By Zach Woogen
As Mahatma Ghandi once said, "You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no results."
With this in mind, students and teachers from Princeton Day School recently marched alongside 400,000 others to demand action, not words, about climate change. It was a day of global climate action, with over 2,000 events taking place worldwide. The event in New York City, that took place as world leaders gathered in the city for the United Nations Climate Summit, made history, exceeding the record for the largest climate march ever by nearly 300,000 people.
Senior Michael Kearney, who was among the PDS group at the march, said his favorite part of the march was that the march was attended by a diverse crowd of native Americans, elders, families, scientists, priests, labor unions and minority groups marching for climate action. Kearney added, "Everyone respected that people had different reasons for being there, but that everyone was marching towards a common goal."
The energy at the march was absolutely contagious. We could feel the intense passion from blocks away as people repeatedly chanted, "What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!" Among the many chants, my personal favorites were, "Hey Hey, Ho Ho. These fossil fuels have got to go!" and "The people, united, will never be defeated."
It is all too easy to believe that change can be made by pressing the "like" or the "share" button on Facebook from a computer or phone. However, real change begins when people take to the streets and show how much they care; there is no cyber-substitution for people marching, holding signs and losing their voices chanting. One image that resonated with me was an infant on her mother’s shoulders wearing a sign that simply read, "Dear adults, I can’t fix climate change. Please fix it for me."
Using the momentum from the march, PDS students hope to participate in our local movement encouraging divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Divestment, which — together with sanctions and boycotts — proved an effective strategy in helping to end apartheid in South Africa two decades ago, has become increasingly popular in recent years as a possible way to put pressure on the fossil fuel industry. Many PDS students hope our school might be the first high school to divest and set an example for independent schools everywhere. It is time to divest and to show the world that we can make action, not just words.
According to Fossil Free USA, "181 institutions and local governments and 656 individuals representing over $50 billion have pledged to divest to-date." A recent divestment pledge that drew a lot of media attention was that of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, established on the Standard Oil Fortune, which announced on the day after the march that it will divest $860 million. Earlier this year, Stanford University pledged to divest billions, leading the charge for many colleges and universities around the world.
Since we’ve successfully made history in the streets, it’s time for those in power to follow up. The United Nations Climate Summit that took place in the wake of the march, was the first of a series of UN talks about climate change. At the summit, a poet from the Marshall Islands, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, performed a poem she wrote for her seven-month-old daughter, in which she promises to protect the child from the threat of climate change, which she says world leaders are ignoring.
President Obama spoke as well, stating that, "The alarm bells keep ringing, our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we don’t hear them, we must answer their call." The Climate March showed us that the people have spoken. They have taken to the streets in masses to demonstrate and to demand climate action. Now let’s make it happen.
Zach Woogen is a senior at Princeton Day School.
