OntheWilderSide

We invited Bill McKibben, global warming activist and longtime YES! friend and contributor, to talk about Step It Up 2007: a call for action on climate change.

Over 1000 middle-school
students spell out ‘Step It Up’
in Park City, Utah.
Aerial Art: John Quigley
Photo: Chris Pilaro/Working Films

Dear Reader,

Sometimes you just have to act, even if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.

In early January, seven of us—me and six newly minted college graduates earning $100 a week—set up a website called StepItUp07.org. We asked people across the country to organize rallies against global warming on April 14, and promised to link them together via the web.

We thought that maybe, if we were lucky, we might be able to organize a hundred of these rallies. Today as I’m writing these words we passed the thousand-rally mark—this will be the first day of National Climate Action. Not because we’re great organizers, but because people are suddenly, finally, ready to act. We have rallies scheduled in every state of the union, and most cities and big towns. There will be rallies on the levees in New Orleans, on top of the melting glaciers on Mt Rainier, even underwater on the endangered coral reefs of the Florida Keys.

Please go to the website and figure out where in your neighborhood you can join the largest grassroots environmental protest since Earth Day 1970. We’re asking Congress to cut carbon 80%—or more—by 2050. And then join us that evening for a webcast to watch the cascade of images pouring in from around the country. We’re all taking action together—and it’s finally starting to work!

Thanks so much for your leadership,
Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, Wandering Home, and the forthcoming Deep Economy, has written for YES! Magazine on climate change. See his articles online.

From the YES! archives: Alisa Gravitz on 12 Steps We Can Take to Stop Climate Change, and going further back, our issues on Changing the Climate, and Can We Live Without Oil?

Locally on this Blog see: Global Warming Solutions with Gordian Raacke (video)                                                               Long Island Offshore Windmills (Babylon Green gathering)

Filed under: Action Alert!, activism, Anti-War, Ecology, Global Warming, Green Party Websites, Our Favorite Radio Stations, Political Websites, reform, US Politics Tagged: | book of the month