Soul Revolution (One Year Later)
Reflections on the Climate Change Rally in NYC, 9/21/14
Reverend Dr. Leon Dunkley
September 20th, 2015
A Call to Worship
Good morning.
This is a lovely time of year. It was lovely at this time last year as well. A year ago today, I boarded the train at New Carrolton and headed to New York City for the People’s Climate Change Rally, the largest environmental rally in history. More than 300,000 of us marched the streets of midtown Manhattan showing the world with our bodies that it is time to heal the Earth…past time. There were six of us from UUCSS—Ken Iobst and Alexa Fraser, their son
Nathan Fraser, Matthew Rice, Bryan Wilmarth and me…and 299,994 other people. We all made the front pageof the New York Times the next day. It was awesome.
It was a beautiful time of year then and it is a beautiful time of year now. The shoulder of the season in our circle around the sun…not quite autumn but past summer in its prime. It’s more crisp up there in New York City and crisper still in Boston. It’s almost snowing in Minnesota…but then again, it’s always almost snowing in Minnesota…except when it is snowing. Minnesota is a little weird but Maryland is slower to change away from summer. It’s slower to turn the seasons the more you travel south. Here, you can still sleep with the bedroom windows open and not freeze—aided neither the furnace heat nor the air conditioning. It’s nice, this extended end of summer time.
When I was as young as Nathan, Matthew and Brian are today…back in 1947…I was in the youth group at my church in New Jersey. LRY. Liberal Religious Youth. Each year in about this season, just before the fall, the UU youth groups of Metro District/New York would gather to spend the week at a lovely camp up in the mountains. There, we would plant and nurture the seeds of all our dreaming and we would grow them to a forest in a single day. It was easy back then. We didn’t know that growing a forest in a single day was impossible. We just did it. The miracle of it all just came naturally. It’s harder today. For some reason, it gets harder to work miracles over time…for most of us.
It hasn’t gotten harder yet everyone. It’s not harder for Felix Finkbeiner. Somehow, he’s held on to the dream. Felix is a friend of spirit but I didn’t know him then, back when I was still into going to camp but he must have been a heck of a dreamer…never letting go. And he still hasn’t…even though the challenges he faces keep getting tougher. Felix put the dreams of his idealistic youth to use. He grew up and founded a revolutionary, environmental agency called Plant for the Planet. Now, he spends his days pushing back on the issue of global warming. In Mexico, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2010, he did something that was really amazing. He started a revolution by planting trees…right there in Cancun. He explained himself back then. He was quite clear. He said,
Here we have planted 194 trees, one tree for every country that is at [this] conference. We invited all the ministers and heads of state to come outside, to plant the trees of their country with us. The organization is called planted for the planet. We want to plant one million trees in each country of the world. When we started four years ago, we thought we had to save to polar bear. We thought we had to save the environment. But soon after, we found out that it is about our future, that we have to save our own future. And here with this action, we tried to get the people inside the conference, to tell them that it’s not enough to talk. Sure, these conferences are important, because without conferences we cannot get a world contract but just talking without any action won’t save our future.
We have to force our heads of government to do something because they know exactly the problems we have and they know exactly the solutions to all of these problems, but they are not doing it. So, we have to force them to do it. If we tell people around the world what is going on with our future, I think they will be willing to do something. We can change something if we work together worldwide. So, let’s do it.
Felix Finkbeiner
—Founder, Plant for the Planet
My old friend, Felix, had the right answer…and he had the right attitude, too. Neither of these things mattered very much down there in Cancun…because he had been locked out of the conference. He had been barred from the proceedings because he was too much of a revolutionary. No one was listening to him for
reasons I still don’t understand. But we can...and
we did, right here in Washington D.C. We gathered
on a cold. winter day—on the 17th of February in
2013—and we march through the streets of our
nation's capital for justice.
No one in Cancun was listening to my old friend,
Felix, but we were listening here in D.C. We were
listening and we were learning and we were marching
through the streets. We were learning more and more
about one another. We can always listen and learn
from one another...even if we find ourselves locked
out of things like Felix was. We can always listen...
…if we open up our hearts.
Come, let us worship together.
