I attended my local Climate Strike! in Paso Robles on Friday, Sept. 20—as did 10 million people, locally and around the globe. Our event was one of several on the Central Coast in San Luis Obispo County. It was organized by local high school students and attended by 60-plus people, about half seniors and half students. It started at 8:30 a.m., and lunch was served at noon.
It was both inspiring and frustrating. The speakers and singers were inspiring. The younger speakers called for action; the academics shared stories about science and nature.
Minor frustrations included inexperienced chant leaders and comments from the crowd that could scarcely be heard because the emcee didn’t urge them to use the mic. Those can be fixed with experience.
Bigger frustrations: As I worked the crowd introducing myself as the editor of the SLO Co. Social Justice eNews and gathered email addresses, I noticed that we had no public officials present—no one from City Council, no city employees (except some of the high school teachers). Part of the problem, no doubt, was that the city participated in the SLO County Creeks to Coast Cleanup at the same time, as part of National CleanUp Day, so some of the Earth-friendly folks may have been there.
Secondly, there wasn’t any media there. Granted, our sole county TV station may have been at one of the other strikes, and our local radio stations are not known for their news coverage. We’ll see if we get any space in the North County weekly newspapers. One friend heard about the strike on the local conservative AM station—both pros and cons. I heard about it on Facebook.
More strikes are scheduled for Friday, Sept. 27. We’ll have a big one at the county courthouse in San Luis Obispo from 5 to 7 p.m. If you missed your local strike, catch the next one for sure!
Gerald “Jerry” Iversen
Paso Robles
This article appears in Autumn Arts Annual 2019.
If you really want change it will have to come thru the political process. The current bunch of politicians aren’t listening. Start with these: ranked choice voting, campaign finance reform, term limits, and same-day primaries.
I read an article on 101 ways to help reduce climate change.
Things like Turn off the Lights when you leave the room. Something our parents taught us in the 1940s. Today’s light bulbs use so much less electricity, I wonder if it matter any longer.
Unplug appliances when not in use. Do they really drain power when off but still plugged into the socket? I really do wonder. Many have batteries to power the little lights still on when you are not using them.
A very long list of things many of us do already along with things that some of us will never need to consider.
The truth is most of the earth is way behind our standard of living and will impact the earth as they enter the modern world. Helping them to have safe, clean water and economies that sustain more lives in some level of comfort is far more important than turning off the lights when we leave the room.
Fortunately for those of us living in comfort, new technology will let those billions of individuals in the developing world achieve comfort at a much reduced cost to the environment than our past industrialization did.
Our job is to encourage and support those new technologies to the best of our ability.