Hope and Glory

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, published in 1989, the first book for a general audience on climate change. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, his forthcoming book is titled Deep Economy. He's participating in a five-day walk calling for action to fight global warming -- From the Road Less Traveled: Vermonters Walking Toward a Clean Energy Future.

No matter what any organizer -- even a pretend one like me -- says, the greatest fear is always numbers. What if you call a rally and no one comes?

Today, by early in the morning, it was clear that wasn't going to be a problem. By the time we headed out of Shelburne Farms toward Burlington, our line numbered over 500. Over the next 10 miles we added hundreds more, the line stretching half a mile along the shoulder of the highway as we snaked past the car dealerships and burger joints on the southern edge of the state's largest city. When we finally got to the rally site on the Lake Champlain waterfront, there were more than a thousand people protesting global warming -- the largest political rally in the state in recent memory, and perhaps the largest demonstration against climate change yet in the country.

And the numbers mattered. We weren't sure till the last minute exactly which politicians would appear, but as word spread over the five days of the march that it was a powerful success, the promises from the various camps grew firmer and firmer. By the time we got to the rally, all the federal candidates were waiting, and one by one they took the stage.

But not, crucially, until we explained the terms of the deal. We didn't want their vague expressions of concern and promises of action -- we wanted their signatures on the giant global-warming pledge we'd written based on the Jeffords-Waxman legislation. As each came on stage for their allotted three minutes, Schuyler Klein -- the youngest of the walkers who had managed the whole 50 miles -- handed them a giant Sharpie and asked them to sign. Bernie Sanders -- our sitting congressional representative, now running for Senate -- was first; no surprise that he signed in a flowing scrawl and then brought the walkers to their tired feet by promising to reintroduce the Jeffords bill on his first day as a senator. But he was followed by the Republican candidate, Rich Tarrant, a gazillionaire who's been running such a negative campaign that one local columnist has started calling him Tarrantula. He signed, he pledged his fealty, and the crowd applauded with real warmth.

The congressional candidates came next. Again, Peter Welch was no great surprise. The Democratic candidate has championed renewable-energy legislation as president of the state Senate; he's made global warming a centerpiece of his campaign. Martha Rainville, his GOP opponent, came next. Two months ago, early in her campaign, she'd said it wasn't clear if humans were even causing global warming and called for more research; today, driven by the obvious passion in the state, she marched right over, grabbed the pen, and inked her signature.

With that, all the candidates for the state's federal offices had signed on to a plan for halting global warming far more radical than anything else proposed in Congress. We had managed to almost literally raise the bar in Vermont politics to the point where anyone wishing to be taken seriously needs to champion an 85 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, the rapid phase-in of 40-mile-per-gallon cars, and a national plan to get 20 percent of our power from renewables by 2020. In other words, the same kind of plan that the European nations have endorsed. More to the point, we'd demonstrated that at least for Vermont voters this was not a second- or third-tier issue -- it was as crucial to getting elected as your position on jobs or the economy or all the things the political pros always call the real issues.

After that, there was nothing but singing and dancing -- Anais Mitchell, a local folksinger with a national following, led everyone in "This Land is Your Land," and John Elder, writer and professor, finished off with the same Frost poem that had launched the march, "The Road Not Taken."

And there were questions, too. Was this success unique to Vermont, or could it be replicated elsewhere? Already people from other states were talking about marches of their own in the coming year. My sense, from helping to organize this one, is that people are simply waiting for someone to give them an opportunity to demonstrate their despair and their hope. I know for me the sheer act of getting out and walking was cathartic -- and to see how many others came along was sheer bliss.

In almost 20 years of working on global warming, I've never had a day when I felt as hopeful.