Last weekend, OrganicFoodee took part in America’s biggest ever protest againt global warming. We organised a hike to the world-famous Hollywood Sign, which involves hiking through some beautiful little mountains in a huge wild park in the middle of Hollywood, California. This was as a part of a new kind of internet-age protest. In the past, protests meant a single march, perhaps in New York or in Washington. Then came the Iraq war, and protests meant one day of coordinated marches in cities throughout the world. And now, Step It Up has invented a whole new de-centralised way of protesting.
The guy behind Step It Up is Bill McKibben, a scholarly man and author of influential eco-books including ‘The End of Nature’. He decided in January of this year to invent Step It Up on April 14th, a week before America celebrates Earth Day.
The format of Step It Up is that volunteers sign up to organise local actions in their own neighbourhood. So a group of senior citizens in Idaho organised a tea party, a group of deep sea divers organised a dive to a coral reef, and OrganicFoodee organised a hike to the Hollywood Sign.
Whatever everyone did, they made sure to bring a banner that said:
Step It Up 2007. Cut Carbon 80% by 2050
This might seem a tall order, but actually, that’s only 2% per year, and is a figure that’s generally agreed upon to be what’s needed to reverse climate change.
So all in all, there were over 1400 local actions in every