[Coalesced by several organizations, including Bill
McKibben’s 350.org, the swarming crowds were there to pressure Obama and other
leaders to make addressing climate change a top political priority. “Today,
civil society acted at a scale that outdid even our own wildest expectations,”
said May Boeve Executive Director of 350.org, in a statement. “Tomorrow, we
expect our political leaders to do the same.”]
By Charlotte Alter @charlottealter
 |
| Hundreds of thousands of protesters take part in the People's Climate March in Manhattan,Sept. 21, 2014 John Minchillo—AP Images |
At the People’s Climate March in New York Sunday, a
four-foot-tall walking banana passionately articulating his feelings about wind
turbines.
“They can make things run just by the wind,” said
9-year old Danny Haemmerle, who dressed up as the yellow fruit to attend the
march with his family. “And my parents don’t have to pay as much,” added his
brother Eddie Haemmerle, 11, sporting a lime green wig.
The Haemmerles were joined by an estimated
400,000-strong crowd that flooded the streets of Manhattan to demand UN action
on global warming–a showing that quadrupled expected attendance and made the
march the largest climate protest in history and largest social demonstration
of the last decade.
Timed to coincide with the UN Summit on climate
change, which meets this week to discuss an international carbon emissions
agreement, the demonstration was an international effort with 2,646 events in
more than 150 countries, attended by hundreds of thousands more people.
Coalesced by several organizations, including Bill
McKibben’s 350.org, the swarming crowds were there to pressure Obama and other
leaders to make addressing climate change a top political priority. “Today,
civil society acted at a scale that outdid even our own wildest expectations,”
said May Boeve Executive Director of 350.org, in a statement. “Tomorrow, we
expect our political leaders to do the same.”
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon made an appearance,
along with NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, former Vice President Al Gore, and movie
stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Edward Norton. Nearly every labor union joined
the march, including SEIU (Service Employees International Union,) the largest
union in the city. The march was supposed to start at 59th street, but the
throng of people stretched past 93rd street, and there were so many marchers
that it took the back of the line over two hours to start moving. The march was
so well-attended that organizers had to send a text at 5 p.m., asking marchers
to leave because the route had filled to capacity.
People marched in clogs, dreadlocks, optimistic
T-shirts, Native American headdresses, bike helmets, feathered hats, Lorax
costumes, and biohazard suits. Babies wore diapers. One woman dressed as
Charlie Chaplin and carried a sign depicting a blackened earth, with just the
word “Oops.” And Danny Haemmerle wasn’t the only person dressed as a banana.
Zak Davidson, a 20-year old junior at Tulane,
iconoclastically wore a suit, explaining, “A lot of conservatives try to
marginalize environmentalism as a fringe movement, like just people wearing
hemp skirts. But I have a job offer in the government for when I graduate, and
I’m going to continue fighting for climate change within the system.”
Davidson and 60 of his classmates drove 26 hours up
from New Orleans to attend the March, and after it’s over, they’ll hop right
back on the road and drive 26 hours again in order to make it to class on
Tuesday.
“Moving to New Orleans really politicized me about
climate change, since the Gulf Coast is predicted to have the worst sea-level
rise,” said Zak’s classmate, Emma Collin, 21. “It’s like being in Rome before
the fall.”
The props at the Climate March were as colorful as
the costumes: a massive model of the Earth, along with hundreds of smaller
balloons and beach balls; a giant, inflatable cow intended to highlight how the
meat industry hurts the environment (a UN report found that animal agriculture
accounts for 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions). People carried massive
sunflower signs, sculptures of waves, goddess puppets and angel kites.
There was also a dinosaur, made of car parts and gas
jugs, named “BP-Rexosaurus,” built by BikeBloc, a group dedicated to promoting
bicycle transportation. “He’s here to tell us how to get pass fossil fuels
before humans go extinct like dinosaurs,” explained Elissa Jiji, who was biking
with the group. Other bikers dressed their bikes as swordfish, noting that
swordfish bills often pierce oil pipelines. People chanted, “Exxon Mobile, BP,
Shell / Take your oil and go to hell!”
Often, people’s attire reflected the particular
social issues within climate change to which they felt the closest.
A cohort of doctors marched in lab coats to protest
the global health effects of climate change. “It’s one of the most important
threats to world health, and it’s completely preventable,” said Dr. Erica
Frank, who specializes in preventative medicine in British Columbia. “It would
be irresponsible for us to do nothing.”
“Carbon pollution directly results in asthma, heart
disease, and cancer,” said Dr. Steve Auerbach, a New York pediatrician who also
marched in his lab coat. “From a micro and macro point of view, climate change
is a global health issue.”
For demonstrator Favianna Rodriguez, climate change
is inextricable from social issues like feminism and immigration policy. To
protest a “culture of hypersexuality,” she marched topless, with yellow
butterfly stickers over each nipple.
Rodriguez works with CultureStrike, an organization
that supports the arts movement around immigration, but she helped design signs
for the Climate March because she says climate change is an example of social
inequality.
“The destruction we’re facing has been wrought under
male leadership, and women and children are disproportionately affected,” she
said. “Addressing climate change is going to require a very strong shift in
leadership, and require us to include the vision of women and youth.”
The one thing that the whole crowd seemed to agree
on, whether doctors, vegans, bike enthusiasts, hippies, feminists, students,
Christians, toddlers, Native Americans, farmers, or grandparents: changing
nothing about global environmental policy is a scary prospect.
“Inaction, dude,” said green-haired fine arts student
Joe George, when I asked him what was the scariest part about global warming.
“I keep imagining where I live in Brooklyn, just under water. It’s horrifying.
You can’t stop the Atlantic Ocean.”
@ TIME
