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.