At New York’s 81st Street, it was crowded, loud, and, on this uncharacteristically hot September afternoon, muggy. Around me stood rows upon rows of people chanting, talking, beating drums, waiting to start moving. The People’s Climate March, which had started nearly two hours earlier, 17 packed blocks ahead at 65th Street, was in full swing.
Organized over the course of nearly half a year, the march was billed as a moment to bring out the environmental community en masse. It was a day to show, as Bill McKibben wrote in his May Rolling Stone op-ed, that we “give a damn about the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced.” Timed to coincide with the eve of a historic UN special summit on climate change, it was also an opportunity to press world leaders to forge real progress—in short, to prove they too give a damn.
Hours into the march, word spread through the march’s line and to spectators on sidewalks that there were 310,000 of us (a number raised later to 400,000). And with our marching bands, periodic megaphone pronouncements, and rising chants of “We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!” filling the already-loud New York, I wondered what all the tourists and passers-by—and, importantly, the world leaders we were hoping to influence—were thinking. There were a lot of superlatives that day, but what I remember most about the march, what first comes to mind when I remember that hectic, overwhelming day a month after it happened is this:
That day, as my watch ticked toward 12:59, hands rose into the air in front of us, and we followed suit. Drums silenced, conversations stopped. As more hands rose and heads bowed, the noise waned. Somewhere near me, someone coughed. A distant ambulance wailed. But then, save the still-clicking news helicopters flying above us, recording and paying witness to our solidarity, silence fell.
Making History, Repeating History
The People’s Climate March made history as the largest climate protest to ever take place, but it was not, of course, the first to call a moment of silence. The use of silence for unification and commemoration dates back hundreds of years, and the origins of the ritual seem uncertain. But the well-known silence on Armistice Day traces its roots back to the Australian journalist Edward George Honey. A veteran of the First World War, he called in 1919 for the nation to remember those who had made the just-renewed peace possible. “Can we not spare some fragments of those hours of peace rejoicing for a silent tribute to the mighty dead?” he wrote.
With Honey’s call echoed by others, later that year in England, King George V declared an annual moment of silence. “In perfect stillness,” he wrote, “the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the Glorious Dead.”
Armistice remains commemorative, but silence can also be a form of protest. The Silent Parade of 1917 saw over 8,000 African-Americans marching through New York City to protest discrimination, lynching, and disenfranchisement and to remember the “butchered dead, the massacre of the honest toilers.” It was, The New York Times added, “in all respects one of the most quiet and orderly demonstrations ever witnessed in Fifth Avenue.”
The success of the contemporary New York Gay Pride Parade’s annual silence was an inspiration for the organizers of the People’s Climate March, said coordinator Leslie Cagan. Discussions to organize the march date back to February, but it wasn’t until early August that someone suggested a moment of silence. And the idea caught on quickly.
Choosing the topic for the silence came easily despite the organizing cadre’s large numbers: it would “honor the people who have been victims of climate change already: the people whose lives have been lost, the people whose lives have been turned upside down by severe weather, drought, floods, and everything else,” according to Cagan.
For many marchers, including Barnali Ghosh, co-founder of Brown and Green, a South Asian climate justice organization, the silence ranked among their most memorable moments of the day. “Being [there] with people who care is very, very hopeful,” she said. “[The silence] was a moment of hope, but it was also a moment for memory.”
Stanley Sturgill, a retired coal mine inspector from Kentucky, came to the march for his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren’s futures, and he found similar meaning in the moment: “It was unreal. The whole city of New York just shut down. It was just a real solemn, eerie-type feeling.”
Sounding the Alarm
But a crucial point that came out of planning was that silence was not enough: we “need[ed] to be sounding the alarm,” according to Cagan. Timed to coincide with church bells tolling the new hour, a whistle signaled the beginning of that alarm. From where we stood, the silence lasted just half a minute; the yells and bells at 1 p.m. rode through the human crowd much faster than the hand signal for the beginning of silence. When the roar reached us at 81st Street, the nearby drumline beat loudly. On the sidewalk, a trumpeter swooped up and down. People yelled.
“Really everyone I spoke to who was there got chills,” Cagan said. “[The silence and alarm sequence] was so moving.” We were sounding the alarm, but as everyone screamed, it struck me that a lot of people were whooping and cheering. I’m not sure I could call the moment happy as we were, after all, drawing attention to a crisis, but it felt kind of warm, energizing: hopeful.
Making Progress
Sometime after that, we finally started moving. And stopped moving, as our pace caught us up quickly to the line’s slow progression. And started and stopped over again until finally we were able to proceed more or less continuously. Eventually, a few of us broke away from the Harvard contingent, eager to move faster and to see a fuller spectrum of marchers.
I found myself talking to someone from the Chesapeake Bay area near where I grew up. My brother volleyed a beach ball of the world that marchers were bouncing around in the air. Communist protesters offered us flyers. One group held up skeletons representing major oil companies. We passed other student groups calling for climate action. I think I caught a glance of Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s Executive Director, as we neared the endpoint. I saw toddlers and seniors, New York City natives and (as one bus sign indicated) Kansans. The sheer diversity of people and the stories that drove them to New York astounded me.
I remember thinking during the silence about how temporary everything feels, how quickly man-made climate change is destroying our ways of being. History tells me the Earth of my grandparents’ time is not the same as the Earth today; science warns me the climate will be terrifyingly different when I reach my grandparents’ age. As a young environmentalist, this saddens me. My blitz forward through all the groups at the march reminded me that we are not just fighting to save the Earth, per se. The Earth will likely survive whatever havoc we wreak; it has, after all, endured for 4.567 billion years and counting. So the People’s Climate March was a march by the people—and very much for all people, present and future.
Tackling climate change, too, will require people from all backgrounds to contribute. Terilyn Chen ’16, co-coordinator of Harvard’s Environmental Action Committee, marched for intersectionality. Discussing at several points in our conversation the need for diversity and representation in the environmental justice movement, she points to the silence as something that crossed all ideological and geographic boundaries. “Lots of people around the world actively work on environmental issues, but it’s a whole other thing when everyone is [in one place],” she said. “The moment of silence was very much something people did together. It was really exciting.”
Most people I talked to were quick to say that the real work of the environmental movement will not be accomplished by marches. But I know from interviews that I wasn’t alone in sensing strains of hope emanating from the alarm. We’d flooded America’s largest city, supported by sister events around the world, to make climate change visible, audible, palpable. I don’t think nearly so many would’ve come if they didn’t believe that we’d make a difference.
In New York that day there were 400,000 people, 400,000 stories—but ultimately one broader aim, one hope, and that was for a brighter, cleaner future like the one Sturgill imagines for his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. In a speech he gave that morning, he exhorted marchers to keep fighting for climate justice.
“Never forget,” he said. “We are our own best hope for change.”
Image credit: Flickr / South Bend Voice