined the cause. Churches have responded in
impressive numbers as well. A founder of the
Evangelical Environment Network, Cal DeWitt, forwarded
our appeal around that thriving web of seminaries and
colleges. The Christian Century, the magazine of
mainline Protestantism, put a big story on the cover.
Sojourners, the radically engaged gospel mission, sent
out an e-mail appeal. And in late February, we heard
from a seventh grader who was planning on turning his
big bar mitzvah bash into a Step It Up rally. Mazel
tov!
But the response that has moved us the most has come
from students. Those who think college campuses are
dens of apathy and sloth must take note: There's a
movement emerging across the nation's high school and
college campuses, and the politics of climate are at
its center. Energy Action, a coalition of more than 30
campus groups, endorsed Step It Up. The fruits of their
labor were apparent one day when a digital photo
arrived from the Alpha Phi sorority chapter at the
University of Texas at Austin: 180 broadly smiling
co-eds behind a big Step It Up banner. "We wanted to
show it wasn't just hippies who cared," they wrote.
Athletes and other outdoors types have stepped up too.
In Florida, scuba divers started organizng an
underwater rally on a coral reef near Key West--a reef
that won't be there in a few decades if the warming
continues. In Wyoming, skiers plan a four-day trip down
the state's highest mountain, Gannett Peak, including a
descent of Dinwoody Glacier, which is rapidly melting.
Rock climbers will hang banners from Seneca Rocks in
West Virginia.
Activists in half a dozen coastal cities plan to paint
blue stripes along the streets where the new tide line
will be in a warmer world. In Petaluma, Calif., they
will mark with yellow tape what would be the high water
mark of the Petaluma River should sea levels rise an
estimated 6 to 22 feet due to climate change. In
Manhattan's East Village, Girls Gone Green is going to
team up with Reverend Billy's Church of Stop Shopping
and march up to Central Park. Others plan to converge
on bikes in city centers. In San Francisco, hybrid cars
will parade across the Golden Gate Bridge. In New
Orleans, citizens will rally along the levees. Seniors
in retirement communities, elementary school kids, you
name them, they are involved.
Aerial artists are working out ways for protesters to
spell out the message with their bodies. In fact, 800
school kids in Park City already have spelled out "Step
It Up" against the Utah snow so we could photograph it
for our Web site. Photographers have volunteered to
provide arresting images, which we'll be webcasting
before the day is over. And then there are the
musicians: Working with MUSE/Cool the Planet, we've
found songwriters aplenty who are writing new tunes.
(There's even a Step It Up anthem from the Gallerists
on the Web site.) All of this is music to our ears as
history shows that movements that sing are movements
that win.
And we need to win. We've wasted the last two decades.
The scientific evidence now tells us that we can't wait
any longer. We have to send Congress and our state and
local legislators a message that is so clear and so
unavoidable that they have to sit up and pay attention.
The message needs to be heard by corporate leaders,
small business owners and everyone in between that this
is a matter that will affect everyone's bottom line in
the years ahead. Reducing carbon emissions by 80
percent by 2050 is a minimal demand scientifically. It
may be the maximum that's politically feasible right
now, but we're just laying the groundwork for what's
going to be a long campaign.
Come April 14, we'll have what's most important--a real
in-the-streets movement that's able to grow and build,
able to buttress the scientific and economic case for
change with real political clout. We hope our
particular goal is simple enough for people to rally
around, strong enough to begin meeting the scientific
challenge, and specific enough to keep Congress members
from simply making sweet, reassuring noises about
climate change. Most of all, we hope we are helping
midwife that necessary network of people who understand
that once you change the light bulb, you have to go and
change the law, and that to change the law, you have to
change the conversation.
Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable
Future. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury
College in Vermont.