Justin Haheem sent in this write-up about an event he helped organize Saturday:
Despite wind and rain Saturday afternoon, New Haven put itself on the map with its human “350” on the lower Green.
Almost 300 people came to participate in the action, which was one of 4,000 in 181 countries (out of 192, for anyone who’s counting) organized by a group called 350.org. It was billed as the International Day of Climate Action, to promote the need to bring atmospheric carbon dioxide down to 350 parts per million. THat is the level at which leading scientists say catastrophic climate change can be avoided. It’s currently at 387 ppm.
The event was both beautiful and distinctly positive — in many ways a new face for an environmental movement that has in past decades been stereotyped as antagonistic or ‘fringe.’ Saturday saw people whose entire lives have been devoted to environmental activism come together with folks for whom this is their first public action, and everyone in-between, in an environmentalism that is becoming increasingly more mainstream.
Organizers called the action Saturday as beginning, not the end, of an intense citizens’ push to convince world leaders to take the need for climate action seriously.