Earth Equity News

Despite Snow -- and Irony -- a Climate Protest Persists. By Bryan Walsh, Time, March 3, 2009. "It would be heartbreakingly easy to mock a global warming protest that was nearly snowed out, but what happened in Washington could be a significant step in the climate change movement. For all the attention paid to it in the media, global warming remains an amorphous issue for many Americans, one with consequences that are far-off and unconnected to their daily lives. If that is ever going to change, warming advocates need to make climate change a matter of justice, appealing to Americans' sense of fairness -- just as social movements like civil rights once did... As speaker after speaker addressed the crowd -- from African-American activists whose cities are blanketed by pollution to protesters from Appalachia, where coal mining has stripped the land bare -- the message wasn't about polar bears or sea level rise, but the essential injustice of climate change. Unjust because in the U.S. and around the world it is those who are least responsible for climate change who will suffer the most from warming, and because it is a form of "generational theft," as one activist put it, with the young standing to inherit a ruined Earth. 'My generation has blown it,' said Rocky Anderson, the former mayor of Salt Lake City, one of several politicians who joined the march. 'But this power is going to be fueled by the young people.' The young people were fully present, both at the Capitol plant march and over the weekend at the Power Shift conference, which brought together more 11,000 college-age activists from around the country to strategize and rally over climate change. For this generation -- post-Cold War, post-9/11, perhaps post-prosperity -- global warming is emerging as their issue. Averting dangerous climate change is going to take smart policy, vast technological change and brave entrepreneurs -- but it will also require a popular social movement that can alter American values. Global warming is far from inspiring that kind of change -- the Capitol plant protest still only attracted a few thousand people -- but it is beginning and it is growing, and a snowstorm isn't likely to stop it."