STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
On Earth Day thousands across the globe took part in more than 600 cities on six continents in a March for Science.
On Saturday, April 29, residents of the Wood River Valley are joining with people around the world in staging a People’s Climate March. The march will begin at Ketchum Town Square and end at City Hall. Speeches will start at 11 a.m. and the march will follow at 11:30 a.m.
The march, which takes place on the 100th day of the Trump Administration, is being staged to show representatives at the national and local level that people take climate change seriously, said Molly Page.
Many Idahoans criticized the Idaho legislature after lawmakers removed the human impacts on climate change from the first attempt to update education science curriculum in the state since 2000.
“The 2017 Idaho legislature session made it clear that many representatives in Idaho don’t take climate change seriously. Let’s show them that Idahoans care about climate, clean air and water, too!” wrote Page, a member of the Climate March organizing group and founder of Indivisible Blaine County.
Idaho Sen. Majority Leader Michelle Stennett will be among the speakers, along with Aimee Christensen, executive director of the Sun Valley Institute. The Institute has organized initiatives to help valley residents and businesses to install solar and buy electric cars at hugely discounted rates.
Also speaking: Dani Mazzotta, the Idaho Conservation League’s Central Idaho director, and Brygitte De La Cruz and Analena Deklotz, Green Team leaders at Community School.
Speakers plan to offer some “common ground solutions” to climate change that they believe can lead to a more livable world.
Representatives of local organizations will also have booths with information about what they are doing to fight climate change locally. And Starbucks will donate free coffee for participants.
There will be a People’s Climate March in Boise at noon on that day, as well.
“Donald Trump is the only climate denying world leader and is using his power to attack our climate, our communities and our jobs instead of advancing a vision of new American economy that protects our planet and people,” wrote Casey Mattoon, conservation program manager at the Idaho Chapter of the Sierra Club and an organizer of the Boise march. “A decade ago the Governor of Idaho endorsed the science behind the climate changed and warned of the environmental and economic impacts if we do not act. The time for our state and cities to affect change is now.”
Hundreds participated in a March for Science at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise and dozens more took part in one in Twin Falls on Earth Day Saturday. A dozen people clustered on a street corner in Hailey, waving signs at passing motorists Saturday afternoon.
Ten thousand people are estimated to have turned out in a downpour at the March for Science in Washington, protesting proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Some wore lab coats. Others dressed as Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.
They chanted “Build labs, not walls,” as they marched down Constitution Avenue. And they waved a plethora of signs: “Science is not an opinion.” “Without science, it’s just fiction.” “Science saves lives.” “Science is not up for a vote.” “No science. No Beer.” Even a humorous “I just came for the pi.”
The director of the Western Watersheds Project talked about how politicians supporting the livestock industry had ignored cheatgrass research, enabling it to spread and leading to damaging wildfires.
James Balog, who talked about his Extreme Ice Survey at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts lecture series a couple years ago, claimed he was a patriot at the rally: “I fight for spacious skies. I fight for amber waves of grain.”
For more information about Saturday’s upcoming Climate March, contact Betsy Mizell at the Idaho Conservation League at 208-726-7485.