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I’ve never felt more certain that love is the answer than I did standing in the crowds outside the capitol power plant last Monday in the largest demonstration against global warming in U.S. history. As our elders Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry spoke from the podium, the next generation of environmental activists cheered out and waved banners and signs that read “Power Past Coal” and “Climate Justice.”

Just three months prior, Berry and McKibben had sent out a mass letter asking for people to gather in DC on March 2nd for an act of civil disobedience. “We don’t come to such a step lightly,” they wrote in the invite letter. “We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated.” For thirty-some years, our elders had kept a flame alive. We were ready to pick it up en masse and let it shine for the world to see. 

The night before, 1,500 of us assembled at Lisner Auditorium on the George Washington campus for the Artists for the Climate event which served as a spirit-booster for the next day’s protest. Bill McKibben, tall and solid as an ash tree MC’ed the evening, speaking between each presenter. His voice was calm and wise with age, peppered with endearing “you know’s”. Discussing the request for the protest participants to dress formally, he explained, “We want them to see we’re not radicals. Radicals are people who want to double the amount of CO2 in the air and just see what happens.”

McKibben told us the magic number of climate change science – 350. According to leading climate expert James Hansen, 350 parts per million of carbon is the limit the atmosphere can handle without provoking a major climate shift. Right now, we are at 387. If we do not bring ourselves down to 350 within the next 20-25 years, climate change will be irreversible. Because coal-burning power plants are the leading contributor to this number, the organizers chose the U.S. Capitol coal-fired plant to be the focal point of the March 2nd protest.

McKibben used the occasion to announce a worldwide day of action to take place on October 24th, 2009 in which people in villages, towns, and cities around the world will share in promoting the message of 350. He encouraged us all to find creative ways to express the number in our communities. In considering how the message could be writ large in New York City, I thought of the artist Christo, famous for covering huge man-made and natural structures like the Reichstag and a mountain valley in Colorado. I envisioned the Brooklyn Bridge covered in a white sheet that read “350” in huge, blue numbers.

As this fantastic vision receded, McKibben was introducing his old friend Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist writer and environmental activist from Utah. Piercingly, her words communicated a feminine wisdom about the crossroads we currently face. She calmly stated “it is time to resist the notion that what is good for corporations is what is good for humanity.”

Affirming our choice to stand up for change despite the recalcitrance of the U.S. government, she quoted Martin Luther King Jr., “All my life I’ve heard ‘Wait.’ This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant never.” She urged us not to wait or listen to anyone who would ask us to wait. Instead, she asked us to be brave enough to feel empathy for those who suffer directly the effects of environmental degradation and let that motivate us to sustained action. Having gotten into this movement because of the impact of mountaintop removal on the people living in Appalachia, that empathy was exactly why I was sitting in front of her that night and I vowed to keep my heart open as our work continued.

The evening culminated with speaker Wendell Berry, poet laureate of the environmental movement, who spoke a wisdom that seemed both universal and uniquely his own. He discussed his most recent book of poetry Sabbaths which he said is built around the question, “How do you get to the Sabbath? How do we reach a point of rest that’s legitimate and earned?”

This question immediately snagged my focus. Sabbath, I reflected, meant, simply, rest. Not the rest you take Saturday afternoon after drinking too much Friday night, but, as Berry had called it, an earned rest. I thought in a flash that most of us haven’t truly earned rest in a long time—earned it by working diligently and at length for something that does good for more than oneself. How many of us do that kind of work on a regular basis? How many of us don’t do it? How many do its opposite?

Listening to Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams speak put me in touch with that yet-possible society in which work builds and gives life for everyone instead of misering the bounty away for a select few. I used to think maybe I was crazy for dreaming that something better was possible but that night, affirmed by my elders and the 1,500 beautiful bodies and brains around me, I rounded a corner. I could see now that I was not alone, I was one of many … and we were not crazy. We were the sane ones. Richard Dawkins writes in The Selfish Gene, “...if you wish as I do to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.”

If we can sway the consciousness of our leaders to phase out fossil fuels and phase in renewable energy, the victory will truly be without precedent in the history of life on earth. Given, as Dawkins calls it, our selfish gene, this moment was inevitable from the inception of our species. We would expand until we covered the globe. We would advance until we were out of balance with our resources. And we would be forced, at last, to choose between death and evolution. Dr. Seuss’s Lorax surrounded by his felled forest ... the princess in The Neverending Story pleading, “Atreyu, call my name” ... Morpheus in The Matrix asking Neo whether he will take the red pill or the blue. These are all popular, mythic symbols reflecting our subconscious awareness of the pivotal choice we now face.