#climate march

Clearly, the climate movement, led by Indigenous groups and frontline communities, has come through the past few years intact; enormous credit is due to the organizers, including Jean Su, of the national N.G.O. the Center for Biological Diversity (“Our Mission: Saving Life on Earth”), who pulled together a major march in a matter of months. Yet, just as clearly, this movement needs to expand again. Campaigns draw their structure from the committed activists at the core, but they draw their power from the large numbers of less intensely engaged citizens that they can entice in for a little while; victory for movements means somehow reaching into the broad middle and convincing people that they can play an important role, even if they do so just temporarily. In September of 2014, for instance, a climate march across Manhattan drew as many as four hundred thousand marchers. They came less because of existential fear (2014 was practically an ice age compared with the heat and fire we’ve seen this summer) than because they sensed a chance to send a message ahead of the Paris climate talks, and their message was heard. Here’s President Barack Obama speaking at the U.N. two days later: Representative Ocasio-Cortez repeated that theme yesterday. “That means something,” she told marchers. “I’m in rooms in Washington all the time where people say that they have a commitment to this issue, but we need urgency.” ...

Here’s what the term ‘ecocide’ means to these youth activists protesting today at one of the multiple Global Climate Strikes around the world