I simply couldn’t resist the urge to chronicle the Climate March, held this past Sunday in New York.
I was there and blown away by the sheer magnitude of people and spirit.
As a New Yorker living in the flood plain downtown, climate change is not an abstraction but reality, as two times out of the last three hurricane seasons, our building was evacuated and we were handed a personal warning sign of changes surely to come.
Of course, climate change touches everyone and everything not just us. From the rising level and temperature of the ocean, to how we produce nutrients to feed the world, to the rising alcohol levels in the wines we drink.
This march, even for NYC, with some 400,00 strong participating, was hyper symbolic simply by its density and size.
It was also a wondrous and large-scale mess from the crammed, uncontrollable mass of humanity overcrowding the uptown trains on a lazy Sunday morning to total bedlam at the intersection of 77th Street and Central Park West.
For myself, ever the pragmatic optimist, it was a graphic reinforcement of my personal belief that truly giving a shit about something, and sharing that belief, is a force that can change the world.
I was egged on to write this by a friend’s Facebook comments to my Instagram photos of the march. ‘Does it really matter?’ was her question punctuated with glass-half empty ennui and painted in inevitability of doom and gloom.
My response is undeniably—Yes!
It is the only thing that matters! Without caring nothing gets done.
Let’s be clear that what was united in this sea of chanting humanity at the march was the passion and collective acknowledgement of a real threat. That’s the key point.
Beyond that communion, it was a jumble of slogans, crazily diverse, many misguided, blaming our current state of the planet on everything from Wall Street to Obama, to industrialization to the decay of religion and ethics.
As diverse as the messages was the population. A melting pot of people, seniors and baby boomers aplenty, but way more teenagers acting out awareness, many costumed, dancing with childlike seriousness and pensive joy.
Granted that this march was more expression than platform, more celebration of unity than a coherent coalition or fund raising effort. Some of the secondary offshoots like Flood Wall Street, and Choose Life over Money seem counter productive if not misguided.
But—exultations at this level mollifies most everything else, even the practical, to some extent.
This was a gathering to show solidarity, to cheerlead the fact that people do care and are willing to do something about it.
I never found my group at the march and in my wandering about, two truths struck me, one from my heart and one absolutely from my head as a businessperson.
The largest cultural changes always comes from the heart of the people up, not from legislation and the government down.
This seems to play itself out time after time in my life.
People are the kernels of the largest changes, not government nor certainly institutions. People are in fact where businesses and government get their cue and permission to act.
Think back to the world you lived in the day after you graduated high school. My bet is the largest cultural changes you are living with today are the ones that you personally were part of making happen.
Civil rights, gender equality, the criminalization of bigotry and hate crimes, gay rights, sexual freedoms—even recycling and large scale composting–all started from people, from individual actions atomizing into groups and communities embracing trends that evolved society and eventually impacted government.
In my personal world, the change is really dramatic.
Post high school, no one was out of the closet, gender equality was an aspirational idea, with not even a hint of reality. Racial and religious intolerance was commonplace. Littering wasn’t even a concept and on the health front, lead was a prime ingredient in the paints used in every elementary school. Asbestos was wrapped around every plumbing pipe in NA.
All of these were taken on by the people and to varying degrees moved in the right direction against overwhelming odds. Fueled by the web of course and instantiating a new moral status of transparency and civil customer rights.
The world is hardly perfect but you are wearing blinders if you don’t see this as a better place and time. And even moreso if you don’t think the world’s population can’t tackle the massive issues affecting everyone—climate and equally of how to feed the world’s hungry without killing the planet itself.
I call bullshit on the doom and gloom crowd.
We shall prevail and not only will change happen it will happen in ways that drive our economy, not hurt it.
Saving the earth just may save the world’s economy
This is not a feeling, this is calculated hypothesis. Maybe optimistic but smacks of possibilities.
VCs are now talking about investing to do good. I applaud this but I also know they are following the money as well and investing smartly.
I believe the real money from capital investments over the next decades will come from AgTech more than tech, from logistics ingrained with sustainability and from leveraging science as truly the partner of computer and behavioral sciences.
I believe that projects around carbon footprints, growing more nutrient dense food per acre, water usage, power and land usage generally are ‘good’ as in the realm of stuff for the ‘common good’ but equally, they are where the smart money is going to be made.
The real reason I’m positive on the future is because good intentions and great business will come together here as a perfect wave.
That not only does the mass of people I followed down Central Park West have a heart to push and support change, but it is also the market for the products of change.
This group of 400,000 and the hundreds of millions they touch in their networks across the web, are both the spirit for change and the consumers who will support it with their choices of what to buy and what not.
This is a big deal. Product without markets fail. Markets chanting for products they can love, change the world we live in.
I also agree with Rob LeClerc, CEO of AgFunder, that AgTech as a category is the next major asset class in the capital markets.
If you can solve any one of thousands of critical agricultural supply chain opportunities, the market is already here.
Wrapping up
This was the best use of a Sunday afternoon I’ve done a while.
To say that people don’t care is simply not true. The march here and around the world proved that. People seriously are concerned and united around that concern.
To think that world leaders can ignore this—I guess is possible, but not for long as the coming generations will be way less patient that we are. And they were out en mass at the march.
The real power here is that the people who were present were united in spirit and will create the market to support it.
From rose colored,peace-signed glasses on baby boomers to musings on AgTech economics—simply a great day.
