Step It Up: An Invitation to the Year's "Hottest" Action

Everyone's got a metaphor, and ours was the potluck dinner. If we were going to build a climate change movement, and we didn't have any money or any organization, how could we do it? We decided to throw a party. Invite our friends. Have them invite their friends. See what happened.

And you know what? It worked. On April 14, people around the country will call for the United States to "Step It Up" and reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. This will be the largest coordinated environmental protest since Earth Day 1970 heralded the onset of a new mass consciousness about the fragility of the planet's ecosystem.

This is the emergence of an actual movement against global warming, something that's been missing for the two decades we've known about this problem -- a movement that, because of the nature of the problem, will need to go deeper than environmentalism has gone before. Techno-fixes only go so far with climate change; this movement will need to take on culture, lifestyle, economics. There is no guarantee it will triumph, but it's almost certain to be interesting.

How it all began

Last summer, I found myself despairing. True, Hurricane Katrina had blown down the door and Al Gore had walked through it with An Inconvenient Truth. More people now knew about climate change than ever before. But it wasn't changing the politics of the issue.

In Washington, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chair of the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change and Nuclear Safety, said global warming was a "giant hoax." In a July 2006 interview with the Tulsa World, he compared environmentalists with Nazis and their use of "the Big Lie." "You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's [the environmentalists'] strategy," he said. "Everything on which they based their story, in terms of the facts, has been refuted scientifically."

I had been writing and speaking about global warming since 1989, when The End of Nature, my first book on the subject, came out and was serialized in the New Yorker. But I was struck by how little those of us who cared had accomplished -- Americans have continued to increase their carbon emissions about a percentage point each and every year. Meanwhile, the scientific evidence was increasingly dire, the degradation of the earth's physical systems accelerating.

In my despair, I called a couple of old friends who live near me in Vermont. "Why don't we walk up to Burlington?" I asked. "We can sit in at the federal building and get ourselves arrested, and maybe it will make a little noise in the newspaper, and at least we'll have done something."

They were good friends, so they agreed to go. But one of them bothered to actually call up to the Burlington Police department, only to find out that in that mellow outpost there was no chance we'd get arrested. They'd let us sit there on the steps forever. Maybe if we set something on fire we'd get the attention we sought -- but, oh, think of the carbon emissions!

Anyway, we decided to convert our little tantrum into something a bit nobler: a march, or, better yet -- a climate change pilgrimage. We'd march on the shoulder of the two-lane highway; we'd hold meetings every night on town greens; we'd camp in farmers' fields along the way. And so we started asking people if they wanted to join us.

In early August, a team of Middlebury students started doing the down-and-dirty, where's-the-porta-potty type of organizing. On Aug. 31, we stepped off from Robert Frost's old writing cabin in the Green Mountains. There were 300 of us that first day. Five days and 49 miles later, when we reached Burlington, we'd grown to 1,000, an impressive turnout in the nation's second smallest state.

This was enough to change the dynamics of the issue. Everyone running for Vermont's open Senate and House seats, from socialist Senate candidate Rep. Bernie Sanders to his right wing opponent, Vermont's richest man, Richie Tarrant, publicly endorsed legislation sponsored by then-Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.) that calls for 80 percent cuts in emissions by 2050 -- the most ambitious climate change legislation yet proposed on Capitol Hill. It reminded us that you don't need 51 percent of the people supporting something -- you just need an organized group of people who really care.