Walking for a Change by Gwendolyn Hallsmith

The cows stare at us, slowly chewing, as if puzzling out the riddle of all the people moving down the road at their bovine pace. The cars speed by between the cows and the crowd; some honk in appreciation, some zip past - apparently oblivious to the long march. We’re a motley bunch - mothers pushing strollers, artists in tree costumes, grey haired ladies carrying hand made signs. The Greenpeace staff who flew in to help with logistics shepherd us like border collies, running back and forth up and down the line, keeping people out of the traveled way, herding us into single file when the shoulder narrows.

The buzz of conversation provides the drone for the honking cars, which quickly get tiresome after three hours of hearing the combustion- engined machines speak to us as if they were somehow part of the solution. We talk long as the miles stretch by, hearing each others’ stories with a new depth that’s possible partly because of the absence of our usual distractions.

A friend tells me about how he walked in the Great Peace March across the country in 1986, back when it still seemed that people power could have a real impact. I feel a wave of nostalgia… the forces we are up against today seem so brutal and large, this small protest walk feels anachronistic, a futile tipping at windmills, even if tip we must because of some quixotic drive we have toward justice, peace, and planetary health.

Three days after the march, climate scientists reported that the frozen bogs up in the Arctic are discharging methane gas at a rate five times what previous projections had anticipated. Methane release into the Arctic’s fragile environment is one of the ‘tipping points’ that could send climate change into a terminal tailspin, at a speed that will quickly overwhelm any of our feeble efforts to reverse it.

And feeble they have been. Despite concerted global action on the part of national governments around the world to negotiate and ratify the Kyoto Protocol and to do further work at the Montreal Summit last year, as a planet we have failed to even slow the rate of increase, much less turn back the overall trend. What’s worse is that the existing carbon in the atmosphere has a life of its own – we are only now feeling the impacts of the CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gasses that were emitted 50 years ago, the impacts of the past 50 years – which have seen an exponential increase in the greenhouse gasses that have been released into the atmosphere - are still to come.

Bill McKibben, the leader of this quintessential Vermont march from Ripton to Battery Park, made an astute observation last year in Orion Magazine about the difference between the environmental movement today and the environmental action of the 1960s. There’s one atom of difference, he said: the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The carbon monoxide problem could be solved by the technocratic solutions that fit so well into the existing system. Add some catalytic converters here, smokestack scrubbers there, and it’s solved. Carbon dioxide is much more difficult because it challenges all of our lifestyle choices. It’s not a matter of finding a new technology, it’s a matter of finding a new life – one without all the energy intensive products and practices, but perhaps also one with more of a pedestrian pace. On the road less traveled, we can do some walking for a change.

Gwendolyn Hallsmith is the Director of Global Community Initiatives, and these are her reflections on participating in the From the Road Less Traveled: Vermonters Walking for a Clean Energy Future march that was co-sponsored by the Vermont Natural Resources Council, Greenpeace, and Vermont Commons from August 31 to September 4, 2006. The march was named after Robert Frost’s poem because it began at his homestead in Ripton, Vermont.