Text messages as the People’s Climate March was unfolding on this historical day, 9/21:
10:36 AM

[…] People flooding in from all streets. Buses are backed up waiting to get into […]

10:33 AM

manhattan – it’s huge! -Matt

11:41 AM

MattLeonard: And we are moving! At the front – but huge crowds packing the whole march, and more on spilling over on sidewalks.

12:31 PM

At 12:58 we’re holding a moment of silence while linking hands overhead in honor of those already suffering in the face of climate change. Spread the word.

12:36 PM

At 1:00 we’ll break the silence and sound the climate alarm that’s been ignored for too long. Be REALLY loud.

02:52 PM

BREAKING: initial count for the People’s Climate March: 310,000. Thank you all for being part of a beautiful, historical day.

03:36 PM

This march is so big that we’re asking people to disperse just before they reach 11th Ave. and 42nd St.

Because of delays at the beginning of the march, South County’s delegation to the March missed its 10:30 AM opportunity, ‘Educating Sheldon.’  An email had gone out to the RI-PCM hub listserv, last week — yes, you can still sign up here:

Here is a communication from Emily Enderly in Senator Whitehouse’s office:

Thanks again for all the info and proposing a meeting time and location.  10:30am on Sunday at 71^st and 8^th Ave works for Senator Whitehouse.  […]

This is a unique chance to let Senator Whitehouse know that his position on natural gas as a bridge fuel is misguided.

Specifically, our congressional delegation should withdraw its support for the AIM project for natural gas pipeline expansion, which will disrupt Green Power for The People.  Senator Whitehouse has the credibility to get us off this path to perdition.

See these links for public statements about this:

1. New England Senators support AIM project
2. RI congressional delegation supports bridge fuel myth

For more detailed information about what’s wrong with this “Green” Bridge to Hell see:

1. Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes
2. See “The Myth that Gas is ‘Clean Energy'” (June link)

–Peter

PS
For dedicated readers only:

• If you want to read the real science, look at this
• This will tell you what’s known about the dangers for public health associated with fracking

Surely, our congressional delegation consists of honorable people, but they are part of a system that has lost its way, a system without ethics, empathy and compassion, a system that tramples on vulnerable communities and treats life on Earth as a disposable commodity.

We need system change.  It’s really not that hard to understand the words of Jeb Saño, climate negotiator of the Philippines:

Super Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in my family’s hometown and the devastation is staggering. I struggle to find words even for the images that we see from the news coverage. I struggle to find words to describe how I feel about the losses and damages we have suffered from this cataclysm.

Our system can no longer take in the meaning of these words.  It ignores what happened in the Philippines.  Listen to our Senator Jack Reed.  Undoubtedly he is a decent, well-meaning person, but all I can say is when I hear him talk about sea level rise in Bangladesh while he focuses only on how it will threaten US national security is this:

Shame!  Shame!  Shame!  Shame on a system that robs people of their ability to show their sensitivity for human misery!

This lack of morality is what we heard from the organizers at “PCM Central” — read everywhere— on the days before the march.  It resulted in a last-minute email to Rhode Island riders to the People’s Climate March:

Please participate in the 1pm moment of silence; text ALARM to 97779 for a signal.  This is to honor those on the front lines, those in humanity’s sacrifice zones.

Fossil Free Rhode Island and our legion allies have been trying to get this message across for a long time.

Naomi Klein sums up the problem as follows and she adds yet another ingredient to the mix:

And I think part of the responsibility for this, you know, is shared by the environmental movement in the United States, because there is this sense that:

• That is a political no-go zone. You can’t talk about any kind of redistribution of technology or wealth between North and South;
• This is toxic.

In her interview with Robert Malin, Vandana Shiva has the looters of Earth and their governmental flunkies stand naked.

VANDANA SHIVA: The issue is so urgent in my part of the world.  We just had one monsoon season last year, where the extreme climate events washed away 20,000 people.  We’re having extreme climate events in Kashmir right now, which affects both India and Pakistan, and more than 500 people have been washed away and died.  We are talking of hundreds and thousands of people dying in every part of the world, every year.  This is no more a theoretical debate.  It is a human emergency and a planetary emergency.

ROBERT MALIN: So, what we are talking about is the genocide that is a socially committed one.  What kind of responsibility does the United Nations have to put an end to that?

VANDANA SHIVA: The United Nations gave us the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and Copenhagen was going to give us the post-2015 commitments.  Sadly, President Obama flew in, got China and India and other polluters together and said: “Let’s continue to pollute and let’s not have a legally binding commitment.”  So, I would say that the UN is being blocked right now, which is why Ban Ki-moon is coming here to the streets.

ROBERT MALIN:  I’ve heard you talking about the corporations structure.  How are people that fighting against corporate power, union people fighting for labor, and people fighting for environmental justice are all fighting the same fight?

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, we are all fighting the same fight, because the same corporations are giving us climate havoc.  The same corporations are giving us poisons in our food.  The same sets of corporations and the same logic of a globalized free trade, which gives them freedom, is dismanteling the hard-won rights of workers to live a life of dignity and justice.  Everywhere in the world, workers’ rights are being dismanteled, and the corporations like a system where workers live in misery and can be super-exploited.  The Planet can be exploited and nothing should come in the way, but that is both ecocide and genocide.

Our politics is about national security and more bombs and submarines. Have we no decency?  Of course, we do;  let’s continue to change everything.

Green Power to the People!

We were a united humanity taking a stand for everything that is truly important: our lives, our world and our future.

With a display of the full-throated, unabashedly leftist critique usually absent from American policy discussions, the NYC Climate Convergence conference kicked off last night at St. Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan with a diverse lineup of speakers who all sought to reframe climate change as a social justice issue. Through the two hours of talks — which often prompted prolonged applause from the more than 300 attendees in the hall and a video overflow room — ran a deceptively simple theme: “System change, not climate change.”

“We need to connect the dots,” said Jill Stein, the 2012 Green Party presidential candidate, who served as emcee and introduced the five speakers. It is impossible, Stein argued, to address climate change within a context of neoliberal capitalism and unfettered corporate self-interest, but that through building a collective, human-focussed movement change is possible. “The moment we get together we are an unstoppable force. The name of the game is coming together and overcoming this framing of divide and conquer.”

That’s the aim of Climate Convergence, which has leveraged the People’s Climate March on Saturday to bring together hundreds of scholars, unionists, artists and activists from around the world for a two-day series or talks and workshops exploring how communities around the world are building transformative alternatives and, according to their web site [convergeforclimate.org], to “build and strengthen an environmental movement that addresses the root causes of the climate crisis.”

The evening began with an introduction by the Indigenous Environmental Network and a blessing delivered by water walker Josephine Mandamin, who focused on the link between the water she ceremonially carries and the health of the Earth. “One day, the earth will be clean,” she said. “This is the work that has been left for us to do.” The climate comprises every drop of water, and, “That little droplet of water unites us all.”

Ann Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project stepped through the history of failed efforts of previous United Nations conferences to achieve meaningful international agreements. Outside pressure, she argued, was the only way to push for change. “I’m very excited about what’s going to be happening this week around the UN Summit,” she said, citing the Flood Wall Street action planned for Monday. “Direct action is the antidote for despair.”

Hip-hop artist Immortal Technique (Felipe Coronel) talked about his personal journey from Peru to Harlem, and the critical need to be “proactive in our progressiveness” across all the intersectional oppressions that contribute to climate change. “We are human beings who have been conditioned to believe in a non-sustainable system,” he said, “The people who are ruining our planet are not going to be the people who fix it.” He closed with a devastating rap, “Sign of the Times.”

Erica Violet Lee of Idle No More stressed the very direct threat to indigenous people from tar sands work in Canada. “To get to the oil-rich lands, they need to move our families out of the way,” she said. “The intent of Idle No More is to draw awareness to the legacy of colonial and paternalistic policies.”

Nastaran Mohit, a New York labor organizer, challenged attendees to move beyond conferences and marches, and drew pointed illustrations from her work with the people of the Rockaways, an 11-mile long peninsula in Queens devastated by Hurricane Sandy. “Some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City had the roofs ripped off them,” she said. “Sandy was the first time that Occupy activists had the opportunity to connect with low-income and marginalized communities. As beautiful a movement as Occupy was, it lacked that connection.” She described the difficult, sometimes painful work that volunteers had to do.

“As a labor organizer,” she said, “I look at unions. The New York State Nurses Association sent out hundreds of volunteers, canvassed hi-rise buildings, met some of the most frightened residents. What those nurses came back from that experience knowing, they saw first-hand how frightening it is when a climate catastrophe hits New York.”

“What did you do to help?” She asked attendees; not, she said, to induce guilt, but to prompt consideration of what meaningful action requires. “Am I willing to be uncomfortable? Am I willing to really go out and connect with these folks who are on the front lines of climate change?”

The evening’s final speaker, Oscar Olivera, talked about the work which won him the 2001 Goldman Environmental Prize: building a coalition which successfully overturned the privatization of water distribution in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city. He drew a parallel to the United States: “Cochabamba is in Detroit right now.”

There are two interlinked challenges, Olivera said, communication and organization. “When the water was privatized,” he said, “There was a law, there was a contract, and the people did not understand anything. Our biggest challenge was how do we make this technical economic language simple for people to grasp.” Second, he said, “We have to have new means of organizing against that whole cadre of business that are threatening our environment. The only way to prove to those in power that we exist, the only way they will understand us is by mobilizing.”

In Cochabamba, he said, “We didn’t just recover water as a public good, we recovered politics, and for us, politics means our collective capacity to make decisions for today and the future.”

He urged attendees to recognize their responsibility, as people from the North who maintain the largest military, the largest transnational corporations, and the highest consumption. He closed by asking attendees to “Commit not only to resist, but to re-exist.” “We pledge to be like water, transparent and in movement,” he said. “We promise to be like children, joyful and creative. We promise to believe that the power is within us — without leaders, without parties, without bosses. Hasta la victoria.”

After the event, a group from FloodWallStreet.org conducted a training outside the church for a group of about 30 activist volunteers for a direct action that will take place on Monday morning at the New York Stock Exchange. Aiming to spotlight the threat to Lower Manhattan from climate change, the group plans to dress in blue and mimic the flooding that crippled the area in the wake of Sandy. Watching the volunteers “Surge and sit” offered an eerie, powerful echo of Olivera’s call to “be like water.”

Did I mention you can get a Climate March bus ticket roundtrip for as little as $15 and the deadline is Wednesday? CLICK HERE FOR THE TICKET PAGE  (If it says the tickets are sold out, please join the waiting list. More buses are being arranged)

The People’s Climate March is expected to draw more than 200,000 people, all to make the statement that global action must be undertaken to drastically reduce carbon emissions. The film builds excitement for the march by interlacing behind the scenes clips of the amazing organizing work being done to make it all run smoothly with interviews of renowned climate activists. The organizers’ perspective on the march is reinforced by periodically counting down the days until September 21st, beginning 100 days out and ending with 14 to go.

One of the renowned activists who makes an appearance in “Disruption” is our own Senator Whitehouse. The Senator held his annual Energy and Environmental Leaders day, and we were able to pull him aside for a moment to get an exclusive video interview. Among other things we asked him why it’s important to go down to New York City. This is what he had to say:

Even if you know you can’t make it to the People’s Climate March and disregard the Senator’s invitation, I recommend watching the movie to get a sense of the scale of the movement we need to create in the coming decades in order to save civilization as we have known it. It requires unprecedented action, and it’s made more difficult by human psychology, which isn’t biologically designed to grapple with problems that emerge and must be resolved over generations. This challenge is acknowledged in “Disruption.” The theory in the film and behind the march itself is to get enough people onto the streets to reach a cultural tipping point, to find a place in our collective consciousness where we can plan for the long term and act accordingly.

We are closer to this tipping point than we realize, and each new pair of boots on the ground brings us a step closer. In New York and beyond, if we want to disrupt business as usual, we must be the disruption.

Buy Your Ticket Now!