Contextualizing Sunday's climate change march in NYC with COP15 2009 and my own dissertation work on trigger point theory
In 2010 I wrote about what might effect policy makers on climate change and COP15. At that time, like many, I had been hopeful that information and passion might affect policy makers to respond and "do the right thing." My observation after COP15 was that policy makers are so deeply in bed with and beholden to global fossil fuel industries, that their response to global concern was ruthless violence. That violence was expressed by the Danish police at the end of the 2009 conference. I was stunned and radicalized and blogged for High Tide and wrote about my experience for CSPA: https://www.academia.edu/8379829/The_Horizontal_Press_Conference.
I think Sunday's climate change march has the
potential to be a significant event, perhaps a trigger point. That is because it may
signal a new grass roots determination to see change, despite the memory of the violent backlash of corporatized policy makers in 2009 in the name of the Danes.
The historical significance of this
march goes back to COP15. That was when it became clear that change had to come from
grass roots action. 2009 was the Flower Power phase of the movement. As I wrote yesterday
however, climate change is too important to leave to policy makers. The
crushing of the 2009 Flower Power phase of hope is what the
internationalization of this march disproves. The difference between 2009 and
2014 is the determination and radicalization of demonstrators as the impacts of
climate change have accelerated and policy makers have dithered. I blogged
about my experience in Denmark in 2009 and 2010, when I tried to make the point
that a persistent international movement is what must turn the tides. This
could be the beginning of a resurgence of that movement and NYC might be the
trigger point to triage our future.
2009 was also when I began my PhD dissertation work on trigger point theory as aesthetic activism with the University of Plymouth, UK. The same weekend as the march, I am now completing that writing and preparing it for my Examiners. Writing my dissertation on what may effect change was my answer to conflating activism and practice.
More to be revealed; more to be revealed.