The Next Eco-Warriors (5 page)

Possibly for the first time on a global scale, all movements, all issues, and all struggles were put in the same room together, or at least on the same street. Even outside of this one action on that rainy day, a dialogue had been stirring since the start of the Copenhagen summit that unified us in one movement. The young and old; the Indigenous, marginalized, elite, disempowered, and empowered; Africans, small Islanders, and Europeans; farmers, doctors, cyclists, white-collar and green-collar—we were all here, fighting for the most important thing of all: the battle for life itself.

On my travels back home, I came to realize that with the failure of Copenhagen came an opportunity. An opportunity to build a movement that was not just focused on events like this summit, but also on a generation's actions. An opportunity for a movement that is more global, inclusive, and stronger than ever before. An opportunity to be a movement whose fire burns within us all. Copenhagen was not the end, only the beginning.

PHOTO BY EMILY HUNTER

The movement is here. This is our moment.

_________

Emily Hunter continues to work as a freelance eco-journalist. She is the eco-correspondent for MTV News Canada, occasionally hosting a TV-documentary series called Impact, covering such issues as the Canadian tar sands and the G20 Toronto protests. Currently, she is finding more ways to get herself in trouble and plans to eco-shit-disturb till the day she dies
.

Twenty-six
United States
Online Organizer

PHOTO BY 350.ORG

I HEARD THE RALLY BEFORE I SAW IT. As I walked around the corner into Times Square with my colleague Jon, I instantly recognized the beat of Jay-Z's “Empire State of Mind,” which we'd been listening to on repeat for the past week. Fists pumping in the air, our pace quickened, and our eyes yearned to see the results of more than a year of organizing. Until there they were: photo after photo of the day's thousands of climate rallies across the planet, streaming across the big screens of Times Square.

A photo of hundreds of schoolchildren in the Philippines preceded a picture of people forming a giant 350 in front of the Sydney Opera House. They were followed by another picture of a rally in Ghana, then Mexico, then the United States. For one day, those big screens that normally showed vodka and Hummer ads were displaying the vibrant, raucous, and powerful birth of the global climate movement.

The photos spinning across the screens at Times Square on that day, October 24, 2009, were part of the 350 International Day of Climate Action, which I helped lead and coordinate. The day synchronized more than 5,200 events in more than 180 countries. CNN later called it “the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.” At each event, whether in Beijing or Bujumbura, citizens made a strong call for climate action by displaying
a simple but important number: 350. Currently, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 389 parts per million (ppm), while rising more than 2 ppm each year. But scientists now say the safe upper limit for our atmosphere should be 350 ppm. Essentially, this all means we are already in the danger zone.

The story of how a data point, as boring and unsexy as 350 ppm, somehow made it onto the screens of Times Square is intertwined with my own story of becoming a climate activist. As one of the founders of
350.org
, the campaign behind the October 24 day of action, I've fought over, despised, grappled with, and learned to love that 350 number. For me, it's become a symbol of what I love about this movement: the creativity and passion of its organizers, the radical ambition of its goals, the diversity of its global network, and the sense of caring and community that permeate throughout.

That number was little more than a factoid, however, when six college friends, environmental author Bill McKibben, and I launched the
350.org
campaign in early 2008. We'd been working together as climate activists since 2005, when a group of us got together over beers on Sunday nights at Middlebury College in Vermont and started to talk about how we could influence the national dialogue around climate change.

What started as a weekly meeting soon took over most of my time. I grew up in a progressive family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent a lot of afternoons volunteering at soup kitchens and community groups in high school, but I'd never considered myself much of an activist. I'd always loved nature and the outdoors but had never been involved in efforts to protect them. Yet, there I was at college, scraping food scraps onto a giant scale to show students just how much we wasted in the dining halls, marching up to the state capitol in full hockey gear to demand that our governor protect winter pond hockey by slashing emissions, and taking an entire summer to help organize a national veggie oil bus tour called the “Road to Detroit” to push for cleaner cars. In 2006, our same group of friends helped organize a march across Vermont that turned out nearly five thousand people, practically a revolution for that small state.

The next year, my friends and I ran our first major campaign, Step It Up, which caught like wildfire across the United States and culminated on
April 4, 2007, with more than fourteen hundred events in all fifty states— the largest day of environmental demonstrations in a generation. I spent the final day of the campaign in a cramped office (more like a closet) that the League of Conservation Voters had lent us in their Washington, DC, office. I'd convinced all my professors to give me the week off from classes, and as I called event organizers to connect them with media outlets, I did my best to try to forget all the work that was piling up back at school. Watching the hundreds of photographs from around the country stream onto our website that afternoon was well worth the all-nighters I had to pull back at school to catch up.

Step It Up was a big success, but I knew it wasn't enough. After all, they called it “global” warming for a reason. So, in late 2007, our team began exploring the idea of an international campaign. About the same time, Dr. James Hansen, one of the world's top climate scientists, published a paper that hit climate science like a “mind bomb.” It showed that humanity needed to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from its current 389 parts per million to no more than 350 ppm in order to “preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” Those were strong words for a scientist. But Bill McKibben, who'd known Dr. Hansen since the late 1980s, seized on the 350 target as the symbol for our new campaign.

I was a bit more skeptical. Parts per million? Give me a break. Who's going to get that? Yet the more we discussed it, the more we all warmed up to our strange new symbol. After all, Arabic numerals are one of the few universally recognized symbols, making 350 mean the same thing in Cantonese as it did in English. It would become the ultimate global target: a clear benchmark
that boiled what we needed to do to stop global warming down to three simple digits. It was a silver lining in a long and gloomy fight. And it was enough to start building a movement.

Over the following months, I settled into my new job as a full-time global climate activist with the beginning of
350.org
. Since there were seven of us on the team, we did the only logical thing we could think of: divide up the different continents and get to work. I picked East Asia and, in our usual organizing style, began to email everyone I could possibly think of who was connected to environmental issues in the region. Each day, I'd bike from my apartment in San Francisco to our windowless office in a rundown neighborhood of the city, sit down at the computer, and spend the next eight hours emailing, writing campaign plans, and trying to pull together the loose strands of activism I was seeing across East Asia. At certain points, I simply resorted to typing things like “Cambodia + environmental groups” into Google and seeing what showed up.

Little by little, a network began to emerge. One day in the spring of 2008, I received an email from a young Korean woman, Hyunjin Jeon, with a photo of her friend holding a big 350 sign in downtown Seoul. I was ecstatic and marched around our shared office space in San Francisco, making sure all the other tenants saw the photo. “Who's the Korean girl?” they asked. “I don't know!” I replied. “Isn't that amazing!”

Emails like Hyunjin's kept me going over the following months as I began to spend more and more time at the office. The day to day of building a campaign can feel like drudgery, and my eyes began to ache after hours of staring at the laptop. Yet, bit by bit, we began to receive more emails like Hyunjin's from places like Cameroon, China, Chile, and more. There was a buzz about 350; the wheels of the movement were beginning to turn. By December of 2008, after a year of building out our website and laying the groundwork with partner organizations, we announced plans for an International Day of Climate Action to take place October 24, 2009—just six weeks before the United Nations climate meetings in Copenhagen, when world leaders would meet to negotiate an international climate treaty.