Step It Up 8

Monday, 8 Jan 2007

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

The most important question about global warming right now is: what do I do once I've changed the damned lightbulbs?

And one small answer is Step It Up 2007.

This is the first of 12 dispatches I'll write, one a week through mid-April, that will chronicle the first nationwide do-it-yourself mass protest, and by far the biggest demonstration yet against global warming.

If all goes well -- and by "all going well," I mean "if you help" -- then on Saturday, April 14, we'll kick off the approach to Earth Day with hundreds upon hundreds of simultaneous rallies all across America, designed to start pressuring Congress to take decisive action on climate change.

Americans will gather in iconic places across the country. Some will be familiar at a glance: the top of the Grand Teton, underwater off Hawaii's coral reefs, on the levees above the Ninth Ward, along a blue line on Canal Street in Manhattan that marks the city's possible new beachfront. Others will be less famous: the steps of your church, the picnic grove in your city park, the biggest barn in your county. But everywhere people will be saying, loud and clear, that it's finally time for serious action from Washington, D.C., on the mightiest problem the world has ever faced.

All you need to take part is a crowd -- small in small places, bigger in big places -- and a digital camera. By nightfall we'll have a cascade of images for everyone, including local and national media, to look at. We'll have proof that Americans care deeply enough to act. It should be lovely in every sense of the word.

We're not an organization. There are seven of us: six recent college graduates earning the sum of $100 a week for their labors, and me, earning only the chance to exorcise some of the ghosts that have been haunting me since I wrote The End of Nature in 1989. For almost two decades, the few of us working on climate change felt like we were trapped in a bad dream, unable to get anyone else to see the monster looming behind them. In the last couple of years, that's begun to change. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Gore, public opinion has turned. Polling shows people know there's a problem, that they want action. And we have the scientists to tell us exactly what's wrong, the engineers and the economists to offer useful solutions. There have been dozens of good books in the last two years, and fine documentaries. Every Rotary Club in America has seen An Inconvenient Truth.

We have, in other words, all the parts of a movement except the movement itself.

Earlier this year, a few of us led a march across Vermont for global-warming action. By the end of five days and 50 miles, we had a thousand people marching. That was sweet -- it was enough to insure that all our state's candidates for Congress pledged to support 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050. But it was also sad. Because that thousand people was the largest global-warming demonstration yet held in this country.

We could change that with a march on Washington. But traveling to Washington spews an immense amount of carbon. And anyway, for the first time in history, we have the tools to do this a different way: to assemble in the places that mean the most to us, the very places that will be wrecked as the planet warms, and make our point there. With digital video cameras and YouTube; with cell-phone pictures and Flickr. With the tools to let our political leaders know that people back in their districts care, that this isn't a second-tier issue -- something to deal with far in the future -- or with penny-ante compromises.

Anyone can play. Some of the day's actions are being organized by Sierra Club chapters and NRDC offices; many more will come from local groups who know that the cove or wetland or inner city or community garden that they've worked to protect and nourish is threatened by drought and sea level rise. Many more still will be organized by people who aren't official activists at all, just so concerned about climate change that they're ready to do something. We're using that same goal we used in Vermont: 80 percent cuts by 2050. But the numbers are less important than the intent -- it's time to finally start doing something, and something on the same scale as the problem we face.

We have most of the tools you need to make a rally work: banners, pointers on working with reporters, and more. And you have the most important tool: your list of friends and their email addresses. All you're asking is that they assemble for an hour on a Saturday to hoist a banner and take a picture. And each of them has a list of email addresses, and ...

The key first steps are to forward this small essay to as many people as you think might act on it, and then go to our website -- StepItUp2007.org -- and sign up to host a rally. It's not a perfect website yet, but it will get better quickly. And already it shows what really matters: a kind of desperate creativity from across the country. Desperate but joyful. And ready to get started.

Tuesday, 16 Jan 2007

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

There are probably people with such overriding social confidence -- Martha Stewart, Donald Trump -- that they can plan a party without ever worrying whether or not people will want to come. I'm not like that.

When we tossed up our website for StepItUp2007 last Monday, we didn't know how people would respond to the invitation to put together a climate-change rally in their community for April 14. Seven days later, we have a pretty good idea.

It's been a remarkable and moving week. From the very start, the responses have been flowing in: I'll organize one on a bridge over the Charles River. I'll put together a march to the Hollywood sign. Here's my bookstore -- it's the perfect place to start a rally. Twin Cities. Tampa Bay. The Poconos. Utah. Alabama. Iowa. New Orleans. The Bronx River. Fort Collins. Reno. They've come in so fast and furious -- way over a hundred in the first five days -- that we're having to work hard to get them completely nailed down. Should we merge the five (so far) New York City rallies into one bigger one? We're working on it! But we need many, many more people to step up and start planning actions in their neighborhoods -- I think April 14 will see many hundreds of rallies, from big cities to small suburbs. It's already clear that it's going to be by far the largest climate-change demonstration in American history -- and we've only been going a week.

What's amazing, too, is who's responding. The League of Women Voters of Cape Ann. The Sierra Club. Rev. Billy and the church of Stop Shopping. Real churches. The Natural Resources Defense Council. Some reef divers in Key West. Religious Witness for the Earth. Interfaith Power and Light. The Orion Grassroots Network is mobilizing its thousand member organizations. Everyone we've asked has said yes, from writer friends like Terry Tempest Williams and Brooke Williams (who are staging one of the more amazing actions, complete with skiers descending a dwindling glacier toward Jackson Hole) and Ross Gelbspan and Paul Hawken to veteran organizers like Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers. Laurie David is sending out 600,000 emails to her virtual marchers. The National Wildlife Federation. The student climate movement, through Energy Action and on dozens of campuses. You name it. Many more will be profiled here, and on our website, in the weeks to come. It's just such fun to see the environmental movement, in all its many scales and across its many divisions, working together. You were mourning the death of environmentalism? Whistle a slightly happier tune.

The reason, I think, is clear. There's all kinds of pent-up energy -- people who have been obsessing about global warming for decades, or years, or the months since they saw An Inconvenient Truth. But it's been hard to know what to do about it, beyond the obvious things in your own home. Given an opening, people are pouring in. The education that leaders like Al Gore have been providing has sunk in, and the time for action has arrived. This will be just the first of what I'm sure will be many big escapades in the next few years.

And they will work, because they represent the latent worry and hope of most Americans, a force now rumbling loud enough that some politicians can register it on their exquisitely sensitive seismographs. Just last week, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) announced a revamp of their old and tepid do-very-little global-warming bill. The new one is not tough enough, but it's a far sight better -- two-thirds cuts in carbon by 2050. And Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) signed on the first day as a cosponsor. By now, most of the leading presidential candidates are on the record advocating somewhat realistic policies. Things are starting -- starting -- to come unstuck.

But the only real solvent is public involvement. If there are rallies on April 14 in most of the country's congressional districts, then by April 15 there will be more cosponsors for the best legislation, like the bill Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reintroduced into the Senate today. There will be more chance that obstructionists like Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) will feel the heat from colleagues and move bills out of committee. For 20 years this issue has been wedged immovably in Congress, and it will take a mighty shove from all of us to really get it moving again. ExxonMobil will be shoving back, of course, but we'll see who has more tigers in the tank.

Which is a long way of saying: Come to our party. Go to StepItUp2007 and register a rally for your community. It's not hard, and we'll even make it easier for you: You don't have to be "an organizer." You just have to be someone who's ready to take a stand.

Monday, 22 Jan 2007

It's happening. The 20-year Washington logjam over global warming is starting to break -- which means that our Step It Up 2007 plans are suddenly more important than ever.

The last few days have seen all kinds of improbable things: a coalition of businesses starting to talk seriously about carbon caps (though tepid and small ones), reports that President Bush will give his first real lip service to global warming (followed, unfortunately, by reports to the contrary), and, maybe most importantly in the long run, the news that House Democrats plan to set up a special committee to consider climate change -- a not very subtle message that Michigan Rep. John Dingell (D) will not be allowed to forever block progress.

None of this would have been imaginable six months ago. And none of it means that there's going to be great progress -- only that there's an opening. Sometime, somehow, in the next couple of years, there's going to be a deal made. If there's a lot of public outcry, there's some chance that deal will actually sting the fossil-fuel industry and in the process do some serious good for the future of the climate.

Which is why, in our little world, the best news is that Step It Up 2007 is going through the roof. As of today, just two weeks after we launched our website, we've scheduled more than 250 rallies -- a number we thought, optimistically, we might hit in a month or two. It's very clear now that this is going to be by far the biggest demonstration against global warming the U.S. has ever seen, and perhaps the world as well. Rallies are being set up all over -- 45 states so far -- and some of them are incredibly creative. (Read the account on our blog of the climbers planning to hang a banner off the Shawangunk Cliffs in the Hudson River Valley.)

But the nicest part for me is watching so many parts of this movement come together under the same roof. Cal DeWitt, a true pioneer of the religious environmental movement, not only sent in a blog post last week, he sent out a letter to 60 evangelical colleges and universities asking that they join in. Meanwhile, MUSE, an organization of musicians hard at work on climate change, is pledging a new song every day on our website through April 14. And all this without any conventional press -- we're still a little under the radar, which is where we'd like to stay 'til Feb. 1 or so.

If all goes as planned, the April 14 rallies will hearten the politicians who want progress on climate, and send a little chill through those who are thinking of some tepid backroom compromise. We've got to help them understand just how important this moment is, and what a shame it would be to let it pass.

Monday, 29 Jan 2007

And so the other shoe didn't drop.

For many months it's been rumored that President Bush would use the State of the Union address to announce a radical and dramatic shift on global warming. It would be his Nixon-to-China moment, when the oilman who'd refused to acknowledge the reality of global warming decided finally to secure what place history still might hold for him by asking for a cap on carbon emissions or calling for international action on the next Kyoto treaty or ... something.

Instead, a tossed-off reference to the problem, and an underwhelming program to reduce the amount of oil America imports. Two out, bottom of the ninth, and your guy pops it up on the infield.

Since global warming appeared as an issue in the late 1980s, we've waited for some leader to take action because, well, why wouldn't they? Reason demanded it -- we faced a truly great challenge, one that clearly demanded American leadership. Surely it would come.

And in fact, campaigning in the 1988 election, George H.W. Bush pledged to "fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect." Four years later, a newly elected President Clinton promised that America would emit no more carbon in 2000 than it had in 1990, that he'd do the work to start turning the ocean liner.

None of it happened, and the reason is that we sat and waited. Politely.

No longer. We're still polite, but we're not sitting. In the last week, more than a hundred groups around the country added new climate rallies to the Step It Up 2007 roster. The total number of events planned for April 14 is now over 470, in almost every state, and this will clearly be by many orders of magnitude the largest demonstration ever about climate change -- certainly in this country, probably around the world.

And at those rallies, we'll call on our leaders, in Congress and in the White House, to answer to our agenda -- 80 percent carbon cuts by 2050. The kind of massive signal that George Bush could have sent last week but didn't. The kind of sane and realistic target his father could have set 20 years ago but didn't.

The failure has been not so much the Bush family's, nor President Clinton's. It's been ours. We discounted everything history teaches about power, preferring to believe reason would take precedence. Now we have to back that reason with the persuasive force of hundreds of thousands of voters willing to take to the city streets, to the hills, to the church steps and the farm fields. Peacefully, hopefully, but realistically, understanding we have to do this ourselves. Join us.

Monday, 5 Feb 2007

Here's why the world needs both the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Alpha Phi sorority of the University of Texas at Austin.

The IPCC is one of humanity's signal achievements. Launched by the United Nations in the late 1980s, just as global warming was emerging as an issue, it managed by 1995 to gather a consensus of the world's climatologists around the proposition that humans were warming the planet. That was a marvel, and in the years since they've issued two more reports -- the most recent on Friday -- documenting the increasing confidence with which we know what we know. This most recent assessment is powerful for the swagger inherent in its (somewhat tedious) prose. Sunspots? Forget it. "Natural cycles"? Give us a break.

But the IPCC's power lies, in some measure, in its apolitical nature. It doesn't tell the governments of the world what to do. At most, if offers scenarios about what might happen if we followed different general trajectories. (And in this report it does offer a masked, but barbed, statistic: had the world's leaders heeded the first warnings about climate change and done the work to hold emissions level by 2000, we'd now be facing temperature increases of 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade, not 0.2. That's a big difference.) The IPCC can only issue the warning, provide the data. It's Paul Revere, spreading the alarm. But if the rest of us roll over and go back to sleep, the warning accomplishes nothing.

Which brings us to Alpha Phi sorority sisters.

This picture of them stepping it up -- taken as part of Energy Action's Climate Challenge week in January, and featured on the It's Getting Hot in Here campus action blog -- is in its way just as important as all the graphs and charts in the back of the IPCC report. It shows that the message is getting through -- to everyone. "We have approximately 180 members, and we are excited to help cut carbon! We wanted to show that it's not just hippies who care about global warming! We all care!!" one member wrote. (That's a truly nice way of putting it, by the way. "Hippies" of various sorts -- those of us out of the mainstream in various ways -- usually start these kinds of movements. But they only work when everyone else joins in. Hooray for the hippie-sorority combination.)

Alpha Phi is not alone. The momentum building toward our April 14 day of action continues to amaze us: every day another couple of dozen people around the country sign up to host rallies, marches, bike rides, hikes. We thought we might, if we were lucky, reach a total of 500 scheduled actions sometime in early April; we blew by that number Thursday afternoon.

I still can't read documents like the IPCC report without getting sad -- the sheer shock of what we're doing to the planet never wears off, not even after two decades of working on it. But I can't look at the picture of those Texans without breaking into a smile (almost) as wide as theirs. We're finally starting to wake up. If Alpha Phi can do it, so can the rest of us.

Monday, 12 Feb 2007

Less than two years ago, I wrote a piece for Grist noting that though scientists had tackled climate change head on, artists hadn't. As a result, I argued, we didn't yet feel the crisis as deeply as we needed to. "Though we know about it, we don't know about it. It hasn't registered in our gut; it isn't part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?"

I think I finished the piece just in time. Within six months, Katrina had roared across the Gulf of Mexico, An Inconvenient Truth had roared across the public consciousness, and suddenly the arts had begun to engage. There were several new nonfiction accounts of climate change so powerful as to be real literature -- Betsy Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe chief among them. Photographers like Gary Braasch and Chris Jordan started documenting the results of climate change with poignant power. Prominent painters like Alexis Rockman started imagining what America would look like in a soggy future. And while I still haven't heard any operas, the rest of the musical world has risen to the challenge as well.

That last development is particularly important to us as we try to organize this Step It Up campaign for April 14. Every day, dozens of people and groups sign up to run new actions: it's clearly going to be one of the largest environmental gatherings since Earth Day 1970. I hope it's also one of the most musical, because history would indicate that singing movements are successful movements -- that having a few anthems to share helps enormously. Singing breeds fellowship, building loose groups of like-minded people into temporary communities. It communicates passion better than most speeches or position papers. It builds courage when courage is needed.

One of my favorite records was recorded in the field during the early days of the civil-rights movement; it features the SNCC Freedom Singers in one church after another, singing "We Shall Not Be Moved" and "Oh Freedom" and the truly great "99 1/2 Won't Do," a song for any dark day. One way of saying this: It's hard to imagine the civil-rights movement without "We Shall Overcome." It would have happened, but it would have been subtly different.

When we marched across Vermont last summer, we relied mostly on old standards -- the march ended with our local favorite chanteuse Anais Mitchell belting out "This Land Is Your Land." But we need new songs too, which is why one of the nicest things that's happened in the month since we launched the website was an email from the folks at Cool Our Planet and the MUSE campaign.

They're mobilizing songwriters to produce hundreds of tunes about climate change, a profusion of rhythm and melody and lyric that should pay off for years to come. And they're supplying musicians for as many of the Step It Up rallies as they can manage. It's just the kind of enthusiasm we're finding across the country, and, truth be told, it's moving as hell.

As are many of the lyrics that people have already produced. Some sad. Mark Josephson, for instance, who is one of the movers behind the campaign, wrote a song with John Sterling called "Our Children" about a rich man haunted by bad dreams:

Hey now, hey now
You have wronged
Your children, their children
Our children.

Some are funny. Consider "Global Warming Blues" [MP3] by Lenny Solomon:

I make so much I could buy me a continent
Gonna build me a trophy house with every complement
A fridge as big as Venus, a stove as big as Mars.

And some are anthemic. Here's one called "Power From Above" that we road-tested up Route 7 on the western edge of Vermont. It comes from veteran Adirondack folksinger Dan Berggren, and it's halfway to pure gospel. Here's the first verse, but listen to the music [MP3] too. If it gets you humming, maybe you can teach it to a few hundred folks on April 14.

Sinners are you ready for a little redemption
To receive forgiveness for what we've done?
The time has come to break bad habits
It's time to turn to the wind and sun
Just a little more power from above,
Just a little more faith respect and love
For this old earth our only home
It may take strength to say no to that power from below
But there's salvation in the power from above.

Monday, 19 Feb 2007

AMES, Iowa

In the first couple of weeks of Step It Up organizing, our map looked a little unbalanced -- lots and lots of actions on the coasts, fewer in between. As we near 700 scheduled rallies, however, that's changing fast -- and on the ground in Ames, Iowa, last night, I got a sense of why.

This is a college town -- Iowa State University is here -- and when organizer Julia Olmstead stood up to give her spiel for a local Step It Up rally, a couple of hundred people signed up on the spot. Iowa is political country, of course -- the presidential candidates for 2008 are already barnstorming through the state. (Didn't we just have an election?) But people here have felt as baffled as most of us around the country about how to make a difference in Washington, D.C.

The politicians who come here pitch the issues relentlessly toward people's supposed self-interest. All come and promise more support for turning corn into ethanol, a process that unfortunately doesn't do much, if anything, for reducing carbon emissions. (And one SUV tankful of corn could feed a person for a year.) Many Iowans have begun to suspect it's a bit of a scam -- and anyway, they know that their real interest in the long run is served by politicians who will do the right thing for everyone, reducing carbon emissions so it will still be possible to grow corn here a few decades hence.

They've begun to rally around Step It Up as one way to get their congressional delegation on board with real cuts that will matter in real time. It's fun to share their energy -- and the organic pork and Amish-raised chicken at the Methodist Church potluck supper and square dance before last night's event.

And it was fun, too, to ski down Onion Creek in the city's suburbs, flushing deer and enjoying the lengthening days of spring. In fact, across much of the country the weather has turned beautifully wintry in the past week. I left Vermont reluctantly -- we just had the best snowfall in many years, three feet of lovely powder in the woods. After the anxiety-producing heat wave that lasted till mid-January, it's almost as if we're being rewarded for our efforts to actually do something about global warming.

If only it were that easy. But it's worth remembering, even in the heat of organizing, to pay attention to just how lovely the world we're working for really is. Paying witness is one of the jobs our generations have inherited -- the world is as intact and complete right now as it's going to be for a long time to come!

Monday, 26 Feb 2007

By now, the six people doing most of the work of national organizing for Step It Up 2007 have introduced themselves on the website. Will Bates, Phil Aroneanu, Jeremy Osborn, May Boeve, Jon Warnow, and Jamie Henn are all recently minted college grads (well, one of them has a thesis still to complete). You can take any two of them, add them together, and come up with a number slightly less than my 46 years.

You would think that this would make for a vast gulf in terms of skills, abilities, and talents. And indeed it does -- when it comes to technology, at least, each of them is forced to treat me like a slightly dim child who needs to be reminded several times a day how to do what needs doing.

Monitor your progress.

I'm not bad at email (though I've not fully mastered the whole I'm-out-of-town-on-business automatic reply thing). But blog-posting and setting up Skype accounts and using the web for videoconferencing is, for the moment, beyond me. It's a failing I'm more and more aware of, because this entire campaign has been organized on the web. We're building the biggest grassroots environmental protest in many years, and so far we've done it almost without a single story in the conventional press.

It's been fascinating to sense the power of this tool. Grist, of course, has long been in the vanguard of electronic environmentalism. For most of us, though, the new mental models that go with web organizing are only now developing. To be honest, we hatched the idea of a widely distributed protest in part because we knew we lacked the financial and organizational muscle to stage a march on Washington. We worried about the carbon emissions, too. But we also sensed that such distributed action fit more easily with the ethos of the moment, a real internet ethos.

I'd define that ethos this way: it's easy to both put in and take out. Instead of massive centralized systems (TV networks, agribusiness, huge coal-fired power plants, and indeed marches on Washington), there's now the possibility for widespread local systems of all kinds. The solar panels on my roof tie into the grid; when the sun shines, I'm a utility. Similarly, the April 14 demonstration in my small Vermont town will be a good thing in and of itself -- and it will tie into a vast network (nearing 750!) of such protests that we can link together electronically. In this way, we will make them more than the sum of their parts.

We're about, I think, to get some more conventional publicity for Step It Up -- newspaper and TV attention, which is already starting to show up at the local level thanks to organizers in each community, will soon be coming from national outlets as well. That will help, because there are still all sorts of people who are still not fully immersed in the web. But it's been fascinating to see that conventional media attention is no longer the absolutely necessary oxygen of political organizing -- and that the alternative structures the web is building are suggesting a whole different way of thinking about doing politics.

I'm awfully glad Martin Luther King Jr. was at the Lincoln Memorial instead of on a webcast. And I'm also glad that the April 14 rallies will be in the real world -- in fact, it's the connection with actual physical place that will make them so powerful. But I'm glad, too, that all of us, even the 40-something geezers, are learning to make full use of these new tools.

Monday, 5 Mar 2007

Wendell Berry.

The writer who changed my life the most is Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and essayist. I read him at an impressionable age, and most of what I've done since has been, in some sense, a result. So it was a great pleasure this week to get to thank him in person, to tell him about Step It Up, and to reflect on the nature of heroes.

I was in Louisville to do an evening program with Berry, part of the launch of a new book of mine. It was scheduled long before we dreamed up these protests, but like the rest of the stops on my book tour, it basically turned into an organizing opportunity. Berry, of course, is the master of the local -- of the idea that we need to pay attention to our towns, our farms, our neighbors. It was good to see that the idea of Step It Up -- Americans taking action in their own home places -- appealed to him: he gave us a big plug on Kentucky Educational Television.

And it was just as much fun to meet all the folks organizing Step It Up Louisville, which will feature a parade from the Federal Building. The town has a new progressive Congress member, Jim Yarmuth, who could be a real ally; after April 14, he'll know just how much the people in his town care.

Terry Tempest Williams.

A few days later, another of my chief heroes, Terry Tempest Williams, was in our neck of the woods. She spoke at Middlebury College, and introduced all of our Step It Up student activists to the huge crowd that gathered for her inspired lecture. She also told us about the event her graduate students at the University of Utah are organizing for April 14 -- they'll be gathering the waters from the rivers in each of the canyons around Salt Lake, and mixing them together in a ceremony designed to remind us how much that water means to the arid west, and how threatened it is by global warming. Meanwhile, her husband Brooke, who runs the Murie Center in Jackson Hole, is helping to organize a Wyoming extravaganza: skiers climbing two days to a remote peak atop a dwindling glacier, doing a cybercast to a rally back in town, and then descending on skis.

Here's what we've found in the last nine weeks: There are incredible heroes all across this country who have simply taken the reins in their town or city and organized actions big and small. I wish I had room to list them all -- but on April 14 you'll see many of their faces, as we webcast the images from every protest rally across America.

And every one of those organizers is reaching new people with impressionable minds -- minds as open as mine was when I first read Wendell Berry, when I first stumbled across Terry Tempest Williams' magnificent words. April 14, I think, will be paying dividends for decades to come.

Monday, 12 Mar 2007

The most overused image for the fight against global warming is the "race against time." Still, it's one of those ideas that grabs you on occasion and won't let go. (And not just because here at Step It Up 2007 we're passing the 30-days-to-April-14 mark and working essentially around the clock to organize our rallies.) It's a metaphor that lingers for a reason.

Tick, tick, tick ...

Photo: iStockphoto

This week the Bush administration admitted what everyone had known: its official projections show our greenhouse-gas emissions increasing 1 percent per year through 2020. In global-warming terms, that's essentially forever -- well past the point where the barrel goes over Niagara. Meanwhile, the early drafts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change impact reports began to leak, full of predictions about the imminent onset of ecosystem collapse, the spread of malaria, and shortages of water. We're stuck in the same cycle we've been in for 20 years -- emitting more carbon even as we understand more clearly the danger.

And each day -- well, each day a day passes. We get that much farther along without doing anything of substance at all -- at least on the federal level, where, ultimately, action is most needed. Nothing deflects the trajectory of our path. Tuesday is worse than Monday by a few hundredths of a part per million of CO2, a few ticks up on the thermometer.

That's why we need something sharp. We need April 14 to be a day of real passion, of peaceful but firm commitment to changing that trajectory. And it's why we need our presidential candidates and our congressional representatives to sign on to the target of 80 percent greenhouse-gas emissions reduction by 2050. (Or, better yet, raise the bidding and go for something even better.) That's the kind of target that might shock our economic system into delivering a set of new approaches, new investments, and new technologies. It might shock us into developing a few new habits.

Another shopworn phrase in the global-warming battle is "business as usual." It's usually employed to describe the emissions scenarios in a future where we make no attempt to do anything new or useful. That 1 percent growth a year? That's pretty much business as usual. But environmentalists can fall into business-as-usual mode too. The long round of papers and books and conferences and proposals is, on the one hand, vitally important -- we need the ideas and the networks -- and on the other hand lulling; it can cause us to imagine progress where it isn't happening.

That's why, when moments come along that allow us to step outside the normal flow and make a loud, heartfelt noise, we should do it. That's why more than 850 communities have decided to Step It Up, and why most of the big environmental groups have lent such a huge helping hand. Now we have a month to collectively figure out how to make our shout echo as loudly as possible, and make April 14 one of those moments when business as usual ceases -- one of those moments outside of regular time when the race suddenly looks winnable.

Monday, 19 Mar 2007

Where does a new consensus come from? How does the zeitgeist suddenly start to shift?

When we started Step It Up 2007, all of 10 weeks ago, 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050 seemed at the very outer edge of the politically possible. Last Friday, youth climate activist Courtney Fryxell, who is helping organize one of the Washington rallies for April 14, asked John Edwards point blank if he'd commit to 80 percent carbon cuts by 2050. "Yes," he said -- and with that earned himself real respect as the first of the major contenders out of the gate on this issue.

He won't, I think, be the last. Because what he was responding to was a surge in grassroots political activism all around this country. On Friday, for instance, a few hours before Edwards talked, a group of intrepid religious climate activists in Massachusetts set off for a 10-day march to Boston -- it was enormous fun to applaud them as they left the church to start their journey because they symbolized the way that faith communities have come to this cause in the last year.

The next night in D.C., 800 people gathered for an evening organized by Mike Tidwell and Ted Glick, tireless activists from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, who for five years have been holding much smaller gatherings, slowly building the movement. The huge throng, cheered by the music of Emma's Revolution, clearly sensed the turn in the weather. Meanwhile, Laurie David and Sheryl Crow are circling the country putting on shows; Al Gore is testifying before Congress; everywhere the force is building.

For many years, speaking at one college or church or library after another, I'd tell people about global warming and they'd say: we can't break through the wall of special interest and inertia that keeps the solutions bottled up. And I'd say, that's right, we can't. Not yet. But eventually the day will come when events -- Hurricane Katrina -- provide an opening. And when that opening comes, we'll need every network, every plan, every small model to build on. So we'll be able to seize the moment.

That's what's happening. Across the country, people who have been working for years and people who have just started worrying about global warming are quickly joining forces. Step It Up is only the most dramatic example -- earlier this week we went past the 950-rally mark; April 14 is going to be one of the most dramatic days in American environmental history. People in every state will be raising their voices, and when that happens the power will help speed this new consensus into being.

The battle won't be easy, of course. But finally Exxon has some opponents they can't ignore. Momentum counts, and momentum all of a sudden is squarely on our side.

Monday, 26 Mar 2007

If we'd known what we were getting into ...

Last week the Step It Up odometer turned past the 1,000-rally mark, which is so far beyond what we'd expected when we began that it boggles my mind. But in a good way.

I spent last night in the small town of Hamilton, Mont., deep in the beautiful Bitterroot Valley. It's one place in a thousand around the country, but let it stand for what's going on.

In this conservative Republican county, 250 people turned out to hoot and holler -- literally. One of the local organizers was recording a radio commercial that he'll be airing to build support for Step It Up in Hamilton and nearby Missoula, and he had everyone singing and clapping in unison. The Bitterroot is a musical place all around: one of the main local Step It Up actions will take place at the Corvallis Grange and feature the Crested Hens leading a contra dance to demand reel change. Get it?

I had come to Montana from Seattle, where hundreds of people turned out at Town Hall to pledge their support for April 14. In Seattle, several satellite actions (neighborhood fairs, a drum circle, etc.) will flow into a mid-afternoon march through downtown.

Today I'm on to Colorado, and then Wisconsin, where organizers in the town of Fort Atkinson are trying to put their neighbors on a low-carbon Atkinson Diet. And on and on and on.

This is what politics can look like when it's not constrained by the narrow conventions of Washington, when we're able to supplement our letter-writing and petition-signing with all the good humor and good will that we can muster. We grow a little giddier with every passing day, fully aware that all this has almost nothing to do with our organizing, and almost everything to do with people's deep desire for real change.

If we'd known what we were getting into ... we'd have done it long ago.

Monday, 2 Apr 2007

Everyone's getting into the act!

The news this morning that the Supreme Court has decided global warming is a problem, and the U.S. EPA can't just ignore it, is significant for two reasons. One, it's the law of the land. And two, just as importantly, it's one more sign that the tide has finally begun to turn. Official Washington has spent two decades pretending that the laws of physics and chemistry don't apply inside the Beltway. But now Congress is taking it seriously, and so is the Supreme Court. The White House is the last bunker, and even there people must be turning a bit pale at reports from the front.

That's why it's more important than ever that those of us who know enough and care enough to take action ratchet up the pressure. The oil companies and the coal barons read the newspapers too -- they know that their days of a free ride are coming to a close, and the only question now is how high the fare is going to be.

But the answer to that question will decide the climatic future. You can be sure that they're preparing to sign on to the weakest deal possible -- and announce it as a triumph, the first step forward. CEOs will pose with congressfolk, editorialists will delight. But if the deal stinks -- if it falls short of the targets scientists now tell us are necessary -- than the celebration will be short-lived. Instead of a solution, it will mean only that the lid's been knocked off the pot and the pressure dissipated. This moment won't arrive again for a few years (it's been 15 years since health-care reform disappeared from the congressional agenda) and by the time it finally does, the deepest kind of damage will be done. The White House is in a bunker, but there's another bunker to fall back to, and that's what's so perilous about the politics of the moment.

Which is why 80 percent by 2050 as a rallying cry is more important than ever. We need to remind both our opponents and our allies that compromise on the essentials simply isn't going to do the trick. It's not a political problem -- it's a problem of chemistry, and chemical reactions don't bargain.

We will pass the 1,200 rally mark today at Step It Up '07. In every corner of the country, people are demanding real action. And they're starting to be heard.

Monday, 9 Apr 2007

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. group charged with monitoring the science of global warming, laid out the stakes last Friday -- laid them out as clearly as anyone is ever going to.

On one side, there's an energy transformation -- the conversion of the world's fuel economy from coal and gas and oil to something else. In involves decades of work on conservation and then on innovation. There are changes in habit and economy and way of life and attitude.

And on the other side, if we don't get going fast on all those tasks, there's malaria and flooding and drought and sea-level rise. There's the extinction of species -- of whole ecosystems. There's a planet tossed into such chaotic instability that it's hard to know what will emerge.

In other words, we can choose between change and Change.

That choosing starts, for Americans, this coming Saturday, April 14. Our day of climate action, which we've been organizing at StepItUp2007.org since early January, has turned into a juggernaut of sorts. There will be more than 1,300 rallies on Saturday, in all 50 states. In the last week, dozens of senators and representatives have signed on to speak at these protests. The media is finally starting to notice -- a team from one of the networks was all over the Step It Up office on Friday, filming us as we worked; this morning, even the BBC World Service was on the phone asking for details.

If we can bring the same passion and the same moral urgency to bear on this challenge that courageous Americans mustered around the civil-rights movement a generation ago, then we have a chance at forcing the right choice. But if we simply worry about the problem, and take the kind of half measures that the politicians and the corporations will naturally push, then we'll miss our opportunity.

We can't say we weren't warned. By now, both the science and the stakes are known to anyone who cares to pay attention. And no one can say they haven't got a way to make themselves heard -- there's a rally to go to in every corner of America on Saturday afternoon. All that's left to see is how much people care.

Sunday, 15 Apr 2007

I have a new hobby: scrolling through the action reports that groups around the country submitted after Step It Up Saturday.

Juneau, Alaska

From Juneau, Alaska (a rally near the retreating Mendenhall Glacier) to Key West, Fla. (scuba divers holding underwater banners in front of a coral reef), from a contra dance in Belfast, Maine, to an interfaith gathering on Waikiki Beach, people have been posting accounts and pictures of more than 1,400 demonstrations large and small around the country. It's simply lovely to read them, and to realize that each one means many people worked hard and passionately to get something going about climate change. That's what a movement is, and now there is one around global warming.

I started Saturday under bright blue skies in downtown Manhattan, where Ben Jervey and a big crew of helpers assembled a "sea of people" clad in blue to show where the new tide line will someday fall around the Battery. And I ended the day in Washington, D.C., where a big crew of people gathered to "watch the returns" -- 20-foot high images of the pictures flooding in from around the country.

Key West, Fla.

Photo: Craig Quirolo / reefrelief.org

It was a great day -- but incredibly frustrating, since I wanted to be above the waterfall in Spokane, Wash., and in the park in downtown Boise, Idaho, where a thousand people gathered, and in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., where lines of people marked the new storm-surge boundaries. I would have given anything to be up high on Whiteface Mountain in my beloved Adirondacks, or anywhere in my Green Mountain State, where dozens of rallies large and small took place. Or at the Community Christian Church in Kansas City, Mo., where 500 gathered inside to avoid a driving rain, or Gig Harbor, Wash., where a flotilla of people-powered boats spread the message, or Brunswick, Maine, where 400 rallied at Bowdoin College to hear Rep. Tom Allen. I would have loved to go to Carlsbad, Calif., and hear Ralph Keeling tell the story of how his father Charles did the groundbreaking science more than 50 years ago that helped to prove carbon was gathering in the atmosphere, or to Baldwin Beach in Maui, where people spelled out their demands with their bodies, and to Lenox, Mass., to hear the festival of rappers. What I would have given to have been at Middlebury College, where all of this began, and where students started April 14 with a midnight flashlight-powered gathering. And what fun it would have been to be in my hometown, Lexington, Mass., to watch my mother reading a speech to, among others, Rep. Edward Markey, new chair of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

A few things stick out for me:

- The old ideas about environmentalists are in need of updating. If you're worried that it's nothing but old white people with lots of money, think again. The New York City gathering was black, brown, white, and young -- in fact, young was one of the day's motifs. Evangelicals, Jews (a "Jew-tingent" organized its own walk to join the day's big gathering outside the Capitol), senior citizens, athletes, you name it. Two years ago we were worried about the "death of environmentalism." Perhaps in part because of that scare, tons of new energy seems to be flooding in.

- Elections count. We had national politicians joining these rallies in dozens of states -- and if you look at the list, you'll see that an awful lot of them were elected last fall for the first time. Sen. Jon Tester in Montana, Sen. Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota, Rep. John Hall in New York, Rep. Baron Hill in Indiana, Rep. Jerry McNerney in California. Special props to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spoke at at least three of the rallies (and also, by the way, is sponsor of the bill in the Senate to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050). And also to John Edwards, the first of the main presidential candidates to endorse that goal, who gave a very strong speech to a Step It Up rally in Fort Myers, Fla.

Seattle, Wash.

- A spirit of collaboration marked this whole event. Big enviro groups -- National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, many, many others -- dropped all their organizational walls and joined together with each other and with the smallest groups around the country to help make Saturday a huge success. But just as exciting was the way many of these rallies were organized by people who'd never belonged to any group at all, who took their first steps as organizers this weekend. Many, in their action reports, said they'd keep going. And they have the key tool to help make it happen: our sense at the end of our 12 weeks of organizing is that we've only begun to explore the power of the internet (and of course the incredible power of Grist!) for this kind of open-source political protest.

By every conventional measure, the day was a raging success -- all the press we could have hoped for (even a long segment on ABC News from reporters at four different rallies around the country!).

For us, though, the real measure of success was the sheer enthusiasm that comes through in one report after another from around the country. Sheer delight, even -- delight at starting to take power, starting to do something about a horror that we've been watching build for many years.

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