Features » April 9, 2007

This April Red + Blue Go Green (cont’d)

In Park City, Utah, more than 800 school children use their bodies to send a message in the snow.

But it’s not simply traditional environmental groups who have joined the cause. Churches have responded in impressive numbers as well. A founder of the Evangelical Environment Network, Cal DeWitt, forwarded our appeal around that thriving web of seminaries and colleges. The Christian Century, the magazine of mainline Protestantism, put a big story on the cover. Sojourners, the radically engaged gospel mission, sent out an e-mail appeal. And in late February, we heard from a seventh grader who was planning on turning his big bar mitzvah bash into a Step It Up rally. Mazel tov!

But the response that has moved us the most has come from students. Those who think college campuses are dens of apathy and sloth must take note: There’s a movement emerging across the nation’s high school and college campuses, and the politics of climate are at its center. Energy Action, a coalition of more than 30 campus groups, endorsed Step It Up. The fruits of their labor were apparent one day when a digital photo arrived from the Alpha Phi sorority chapter at the University of Texas at Austin: 180 broadly smiling co-eds behind a big Step It Up banner. “We wanted to show it wasn’t just hippies who cared,” they wrote.

Athletes and other outdoors types have stepped up too. In Florida, scuba divers started organizng an underwater rally on a coral reef near Key West—a reef that won’t be there in a few decades if the warming continues. In Wyoming, skiers plan a four-day trip down the state’s highest mountain, Gannett Peak, including a descent of Dinwoody Glacier, which is rapidly melting. Rock climbers will hang banners from Seneca Rocks in West Virginia.

Activists in half a dozen coastal cities plan to paint blue stripes along the streets where the new tide line will be in a warmer world. In Petaluma, Calif., they will mark with yellow tape what would be the high water mark of the Petaluma River should sea levels rise an estimated 6 to 22 feet due to climate change. In Manhattan’s East Village, Girls Gone Green is going to team up with Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping and march up to Central Park. Others plan to converge on bikes in city centers. In San Francisco, hybrid cars will parade across the Golden Gate Bridge. In New Orleans, citizens will rally along the levees. Seniors in retirement communities, elementary school kids, you name them, they are involved.

Aerial artists are working out ways for protesters to spell out the message with their bodies. In fact, 800 school kids in Park City already have spelled out “Step It Up” against the Utah snow so we could photograph it for our Web site. Photographers have volunteered to provide arresting images, which we’ll be webcasting before the day is over. And then there are the musicians: Working with MUSE/Cool the Planet, we’ve found songwriters aplenty who are writing new tunes. (There’s even a Step It Up anthem from the Gallerists on the Web site.) All of this is music to our ears as history shows that movements that sing are movements that win.

And we need to win. We’ve wasted the last two decades. The scientific evidence now tells us that we can’t wait any longer. We have to send Congress and our state and local legislators a message that is so clear and so unavoidable that they have to sit up and pay attention. The message needs to be heard by corporate leaders, small business owners and everyone in between that this is a matter that will affect everyone’s bottom line in the years ahead. Reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 is a minimal demand scientifically. It may be the maximum that’s politically feasible right now, but we’re just laying the groundwork for what’s going to be a long campaign.

Come April 14, we’ll have what’s most important—a real in-the-streets movement that’s able to grow and build, able to buttress the scientific and economic case for change with real political clout. We hope our particular goal is simple enough for people to rally around, strong enough to begin meeting the scientific challenge, and specific enough to keep Congress members from simply making sweet, reassuring noises about climate change. Most of all, we hope we are helping midwife that necessary network of people who understand that once you change the light bulb, you have to go and change the law, and that to change the law, you have to change the conversation.

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• Reader Comments

  I sincerely wish you luck. I have spent the last 20 years of my life preaching the need to change our life-style, looking after nature, refusing to use products which come in disposable bottles, or else making their manufacturers responsible for their recollection and recycling, not using chemicals that are harmful, the need to forbid the manufacture of huge cars because itīs simply stupid to use several tons of metal plus the petrol consumption just to carry a human body, the return to natural crops.
  I know these ideas are not popular, people usually stare at you as if you were out of your mind and that is why the world is in danger as it is, because nobody wants to assume its share of responsibility in the general chaos. I am on your side all the way.
  Right now I am living in Costa Rica, which was once a natural paradise but is now on the verge of collapse, with garbage dumped in every river, beautiful trees chopped down for greed or to build another stupid mall. Squirrels, butterflies and birds have vanished and the landscape has disappeared behind huge signs encouraging people to consume all kind of unnecessary stuff.

  Posted by Maria on Apr 12, 2007 at 2:26 AM

  That’s sad ! Some years back my now wife and I wrote about John Hull, the CIA rancher running the Contra drugs for guns network in Costa Rica. Z, April, 1990. We were thinking of retiring there but it sounds like the Bay Area now.

  Posted by blondemike on Apr 12, 2007 at 9:34 PM

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