The Walking Cure: Movement for Climate Action
Hello again, friends. I wrote a new post about reading books for this week. But something else has been on my mind these past few days. Images of Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic flooding in Appalachia sent me right back to August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Nearly 20 years later, I once again sent a small donation to hurricane victims and felt that old familiar helplessness to do more.
Then, I remembered one example of political action a year after Katrina. On a Lake Champlain swimming trip in August 2006, I noticed a flier for something billed as "The Road Less Traveled, Vermonters Walking Toward a Clean Energy Future.” A 2006 Labor Day weekend walk across Vermont led by writer and activist Bill McKibben, culminating in a Burlington rally demanding climate action. I got an assignment to file a quick report on the walk for Plenty, a new (and, it turned out, short-lived) environmental lifestyle magazine. I drove up from New York to get the story.
The editor who acquired the piece moved on suddenly just before I filed. The replacement editor wasn’t interested in the coverage, dubious that a walk in earthy, progressive Vermont mattered to environmentalism’s bigger story. Plenty sent me a decent kill fee. It was the start of a busy semester teaching college writing for me. I didn’t have time to find another outlet, let alone revise the piece. With some regret, I moved on from the story.
Plenty was wrong. The next spring, Bill McKibben and some Middlebury students built on the success of the 2006 Labor Day march. They coordinated 1,400 simultaneous demonstrations in all 50 states. As McKibben later wrote, “Then we decided to do the same thing on a global scale and formed the nonprofit 350.org. Our first worldwide day of action, in fall 2009, featured 5,200 rallies over the same weekend in 181 countries.”
The 2006 Vermont Labor Day walk did inspire something larger. And nearly two decades later, the walk still demonstrates one way a group of friends and neighbors can join forces with other concerned parties, moving beyond horror-struck-on-the-sofa helplessness to accomplish something useful.
My post about reading will hold until next week. Today, here’s my unpublished report on that climate change walk as filed in early September 2006. It was never edited.
Right now, millions of people are watching the rising death toll in Appalachia and asking, once again, “What can I do?” This week, it’s worth revisiting what one group of Vermont folks did after Katrina. It’s worth emphasizing that local political organizing can grow into something broader, even global. It’s worth remembering how any movement in the right direction can make a difference.
The Walking Cure: Vermont’s Movement For Climate Action Over Labor Day Weekend (September 2006)
On the Thursday before Labor Day, about 250 people gathered near Robert Frost’s writing cabin in Ripton, Vermont. The running shoe and khaki shorts-clad crew might have been holding a family reunion picnic in the Green Mountains on this perfect late-summer day.
But to one side was a table where some were busily making signs. Signs like “Skiers to Save the Maples,” “Will Work for Planet Earth,” or my favorite, “Puck Global Warming: Hockey Players against Climate Change.“
It was the launch of a five-day, 49-mile walk through the Champlain Valley to Burlington for a Labor Day rally about global warming. Bill McKibben was behind the idea. He’s a Middlebury College scholar-in-residence and writer whose 1989 book, The End of Nature, first presented global warming to a popular audience.
The lanky local hero stepped up to a microphone placed within a grove of aspen, birch, and blue spruce pine. It couldn’t have been more picturesque.
“You probably don’t feel very political,” McKibben said. "But this could end being the largest single demonstration yet in this country against global warming.”
McKibben pointed to a large placard with a pledge that walkers would ask Vermont’s political candidates to sign at the walk’s end in Burlington. It promised to support retiring Senator Jim Jeffords’ bill to reduce global warming 80 percent by 2050, calling for increased renewable energy and mileage standards. As I spoke with members of the crowd, I got the general sense that many had long practiced green-friendly lifestyles but were newer to political action.
Middlebury College English professor John Elder emerged in a bright orange leafy headdress and brown sheet, as if costumed for an EarthFirst toga party. Elder somehow managed a festive gravitas as he read Frost’s “The Road Less Traveled,” duly citing Rachel Carson’s previous use of the poem in her environmental classic Silent Spring.
Elder’s maple tree get-up was a rare example of exhibitionism in the crowd. It was largely a sturdy, sensible-looking group of Vermonters who set off single-file against traffic down a steep, winding mountain road to Middlebury. Drivers didn’t see a special interest group or the environmental movement’s usual suspects. They saw their friends and neighbors.
In the summer, Vermont’s round Green Mountains offer verdant vistas, living picture book illustrations. Yet it’s in winter that Vermont truly comes into its own, providing some of our most iconic New England holiday images and thriving as a winter sports playground. Much of Vermont’s economic and cultural life depends on long, cold winters. Now, the state's ski resorts are experiencing 15 percent less snow than they did in the 1950s and sugar makers are tapping their maple trees as early as February, which is sending the industry north. Since concern for climate change extends across Vermont’s political spectrum, it’s a good place to build a mainstream movement, and that’s what this Labor Day walk represented.
The walk’s greatest strength, though, may have been its combined aesthetic and political mission, the radical luxuriousness of simply taking time for a long, beautiful walk. As they strode through lush Champlain Valley farmland, walkers settled into another simple pleasure: conversation. There’s little pressure to cut to the chase on an eight-hour trek. Topics ranged from the prosaic—the best sunscreen—to a full-out history of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster.
“It’s like a walking seminar,” John Elder enthused.
On day two, I worked my way up the line to Rebecca Sobel, who organized McKibben’s idea into a well-ordered event. Sobel is the Vermont representative for Greenpeace’s political initiative “Project Hot Seat.”
“Global Warming is the issue of our time,” she told me. “It can unify everybody more than anything else. Hot Seat is about making sure it’s the pillar issue in the upcoming election.”
Our conversation was interrupted when a herd of 50 or so horses thundered across a pasture in our direction. The animals’ shining coats flashed as many shades of brown as there were hues of green in the fields and mountains behind them.
“In Vermont, you can definitely use natural beauty as a weapon in this fight against global warming,” Sobel noted.
We stopped talking for a while, savoring the moment. Walkers were out to make a point; they were also out for sheer enjoyment. It wasn’t exactly 1960s “Make Love Not War” hedonism, but on this walk, a principled stance didn't preclude the pleasure principle.
The symbolic start from Frost’s Ripton hills hangout had an achingly real side effect: walking downhill on pavement was hard on hips, shins, and feet. Walkers compared aches and pains. After two days on bucolic backroads, the walk moved to the noisy thoroughfare of Route 7. The highway trudge sacrificed beauty but gave walkers greater visibility. They were pleased to note that around 90% of passing drivers honked and waved in support. Still, the pilgrims seemed weary by Sunday morning—and a little disheartened when the sky threatened rain.
“I think we’re all ready for some spiritual uplift,” Rebecca Sobel said. She gestured at Charlotte’s Congregational Church, where McKibben would give a sermon, temporarily formalizing his role as minister to this wandering flock.
Many in the regular congregation welcomed the activist invasion—the sober white-bearded organist even marked the occasion with a few extra trills in his processional hymn.
John Elder read from Chapter 38 in the Book of Job, where God delivers a taunt in response to Job’s laments. "Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain. . . “ When McKibben took the pulpit, he called this passage “the first piece of nature writing in the Western tradition.” The message: It’s God’s world. We just live in it—and are thus morally obligated to take care of it. This stewardship is behind the “Creation Care” movement, the evangelical environmentalism that’s been gaining force since the 2002 "What would Jesus drive?" campaign.
“Along with the energy revolution, we also need social change about the way we perceive the world and our communities,” walk co-organizer Will Bates said after the service, his good spirits clearly restored by McKibben’s sermon. “Churches can provide a model. And look at what the black churches did for the civil rights movement.”
Right there in front of us, the Charlotte congregation was swelling the walk’s numbers and reviving its momentum. As churchgoers joined the group, climate change didn’t look anything like a liberal concern. It looked like a human concern.
The walk’s final stretch on Labor Day brought out a lot of Burlington hippies: Caucasian dreadlocks, hackeysacks, and even a small group singalong to “House of the Rising Sun.” It also brought Vermont Representative Bernie Sanders to the outskirts of Burlington, where he joined the walk, stoked by the display of homegrown activism. The march was 1000 strong and a mile long when it reached Burlington’s Battery Park in the mid-afternoon.
At the rally, McKibben addressed the crowd from bandshell framed by Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks beyond it.
“This is like a TV game show,” McKibben said, dramatizing the moment. “Because we don’t know if these political candidates will sign the pledge.”
Some suspense did mark the appearances of Republican candidates Richard Tarrant and Martha Rainville, but in the end all eight candidates signed the pledge. The walk made climate change a first-tier issue in the upcoming election.
“We need to make fixing climate change as politically sexy as putting a man on the moon,” Bill Clinton said recently. The walk achieved that aim locally and called for Vermont’s candidates to enact it nationally, where it could count even more.
Could this walk also serve as a model for a mainstream mass movement, as its organizers hoped?
The earthy Vermont mainstream is not the American mainstream. A long group walk to many other U.S. cities would of course be far less pleasant, if not impossible. Still, all climate change activists could learn something from the event’s successful integration of a local religious base and other communities into their movement. Above all, the weekend demonstrated the old-fashioned, transformative pleasures of walking for a good cause.
“The sense of doing something physical is important,” John Elder observed. “Global climate change is daunting. Moving makes it less so.”
Thank you for this article. I’m off to walk the dog. He says thank you too.
Yesterday I got a message from Michael Jefry Stevens, a jazz pianist and composer I have supported through Bandcamp, who recently released a beautiful solo album of standards. He and his wife live on a mountain in North Carolina. He wrote to say they were "still alive" and have food and shelter.. He wrote:
"I was supposed to fly to Europe this past Monday for my first European concert tour since Covid. Obviously, I was not able to trave lanywhere. To my European friends and promoters: I am so sorry I will not be performing at your venues, but it was literally IMPOSSIBLE for me to leave my driveway. There were trees down everywhere and the driveway itself was obliterated. It did not exist anymore. Instead, there was a 5 foot deep trench that was un-passable. "