This is the second part of a climate train article detailing preparations and actions ahead of the People's Climate March in New York City on Sept. 21. The first part of the article ran yesterday.

Organizers of the People's Climate March haven't been shy about their underlying intentions: using the September action in Manhattan as a platform on which to build an international environmental social movement unlike any previously seen.

While labor unions can rally around the theme of “green jobs,” many communities of faith are approaching climate change as a moral issue resulting from a corrupt economic system. In a phone interview, Sister Ayya Santussika Bhikkhuni, who helped organized the climate train that left from the Bay Area on Monday, said that despite the ambiguity of what "success" at the march might look like, the event will strengthen people's resolve to take meaningful action in addressing the crisis – even among America's boardrooms.

Because to really understand the People’s Climate March, one has to also consider the broader mobilization around climate that's already occurring in the halls of government and global corporate offices.

While the march on Sept. 21 is a cornerstone event for climate justice activists, it is also taking place two days before the UN Climate Summit and one day before the 6th annual Climate Week NYC, an initiative put forward by the corporate-backed Climate Group. Rather than a climatic conclusion, the People’s Climate March is being seen more as a precursor – setting the stage for a media narrative around climate change that will play out in the 24-hour news cycle for the rest of the week.

The Climate Group is an international "NGO" whose goal, according to its website, is “a prosperous, low carbon future.” However, the group, which prides itself for bringing stakeholders to the table, has partnered with notorious polluters like Duke Energy, BP and the EN+ Group, a Russian firm that invests in coal and uranium mining. Rather than genuine climate justice advocates, the group functions more as an unofficial mouthpiece for corporate, profit-making efforts to tackle climate change.

In a recent press release Climate Week NYC announced a record 100 events confirmed for its conference. A quick survey of the event schedule revealed those events range from “Carbon Forum NYC” to “The World Conference of Indigenous Peoples,” “Rights of Nature and Systemic Change in Climate Solutions,” and the ”Interfaith Summit on Climate Change.” What's all this really mean?

The Carbon Forum NYC will be held at Morgan Stanley headquarters, where industry and state representatives will discuss – in a type of doublespeak all too familiar in their professions – the “mutual interests in using market based flexibilities in response to” the climate crisis, including President Obama’s recently announced Carbon Emissions Standards on power plants. Through forums like these, and more frankly titled discussions like “Corporations Leading Climate Resilience Around the World,” the Climate Group seeks to engineer media junkets where banks and corporations can argue that capitalism will solve the very existential problems it created.

There Are Other Alternatives

Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of the most esteemed English translators of the Pali Buddhist Cannon, as well as a board member of Buddhist Global Relief, recently wrote in Truthout, “The dominant political and economic elites claim that this system is beyond doubt or questioning, that it is as immutable as the laws of physics. They confront us with the maxim, ‘There is no alternative.’”

In his critique of the neoliberal, market-driven ideology that values all aspects of the world in terms of financial wealth, Ven. Bodhi continues, “It pushes indigenous peoples off their lands and treats labor as an abstract variable, reducing real human beings to figures in a database.” This “culture of death,” as Ven. Bodhi calls it, is directly attributable to the paradigm of corporate capitalism that objectifies the planet – and the life that has flourished on it – as “objects” to convert into financial wealth.

“To avoid civilizational collapse, we need not only new technologies to reduce carbon emissions but even more fundamentally, a new paradigm, a model for a culture of life that can replace the pernicious culture of death,” Ven. Bodhi concludes. “For our own sakes and for generations to come, we must bluntly repudiate the culture of death and embrace a new vision, a new economy, a new culture committed to the real enhancement of life.”

Not only faith leaders are offering a critique that questions the capitalist status quo and its ability to deal with climate change. Journalist Chris Hedges recently published an article in Truthdig titled, “The Last Gasp of Climate Change Liberals”, in which he writes that carbon emissions “will continue no matter how many police-approved marches are held.” Hedges argues that only through resistance to the capitalist status quo and our economic structures driving the continued rise in carbon emissions will humanity find the tools to confront climate change. “Resistance will mean physically disrupting the corporate machinery,” writes Hedges.

The People’s Climate March is not the only gathering of climate activists during this week's mobilization. On Friday prior to the march, activists will gather for the New York City Climate Convergence whose “objective is to build and strengthen an environmental movement that addresses the root causes of the climate crises; a social-economic system that values profits above people, planet and peace.” The group's website explains, “As the corporate captured UN proposes false solutions like carbon trading and sets meager greenhouse reduction targets, we will show the world what tackling global warming from the bottom up looks like.”

On Aug. 20, Rising Tide North America organizer Scott Parkin wrote in Counterpunch, “The liberal reform agenda of the environmental establishment continues to dominate the climate movement. Organizations sitting on millions of dollars in resources and thousands of staff are now engaged in a massive 'Get Out The Vote' style operation to turn out tens of thousands to marches before the September 23rd United Nations Climate Summit in New York.”

Parkin points to similar campaigns conducted before the 2009 Copenhagen Summit and thinks its futile to wait for the corporate state to reform itself. Instead he points to examples of grassroots resistance like the kind taking place in Utah to disrupt the first tar sands mine in the United States – a tactic he says might actually have a chance to succeed in disrupting the extraction of fossil fuels at their source.

“In each of these campaigns, bold and effective organizing against oil, gas and coal companies has created moments to stop egregious practices and projects at the points of destruction only to be abandoned or ignored by the larger environmental establishment,” Parkin says.

And there are signs within the environmental establishment that critiques like his are being heard. Last year, the Sierra Club made news when it endorsed civil disobedience as a means of protesting the Keystone XL project at the White House – the first time in the Sierra Club’s 120-year history that it openly supported such an action. At the final mobilization meeting for the People’s Climate March last Wednesday, organizer Leslie Cagan said: “If the people at the UN are not ready to take action, they should move to the side, because the people will.”

Flooding Wall Street, Counting the Forces

On Sept. 14, I participated in a meeting of activists not far from the Mayday Space in Bushwick who were organizing a direct action called #FloodWallStreet. Consensus was reached by activists to organize the largest single act of civil disobedience in U.S. history around an environmental issue, explicitly critiquing consumer capitalism as the root cause of climate change. Rather than targeting a specific corporation or institution, the group concluded that the strategic objective of the action is to critique capitalism itself. The website for #FloodWallStreet states prominently: “Stop Capitalism. End the Climate Crisis.”

Many of the activists were veterans of Occupy Wall Street, and excitement was palpable as the meeting seamlessly broke out into working groups to facilitate a direct action whose message could counter the financial status quo narrative. #FloodWallStreet’s call to action reads: “Wearing blue to represent the sea that surrounds us, we rise to the steps of the NY Stock Exchange at 12:00 pm, flooding the area with our bodies in a massive sit-in – a collective act of nonviolent civil disobedience – to confront the system that both causes and profits from the crisis that is threatening humanity.”

Although much was made about NGOs like MoveOn.org co-opting the Occupy movement in the spring of 2012, it seems the opposite has now happened, as the radical politics of Occupy Wall Street organizers have been internalized in institutional groups. In a Mother Jones article about the 900 direct action trainings conducted across the country in spring 2012 as part of the “99% Spring,” titled “How Occupy Co-Opted MoveOn.org”, Sam Corbin, a veteran member of the OWS direct action working group, was quoted telling journalist Josh Harkinson: “When they said we want to talk about ‘people power’ and making people understand and be comfortable with direct action, they meant it. I am really proud to have been a part of it.”

Last year, Credo Action created waves in the activist community when it launched an online "Pledge of Resistance" for activists committed to “engage in acts of dignified, peaceful civil disobedience that could result in my arrest in order to send the message to President Obama and his administration that they must reject the Keystone XL pipeline.” Since its launch, the pledge has gotten over 95,000 signatures – and it's those activists that #FloodWallStreet organizers hope to mobilize next Monday, Sept. 22.

In addition to multiple non-violent direct action trainings that will take place in the week leading up to #FloodWallStreet, organizers have mobilized a large on-the-ground outreach campaign in NYC consisting of dozens of volunteers flyering and preparing to facilitate the many meetings, forums and summits to take place during the next week. Organizers are launching an online campaign called “Flood the Net," during which thousands of participants are expected to flood social media and the Internet with public invitations to the action. The goal: for hundreds, and perhaps thousands, to risk arrest on Sept. 22 as they engage in non-violent civil disobedience to demand carbon reductions and aggressive solutions to climate change.

Last Chance to Avert a Dangerous Era

The most chilling implications of climate change are the destabilizing effects that extreme weather events present for humanity. During my recent visit to California over the summer, evidence of the state's historic three-year drought was widely visible in the many dry stream beds and low reservoirs I encountered while bicycling in both the north and the south.

For the People’s Climate Train, organizers have planned workshops and teach-ins to educate participants about numerous frontline climate campaigns taking place across the U.S. Beneath the billowing smoke stacks of the refineries of Richmond, Calif., organizers taught participants about increased incidences of asthma and other health issues that occur in communities of color because of pollution. As the train passes within 100 miles of the first tar sands mine on the East Tavaputs Plateau of Utah, organizers intend to share firsthand accounts of the resistance movement occurring in the region as a part of the Utah Tar Sands Resistance.

In Colorado, organizers will focus on the fracking boom happening in eastern Colorado, unraveling the myth that natural gas is in fact a “clean energy” and shining a light on the increased cases of illness that many communities in the region are facing in the wake of the recent fracking boom. In Nebraska, organizers will talk about the local Cowboy and Indian Alliance whose coalition is resisting the proposed northern leg of Keystone XL pipeline. The Lakeshore Limited train will take them along the shores of Lake Erie, where phosphorous fertilizer runoffs and warmer temperatures have exacerbated cyanobacteria blooms, causing the city of Toledo, Ohio, to stop residents from drinking the water during two days in August. The People's Climate Train teach-ins will be broadcast via livestream to reach Internet audiences across the world.

Life on the train includes morning meditations and community building activities like art projects, spoken word and music sessions. Ven. Santussika wrote, “Group practice certainly does have power. I’ve seen chaotic, bickering groups settle into sane collectives capable of productive discussion and forward movement due to meditating together even for a short session. Here we have a group that already shares a strong intention. I expect that meditating together will bring greater cohesion.”

During my journey several weeks ago on the same route being taken by the People's Climate Train, I was delayed multiple times not only by extreme weather events, such as the flooding I encountered in Iowa, but also by flat bed freight trains carrying coal and oil tankers transporting crude to be refined. Traveling by rail in the United States, where commercial freight has precedence over passenger trains, is a practice in patience. Giving up the convenience of air travel for less carbon intensive travel by rail presents challenges and demands mindfulness. “From my perspective as a Buddhist nun, I appreciate the meaning and importance of pilgrimage,” Ven. Suntussika wrote. “The journey is part of the experience, an opportunity to build on the power of our intention...[and] to build the strength of character and unwavering intention that we need for the climate movement.”

We find ourselves today at a crossroads, where continued collective inaction by humanity to temper our impulses and the greed that drives us to over-consume, will ensure an environment of unprecedented hardship for communities and the planet. But great suffering creates the opportunity for great enlightenment, presenting the opportunity to step back from the edge of the abyss and set human society on a path toward a truly liberal society. Although there may be disagreements among allies on the actions necessary to respond to the various forms of civilizational collapse, it is by collectively confronting the challenges that our intentions can start to manifest. We can bend the arc of history towards a more enlightened society, one which values life in all its forms. And it's in the actions of the many individuals participating this week where we will grow that future strength and counter the cultural pessimism that has told us we cannot change, or that it is already too late to do so.

Change is already upon us. In the climate, and in ourselves. Now, it's important we recognize that only together can humanity rise to the occasion and create the collective, positive break from the past – moving us toward reimagined economic, political and social systems organized around the higher aspiration of justice for all.

peoples-climate_0.jpg