Above Photo: Art Killing Apathy/ Eleanor Goldfield
The People’s Climate March was this past weekend and roughly 200,000 people descended on Washington, DC to walk along Pennsylvania Ave, past the White House and up to the Washington Monument where speakers and musicians worked the crowd in a festival like setting. And while the energy brought in particular by indigenous and frontline communities was powerful, the march felt very much like a parade and as Dissentralized Organizer Jimmy Betts put it exemplified the “messterpiece of NGO-dom.”
While the Climate March garnered most if not all the media attention, the day before, activists picketed and protested outside of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – calling for an end to the blanket rubber stamping of dirty energy projects including the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
Even further outside the media gaze was the Uptown Art House, a flat structure community art space where indigenous, borderlands undocumented, black, white and everyone beyond and in between gathered together to create art and share ideas and inspiration. This compilation serves as a platform for the people involved in the building of movements, in fighting the frontline battles and in walking the walk.
Together with Jimmy Betts, we analyze the tactic of a mass march and bring to light alternatives for viewers to engage with, for people and planet.
See photos by Eleanor Goldfield from her Art Killing Apathy page
The Climate Change March/Parade
Sweet Potatoes Not Pipelines