The “People’s Climate Movement – Marching for Climate, Jobs, and Justice”is pushing out a powerful new wave of social justice and environmental activism that will swell high this weekend in Washington, D.C., with a massive march to surround the White House and demand action on climate change. Sister marches will take place in hundreds of American cities and around the world.
The local manifestation of this new wave is a diverse group of Baltimore social and environmental justice organizations, artists, and members of various communities of faith – to name a few – who have been meeting under the banner of the Baltimore People’s Climate Movement.
Whatever happens this weekend, it is only the beginning of something new in Baltimore and in America as other local communities and tribes rise up against outrages of a political system turned deadly and toxic, threatening and shortening lives now, and leading toward climate catastrophe.
The name of the organization behind this new wave and its signature event this weekend, says it plainly. This is a movement, not just a one-time march.
This is a movement about demanding decisive action on climate change, yes; but it is much more than just about climate change. This movement is about the social and political climate of injustices that have brought upon us not only escalating climate change (as the powerful few have dominated our planet with short-term grabs for profits built around a fossil-fueled economy), but many other attendant injustices.
So, yes, this movement is about the need for clean energy, but it is also about cleaning up and overcoming the environmental injustices that people experience in the here-and-now of Baltimore City, County and the Chesapeake Bay region. These include daily violence, mass incarceration, air pollution from incinerators, dangerous dirty oil trains rolling through the city, transit systems bypassing poor communities or not built at all, joblessness and inadequate wages, racism, and the desperate need for a just transition away from dirty energy jobs to a clean energy future where people are trained in jobs that yield a living wage.
All these ills can only by overcome by building a just society across racial and economic lines that divide us. This is the whole package of a new movement, the People’s Climate Movement, carried on the feet of every marcher and their personal story.
This march is about students at UMBC, Towson State, Morgan State and Loyola University acting to secure their futures and sustain the habitability of our planet.
It is about the marchers with children suffering from asthma in Baltimore City where asthma is the #1 cause of children missing school; or a marcher who suffers COPD from a childhood lived in Baltimore neighborhoods filled with poor air quality and toxic materials. In this movement the trash incinerator is an environmental injustice, not clean energy.
In this movement climate change is understood as having its greatest and first negative impacts on the poor and marginalized, because those who march on Saturday experience that in our polluted and falling-apart neighborhoods, where 30,000 empty houses and 2,500 homeless people coexist.
In this movement are 40 members of one of Baltimore’s oldest churches, the First Unitarian Universalist, acting on their mission of “Building a Better Baltimore,” in solidarity with other faith groups and community-based organizations who will be marching. It is other faith communities like the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation filling it bus to express Jewish values of healing the world.
For Baltimore area residents this about planting seeds of change and building lasting relationships and coalitions that will sprout into and yield new climate of justice across the neighborhoods of the city and in the halls of education from grade schools to universities, and new businesses.
The march is only a beginning. The Baltimore People’s Climate Movement is already planning its follow-up meetings to continue the work. In a real sense these follow-up meetings are the true excitement in the air, to be continued in the years ahead, pushing that wave of justice forward.
Written by Stephen Cleghorn with Baltimore's First Unitarian Universalist Church & the Baltimore Peoples Climate Movement
Find out more about the Baltimore Peoples Climate Movement at http://bit.ly/pcmbalt
Follow the Baltimore Peoples Climate Movement on Facebook: www.facebook.com/BaltimorePCM