The People’s Climate March: This Generation’s March on Washington?

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from In These Times:


The People’s Climate March: This Generation’s March on Washington?
The climate justice movement is preparing for what could be its biggest mobilization yet. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

BY Nick Engelfried


On August 28, 1963, 200,000 people swarmed into the nation’s capital for one of the most iconic moments in the civil rights movement: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. More often remembered today simply as the March on Washington, it was seen by many as a turning point for the civil rights movement, which helped spur passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Today, with hundreds of thousands of people preparing to descend on one of the country’s largest cities for the September 21 People’s Climate March, some are hoping for a similarly transformative moment in the climate movement. But whether the People’s Climate March succeeds in generating the kind of results achieved by the 1963 March on Washington — and whether that is, in fact, a desirable outcome — remains to be seen.

Back in 2009, writing for Orion magazine, Bill McKibben said, “Instead of another march on Washington or London, we’re collecting images from every corner of the world.” He was referring to the recently founded organization 350.org and the preparations for its first international day of action on climate change. In October of that year, people in almost every country staged more than 5,000 actions calling attention to 350 ppm, the maximum safe threshold for atmospheric parts per million of carbon dioxide. They helped focus attention on the importance of getting back to 350 ppm, in the lead-up to the 2009 U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen.

The quote from McKibben suggests organizers of the 2009 mobilization envisioned a movement not dependent on big marches in national capitals — and such an approach had the advantage of being new and different. An equally important factor, though seldom or never mentioned by movement organizers, was that the 2009 climate movement, at least in the United States, simply wasn’t ready for a major march on anywhere. The largest U.S. climate gathering up to that point, Energy Action Coalition’s national Power Shift event in early 2009, had consisted of just slightly more than 10,000 people. There wasn’t going to be a climate moment like the March for Jobs and Freedom that year. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17151/peoples_climate_march_hopes_to_be_this_generations_march_on_washington

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