The Next Eco-Warriors Read Online Free PDF Page B

all the world's media paying attention to our fight. Creating a circle, activists held off the cops. Inside the circle, we began our own dialogue, a dialogue on the future we wanted, not that of a select few elites who would never come to see the consequences of their actions.
    I knew right there and then this was the beginning of a new era. It wasn't just that the sparks were flying, as in my Sea Shepherd days, but that the fire was burning, and brightly .
    There was a lot of things said— an end to neoliberalism, down with capitalism, Copenhagen was an orchestrated failure, we need to make the movement accessible to all —and then all of a sudden, I heard it:
    “This is the dawning of a new movement,” an anonymous activist yelled out on a megaphone.
    After a week of being stepped on and beaten to the ground—at least that's what I felt had happened to my soul—I had the first genuine reason to have hope again. Why? Because I knew these words were true. As I stared at the brave faces of the women and men around me, who were fighting and constructing a new narrative, I knew right there and then this was thebeginning of a new era. It wasn't just that the sparks were flying, as in my Sea Shepherd days, but that the fire was now burning, and brightly.
    Possibly for the first time on a global scale, all movements, all issues, and all struggles were put in the same room together, or at least on the same street. Even outside of this one action on that rainy day, a dialogue had been stirring since the start of the Copenhagen summit that unified us in one movement. The young and old; the Indigenous, marginalized, elite, disempowered, and empowered; Africans, small Islanders, and Europeans; farmers, doctors, cyclists, white-collar and green-collar—we were all here, fighting for the most important thing of all: the battle for life itself.
    On my travels back home, I came to realize that with the failure of Copenhagen came an opportunity. An opportunity to build a movement that was not just focused on events like this summit, but also on a generation's actions. An opportunity for a movement that is more global, inclusive, and stronger than ever before. An opportunity to be a movement whose fire burns within us all. Copenhagen was not the end, only the beginning.

    PHOTO BY EMILY HUNTER
    The movement is here. This is our moment.

    _________

    Emily Hunter continues to work as a freelance eco-journalist. She is the eco-correspondent for MTV News Canada, occasionally hosting a TV-documentary series called Impact, covering such issues as the Canadian tar sands and the G20 Toronto protests. Currently, she is finding more ways to get herself in trouble and plans to eco-shit-disturb till the day she dies .

JAMIE HENN
    Twenty-sixUnited StatesOnline Organizer

    PHOTO BY 350.ORG

350: The Movement behind a Number
    By defining our goal more clearly—by making it seem more manageable and less remote—we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it .
    —JOHN F. KENNEDY
    I HEARD THE RALLY BEFORE I SAW IT. As I walked around the corner into Times Square with my colleague Jon, I instantly recognized the beat of Jay-Z's “Empire State of Mind,” which we'd been listening to on repeat for the past week. Fists pumping in the air, our pace quickened, and our eyes yearned to see the results of more than a year of organizing. Until there they were: photo after photo of the day's thousands of climate rallies across the planet, streaming across the big screens of Times Square.
    A photo of hundreds of schoolchildren in the Philippines preceded a picture of people forming a giant 350 in front of the Sydney Opera House. They were followed by another picture of a rally in Ghana, then Mexico, then the United States. For one day, those big screens that normally showed vodka and Hummer ads were displaying the vibrant, raucous, and powerful birth of the global climate movement.
    The photos spinning across the