Why the Climate March?

Actually, that's a silly question on this site. The Climate March is a heart cry from all of us who can feel the planet we inhabit being smothered by our species' excesses. So we march. National Peoples Climate March information is here. People's Climate Movement Bay Area information is here.

Any seasoned political observer can't help asking: why did we have a Science March last week and the Climate March this week? That both arise from congruent if not quite identical impulses seems obvious. Oh, I know, some of the scientists continue to hope that their discipline can exist above the political hurley-burley, but that's both faux-innocent nonsense and damn poor anthropology. So I did some cursory internet research and here's what I learned:

The Peoples Climate March aims to promote the broad truth that:

... climate change is as much a social issue as a scientific one. “We are a broad-based coalition that represents immigrants and workers and women and people of color and multi-issue community organizations,” [coordinator Paul Getsos] said.

Washington Post, April 21

Moreover, the Climate March was initiated without regard to who might be elected President. The call would have gone out just as certainly under Hillary Clinton as under Donald Trump. The struggle against soiling our own (and only) nest really is universal, as well as particular in every community and political context.

For those of us who have been trying to make our rulers do the right thing for decades, it is probably correct to think of the Peoples Climate March as the worthy successor to what felt like an endless parade of "Spring Mobes" -- fraught coalitions which demonstrated successively, spring after spring, against the Vietnam war, nuclear power and nuclear bombs, Reagan's wars in Central America, South African apartheid, Iraq War One, Iraq War Two,... In the spring when green shoots flourish, it's always time to push for justice and peace.