Old OHIO was represented at the united 2014 People’s Climate March. Larger than the 250,000-person March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 for Civil Rights, the People’s Climate March on September 21 saw over 400,000 people descend on New York City for global environmental action. Non-human denizens were represented in record numbers, as well. 2,808 observer events and counting were held simultaneously in 166 nation-states.
Old OHIO was represented at the united 2014 People’s Climate March. Larger than the 250,000-person March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 for Civil Rights, the People’s Climate March on September 21 saw over 400,000 people descend on New York City for global environmental action. Non-human denizens were represented in record numbers, as well. 2,808 observer events and counting were held simultaneously in 166 nation-states.
To begin, a solemn moment of silence for those affected directly by global climate change catastrophes was respected. The city’s glass canyons fell eerily quiet; stray Earth balloons seen escaping into the misty cloud cover; pigeon flocks flew in droves from the surrounding Gotham. Then, a humming buzz vibrated from the fourth squadron of the march; next the third; 15 seconds passing, the noise made clearer, growing louder—the second and first squadrons erupted in high pitched screams. The steel valley's windows shook as the march commenced. In the front, Laurent Fabius, Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Ban Ki-moon, and Ségolène Royal—arm-in-arm, all world citizens—led en route past Central Park, and on to Time Square and the edge of Manhattan. Miles of marchers waved signs and flags for climate justice, environmental integrity, animal freedom, equality, anti-Keystone pipeline construction, nuclear energy bans, and, of course, a severe global climate treaty.
Signs explaining mechanisms for stopping anthropogenic climate change included: 1) a climate treaty respected by nations to cut carbon-emitting energy consumption and nuclear; and 2) U.S. federal intervention in the viable alternative energies’ stocks and patents hoarded by big energy companies to free the ideas that can save a planet like a nation did with other monopolies forgotten years ago. The concept of market failure in the ruptured Ozone, and the externalities with it should galvanize the world to act with integrity.
Signs explaining the cause of global dimming educated onlookers and marchers alike: Oceans circulate to cause warmth; when the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat with catastrophic carbon levels, those currents stop, and affect extreme cold. Whole species are wiped out each day in our planet from the activities on the surface.
Shouts for justice, shouts for peace, shouts for empowering citizens of the world, leaflets and activism for animal freedom in ‘now’ time; mothers, fathers, and teachers yelling for the future generations; youths demanding equal voice in the cities and the hills, where smog, mountain-top removal, and fracking cause human and nonhuman travesties. There were shouts of “This is what Democracy looks like!” The march was tapestried with collective chants and the neon flocks of students, professional demonstrators, and the politically engaged. A single hymn resonated from the student squadron: For Justice, a familiar psalm from so many a civil movement.
Something reminiscent felt, as the crowded bus rolled down the highway west—the orange sunset casting a glow over the unlit metropolis vanishing into the dark evening of the Atlantic, with the iconoclastic One World Trade Center spire and Statue of Liberty hued with radiant sunlight. During the spring exams in a small Ohio city, climate dinners in the dining halls of Ohio University! The unity and the solidarity of the march was at that place. With every climate dinner, with every word for the environment—we hope for a better life, a freer world, a greener planet, all subjective things by our objective morals. Ohio has Sherrod Brown in the U.S. Senate, who works every day for the very goals the marchers walked to achieve in NYC. With his unifying actions and more—imagine a Student Employee Commission from the Student Senate at Ohio University—the life of community gets better.
The 2014 People’s Climate March made world history, and Ohio University was very much a part of September 21st in hundreds of thousands of gatherers who marched to ignite the city’s and U.N.’s summit that day and remind a planet it's common core.
Christopher Myers is an Ohio University alumnus and resident of Philadelphia, PA.
