Tim Murphy, at NYMag, “Can Sunday’s Climate March Expand the Movement Beyond Wonky White Men?“:
Vernell Robinson was stressed. The 51-year-old resident of the Carleton Manor public housing project in the Rockaways sat last weekend in the putty-colored community room of her building with two other local activists, Danielette Horton and Lawanda Johnson-Gainey, trying to figure out how to inspire a busload’s worth of fellow low-income Rockawayers to join them for the trip into Manhattan on Sunday for the People’s Climate March. Organizers of the march, which will occur in advance of next week’s U.N. Climate Summit, hope that it will be not only one of the biggest environmental rallies in history, but one of the most racially diverse, dispelling forever the climate movement’s reputation — and, at least in its upper echelons, its true history — as a preserve of privileged, outdoorsy white men.
Robinson and a few of her fellow Carleton residents got involved with climate activism after Hurricane Sandy. Sand got into the pipes at Carlton Manor and major storm damage to exterior brick walls remained unrepaired to this day…
So Robinson, a member of the low-income activist group Community Voices Heard, had pulled $23 from her own pocket to print up flyers about the climate march. “We’re trying to raise awareness and get people to connect the daily stuff to the big picture,” she Robinson. “The energy from the march will have a trickle-down effect.”
Horton, who was born in Liberia and lives in the nearby Hammel Houses, said, “I want people around here to be conscious of the planet.”
Their words would’ve been music to the ears of the organizers of the People’s Climate March, whose very name suggests the desire to expand the movement beyond the stereotype of wonky, well-to-do men with light complexions (think Al Gore, Bill McKibbin, RFK Jr.). They hope the protest, reflects who actually is most at risk from climate change: regular people, often urban and poor and with little mobility — be they residents of the Philippines or Red Hook. This broadened perspective is often called the environmental justice movement…
Getting the buy-in of the labor powerhouse SEIU, which played a major role in getting de Blasio elected mayor, was a no-brainer for the union, says Lenore Friedlander, who works in SEIU’s 32BJ sector, which represents building maintenance workers. “Our members experienced a wake-up call around Sandy,” she says. “They saw and felt the impact of extreme weather in a very direct way. We had thousands of members whose buildings where they work were closed down because they were underwater. Many of them couldn’t get to work because the city shut down transportation, and some ended up stuck at work. We had cleaners in the public schools, which became evacuation centers, flooded with people looking for a safe place.”…
Endorsement from scientists and other interested parties here, via Eric Holthaus at Slate.
