AS FAR AS THE EYE COULD SEE

Up and down Central Park West and along many a side street, as far as the eye could see, we lined up waiting to walk in the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21, 2014. 400,000 people in the streets of Manhattan and hundreds of thousands more in solidarity events around the world marched to sound the alarm about climate change on the Sunday before world leaders gathered at the United Nations Climate Summit called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon – who marched with us on Sunday.

Before the march, I posted my reasons for going on the the Oregon Hub at the PCM website. Those reasons hold true and here they are:

As soon as I heard about the People’s Climate March and read Bill McKibben’s “A Call to Arms – an Invitation to Demand Action on Climate Change” in Rolling Stone, I wanted to go. I wanted to be in New York again, to be part of the grandeur of the event, part of the pageantry that comes not from formality or ritual or rank, but from the creative vision and voices of concerned, committed people.

There is nothing like it – being among throngs of people, “every kinda people,” young and old and in between, of every race, ethnicity, color, creed, gender, sexual identity and ability level. Little kids with homemade signs, people of faith with the strength of moral clarity, young activists with the fresh wisdom of enthusiasm and still unbroken dreams, elders who never will give up.

It’s a guilty pleasure, that such terrible causes – war, injustice, looming climate disaster – call forth such a beautiful spirit of unity and resolve. To be there nourishes the soul, renews hope for our humanity, and invigorates our efforts to keep moving forward, to keep creating that better world we know is possible.

Most of all I wanted to go because the climate change movement really does have the potential to change everything. Climate change affects all of us in all the dimensions of our lives. The movement is becoming more and more centered in that knowledge, in the call for climate justice, in the commitment to solidarity.

With climate justice as a fundamental insight, this movement asks the hard questions and strives to do the hard and necessary things:
• How do we share resources equitably without depleting them?
• How do we have work and livelihoods that do not destroy our ability to survive on Earth?
• How can developed countries manage a just transition to a fair, sustainable economy when reducing consumption and energy use will cause economic dislocation?
• How can developing countries overcome energy poverty, income poverty and wealth poverty without massive increases in greenhouse gas emissions?
• How do we stop the juggernaut that is the fossil fuel industry?

The great diversity of over 1500 organizations that supported the People’s Climate March proclaimed that this really was a People’s Climate March.

And I was there!