Let me offer here the first five paragraphs of Todd Gitlin’s remarkable new post on the genuine arrival -- no turning back -- of a climate movement. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a must-read, so check out the beginning and then read the whole thing at TD! “Less than two weeks have passed and yet it isn’t too early to say it: the People’s Climate March changed the social map -- many maps, in fact, since hundreds of smaller marches took place in 162 countries. That march in New York City, spectacular as it may have been with its 400,000 participants, joyous as it was, moving as it was (slow-moving, actually, since it filled more than a mile’s worth of wide avenues and countless side streets), was no simple spectacle for a day. It represented the upwelling of something that matters so much more: a genuine global climate movement. “When I first heard the term ‘climate movement’ a year ago, as a latecomer to this developing tale, I suspected the term was extravagant, a product of wishful thinking. I had, after all, seen a few movements in my time (and participated in several). I knew something of what they felt like and looked like -- and this, I felt, wasn’t it. “I knew, of course, that there were climate-related organizations, demonstrations, projects, books, magazines, tweets, and for an amateur, I was reasonably well read on ‘the issues,’ but I didn’t see, hear, or otherwise sense that intangible, polymorphous, transformative presence that adds up to a true, potentially society-changing movement. It seemed clear enough then: I could go about most of my life without brushing up against it. Now, call me a convert, but it’s here; it’s big; it’s real; it matters. “There is today a climate movement as there was a civil rights movement and an antiwar movement and a women’s liberation movement and a gay rights movement -- each of them much more than its component actions, moments, slogans, proposals, names, projects, issues, demands (or, as we say today, having grown more polite, “asks”); each of them a culture, or an intertwined set of cultures; each of them a political force in the broadest as well as the narrowest sense; each generating the wildest hopes and deepest disappointments. Climate change is now one of them: a burgeoning social fact.”
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 19:10:47 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015