Every year, before I vote in a federal election, I play a little game with myself.
I pair my vote. It's kind of immature, but I've made no great claims to maturity that anyone can pin on me.
It isn't exactly matching. I decide whose vote I'm neutralize. Usually, It's Dick Cheney's, or Karl Rove's. I vote, knowing that my vote for X will cancel out their vote for X-minus.
During the March4Climate on September 21, I'm voting with my feet, and I'm going to pair my vote once again.
This time, I think I'll link it to someone who would march if they could. I'll carry them on my back, in a way. I think on September 21st, I will pair my vote with a farmer in Sub-Sahara Africa, who's lost ten years worth of crops due to 50 years worth of environmental degradation to the surrounding farmlands.
Who else marches for them?
The impact of climate change is being felt everywhere. Let me repeat that- the impact of climate change is being felt everywhere. There are great and stunning shifts in how the winds are blowing and how the seas, the currents and tides are running. Tornado Alley is open for business, with new, longer hours.
California is looking at spending billions of dollars to move a very valuable commodity- water, from here to there- and trying to ignore the fact that the more it sends there, the less it has here. Around 200,000 acres of critical, oxygenating rain forest acreage is burned every day, and in 2009, there were 15 ships out on the ocean throwing more pollutants and asthma-producing chemicals into the air than 50,000,000 cars can on an annual basis. As a result, we are changing the chemistry of the ocean. The air. Our bodies.
Man- especially the corporate man, and his cohort, the corporate woman, seems to be taking little to no responsibility for what their corporate child is doing to the earth. If, as Mitt Romney and five misguided Supreme Court justices suggest- corporations are indeed people- then our major corporate polluters are, as Lou Costello would say- very bad boys and girls, indeed.
Maybe we don’t send them to bed without dinner because we reap ‘the benefits’ of an economic system that consumes resources and spits a percentage of those resources back out into the world as pollutants. Pollutants that are the fundamental elements driving climate change. We have a standard of living that allows us to get new toys as soon as the old ones bore us. We aren’t forced to clean up our present mess, before beginning to make a new one. In that regard, we are among the world’s 1%.
But September 21 is fast approaching.
I believe that day will be one of those benchmarks we will look back on. The tide isn’t turning, but something is starting to break through. I can see that the pre-apocalyptic arguments of the climate change deniers are evolving. It’s rarely “it isn’t happening” anymore- it’s more like “sure, it’s happening, but it’s a natural function of the way climates... umm... change. Man is not responsible for it.” It’s a slippery slope, and they are sliding ass-first into reality.
Educators and scientists are joining forces with green lobbyists and community activists. A new dynamic is emerging. Corporations aren’t the only entities with the magical capacity to render borders permeable and porous. Environmental activism, driven by a demand for justice, for equity, for the truest form of conservatism ever invented- conservation itself- is bringing people together from around the world. Literally, that will happen in New York during the March.
So, who marches for the people of Bhopal? Fukushima? For the starving people of sub-Saharan Africa, whose famines are directly related to practices that have degraded the growing environment for agriculture? For the fisherman of the North Shore of New England, who have seen stocks and weights of target fish populations dwindle over 100 years of mismanagement and overfishing?
Who will march for poor people living in countries that lack models of sustainable development, and are disproportionately impacted by damage to their environment caused by unregulated development and exploitation of resources by international corporations?
I will.
You will.
We will. It’s a parade route that stretches from downtown New York, thru Ferguson, Missouri, to the dry prairies of the middle of the country, and the parched streams of California- across the Pacific, past the mountains of Hawaii where invasive species have eliminated native species of animals and plants, across the great heaving island of plastic detritus bobbing in the Pacific, through Fukushima, winding up through Chernobyl, heading across the cancer fields downwind from poorly designed factories in Eastern Europe, then north over the shrinking ice fields of the Artic.
We will march until we prevail, and reconfigure the balance between humanity and the planet.
It’s not like we really have a choice.
Marchons! 48 Hour People's Climate March Recruitment Storm:
Thursday August 21st at 12 Noon through Saturday the 223rd at 12 Noon
We are one month out from the historic People's Climate March. The September 21 March is being held two days before the UN Climate Summit, where government and corporate leaders will convene to discuss taking action to address climate change.
Tens of thousands are expected to march in New York City.
Join in the 48 hour Recruitment Storm by registering and inviting friends to participate. Our goal is to add 10,000 new marchers this weekend. Let's make September a game-changer for the climate movement.
Sign up here!!! --> People's Climate March