Together We Can Do Anything

By Elizabeth Saunders, Massachusetts Director - Follow our Boston office on Twitter (@CleanH2OMA) The People's Climate March was an incredibly powerful experience.  The Clean Water Action Boston team joined a bus organized by Alternatives for Community and Environment, the leading environmental justice organization in Boston, which organized dozens of youth leaders and others to travel together to the march. The march was equal parts protest/call to action and celebration.  Of course it was a protest against the lack of commitment from our political leaders to doing the hard work and taking the firm stances that are needed to end climate change.  And of course it was a call to action to United States and world leaders to do that work and take those stances this week in the UN Climate Summit. But equally importantly, it was a celebration of the coming together of more than 400,000 people from across the country, a celebration of the creativity, energy and hard work of those individuals, and a celebration of unity.  As we keep our noses to the grindstone, day in and day out, fighting the battles in our corners of the country, it can be too easy to forget that we are part of a huge movement of passionate people.  At the People's Climate March, that was impossible to forget. I carried a sign that said on one side "Cool Planet + Clean Water = Healthy People" and on the other side "Together we can do anything...(let's turn this ship around)."  Lots of people stopped me to take a picture of my sign, especially the "Together" side.  One of my favorite signs from the day read "Turn up the HOPE, not the heat." That there is hope and that we are all together in this are reminders that we all need in the face of terrifying statistics and bad news.  To me, that's what this march was all about. The other most important thing to me about the march is that it was led by indigenous people and those from front line communities.  It's so critical that this conversation be not just about ending climate change, but about simultaneously creating a just society in which there is no role for racism, classism or any other oppression.  We have to hold ourselves, as a movement and as a society, to those high standards. I look forward to working side by side with every one of those hundreds of thousands of people (and the hundreds of thousands who didn't make it to New York) for a just and healthy future.