Blog post

21st September: Climate action in New York and across the globe – free Verso ebook

Mark Martin11 September 2014

Summer was mellow in Gotham, and now the New York fall is fit to melt a poet’s heart. It’s all mists and mellow fruitfulness. The clement weather could almost make city dwellers forget the dire state of our global environment. But, as we know, weather and climate are very different matters. Since the days when sonnets did the work Tinder does now, it’s been true that sometimes too bright the eye of heaven shines; just as often is his gold complexion dimmed. The weather’s like that. It goes up and down. But the changing climate is a matter of steady deterioration, and the eye of heaven is going to burn your backside to the bone if you don’t get up off your fat one and make a difference.

September 21, 2014, is a GLOBAL DAY OF CLIMATE ACTION, and the epicenter is NEW YORK.

Tell your friends; tell your enemies; tell your enemy’s enemy, regardless of his questionable status as your friend; tell your family; tell the Adam’s family; don’t tell your partner – pretend your partner told you, and then feign reluctance because you know how determined that will make him/her that you both attend and get there when the clubs are emptying and the lark’s still making coffee; don’t go tell it on the mountain—try the city:

On Saturday, September 21, United Nations delegates will converge on Manhattan to prepare for next year’s climate conference in Paris. We need to make them understand that the world is watching and will not stand for inaction.

To keep you all focused on the march and what it means, Verso is giving away free ebooks of I’m With the Bears: Stories from a Damaged Planet, featuring fiction by David Mitchell and T. C. Boyle, among others, and an introduction by Bill McKibben.


Here are a few illustrative numbers from organizers 350.org:

50: US states that will be represented at the march.

374Buses and trains currently listed online for travel to New York City for the march.

26: City blocks the NYPD has reserved for us to assemble in before the march. That’s a lot of room for us to fill.

1100+: the number of community, labor, environmental justice, faith and progressive groups who have endorsed the march. More join every day.

28: Different religious faiths and denominations represented in that list of endorsing organizations.

20: The minimum number of marching bands we’re expecting, to make sure we are a movement that dances as well as marches.

300+: The number of college campuses where students are mobilizing to come to New York.

1500: Actions planned worldwide for the weekend of Sept. 20th and 21st, in 130 countries.

40,000: The number of people at the biggest US climate march to date. (Last year's Forward on Climate march in DC). I'm confident we can do much bigger on the 21st.

401 parts per million: The peak concentration of carbon in the atmosphere measured by the world’s leading scientists this spring—higher than any time in human history.

0: The amount of progress we'll make if we stay home. There's no guarantee this will work. The only thing that’s for sure is if we stay home, nothing will change—except the climate.

And if some reactionary doubter starts to argue that this is all a big commie fuss about nothing, direct this person to the site of that famous source of far-out radical conspiracy theories NASA. On its website, you can check the planet’s vital signs. Mother Earth is not looking too good. No number of facetious allusions to famous verse can make that funny.