Mark your calendar for Oct. 24, a day of global climate action

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Environmentalist Bill McKibben is on a mission. I wonder if Asheville people will join in:

Moving from a national campaign to try to ‘organise the world’ is quixotic at best, yet, according to McKibben, it appears to be working. 350.org’s first big act is a global day of witness on 24th October, the goal of which is ‘merely to drive this number into the information bloodstream of the planet.’
The number 350 itself is radical. Although the global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are already beyond that – at 390ppmv – scientists and climate experts, particularly following the Arctic’s heavy loss of sea ice two summers ago, have begun to revise the highest safe levels of carbon dioxide to 350ppmv. The date was chosen as a global day of action as the start of the six-week run up to the Copenhagen negotiations, where a global climate change agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol will be finalised.
On 24th October, Bill McKibben and his team are trying to get as many people as they can muster to put aside what they are doing locally, or incorporate it, into a joint global witness. ‘It’s a pot-luck supper. We are saying, “Here is the date, here is the theme, and you have to do the cooking, to self-organise”. And people do. It’s a good thing. It allows people, wherever they are, to make this make sense. In every place it will look different. That is part of the vision of what the world should be.’
An ‘action’ can be anything from a walk, march or rally to a teach-in, a bike ride, a sing-a-thon, a carbon-free dinner with friends or volunteering to help retrofit a house for the day. After registering your action on 350.org, the only request is that you plan a time to take an action photo that visibly displays the number 350.
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The current plan is to have a huge screen outside – or inside, he jokes – United Nations headquarters in New York, to showcase the images uploaded from around the world on the day. By the next day, McKibben says, photographic prints will be delivered to all the Copenhagen negotiators from each country – with a note along the lines of ‘Here is what’s happening in your country. Act now’.