Global warming knocking at your door

By Bill McKibben | March 20, 2007

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You can see it in ways large and small: President Bush, touring Latin America, talks less about new free trade agreements, suddenly not as popular either with our neighbors or with the new Democratic Congress. Meanwhile, local food is on the cover of Time magazine -- and on the menu, with italicized encomiums, on every high-end menu. (Farmers' markets, indeed, may be the fastest growing part of the food economy.)

If you take global warming seriously, for instance, the prospect of using 36 calories of energy to grow and transport one calorie of California lettuce east doesn't make much sense. Peak oil and climate change alone may mean that the economy will grow gradually less national and global, and more regional and local.
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We thought about a march on Washington, but we didn't think we could organize it (and the carbon emissions from all those buses!). So we hit on a local strategy: help people set up rallies in their communities, to engage their congressional representatives close to home and to highlight the local places they believe will be threatened by climate change.

We agreed on a minimal joint message: Congress should pledge to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, the kind of ambitious and aggressive target that may still do some good.

Instead of just the local demonstrations, we also pledged to link the actions together via the Web to produce, by the end of the day on April 14, a cascade of iconic images from around the country.
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The attractions of the local are obvious -- a town or a city neighborhood is intimate, efficient, human-scale. It's possible to imagine them enduring in a world where expensive oil and climate chaos are disrupting larger systems. But the drawback, in the past, has been that they're also parochial, cut off.

You had to leave Oxford, Miss., or Bremerton, Wash., or Abilene, Texas, to participate in the larger world. That's no longer true -- the few hundred people who will gather in each of those towns on April 14 to demand action on global warming, joining hundreds of thousands of others across the country, presage a future filled with interesting possibility.
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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/03/20/global_warming_knocking_at_your_door/

http://www.stepitup07.org/