It was famed Vermont activist and author Bill McKibben who led the 35,000-strong “Forward on Climate” march in Washington on Sunday. But it was the scores of uncelebrated Vermonters who helped infuse the largest-ever outpouring of its kind with a vocal mixture of hope and fear.
Three buses filled with students from the University of Vermont and from Middlebury and St. Michael’s colleges made the 23-hour round trip along with three more buses carrying Vermonters of all ages. They came to urge President Obama to stop the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would pump oil extracted from Canadian tar sands 1700 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Tar sands oil is an especially carbon-rich fossil fuel that, opponents warn, could push the climate crisis to a tipping point.
But the rally alongside the Washington Monument and a subsequent march around the White House were motivated by more than the Keystone project. There were loud and urgent calls for investment in clean forms of energy, making the event feel at times like a wonky exercise in lobbying. But plenty of raw emotion was expressed on a bitterly cold afternoon.
“I don’t want to bring children into a world they can’t live in,” said Corinne Almquist, a Middlebury vegetable farmer and Nordic ski instructor who plans to become a midwife. “Climate change is the biggest issue of all. It affects everything.”
Gary Beckwith of Richmond also expressed worry about how a hotter, more tempestuous planet will affect the lives of his own three children and “all the children of the world.” But climate change “isn’t just about the future,” said the inventor of a bus that runs on solar energy. “It’s about today. It’s happening now.”
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