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.
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The violence of climate change feeds potential for human violence