Philly climate activists to flood NYC

IT WAS ONLY about three years ago Joanne Graham - longtime resident of working-class Eastwick, wedged between the overpasses of I-95 and the Cobbs Creek floodplain under the shadows of jumbo jets landing at Philadelphia International Airport - started to think seriously about the environment.

The environment on her block, that is.

The nonstop flooding in Graham's stretch of Eastwick, which is causing a corner of her home to slowly sink, turned the part-time consultant into a community activist. That got her to contemplate the landfills and former industrial sites in the neighborhood, which she said led her to thinking more and more about the big picture.

"There is a very definite correlation between sea-level rise and flooding, and national studies show that the greatest sea-level rise will be between the Carolinas and Maine," Graham said. She was voicing her concern that climate change caused by greenhouse-gas pollution won't only raise the tidal waters but also will lead to more powerful storms, like 2012's Superstorm Sandy, that could inundate Eastwick.

On Sunday, the local activist will act globally - and so will about 40 of her friends and neighbors. They'll be boarding a bus for New York City, where they'll join the People's Climate March - a daylong pep rally for action on global warming that may become the biggest environmental event on U.S. soil since the first Earth Day 44 years ago.

Organizers of the march say they want to send a message to world leaders who'll be arriving on Tuesday for a major climate-change summit at the United Nations; they are expecting a minimum of 100,000 people to take part, and if Philadelphia is any indication, the count could grow much higher.

Roughly 3,000 people from Philadelphia and the nearby suburbs have already signed up to ride at least 60 buses, according to local planners. ("The most useful gallon of gasoline anyone will ever burn is the one that gets them to the march," environmentalist and chief organizer Bill McKibben quipped to the New York Times.) And thousands more from this region are expected to travel to Manhattan by car, train, or commercial bus.

Jen Hombach, the Philadelphia-based organizer for the McKibben-led 350.org, said the numbers are impressive but what matters even more is the diversity of those signing up. This time, the attendees are not just college students and Volvo-driving suburbanites - but also those from middle-income and predominantly minority communities, like Eastwick, as well as labor activists, ministers and anti-poverty groups that once shunned environmental causes.

Although many skeptics remain, the vast majority of the world's climate scientists believe that burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal in power plants and cars is rapidly warming the planet, which will cause rising sea levels, severe drought and extreme storms and flooding.

The message from the thousands who will march Sunday is focused less, for now, on specific solutions and more on venting frustration that world leaders aren't taking the threat seriously.

David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment, said there's a special reason to be frustrated here in Pennsylvania, where an abundance of coal-fired power plants means the state now produces as much carbon pollution as the entire nation of Chile.

"This is the time to start thinking about it, if you want to be around for the future and have future generations," said Matthew Wang, 29, a SEPTA worker and Drexel architecture student who's leading a student delegation to New York on Sunday. When he gets back, he plans to lobby the university to dump its investments in fossil-fuel companies.