Thirty-two Diné Political ProgressorBy defining our goal more clearly—by making it seem more manageable and less remote—we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it.
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
I HEARD THE RALLY BEFORE I SAW IT. As I walked around the corner into Times Square with my colleague Jon, I instantly recognized the beat of Jay-Z's “Empire State of Mind,” which we'd been listening to on repeat for the past week. Fists pumping in the air, our pace quickened, and our eyes yearned to see the results of more than a year of organizing. Until there they were: photo after photo of the day's thousands of climate rallies across the planet, streaming across the big screens of Times Square.
A photo of hundreds of schoolchildren in the Philippines preceded a picture of people forming a giant 350 in front of the Sydney Opera House. They were followed by another picture of a rally in Ghana, then Mexico, then the United States. For one day, those big screens that normally showed vodka and Hummer ads were displaying the vibrant, raucous, and powerful birth of the global climate movement.
The photos spinning across the screens at Times Square on that day, October 24, 2009, were part of the 350 International Day of Climate Action, which I helped lead and coordinate. The day synchronized more than 5,200 events in more than 180 countries. CNN later called it “the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.” At each event, whether in Beijing or Bujumbura, citizens made a strong call for climate action by displaying a simple but important number: 350. Currently, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 389 parts per million (ppm), while rising more than 2 ppm each year. But scientists now say the safe upper limit for our atmosphere should be 350 ppm. Essentially, this all means we are already in the danger zone.
The story of how a data point, as boring and unsexy as 350 ppm, somehow made it onto the screens of Times Square is intertwined with my own story of becoming a climate activist. As one of the founders of 350.org, the campaign behind the October 24 day of action, I've fought over, despised, grappled with, and learned to love that 350 number. For me, it's become a symbol of what I love about this movement: the creativity and passion of its organizers, the radical ambition of its goals, the diversity of its global network, and the sense of caring and community that permeate throughout.
That number was little more than a factoid, however, when six college friends, environmental author Bill McKibben, and I launched the 350.org campaign in early 2008. We'd been working together as climate activists since 2005, when a group of us got together over beers on Sunday nights at Middlebury College in Vermont and started to talk about how we could influence the national dialogue around climate change.
What started as a weekly meeting soon took over most of my time. I grew up in a progressive family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent a lot of afternoons volunteering at soup kitchens and community groups in high school, but I'd never considered myself much of an activist. I'd always loved nature and the outdoors but had never been involved in efforts to protect them. Yet, there I was at college, scraping food scraps onto a giant scale to show students just how much we wasted in the dining halls, marching up to the state capitol in full hockey gear to demand that our governor protect winter pond hockey by slashing emissions, and taking an entire summer to help organize a national veggie oil bus tour called the “Road to Detroit” to push for cleaner cars. In 2006, our same group of friends helped organize a march across Vermont that turned out nearly five thousand people, practically a revolution for that small state.
The next year, my friends and I ran our first major campaign, Step It Up, which caught like wildfire across the United States and culminated on April 4, 2007, with more than fourteen hundred events in all fifty states— the largest day of environmental demonstrations in a generation. I spent the final day of the campaign in a cramped office (more like a closet) that the League of Conservation Voters had lent us in their Washington, DC, office. I'd convinced all my professors to give me the week off from classes, and as I called event organizers to connect them with media outlets, I did my best to try to forget all the work that was piling up back at school. Watching the hundreds of photographs from around the country stream onto our website that afternoon was well worth the all-nighters I had to pull back at school to catch up.
Step It Up was a big success, but I knew it wasn't enough. After all, they called it “global” warming for a reason. So, in late 2007, our team began exploring the idea of an international campaign. About the same time, Dr. James Hansen, one of the world's top climate scientists, published a paper that hit climate science like a “mind bomb.” It showed that humanity needed to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from its current 389 parts per million to no more than 350 ppm in order to “preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” Those were strong words for a scientist. But Bill McKibben, who'd known Dr. Hansen since the late 1980s, seized on the 350 target as the symbol for our new campaign.
I was a bit more skeptical. Parts per million? Give me a break. Who's going to get that? Yet the more we discussed it, the more we all warmed up to our strange new symbol. After all, Arabic numerals are one of the few universally recognized symbols, making 350 mean the same thing in Cantonese as it did in English. It would become the ultimate global target: a clear benchmark that boiled what we needed to do to stop global warming down to three simple digits. It was a silver lining in a long and gloomy fight. And it was enough to start building a movement.
Over the following months, I settled into my new job as a full-time global climate activist with the beginning of 350.org. Since there were seven of us on the team, we did the only logical thing we could think of: divide up the different continents and get to work. I picked East Asia and, in our usual organizing style, began to email everyone I could possibly think of who was connected to environmental issues in the region. Each day, I'd bike from my apartment in San Francisco to our windowless office in a rundown neighborhood of the city, sit down at the computer, and spend the next eight hours emailing, writing campaign plans, and trying to pull together the loose strands of activism I was seeing across East Asia. At certain points, I simply resorted to typing things like “Cambodia + environmental groups” into Google and seeing what showed up.
Little by little, a network began to emerge. One day in the spring of 2008, I received an email from a young Korean woman, Hyunjin Jeon, with a photo of her friend holding a big 350 sign in downtown Seoul. I was ecstatic and marched around our shared office space in San Francisco, making sure all the other tenants saw the photo. “Who's the Korean girl?” they asked. “I don't know!” I replied. “Isn't that amazing!”
Emails like Hyunjin's kept me going over the following months as I began to spend more and more time at the office. The day to day of building a campaign can feel like drudgery, and my eyes began to ache after hours of staring at the laptop. Yet, bit by bit, we began to receive more emails like Hyunjin's from places like Cameroon, China, Chile, and more. There was a buzz about 350; the wheels of the movement were beginning to turn. By December of 2008, after a year of building out our website and laying the groundwork with partner organizations, we announced plans for an International Day of Climate Action to take place October 24, 2009—just six weeks before the United Nations climate meetings in Copenhagen, when world leaders would meet to negotiate an international climate treaty.
Copenhagen helped focus public attention on climate as an international issue, and as the meetings approached, more and more people turned to 350.org as a way to do something about the issue. As usual, we welcomed everyone who wanted to chip in—other than corporations, which we couldn't ensure wouldn't just use our events for their own personal greenwash. But otherwise, we were confident that a diversity of partners would bring the type of creativity and energy we knew a successful campaign needed. Soon, artists and athletes were on board; churches, mosques, and temples were planning events; and students, always a strong base for us, were organizing alongside grandparents. We adopted the informal slogan “Just say yes!” and did our best to remain as transparent and responsive as possible, even as our email inbox began to reach the breaking point.
I was reminded every day in the office that our campaign wouldn't be possible without the new online tools that allowed us to communicate with people around the world. I often found myself in San Francisco G-Chatting with an organizer in Beijing while on a Skype call with a volunteer in Malaysia and editing a Google Doc with partners in Vietnam, while telling everyone about it on Twitter. One day, I tracked down a guy from Brunei on Facebook who seemed interested in climate change and told him about 350, and a few days later, he sent me back a link to a 350.org Brunei Facebook group with more than three thousand members. I was thrilled but mostly stunned that no one had contacted him before. Despite the increasing prevalence of the Internet in our everyday lives, I think many organizations or campaigns still haven't grasped its full potential.
At the same time, I knew that online organizing wasn't enough. For one thing, even the Internet doesn't reach everywhere, and even when an email can get through, a face-to-face interaction is still preferable. So, tapping into some funding from a number of foundations that were willing to take a risk on our campaign, I took a few trips to Asia to try to track down potential partners in person. On my first trip to China, I met up with the Green Long March, a student conservation movement. We first met in Beijing, but the organizers invited me to join one of the ten marches across the country that they were holding that summer. I eagerly accepted and joined a group of students for a few days outside of Guangzhou. Watching student discuss climate change and other environmental challenges with local townspeople we met was a revelatory experience for me. I'd been talking for months about how people “all around the world” were taking action to fight climate change, but the phrase didn't really hit home until I was halfway across the planet.
On another trip, I spent three weeks traveling through Southeast Asia after attending a climate meeting in Bangkok. In Northern Thailand, I spoke with a monk I met outside a temple about Buddhism and protecting the environment. An hour later, he pledged to organize an event for October 24. In Laos, I tracked down the one environmental reporter in the country at the Vientiane Times, and we shared ideas about different storylines and articles he was working on. I squeezed in five meetings a day in Phnom Penh by hiring a motorcycle driver for ten dollars and zipping from meeting to meeting on the back of his bike, clutching my pamphlets. In Hanoi, I met up with ten Vietnamese journalists who thought that I was Dr. James Hansen—I guess Jamie Henn looks similar enough in Vietnamese—but who were still willing to talk with me when I admitted I wasn't a NASA scientist, rather an organizer fresh out of college.
Contact by contact, meeting by meeting, a network began to take shape. I remember being exhausted in the end, sitting in the youth hostel in downtown Bangkok, dripping in sweat but with a big smile on my face as I watched new friends make banners and signs to take back to their home countries for October 24.
Along with organizing East Asia, I took on the role of communications director. As October 24 approached, I began to try to map out how we could leverage the day to make a real impact on the public imagination. Soon, we'd assembled a global communications team with members ranging from individuals like Landry Ninteretse, who had to move from internet café to internet café as the power failed in his home city of Bujumbura to keep sending press releases, to a cheap public relations firm in India that committed to taking on the whole subcontinent. Linked together by Skype and Google Docs, our ragtag crew quickly prepared itself to try to channel the tidal wave of actions that we saw headed our way.
With a week left until October 24 and more than four thousand events registered across the planet, our core team of friends and some of our now thirty-five global staff convened on an office in downtown New York City for the final push. Those last few days felt like juggling a thousand balls at once, just trying to keep them moving through the air until the final moment when they were all supposed to fall into place. And as the pizza boxes began to stack higher and higher and our action counter skyrocketed up above five thousand rallies in more than 180 countries, we all began to get that tingling feeling that this whole crazy experiment might just work.
The day itself really proved to be the ultimate test for our open-source organizing. It was a nail-biting moment of waiting to see whether this would all end up as a failed dream or as a spectacular reality. Just forty-eight hours before October 24, I remember our South African media coordinator, Adam, was calling through to organizers on Skype to make sure they were actually doing their events. Two sisters of his were organizing an event. They'd come down to a workshop we'd run in South Africa before and gone back to Ethiopia fired up to organize, but we hadn't heard much from them since. Over a crackling Skype–to–cell phone connection, one of his sisters told Adam that not only were they having the event, but also that fifteen thousand schoolchildren would be in the streets the next day, marching for 350.
Adam and I nearly fell out of our chairs when we heard the news. Here was the event that could kick off the entire day! Ethiopia holding the first 350 event. Adam quickly asked them if they had a video camera and could send us footage of the rally. “Hmmm,” said the sister, “we hadn't thought about that.” Then Adam and I really fell on the ground. Here was our biggest event, and with just forty-eight hours to go, we had no way of getting the footage together to show the world. I think the technical public relations term for the situation was we're screwed.
Not ready to have our dreams shattered so quickly, Adam rushed to recharge his Skype account with more money and got busy tracking down someone to film the event. With only a few hours to go till the Ethiopian event would start, Adam ended up calling his father's friend's uncle's cousin's girlfriend—or something like that—and eventually tracked down a young woman. A woman who was not only near the 350 Ethiopian event, but also had a high-definition camera and would share the footage online. The next morning, the woman got on her bicycle, biked to the event, shot the footage, biked over to the one hotel in town that had high-speed Internet, bought an obligatory drink at the bar in order to use the connection, and uploaded the footage to our online video library. Sure enough, we got them out to the media a few hours later. Skype, plus cell phones, plus bicycles, plus cameras, plus Internet, plus laptops, (plus alcohol?) equals a new organizing frontier!
The images from Ethiopia were only some of the thousands of stunning photos that came across our laptops on October 24. I was captivated by images of thousands of people forming a giant sun in Mexico City, a human 350 with a peace symbol for the 0 in war-torn Serbia, and the video of climbers hanging with 350 banners off of Table Mountain in South Africa. I was driven to tears by the stories of the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh who held 350 signs at their sewing machines because they couldn't get off work to join an event and of the children in Indonesia who held banners that read NO ONE CARES ABOUT US, BUT WE CARE ABOUT THE PLANET outside of their orphanage. And I was inspired by the single young woman in Iraq who held a banner on her own because her friends were too afraid to join her; the citizens in El Salvador who marched through their tumultuous capital despite a ban on demonstrations of any kind; and the soldiers in Iraq who formed a 350 out of sandbags and told us they'd left their Hummers, walking on patrol to save gas.
In a single day, we'd put to rest the idea that the climate movement was just for rich, white people in Europe and North America. Instead, our photos were filled with young and old; poor and rich; black, brown, and white; faces and places that represented the entire planet.
Those were also the faces that made it onto front pages and newscasts around the world. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of organizers around the world, 350.org hit the media jackpot on October 24, making it into nearly every major international news outlet and becoming the most popular story on Google News of the day—meaning it was the most covered event in the world.
_________
OVER THE COURSE OF THE TWENTY-FIVE HOURS I was awake around October 24, I must have talked with one hundred reporters, doing my final interview with Radio Australia at two in the morning after the big day had finally come to a close in New York. After I hung up the phone, I sat for a while in the darkness of our rented Manhattan apartment where the rest of our team was asleep on their desks. I just stared into the blackness, exhausted and fulfilled, seeing image after image from the day in my mind. In that moment, I felt truly connected as a movement, as if every single person who took part in the day was reaching out from their photos, reminding me that we're all in this together.
Six weeks later, our team at 350.org brought all those photographs and stories (and about fifty youth organizers from the global South) to the historic UN climate meetings in Copenhagen, Denmark. Our goal was to bring the full force of this growing movement to bear on our political leaders and push them to create a fair, ambitious, and legally binding climate treaty that could take the world back to 350 ppm carbon dioxide. From the outset, I knew this was near impossible: two weeks of meetings weren't going to suddenly convince the United States to take on ambitious policies or heal the divides between rich and poor countries. Nevertheless, I was hopeful. Copenhagen was a chance for the world, and our movement, to come together and chart a new course that at least pointed towards a sustainable and just future.
Sadly, Copenhagen proved to be a disappointment. I remember standing outside the AP Television room on the Saturday before the final weeks of negotiations and watching images of protestors being beaten by police outside the convention center. Stunning as the pictures were, I couldn't help but feel that the real crime was taking place inside, where negotiators from developed countries continued to block substantial progress on a strong treaty. Even though 117 countries adopted the 350 ppm target, they were, in a sense, the wrong 117—the poor and most vulnerable nations, not the rich and addicted ones.
Copenhagen didn't produce the treaty we desperately need, but it did strengthen our movement. Organizers and activists from around the world had the chance to work, celebrate, and protest together. As the meetings ended in failure, youth from around the world made a video repeating the phrase You're not done yet. And neither are we, in different languages. It was a message that I'd take home with me.
So, as I write this in the spring of 2010, I'm back to emailing everyone I know and helping get another campaign off the ground. On October 10, 2010, 350.org hosted a Global Work Party, with actions in thousands of places around the world. Folks put up solar panels, dug community gardens, and laid out bike paths. Not because we think we'll solve climate change one bike path at a time—we won't. But because we want to send a strong message to our leaders: If we can get to work, so can you. If we can climb on the roof of the school and hammer in a solar panel, you can climb to the floor of the Senate or Parliament and pass a strong new climate policy.
Each new event for October 10 that I heard about was like a jolt of energy. Students in Malaysia installed homemade wind turbines. Across the United States, communities planned to retrofit schools and low-income homes. In Ghana, one town planted 350 trees. For me, it's proof that our movement is still strong and we're still growing. That even on the days when I'm feeling tired or hopeless about the state of the world, there's someone else out there who's also working hard to make a difference. Because now, we've got a movement.
Jamie Henn is the communications and East Asia director for 350.org. He continues to help lead 350.org's innovative efforts to use the web to connect a grassroots climate movement around the world.
Thirty-two Diné Political Progressor
PHOTO BY CY WAGONER