The first question for organizers is always, Will anyone show up? Six months ago, when we started asking people to come to New York for a “People’s Climate March,” we were hopeful that we could stage the largest rally about global warming in history. The old record was set in Copenhagen, during the 2009 climate talks: eighty-five thousand people attended.
And so everyone went to work. Local leaders of the environmental-justice community—experts at organizing on the grassroots level against things like dirty incinerators—joined with large national organizations like the Sierra Club and globe-spanning Web-based operations like Avaaz. They did all the right things: rented buses, purchased subway ads, reserved Porta-Potties. And built a coalition: eventually, some thirteen hundred groups endorsed the march, and by a week out we were pretty clear we’d meet our mark. We were thinking a hundred thousand people, maybe a hundred and fifty thousand. More than enough to make our point.
But about forty-eight hours out it began to feel bigger—began to feel like interest had suddenly metastasized in a way you can’t quite organize. I travelled from my home in Vermont down to New York along the Hudson River Valley, giving speeches along the way. At each stop—Albany, New Paltz—people were saying, “We’ve run out of buses. There aren’t any more to hire.” Sunday morning, when my wife and I showed up early at Columbus Circle, it was clear that the grey and muggy weather would make no difference: people were coming in droves. It created chaos, but the right kind. Some people patiently stood in place, north of Eighty-Sixth Street, for two or three hours before they even got to move. The first ranks had long since finished the route, which ran several miles through midtown, from Columbus Circle to Thirty-Fourth Street and Eleventh Avenue, before the last ones got to step off. As far as I could tell as I wandered through the crowd, no one minded—it was a block party, with scientists, rabbis, Native Americans, college students. There were cavalcades of nuns, brass bands, kids in strollers, all of them diverse in the way that only New York can be diverse. In this odd new world I could watch aerial drone feeds of the whole long line on my phone as I stood under the Jumbotron screen in Times Square, which was broadcasting video of big solidarity marches in Paris, London, Melbourne, and Rio.
The Times, quoting a Carnegie Mellon data analyst and thirty-five crowd spotters, estimated that the marchers numbered three hundred and eleven thousand; Fox News said four hundred thousand. The point is, it was huge: a sprawling crowd of the kind that comes along once in a generation, one of the largest political gatherings about anything in a very long time. As one of my colleagues said, pointing to a particularly beautiful NBC shot of the long line along Central Park South, “The next time someone tells me people don’t care about global warming, I’m going to show them this.”
I’ve never thought that people didn’t care. I’ve always thought that, to the contrary, climate change caused a peculiar combination of deep dread and a sense of powerlessness. We are, after all, so small compared to physics. We sense that our individual actions (the light bulbs, the Priuses) won’t add up to enough to matter. In that we’re correct—global warming is fundamentally a structural problem, driven above all by the fact that there’s no price on carbon. This means that the crucial work of individuals is to become, well, less individual, to join together in movements. When those movements seem big enough to potentially make a difference, the powerlessness begins to give way, and we can act on the dread.
That is one of the reasons numbers matter: they build on themselves, speaking to the part in each of us that doubts change can really happen. But numbers also say something to the larger world; they are the basic currency a movement relies on. The fossil-fuel industry represents the one per cent of the one per cent; lacking scientific arguments, its advocates use their only asset, an unparalleled pool of cash, to maintain the status quo. If the rest of us are going to shake up the planetary gestalt, our equivalent currency is bodies—and the passion, spirit, and creativity they contain.
To borrow a metaphor from the fossil-fuel age, our job is to inject pressure into the system. Marches aren’t subtle; they don’t lay out detailed manifestos (and, in any event, economists have been telling us for a quarter century what we need to do—beginning, again, with putting a price on carbon). Movements work by making the status quo impossibly uncomfortable—by deploying people, arguments, metaphors, and images until our leaders have no choice but to change and, in so doing, release some of that pressure.
They’ll try to change as little as possible, hoping that they can spin incremental change so it looks significant enough (the U.N. summit this week will be a carnival of greenwashing). But it’s hard to distract chemistry; we need to keep piling on pressure until the system reconciles itself with science. It was good to see a smaller band of protesters head down to Wall Street on Monday to sit in outside the stock exchange—and good also to see the Rockefeller Brothers Fund announce that it will sell off its fossil-fuel stock. Pressure comes in many forms.
To steal another metaphor, this one from the coming age of worldwide renewable electrification: this movement is like a battery. When lobbyists head out to congressional offices to argue for sensible legislation, when shareholders ask companies to change, they draw on the juice that comes from people in the streets. The twenty million people who marched nationwide at the first Earth Day, in 1970, were directly responsible for Richard Nixon signing the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Four decades on, that battery had lost most of its charge. Politicians had stopped fearing environmentalists, caricaturing them as old, white, and polite. Those stereotypes are changing now. The battery’s not topped off, but the current is flowing.
