The People’s Climate March: What Now?

Last week several Harvard Law School students headed to New York City for the People’s Climate March, the largest climate protest in history. We joined around 400,000 activists and demonstrators from around the world demanding action to address global warming. The following day, a few Harvard students joined Flood Wall Street, an unsuccessful attempt to shut down the New York Stock Exchange in the hopes of accelerating such action.

These demonstrations are sure to take their place in history as significant, if minor, first steps in the growth of a popular climate movement. Global warming, which disproportionately affects the weakest and poorest, is caused by the burning of fossil fuels; our fossil fuel addiction is fostered and enforced by the world’s strongest and richest. As the failure of institutional politics or market mechanisms to address the climate crisis becomes ever more apparent, environmental activism will become increasingly aligned with radical theory and action.

The People’s Climate March was a testament to this growing awareness. As in the rise of any political movement, a manifestation of mass support is a necessary precursor to mass action. In this sense, the sheer size and energy of the March was a victory for climate activists. It put environmental politics back in the center of our national conversation and laid the groundwork for accelerated education and organizing. And, at least from the perspective of this observer, there were far more signs and many more cheers maligning capitalism and calling for systemic change than in climate protests past.

The March has not been immune from attack, however, and some of its harshest critics are those most committed to the climate movement and to radical political change. The March enjoyed widespread support from politicians like Al Gore and Bill De Blasio, and private money and corporate-backed NGOs were instrumental in its organization. To some, this smacks of complicity, of a failure to confront the climate crisis with requisite political seriousness. In a time of crisis, these activists claim, Kumbaya ecumenism is a recipe for disaster.

This critique stresses the real problem facing climate activists, radical or not: It’s already too late. The March, successful as it was, and even as necessary as it was, should have happened twenty years ago. The fact that we’re just now building mass support for serious action on global warming — support not for specific demands, or for institutional change, or for revolution, but just for doing something — does not bode well for our chances of reaching even the modest goals set out by that most mainstream and cautious of global warming observers, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Flood Wall Street was an attempt to jump start a more radical approach. Responding to a call of action issued by the Climate Justice Alliance, over 3,000 protesters gathered at Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan and marched toward Wall Street. Enclosed by an oppressive police presence, we paused for several hours by the golden bull, engaging in Occupy-style mic checks and mini-assemblies and hearing testimony from the front lines of global warming’s ravages. In the afternoon, the crowd attempted to take Wall Street, only to be rebuffed at the intersection of Wall and Broadway. Over 100 protesters were arrested later in the evening after the police issued a dispersal order.

Unlike the March, Flood Wall Street had a definite target — the Stock Exchange, synecdoche for the global system of financial capital — and specific demands — stop funding fossil fuels now. It represented an alliance of often divided groups (labor, racial justice, radical, environmental) and was a more serious attempt to confront the root causes of climate injustice. But like the March, it victories were largely moral and symbolic.

The March and Flood Wall Street were both, to my mind, relative successes. A spirit of solidarity pervaded both, and detrimental conflict with allies and authorities was avoided. Frustration with the big-tent approach of the March and the stymied tactics of the Flood are due to the basic conundrum of climate politics — we’re not moving fast enough, not even close. But popular resistance, like a fossil-free economy, cannot be built overnight.

This doesn’t mean we should content ourselves with mainstream solutions and business as usual. Quite the contrary. The events two weekends ago in New York demonstrated that radicals and moderates can operate in relative, if uneasy, conjunction: the March flowed into the Flood, and the Flood fed off the March. Radicals should increase their direct actions as much as possible, confident that more and more moderates will find their way into their camp — because, as the climate crisis worsens, the wisdom of confrontation will become more apparent. And the usual fear that the state and its allies will cause a rift between the center and the poles — that subterfuge or opportunism or frustration will cause radicals to become, or to be dismissed as, erroneous extremists — seems less likely in a world in which the weather itself will be radicalizing society.

So the unsatisfactory conclusion: more of the same. More mass protests. More direct action. It’s too late to do anything but strike at the root of the problem, and it’s too early to forego the support of those who disagree. A time will come when the People’s Climate March will seem like an immature and inchoate cry of global demand. Until then, radicals and moderates have to work together to overcome the political and moral inertia that is their mutual enemy.