Sunrising
Twelve Years
“Anyone on the B team? Anyone on the B team here?” We look around at each other, standing in black shirts and yellow lettering, spines straight and shoulders back. “No one on the B Team?” the leader asks. We shake our heads. “Good. Because once you get out of that elevator, you are already in the zone of arrest.”
We line up before the elevator, breathless from the long rush down the Congressional tunnels, all that speed walking with our signs smuggled in sleeves, coats, armpits. Inhale, exhale, glancing at the butter yellow light on the walls. The doors wheeze open.
There are too many of us to fit. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get the next one.” Ten more disappear on to the lift, and then it is just six of us waiting for the bell. The up arrow flickers on. Ready. I step across the crack, doors closing with a hiss behind me. We look at each other in the half-light.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Great.”
“Signs out.”
We unfurl the banners, blue envelopes with letters to the Democratic Party Leaders, yellow cloth and hand-stenciled words. The floor lurches, and we soar up.
It’s chaos beyond the doors. There are reporters with their tripods perched on scattered furniture, wires and microphones on the floor, hundreds of cops with beeping radios and belts thick with zip-tie handcuffs. At the end of the hall, our friends spill from Representative Hoyer’s office, holding their signs up before their chests. We Need the Green New Deal. Step up or Step Aside. They have been here for hours, occupying this office with their speeches and their singing and their words.
“If we do nothing in the next twelve years, it will be too late.” Ben stands in the center of the circle, protestors stomping into the marble floor. “The most recent climate reports state that we can reduce emissions by 45% by 2030, or hit a climate tipping point. Nations will go underwater, fires will spread even larger, and there will be droughts and famine and war. Or, we can change.” They’re stalling, Ben’s face lit up by cameras, Grace draped in yellow banners, Jordan with his long arms almost praying.
Ben raises a finger. “The Green New Deal mandates a transition to 100% renewable energy in the next twelve years. It provides carbon neutrality by 2030, a jobs guarantee, and investment in the poor communities of color who bear the worst of climate change. It is the only policy proposal that meets the demands set by justice and by science.” Jordan looks up over the cops and grins as our group steps from the elevator. “History is calling you,” Grace says, raising a fist. “Will you answer?” And as the last of our group emerges, they move to the next stage of the sit-in, raise the stakes.
Out of Hoyer’s office strides Grace, the woman I met on a hot cracked sidewalk in Philly while we shouted about the gas plants and the bomb trains and the air like thin wet dust over everything. The woman who told me on the phone that yes, it is a good idea to send dozens of panicked emails and blow off exams to lead a lobby delegation and drive nine hours to sit in Congress and sing. Grace walks arm in arm with two comrades towards the police, belting “Courage.”
Courage, my friend. You do not walk alone.We shuffle into a circle and filling the hallway, sit down. I tuck my jacket under me and hold my sign up, pass extra banners back. We will. We will. Walk with you. Walk with you. And bring your spirit home.
“I’m Lieutenant Adams, United States Capitol Police. You are in violation of DC code. If you do not cease and desist, you will be arrested. This is your first warning.” We sing louder, the words and harmony ringing off the plaster walls. Jordan stands and speaks of his experience living in Florida and watching communities respond to the devastation of climate change. He is still talking as the cops push the reporters and the media out of the way, usher them back behind the arrest line. I move forward, fill in beside Grace and Elise and Raven and Savannah and so many others I know from late night strategy calls and long drives with protest music blaring on the radio, from the night on the linoleum floor of the community arts collective, from last night in the church when the sound of a thousand stomping feet made the ground shake.
“Lieutenant Adams, United States Capitol Police. You are in violation of DC code. If you do not cease and desist, you will be arrested. This is your second warning.” “Brother join us,” someone calls from the back. “This is your planet too. This is all of our planet. No matter what uniform you wear.” We cheer.
“Okay, this is going to be your last warning.” The media has cleared out behind the wall of cops. I look around at the faces beside me. Elise determined and peaceful, lips pressed together. Grace is beaming, and bellowing from the bottom of her lungs, Raven frowning under their storm of curls. “All right. Lieutenant Adams, United States Capitol Police. You are in violation of DC code. You have not ceased and desisted. You are all under arrest.”
I’m sitting near the front, so I’m one of the first ones they take. But there are a few before me, standing one by one to the gruff “Hands behind your back.” Zip ties snapped around their wrists, they are walked out and down the hall. Courage, my friend.Some of them look at the ground as they are tied, others out across the crowd. One middle-aged woman stands with tears running all down her cheeks unwiped as she looks at us, face cracked open and shining. We sing back at her as she’s led away. Then it is my turn.
The zip ties are very tight. The officer turns me around and cinches them around my wrists, tucks my jacket under my arm. “Do you have anything on you?”
“No, sir.”
He pats my pockets and grips my arm. The ties pinch and twist my hands at a strange angle. I wonder if they will go numb. “I’m Officer Hall.” He steers me towards the elevator, nearly lifting me, but even so he is gentle, nothing like the Philly cops I’ve seen shove crowds with sticks and bicycles or pin protestors to walls.
There’s the elevator ride where Savannah and I smile at each other as if the cops do not exist. “How are you?” “Okay.” Then the walk down the long hallway to the door, over plush carpeting and down the steps to the curb. Our friends from the B Support Team are lined up behind the police barricade, cheering and waving. We pass the police tape and metal fences to the sectioned-off area beside the prison bus, and then it is just us and the police.
“Spread your legs. Look over there. I’m going to search you now. Do you have anything on you?”
“Just my inhaler.” The search seems to take hours. He pats down my arms legs, chest, back, at least three times, turns out my pockets, undoes my hair from its braid, all the time holding my arm. Whenever his hands skim my crotch my skin crawls. He is professional, sure, announcing “sensitive area, sensitive area” every time he nears one. Even so I worry he will squint at my ID, realize he’s picked up a trans person and drag me into solitary. But he doesn’t, and after what feels like days and far too many butt swipes, after the others have filled in around us with their own cops and lonely searches, he sticks my jacket in a bag and leads me to the bus. I lean back against the cushioned seat as the others fill in around me, my hands pinned beneath me, twisted up and wiggling for oxygen.
We introduce ourselves with grins and nods, no handshakes, make sure that everyone can feel their palms. “You okay?”
“Yes.” The bus lurches into motion, and we glide out past the barricade and our friends lined up on the edges of the road, waving and shouting. And then it is just the quiet streets of DC and the traffic, all of us singing for no one but ourselves, the hymns ringing off the windows and the metal mesh of the bus walls. When the people rise up, the powers come down. When the people rise up, the powers come down.
We have one speaker who didn’t get to tell her story at the action, so she’ll tell it now. We all turn, as Savannah sits and recites her speech, no notes. She tells the story of her father, how she lost the man who raised her to the flu. He was a coal miner, and he died far too soon, lungs broken by the dust. Her voice cracks as she talks. Courage, Savannah, you do not walk alone. We will, we will, walk with you, walk with you, and sing your spirit home. I’m crying.
For the moment before we pull up to the processing center, it is just all of us on this bus singing together, the grey of the Capitol dome far behind. I’m thinking about all the movements I read about when I was young, the stories of kids lining up across from cops, of generation upon generation of people fending off the apocalypse with songs and walking and blood. I’m thinking of the movements before us, the people of color and women and working-class people who figured out the tactics we are using now, all the people who’ve died fighting. I look at the 12 yearswritten on the shirts across from me. The bus sways and rocks, and I’m thinking of the activists back home in Pennsylvania testifying against gas plants and pipelines, of elders rattling their fists at the refinery gates. And I’m looking up at the white walls of Washington, wondering if they will break. Courage, my friend. I close my eyes and listen to the voices, ragged and rising. I think of those rare moments when after years of pushing and silence, suddenly everything can change.
——————
Twelve years ago, I’m standing at the side of the road at the Norristown Farm Park, looking at the display case with big third-grade eyes. Wind tugs my jacket and rattles at the corn. It’s fall, blue-grey sky and frost creeping over orange valleys. My bicycle leans against the curb, wheels still spinning. I stare. Behind the thin glass, cut-out construction paper and pieces of litter stapled to the cork. It’s an exhibit about how long it takes trash to decompose. Apple core, three weeks. Cigarette filter, five years. Plastic bag, twenty-five. Plastic bottle, a thousand. Styrofoam, infinity. I look up at the geese making ribbons in the sky, afraid of the future. There are hundreds and hundreds of Styrofoam plates in our school cafeteria trash bins. I imagine the world a million years from now, all that waste locked as fossils in the dirt. When I’m gone, I do not want a heap of trash to be my legacy.
Two weeks before the DC sit-in, I call Grace. The last time I saw her, we were standing on a bench outside Philadelphia City Hall as she dispatched teams of canvassers into the subway. Now it’s 5 pm, and I’m sitting in the stairwell of the Middlebury College Environmental Center, laptop propped on my knees, fingers dabbling in the blue-green light. The months since I’ve seen her feel like one long blurred email chain; action summits and strategy spreadsheets, rapid messages and midnight meetings, too many things that have needed protesting. “Our final push for divestment is going really well,” I tell her. “I was thinking maybe we’d set up a Green New Deal campaign pretty soon.”
“Yay, divestment!” her voice pops static on the cell phone. I can practically see her jaw clenched with focus, her blond eyebrows wiggling. “So exciting you are interested in a Vermont hub, I’ll set you up with the resources and such!” She is perpetually breathless, emphasizing every syllable. “And I know this is short notice, but we are planning another action in DC on December 10 if you all want to come down.”
I remember the gratitude I felt a few weeks ago, watching the livestream footage of her and Ben and Raven getting walked out of Congress in zip-ties, their shouts still echoing off Pelosi’s walls. “We’d love to.”
In third grade, I start a boycott. Every day for months we bring porcelain plates to school, carry them down the lunch line and wash them off in the water fountain afterwards. We make anti-Styrofoam pins and eco blogs, hold No Styrofoam days, march down the hallway to the headmistress’s office to demand reusable plates. I stand hand in hand with Lauren, my best friend, all love for animals and perpetual-motion. I’m shaking, eight years old with long tangled hair and all-boys’ clothes, mud streaked across my palms. There are portraits, thick plush curtains and shiny paperweights, carved chairs fancier than any I have ever seen. The headmistress looks down from her grey desk. We tell her about the end of the world.
“Hey, do you want to go to DC next week and get arrested?” I run around through the college environmental building, asking everyone. I make group chats, email the rest of our climate justice group, stand up at our meeting to explain the Green New Deal with its twelve- year action plan. There’s interest, enough. Elise with her bubbling joy and long earrings, who got us down the mountain that night we crashed into a snowbank on the way to the Vermont Climate Union. There’s Connor with his steady smile and scrappy can-do attitude. He’s been arrested once before, blocking a pipeline as a seventeen-year-old. And Emily; organized, brilliant journalist, new to the climate movement. Slowly the excitement builds, and I bounce in and out of professor and admin offices to ask about funding, pour over movement spreadsheets with carpool plans, research plane tickets and rental cars, email people from Bowdoin and Boston to ask about vans. “I’m going,” Elise says. “Now how do we get there?”
“Ah. Great question.”
Middle school in Philadelphia, and I watch the trees die one by one, listen through the drizzle to the sound of saws and gas leaks. The fracking company tries to lease our family land up by Hancock; burnt hills of hemlock and maple, Delaware weaving ribbons through the shale. My father leans through the car window to talk to our neighbor in his pickup, the two of them pouring over the proposed contract. We are lucky we have the money to say no. All around, the amber ridges flicker along the water, wooden houses crumbling into earth. By the time I’m ten I know the world is ending. I read about social movements and endangered species, Gandhi and Dr. King, Hitler and the Nazis. And I walk down school hallways to smirks and stares, hatred whittling away my bones. I run to the woods when I can, hide and scramble between folded schist and poplar, skyscrapers blinking through the trees. And so often I wish I could die for all of this; self-sacrifice for a better world and leave these crinkled red ridgelines in peace. But it’s not so easy.
When the bullying gets too much I transfer high schools, walk halls with old Quaker socialists with white hair to their knees. Climate justice, a new word. In class, I learn the theory, how the waste plant a few towns over is poisoning our black neighbors, how climate predictions show our potential extinction. Pipelines are robbing Native land, and our two watersheds are bleeding gas. So much to fight against. Teacher Judy drives us to the Pittsburgh Powershift youth climate justice conference; yellow bridges over water, hills carpeted in green. I’m fifteen, listening to college kids sit in circles and talk about Keystone XL and divestment, tar sands and fracking. They have information folders and patches, flags and sunflower signs. I want nothing but to follow them.
Three days before DC, and we’ve gone through so many plans. Email after email, rearranging our exams schedules, reserving housing. The moon ticks down the hours out the window, fire in the wood stove burning low, light of the computer screen. I haven’t slept for two weeks. I find money from Environmental Affairs, tell my professors my essays will be late, book the van. All set. Then one last strategy call, the day before we leave. I sit with Emily and Elise and Connor in the empty Environmental Studies classroom, listen to the Skype as young people from across the country talk about why they’re coming to DC. There’s Aru, Swarthmore student who saw her hometown in India nearly washed away by flooding, Ben back home in Philly who speaks about the smokestacks and the percussive groan of oil trains. Their eyes are fire, voices raw with caffeine. Connor pumps his fist. Elise is beaming. I look over at Emily, another Pennsylvanian. “We are going to do this,” she says.
When I’m sixteen, I go to New York to protest, stand in a puddle at the People’s Climate March, packed shoulder to shoulder with 400,000 others, raise my fist to the buzzing helicopters. I organize a field trip to UN climate talks, stand staring at the polished desks and flags, the microphones glowing green electricity. I’m terrified, watching the international delegates sit and read over climate science, all of them silent. Senior year of high school, we block the gates to the oil refinery in Philly. Cars honk and processing tanks balloon against the sky. We lean cardboard sunflower signs against the fence. “Cultivating the seeds of resistance,” the speaker says. On the road back to school, I see power plants stretched out like the bands of a galaxy, the smokestacks billowing into clouds, the constellations of steel and firelight. It’s the first time I understand why the air feels so heavy.
When I start at Middlebury, I join the divestment movement. We attend disastrous meetings with administrators, protest and rally and drop banners from balconies. They tell us it is not an issue worth discussing. Then a student referendum, showing up at Board meetings with folders of research and dress shirts, demanding to be taken seriously. In October, we present to the Trustees. I face a circle of men in blazers and tell them about the oil train blast zone in my city, the fight against the gas plants and the fracking. Walking up the carpeted stairs of the admin building in borrowed shoes and braided hair, eyes on polished wood and gilt, I’m thinking about power. Power in the electrical wires, in the churning of the wind and raised fists. Power to break mountains, the force of shackles and shovels, in prisons and cop cars and coins, the power to destroy. And I wish we could change our power source from vaults of coal dollars to the scatter of sunbeams. People shout, but fossil fuel money stifles our screams. I look at the Board and think about what that money does, about my neighbors’ battle for breathing.
The night before we go to DC, I sit on the slate common-room floor and put pictures from home into an envelope. It’s a time capsule, our final assignment for Environmental Justice class. In the pictures, there’s the crowd of us standing in the basement of the train station, protesting the fracked gas plant they’re building in North Philly. There’s Mitch; thick glasses and organizational charts, his brain an encyclopedia of environmental law. Meenal, her feet wide and chin lifted, striding up to the podium to interrogate transportation officials at town meeting. And Florence, a seventy-year-old nurse with hands like a nutcracker and a warbling voice, shaking her fist at the smokestacks. “Leif, you know, it’s the nurses. The doctors… not them, they don’t know. They aren’t close enough. The nurses are the ones who know what’s killing us.” I put the roll of photos into my time capsule. Two-hundred years, our professor said. This capsule will take two-hundred years to break down. This is your final exam. What do you want to leave?
———-
I wake before dawn, walk down to the transportation office, breath puffing crystal, hands numb. The others come sleepy and smiling. I toss my beat-up green hiking pack into the trunk. On the horizon, mountains tumble light purple before the sun, empty roads glowing. We sit with half-eaten bagels and Nalgenes stuffed into side compartments, balance coffee mugs and computers on our laps. I read to them as the hills roll by, protest music on the radio, leafless sugarbush and empty barns, Adirondacks like blue spikes in the dawn. The advertisements come on fast, then the oil trains and trucked barrels of gas. In the miles north of New York, walls surge from the earth like colliding continents, angry and looming. New York City is built on a marsh, Lenni-Lenape territory. In between the highways, cattails puff their pillow seeds. On either side of the roads stand billboards and powerplants, choked and tangled in railroad ties. “God’s Legos” Connor says. Cranes swivel and dip like herons, multi-color containers stacked to the sky.
We speed south through the trainyards, past swollen oil drums and the reek of gas. Peering out the window, I watch trees and cattails blur to steel and think about this land, before. Millions of years ago, far before the Anthropocene, was the Pennsylvanian period, all life and hot green buzzing and swamp mush. Then came the Permian period and the Alleghanian orogeny; rock compressed and creased and crushing. And then came extinction. 90% of species were lost. 252 Million years ago, they were dying in Pennsylvania, as gas sparked in the deep and swamp creatures petrified to coal.
People came, the Lenni-Lenape and the Susquehannock, Seneca and Erie, then conquerors and Quakers with their smallpox death and ink. And the colonizers dug the fossils made in the last extinction, built factories of whirring smoke. When the workshops shuttered down, they left North and West Philly in their wake; redline racism and vacant warehouses with their hot flashes of graffiti, windows plywood and pulverized.
Then came the slow decay of coal mines, fissures and fracking. The ridges cracked and shivered with the shale gas, fires in the water table, in the faucets, in the mine shafts, buckling whole highways with their heat. The land sucked dry with soot and poison water, hills crumpled to battered trailers and boarded stores. And all the while, Philadelphia skyscrapers bloomed against the blue light of the subway, the hiss of trains on silent rails. The world narrowed to puffing smoke and the greased swift slide of steel, and people slept under the eaves on cardboard.
We glide down along the Delaware, over the Susquehanna flexed brown beneath our wheels. On the horizon, glass towers and refineries stand blue and rusty. I’m thinking of all the marches outside Philadelphia City Hall, the megaphones and red banners, getting chased by the counter-terrorism squad and looking up over Nazi protesters to watch hawks circling. And the council meetings and court hearings, the walls of cops and endless hours of testimony. Shouting “No, no, no,” over and over again. All these past twelve years of fighting against. We roll the last miles of oil and concrete to Washington, and it all makes sense.
The pre-action training is in a massive DC church. Big walls of reddish stone, excitement crackling in the wooden pews. A thousand of us sit and cheer as Varshini rattles the windows with her voice. She speaks of flooding back home in India, how the once unspeakable Green New Deal is gaining momentum. “I want to be clear with you,” she shouts, striding across the stage with her curls flying and her fist raised. “This is because of What. We. Did.” There’s a plan; civil disobedience and coalition building and political campaigns. We are going to get the Green New Deal on the national agenda and flip the 2020 election. We will make sure it passes. “And I swear, with every person here as my witness, that I will do everything in my power to shake the very foundations of this Earth to insure that a better day will come.” Her words that crack like thunder. It’s a long shot, sure, but then there’s clean air and clean water and fair work and justice, and all of us here singing and chanting and shaking the floor. So much to fight for.
That night, we sleep in an artist co-op on the edge of the city; emailing our lobby squad in the middle of the night, blue glow of phones and people rustling. The alarm beeps before morning. I wake in the dark and walk to the bathroom to pull on my uniform, cram materials into my lobbying envelope. We speed through Washington in the gray pre-dawn, group up at Spirit of Justice Park. “Clear eyes, full hearts, green jobs, can’t lose! Clear eyes, full hearts, green jobs, can’t lose!” Our Vermont lobby squad groups up, everyone bundled in coats and scarfs, sky peach and pale purple above, media cameras balanced on spindly tripods. I raise my voice. “Everyone here? Alright. Great. This is what we are going to do.”
We rush across the Capitol with its sidewalks and security lines. Rules of engagement: stay along the walls, walk single file, strong and dignified, hide your signs. We move as a unit up the marble staircases, past brass plaques and velvet flags. During our lobby visit to Representative Welch’s office, Perrin speaks of disappearing winters and Matt describes the swollen rivers of Irene. The staffer nods and smiles, promises that Welch will make the endorsement. Afterward, we stand on a street corner and sing.
We march to the sit-in in McGovern’s office three-hundred strong, chins up and fists raised, forcing Congresspeople to scatter out of our way. When we reach his floor we line the walls. We take turns speaking, each person listing what we will lose to climate change. Blue envelopes and cameras rolling, chaos in the hall. And all of a sudden I’m standing in the front row as Jim McGovern the Chair of the House Rules Committee and one of our major targets, steps out of his office to face us. “I support the Select Committee. I support the Green New Deal,” he says. Our action leader’s mouth falls open in shock. “All right,” he directs us, his black eyes sparking with wild optimism. “You all can head to the Hoyer sit-in.” We turn and file out, race through the basement tunnels with their exposed pipes and brick. I am reassuring anxious teammates, and Elise stares straight ahead. My heart is pulsing. McGovern’s in, and Welch too. All throughout the building, I can hear the echo of stomping and song. Waiting for the elevator, I think of our gorgeous, terrifying future, of all that needs to happen in the next twelve years. And I’m eight years old, too, quaking in the hall before the headmistress’s office, armed with a trash chart and a Styrofoam cup. The bell dings and the doors open. Going up.
—————–
They let us go after sundown. Walking out of the arrestee holding center in the dark, through the back alley to the curb. Connor and Emily mob us with hugs. Food and hot water, then the long drive home through the night, the lights passing in a blur, crackle of the radio, all of us talking fast. Over winter break, representative lobby visits and hub meetings, fundraisers in West Philadelphia with poetry spitting over the microphone and sun posters on the walls. I sit on the subway on the late-night rides home, watch the skyscrapers slide by in blue darkness, stand on the cold sidewalk before Philadelphia City Hall full of momentum and hope.
But Pelosi says no, no to the Select Committee on the Green New Deal, no to the action we wanted, no to the most meaningful climate proposal to come out of Washington. So then it is on to writing it ourselves with a whole coalition of justice groups, interrupting debates and recruiting members, onward, onward, onward. Prepping for mass action, local fossil fuel bans, political campaigns. Long email chains and Skype calls and coffee shop meetings, and we soon enough have contacts, midnight plans, and national strategy. Back up to Vermont, to a last divestment push and emissions reductions campaigns, to staggering each morning with blast after blast of email messages. I step outside in the dawn and watch the snow light up like yellow dust on the evergreens, storms crusting slow grey ice over everything.
In January we paint the halls of Middlebury black with posters about divestment, with orange banners and fact sheets. Then it’s pushing for the Energy 2028 Board Resolution and a new environmental plan for Middlebury, that slow grind of event registration forms and meetings with admin, a month of planning panels and rallies. I lose myself in coffee and spreadsheets and email lists and negotiation calls with treasurers and national organizers, what if we mess this up, what if we mess this up, what if we…
“Twelve years from now, the world might end. For so many people on this Earth, it has already ended….” It’s Thursday, and I’m standing up at the podium during the divest rally, telling stories about rocks. I remember our convocation here the first week of school, the silver-blue light outside on the snow, the college president standing at this same carved podium. Now, the wooden walls are draped in divest orange, people writing letters to the trustees in the pews, our banners sailing.
I stand at the microphone and blink. “We face a future of hurricanes and sea level rise, fires and flooding and droughts and violence. Entire species are disappearing, and in the next century we face the potential collapse of civilization. We know, based on the latest scientific reports, that the next decade will be a fight for our lives, and the years after it even more terrifying.”
I look down at my friends in the crowd, Cora with her sociology research written into her speech, Fran our community member friend in a turquoise snow suit that’s seen decades of Vermont organizing. Alec with his fire of curls, veggie burgers and communist manifestos stuffed in his pockets. I tell them about Pennsylvania.
“The rocks of my home, the same rocks that are being dug up and burned, the rocks that poison our water and travel in pipelines past the elementary schools threatening to explode, those same particles that choke my neighbors with soot, and warm our planet and kill, those are the bodies of the creatures that millions of years ago were facing what we are facing now. I think a lot about those who have come before us. I think about species that have gone extinct and indigenous people who have fought exploitation and colonization, about poor people of color and frontline communities leading the battle against fossil fuel infrastructure, about all the women who have died for clean air and clean water, all the activists here and beyond who still fight for justice.” I look over at the alums who have come back to be with us, over at the organizers from other campus movements. “I think of what an honor it is to walk in your footsteps.”
After the speeches, Alec and Cora and I walk down the aisles of the church and raise our Climate Change is Scary sign. The others fill in behind us, Elise and Connor and Emily and Fran and so many more. Out the doors and down the hill, mountains snowy purple in the distance. I walk slow and silent, trans scarf wrapped around my shoulders, head down and banner raised. Behind us walk the alumni and community members, dozens of our friends with their hands joined. We reach the administrative building and fill the whole hall. I glance down the line as one by one, orange-clad activists explain the reasons they are here, support for friends and justice, fear for the future and people back home, solidarity with people across the globe. We hand the letters over to the trustees, first-years waving hand-made signs, Elise’s camera sparking. Everyone grins, lamplight amber on the burnished railings and rugs. Meeting after meeting here, today this place is ours.
I think about how much I love them, about the nights out in Fran’s field; bowls of chili and community activists and flames snapping beneath the stars. I think about the rush of cold air as our sleds plummeted, Cora and Connor shrieking. “I want you to know how brave you are, for fighting for what you believe in and not stepping down. And I want to talk about how much of an honor it is, to be alive right now. Because the future is terrifying, but it is also an enormous challenge, an immense responsibility.”
And I remember Alec with his granola and midnight rants, Florence roasting the mayor with her glance, Grace’s raised fist and Lauren’s giggling, Meenal’s arguments and Mitch’s hugs. “When I think about geology, I think of the layers of the past, sure, but I also think of the future. I think of millions of years from now. Someday, someone, maybe a human or another creature, will look back on us. When our time becomes part of the geologic record, those rocks will hold the bodies of all the people and species that have died from this. Looking back, people will see the increasing levels of carbon dioxide and violence, and all the plastic and Styrofoam that will never disintegrate. But they will also see us.”
And then I’m sitting in the boardroom as the college President announces the unanimous approval of Energy 2028. The plan involves 100% transition to renewables and divestment from fossil fuels. It’s the kind of holistic vision I was hoping for in Washington, but at Middlebury it’s happening. I’m sitting numb at the conference desk, thinking about all those people in the DC holding center, packed together and singing, about the world shaking under our outrage, about how fast things are changing.
They talk of tipping points, the scientists. They talk of a day when nothing matters anymore, when civilization is all but over and warming can’t be stopped. They talk of a date, 2030. And a number, 2 degrees maybe, or 1.5, or 3. Once we hit it, it’s all over. But I think there is a different tipping point, a tipping point for people. The moment when the momentum for change builds so high enough it can’t be stopped. It happened at Middlebury with Energy 2028, and it will happen more broadly. And sure, no Congressional Select Committee was created, but the Green New Deal is just starting. Only this week another a new bill was introduced, and they will just keep coming. Sitting at the polished boardroom desk, I can hear President Patton’s announcement, but I can also still hear the divestment response from two years ago, when we were told “this will never happen.” The clash of the two phrases makes my head spin. I close my eyes and think of the day national climate action will make this shift. Courage, my friend.
At the end of the divest rally, I look down at the crowd and swallow. “When people look back at the fossil record, there will be the plastic and the Styrofoam that will never go away, of course. But there will also be all of the trash that isn’t there. The carbon emissions that didn’t happen. The species and cultures that didn’t disappear. They will see us, fighting. And all I want is for someone to look back and say, ‘They did it. The world could have ended but it didn’t.’ And I want them to see that we died, sure, but also that we lived and fought and changed and built a world that worked for everyone.”
Twelve years from now, I will stand in a world carved from clean air and light. I will see inequalities and injustices stacked up like shipping containers dismantled, the pipelines broken and the smokestacks quiet. I will stand along the train tracks of my home and listen to children laughing, breathe great big lungfuls of clean wind and snow. I know that the next twelve years of this Earth will be written in stone. And I swear when someone digs up our bones, they will see hope.