People's Climate March: Why We March

We left at six in the morning from Washington, D.C., bleary-eyed and unresponsive to the bus leader who gave us the run down on how the day would go. But by ten o’clock, when the bus rolled into New York City, people were introducing themselves, chatting about their points of origin, reasons for coming. The bus came from D.C., but it pulled its passengers from a wider radius. This four-hour trip was just the last leg for many of them. At one point a giddy, grinning, middle-aged man, there with his college-aged daughter took over the PA system to share a few upbeat lines of climate-march doggerel that he composed on the ride up.

I started demonstrating three years ago when, more than a year after I had turned thirty, I found myself getting arrested outside the White House to protest the approval of the Keystone Pipeline. In college, studying for my economics degree, I remember watching fellow students from the window of the library as they protested World Bank lending policies. I thought they were silly. I thought that anyone who really knew what she was talking about could make a chart and find a reasonable person to listen without needing to make so much of a fuss out in the street. If you didn’t know, you had to yell. It took me almost a decade of chart making before reality sank in. There were fifty thousand students at the rally yesterday. Whenever I see youth out at demonstrations, I am impressed with them for having an understanding of government and individual responsibility far superior to what I had at their age.

Joining a movement takes you outside of yourself in ways big and small.  Yesterday morning when the bus leader stood up and said that we were going to go around the bus and introduce ourselves, I curled up in my seat, looked at one of my companions and grumbled, “Noooooo.” I don’t do well on little sleep, and I don’t do well on long, lurching, over air-conditioned bus journeys either, but that morning I’d done both of these things and didn’t want to be bothered to do much else. But after everyone on the bus had introduced themselves to the group and I heard how much farther many other people had come, I was forced to remember that I had come out to be something more than my every-day, ineffectual self. I introduced myself to the man behind me, who had just come back from seven years of democracy-building work in Afghanistan, was traveling by himself and had said that he, “wasn’t affiliated but was looking to be.” I was affiliated, a part of a nationwide grassroots lobbying effort on a carbon tax, and traveling with a group of people from my local chapter in D.C. I told him about our work and he ended up marching with us.

We got off the bus at around 86^th and Amsterdam. I noticed, looking through the windshield as I stepped down off the bus, that most of the people on the street appeared to be carrying signs and heading towards Central Park. A marching band made their way across the immediate intersection, their percussions announcing their way. They were one group of dozens of bands come to show their support and help move people along, as drummers have always have done with armies. We were told to expect one to two hundred thousand people. No one knew yet that that the actual numbers were three to four hundred thousand. But it looked like there were a lot of people on the move.

At about 11 am we stepped into the staging area that stretched along Central Park West from Columbus Circle and up into the eighties. We were at 73^rd. Standing in the middle of the street waiting to move, it was hard to know who was in or out, or if even those people themselves knew. We were shoulder-to-shoulder inside the police lines, but there were almost as many people in the wings, lining up along the sidewalks, kids climbing the scaffolding of buildings to get a better view, people sitting on the rock embankments of Central Park taking photos, assembling signs, and floats. We were in the middle of a lot of vegans carrying signs saying, ‘Ask a vegan why you’re not a real environmentalist if you eat meat.” I eat meat, and I do give a damn, so I didn’t bother to ask. Lots of livestock is pretty bad for the planet, no argument there. Another sign said, ‘What’s the ROI on a dead planet?” But it’s the dead planet that’s the ROI on fossils and reckless agriculture, I think. Behind us, a group of people launched a ten-by-fifteen foot inflatable Holstein cow and started moving it into the center of the column. We made way.

The vanguard started walking at 11:30. Less than halfway up the staging area, we were still stock-still by 12:30, and a little restless. It was a cloudy, swampy day for late September and uncomfortably warm. Some of us sat down on the pavement to give our legs a break before we started walking. Beneath the street, the subway rumbled by at regular intervals, and overhead the police helicopters made routine sweeps. But no one complained about the long wait because we all knew that it meant that the crowd was huge. Each one of us had come with the burning ambition to be only the tiniest possible fraction of the whole. It was that that would make us powerful. So as we sat and waited amidst the masses, we had the sense that we had succeeded.

‘It doesn’t make a difference.’ I have heard the criticism more than once when trying to corral friends to join me at demonstrations. They talk about the ignored Iraq war protests. They point to global governments that are becoming increasingly insensitive to democracy. But like it or not, at the time that the United States invaded Iraq, the majority of Americans saw Iraq as a security threat and were in favor of U.S. action. And the millions who took to the streets against the Iraq war, feeling the sting of their failure a few months later, did not return.

A majority of Americans now believe that climate change is real, man-made, and want the global governments to do something about it. The New York climate march is a reflection of what most of the public feels. But of course the public can be ignored. In the coming days and months global leaders will continue to talk about climate change within their countries and between other countries. They will likely continue to put forward actions that are not strong enough. The public will have to stay on top of this every step of the way. The march is not the culmination of the movement; it is the beginning still. It is a way of showing how many of us care enough that we are willing to get up early, to pay for planes and trains, sit on uncomfortable bus rides, stand in line in swampy weather and to march in huge crowds for hours in order to be heard. The significance of this march is not just that it happened and was huge, but also that it is almost ten times larger than the last largest American climate change march that happened in Washington, D.C. just a year and a half ago.

And in democracies we will also vote the way we walk. But it is hard to vote when leaders of all countries and parties have been complicit in inaction. And so we are in the streets en masse, because it is a time-tested way of making governments uncomfortable in their complicity. No one wants to rule a country where something like that keeps happening.

At about four o’clock, we marched through midtown and, having stood for hours, a friend and I ducked out of the march to get something to eat. The pizza line was full of marchers and non-marchers alike. I was in line behind a set of the latter. A man wearing a Mets sweatshirt tapped his finger on the pizza in the window, “This is the stuff. This is a good New York slice right there.”

“Not as good as a New Jersey slice,” the friend said. The man snorted and the friend defended himself, “Hey, I’m from Jersey, gotta stick up for it.”

The man still shook his head. I am of midwestern origins and can’t parse the difference in Eastern pizza types, but they both had accents that indicated they knew their territory. Then a few marchers coming up the sidewalk, walking counter to the flow of the main parade, overwhelmed the conversation with their chanting, “What do we want? End climate change! When do we want it? Now!”

The men listed for a second, tilting their heads and then bouncing them in rhythm to the chant. And then as the demonstrators passed they joined in, responding, “End climate change!” And when do we want it? “Now!”

The nodded to each other as the marchers faded away, and the man from New York said, “Yeah. Ain’t gonna end it though.”

The friend shook his head in agreement, “Nope.”

“You can slow it down, but you can’t end it.”

They saw me watching them, recognized me for what I was, and shrugged. I met their eyes nodded my head. Atlantic shore locals would know. They were still recovering from the floods.

As we rejoined procession the police, having double the people they had anticipated, had stopped giving full right of way to the demonstrators and started breaking the march at intervals to let traffic through. As we waited at a light to get back into the flow, a barfly stuck his head out into the street and shook it in a mix of wonder and exasperation. “They’ll still fâ€"ing marching!”

Yes. And we will be.