I stood on the steps of Northampton City Hall on a late Friday afternoon with friends and organizers of the Climate Emergency March for Social Justice.
We watched the broad line of marchers — young and old, various races and ethnicities, male and female, straight and gay — emerge from under the railroad bridge and march down Main Street. For the longest, we couldn’t see the end.
“Hey-hey! Ho-ho! Fossil fuels have got to go!” “Whose planet? Our planet!” echoed from our historic downtown buildings. Unlike the crowd, for a moment I was silent with pride, gratitude and hope. There was a movement coming our way.
Chances are fair that you were in that crowd of a thousand or more, or took one of the 15 youth-led buses to Boston, or joined the hundreds gathered at the noon rally at Pulaski Park. Or you stood out in Greenfield or Springfield. If so, I thank you for responding to the call for the Global Climate Strike.
Four million people around the world demanded on Sept. 20 that our governments declare a climate emergency and act on it to put an end to burning fossil fuels in a just economic transition. The upsurge didn’t come out of nowhere. The drumbeat of the marchers recalled the steady drumbeat of evidence that global temperatures are rising, glaciers and sea ice are melting, powerful storms and fires are destroying whole communities and the complicated web of species interdependence is unraveling due to environmental and climate destruction.
In May, carbon dioxide levels hit 415 parts per million, a level last approached 3 million years ago.
July was the hottest month ever reported since records of global temperatures began.
Then a study of North American birds showed a decline of 3 billion, or 29% of the total population in recent decades.
Last week, 2019 Arctic sea ice minimum was reported as tied for the second lowest in history, after that of 2012.
The sea ice report augmented the most recent extensive report by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the oceans and frozen parts of the world (cryosphere). Like sea ice, glaciers are shrinking worldwide. Oceans have absorbed 90% of the excess global heat and a quarter of the carbon dioxide our burning has produced.
The result is a warmer and more acidic ocean incapable of supporting many of the species — especially shellfish and coral reefs — on which humanity depends. The changes themselves will provoke a lowering of oxygen levels in the ocean, further harming its ecosystems.
And just this morning I heard on public radio that Hurricane Lorenzo, which slammed the Azores on Wednesday, is the strongest hurricane ever to hit so far north and east in the Atlantic, provoked by those warmed ocean waters referred to by the IPCC.
This is the physics that those Sept. 20 climate strikers were tackling as they marched toward City Hall. But these threatening natural phenomena were set upon our world in great part by fossil fuel industry greed. Exxon knew long ago that its products were toxic to life on earth, but it and its allied corporations, investors and politicians covered up.
Now we are faced with the consequences and our movement, which has the potential to cross most political lines, must do everything it can to save a future for our children and our planet’s species.
“We will only be able to keep global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels if we effect unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society, including energy, land and ecosystems, urban and infrastructure as well as industry,” said Debra Roberts, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II. “The ambitious climate policies and emissions reductions required to deliver the Paris Agreement will also protect the ocean and cryosphere — and ultimately sustain all life on Earth.”
On Sept. 20, we glimpsed the movement that will fight to do it, and it gave us all heart. But the next steps are harder: That movement must grow exponentially in the coming months and years and it must work effectively at all political levels to implement policies that massively cut emissions, support and expand our natural defenses, including all our forests, while protecting, benefiting and empowering those who are most at risk from the effects of climate change — young people, poor people, working people, indigenous communities and people of color.
Whose planet? Our planet.
Marty Nathan, MD, is a physician, mother and grandmother and serves on the steering committee of Climate Action NOW and the Springfield Climate Justice Coalition. She may be reached at martygjf@comcast.net.