By Daniel Rigney
Dateline: Sunday, September 21, 2014
I'm reporting today from the People’s Climate March in New York City, where more than a third of a million of us are gathered in the streets urging strong international action to prevent runaway climate change.
The mood is paradoxically both festive and deeply serious. It’s as though we’ve all been watching an unfolding slow-motion disaster movie called “Global Weirding” and we’re hoping it’s not too late to rewrite the ending.
Hundreds of similar but smaller events are happening around the world today, spearheaded by Bill McKibben’s climate action group, 350.org. The events come on the eve of a major United Nations climate summit to be held here later this week.
The march brings together a motley crew of earth voyagers. Scientists, teachers and students, religious pilgrims, peace activists, businesspeople, unionists, animal lovers and plant eaters, grandparents, parents, millennials, children, and earth preservers of every variety are here to march together in common cause.
How often does such a diverse array of earthlings come together in mutually affirming support of a greater goal? Almost never.
I’ve flown in from Houston, buying carbon offsets for the trip, to join our son Matthew for this historic event. We’re with a group of about 1,500 Unitarian Universalists (UU’s), many of us wearing our sunflower gold t-shirts as seen in the photo above. We've assembled in the staging area of the march’s religious contingent, which includes representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian (Catholic, Protestant, Green Orthodox), humanist, pagan, and atheist faiths -- the latter professing an abiding faith in the laws of nature.
I share this faith in nature's laws. Here is my own personal confession of faith regarding global warming:
I believe that greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and others) trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere.
I believe the laws of physics that govern the behavior of these gases are non-negotiable. Even the Texas legislature and its corporate sponsors can’t buy or repeal them.
I believe this trapped heat is warming the earth’s air, land and oceans gradually but measurably over time – so gradually that we’re tragically tempted to ignore the phenomenon until it’s too late. We're not the brightest star in the sky.
I believe in the compelling evidence that anthropogenic (human-induced) greenhouse gas emissions generated mainly by the burning of fossil fuels are increasing over time, and that their rate of increase is turning upward – a fact clearly demonstrated in the systematic measurement of CO2 concentrations depicted in the Keeling Curve. I believe awareness of the Keeling Curve and its implications is crucial to understanding the reality and looming dangers of global warming, and should be taught in our schools, beginning in kindergarten.
I believe that if this trajectory of heat-trapping greenhouse gas concentrations continues along its upward-bending trajectory, global warming will accelerate, setting off several dangerously self-amplifying feedback loops, and resulting in the quickening of icemelts, permafrost thaws, acidification and thermal expansion of the oceans (the latter leading to rising sea levels and the inundation of coastlines and coastal cities), increasing probability of extreme weather events, and other potentially destructive phenomena, beginning slowly but gaining momentum over the course of the coming decades.
I believe these climate trends are especially bad news for the great majority of humanity who live closer to the equator, and in less prosperous countries, than we in the Global North. Those living in tropical regions, who are least responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases, are likely to suffer the worst effects of climate change, including increasing incidence of tropical disease, flooding, drought, famine, political and social destabilization, food and water wars, and mass refugee migrations. What's morally wrong with this picture?
I believe the laws of nature are impersonal, and that they do not and cannot care whether our species or any other life form on earth survives. The laws of nature don’t care whether we have the wisdom to respond immediately to the slow-motion crisis we're causing. The laws of nature don't care whether global warming scares us or drives us into denial. The laws of nature are not going to change for our benefit. Nothing can save us from ourselves now but we ourselves.
Finally, I believe in the power of honest thinking and far-sighted action. Future generations will suffer needlessly if we don’t move as quickly and equitably as possible toward the transformation of carbon economies into renewable, sustainable economies and social institutions.
On a more hopeful note, I believe there are many signs, on many fronts, that we can mitigate the worst effects of climate change. I grow more hopeful as I learn about the exciting work that scientists and engineers are currently doing all around the world in the areas of affordable renewable energy technology, battery storage, energy efficiency, carbon sequestration and regenerative agriculture, and a host of other research and development frontiers. I am hopeful that the costs of wind and solar energy will continue to plummet, and that the actual health and environmental costs of fossil fuels will be reflected in their prices via cap and trade or (preferably) carbon tax initiatives. I’m hopeful that reforestation and other carbon-capture programs will begin to reverse the ill effects of deforestation, and that increasing numbers of institutions and households will purchase carbon offsets to shrink the size of their sooty and oily footprints. [Subliminal suggestion: Buy carbon offsets.]
Above all, I hope the social and political movement we see rising around us on the streets of midtown Manhattan will take wing and fly around the globe. In fact it's already doing so, in events like these, in every part of the world today.
The problem of climate change, as Bill McKibben says, won’t be solved with a silver bullet, but with silver buckshot. And we have only begun to fight.
Today’s climate march is a river of humanity carrying us from Columbus Circle eastward, across the south edge of Central Park, then down Sixth Avenue (the Avenue of the Americas) past 30 Rock and Radio City Music Hall, back westward across Times Square, and finally down 11th Avenue to the Jacob Javits convention center – a distance of more than two miles through some of the most scenic urban canyons in the world.
Herewith, for your entertainment and edification, a curated sampling of signs and slogans I saw along the way:
It’s not a march. It’s a movement
Wake up to planet change.
Teach Science
There’s No Planet B
No Time to Lose
Capitalism vs. Climate
Tax Wall Street and Climate Change
Tax Carbon Now
Be a hero. Carbon zero.
Stop the Frack Attack
Love More. Buy Less.
Take Only What You Need
Whatever we do for the world, we do for ourselves. [… and for our children, and their children, and …]
System Change, Not Climate Change
Climate’s Changed. Will We?
Less Coal, More Rock
Keep the Oil in the Soil and the Coal in the Hole
Hey, Reincarnation May Be Real [Hindu/Buddhist suggestion that we may be returning to the very world we leave to posterity. Indeed we ourselves may be among that posterity. I don’t believe it, but what do I know?]
“I want traffic justice. Get these people off the streets.” [from a disgruntled motorist]
I [heart] fossil fuels. [from a young woman on the sidewalk protesting the protest]
Another Octogenarian for Climate Action
Another Jazz Musician for Climate Action
Another Average Boy for Climate Action
Another Hot Lesbian for Climate Action
Divest [carbon stocks], Reinvest [in renewables]
Parents, tell your children about abrupt climate change. Children, tell your parents about abrupt climate change.
cartoon of Uncle Sam tying his arm off and shooting up oil like it was heroin
cartoon of an ostrich with its head in tar sand
young woman with lavender ukulele playing and singing “We have the whole world in our hands.”
Biochar the Soil. [Biochar enriches soil with charcoal, sequestering carbon.]
Time for a Power Shift
Another Unitarian Universalist Professor Kvetching for Action [I swear this wasn’t me.]
Repair the World [a group of Jewish millennials from Philadelphia and New York]
SOS [with an image of earth as the O]
We speak for the trees.
Save the Bees
Eine Erde, Ein Zukumft. [German for “One earth, one future”]
Global Warning [not “Warming” – button]
Go Vegan for the Planet.
What Would Thoreau Do? #WWTD
Granny Peace Brigade
Another Grandfather for Creation Care
Another Human Being for Creation Care
This is the hour. We have the power. [chant]
The people, united, will never be divided/defeated. [chant]
Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like! [chant]
You Change or the Climate Will.
Climate Change Is a Hot Mess.
Renewable Is Doable.
The greatest threat to the planet is the belief that someone else will save it.
We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.
… and my personal favorite –
“If not now, when? [Hillel the Elder, first century BCE]
And I would add: “If not we, who?”
DR
P.S.:
All photos are by author.
--originally posted in Danagram on opensalon.com
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