Standing room only along Central Park West.
Whether or not the People’s Climate March this past weekend finally pushes the needle for rampant, worldwide action on global warming, we cannot know for sure. But after standing - I mean marching - with my fellow citizens for over two hours, I am once again hopeful.
As you have probably heard, turnout was stronger than expected - with estimates ranging from 300,000 to 400,000. The waves of people coming up from the subway in all directions near Columbus Circle caused delays. Organizers had planned on beginning the procession around 11:30 a.m., but by 1 p.m., I was still standing put in the same spot along Central Park West with a gathering of lawyers and scientists from the Natural Resources Defense Council. (Different sections of marchers had their own themes. NRDC was in the ‘solutions’ section.)
A volunteer and her husband, who I’ll call Kristen and Bill, opened their Brooklyn home for breakfast that day for local PCM volunteers. Kristen, a vegetarian, used to work for a hedge fund firm and now writes poetry. What motivated her to hand out march literature to strangers at subway stations and open up her home for a climate change documentary screening?
The future that awaits her 1 ½ year-old twins, she said.
I spoke to a grandfather from Connecticut who was attending his first demonstration. His daughter, celebrating a birthday on Sept. 21, is the head scientist of the NRDC’s oceans division. We talked about our favorite national parks, settling on Zion National Park in Utah as our most beloved for its varied landscapes and hiking terrain.
Trekking back to the subway around 1 o’clock to go to work, I saw a few exasperated marchers, clutching posters, moving in the same direction home.
“What happened?” an older woman and her friend asked me. “Why didn’t the line move? Our legs started to get tired.”
It’s OK, I told them, our statement has been made. Now we just need to keep forward momentum going.
One of the beautiful aspects of marches is how national leaders and Hollywood types can join regular people in the streets for a common cause - without the burden of metal detectors and checkpoints. A homeless man can march close to Al Gore; a college student can be within arms’ reach of Leonardo DiCaprio.
I love the camaraderie of marches - how strangers smile at each other on the sidewalk when they realize they are in the same fight. This fight, however, has a time limit. If people continue to pressure their leaders, hopefully the necessary transition to a clean energy economy will occur before it is too late.
The columnist, Mike D. Hays, is a freelance journalist from Montgomery County, Penn. He currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.