Four Questions for After the Climate March

PHOTOGRAPH BY ADREES LATIFREUTERS
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADREES LATIF/REUTERS

The People's Climate March, which organizers estimate drew more than three hundred thousand people, came to a close at West Thirty-fourth Street and Eleventh Avenue, just about where, as it happened, the final section of the High Line park opened this weekend. The march and the park, which sits on what were, practically just the other day, rotting, abandoned railroad tracks, are both, in their ways, efforts to change how we think about the legacy of human industry—to rebuke, revise, reclaim; to have the story end differently. On Sunday, this meant that the wildflowers and grasses of the High Line were complemented, on the streets below, with hundreds of signs featuring sunflowers, and something like a continuous festival. Here, though, are four questions for after the march.

1. Whom did the march change? This might be a more enduring question than what it changed, which, on an immediate policy level, might not be so much. There is a U.N. summit on climate change in New York this week, called by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon—who was in the streets—but, as Elizabeth Kolbert put it in a post earlier this week, this was really meant as a “pep rally” for the next round of talks on an international climate treaty, which will be held in Paris about a year from now. Though the march was big, the coverage was fairly muted. Maybe it will still be effective; perhaps the numbers will persuade some politicians that more people care than they thought. But its less predictable legacy might be helping some people who were in the crowd, or who saw pictures of it, realize that they care more than they thought. Some might even become leaders, or—stranger things have happened—politicians. Marches like this may not be the planet's last hope, but they may be a last chance to persuade a generation that the profession of politics is not entirely disconnected from the planet's great problem.

2. Whom might it haunt? On May 9, 1970, there was a protest against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. and, for hours afterward, Richard Nixon couldn't sleep. White House records show that he placed about fifty calls between 9 P.M. and 3:30 A.M. that night. Then he asked his valet, Manolo Sanchez, if Sanchez had ever been to the Lincoln Memorial. At 4 A.M., they were walking up its steps, where Nixon found young people who had been at the march. He told them that he wished they'd seen his press conference and knew how much he cared about peace. The incident was a strange one, and says a good deal about Nixon's personality—but also about how the popular rejection of the Vietnam War disconcerted powerful people. Where is the President, senator, or governor who feels not just disappointment but a desperate failure to connect when encountering young (or old) people who want to know why more isn't being done about climate change? Which ones, looking at the pictures of the crowds in Manhattan on Sunday, will feel lonely?

3.Was this a New York event or a global one? There were other marches around the world on Sunday—“from Paris to Papua New Guinea," as the Times put it, in a formulation that captured the disparate positions of different peoples in the face of climate change. Paris and Papua New Guinea have different vulnerabilities (and different culpabilities). Will these marches make the fight against climate change a truly transnational one? If the only product is a vague sense of fellowship—of being pleased at having met people from a country one will never visit (and may sink into the sea)—not much will change. There have to be exchanges on the level of policy, too. Paris is going to have to make some sacrifices. (A related question, about a different kind of transnationalism: Has some social-media infrastructure been put in place in the course of planning simultaneous operations? And how might it be deployed?)

4. When will we meet again? And will it be a protest, or a party, or a wake? Along with Ban, Mayor Bill de Blasio was walking and talking and promising that the city would turn green. But it won't do much good if showing up at marches like this just becomes something that politicians and celebrities do to check off a box, like the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Maybe the march will become a tradition: it could be an invigorating one, like many of the parades in the city.  The problem is that something actually has to be done, or the marches will, eventually, more resemble the High Line in its days before it became a park: a monument to wreckage, a visible reminder of a collective abandonment. What one doesn’t want is to get to the point that there’s nothing left to do but atone.

The organizers have achieved their goal of making this the largest climate-change protest in history. It won't be the last mass gathering that climate change will bring about; the non-theoretical fear is that future ones will be driven by different kinds of anger, over drought or loss of land, political disruption or mass migration. The march on Sunday needs to end somewhere better than that.