Derailing

Once again, I’m not about to give you a play-by-play recap of tonight’s events on here. For that, you can read my twitter. But I will tell a little bit about what I’ve been doing for the past 24 hours or so, and my thoughts on what’s next for the movement.

Today was a ridiculous day, and a day I will–without a doubt–remember for the rest of my life. Not only did we have the DIS closing ceremony, which made me re-realize how much I’m going to miss all the wonderful friends I’ve made here, but I spent the entire afternoon and evening (until about 2am) in the tcktcktck Fresh Air Center volunteering, manning the door and tweeting my brains out as fast as I can for all the breaking info that came out of tonight.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Derailing.

There’s no doubt that our ideal train to a sustainable future has totally derailed. (And, in a more personal sense, so has my blog posting–I’ll be finishing up my “Things I’ll Miss” list on Sunday as I travel, most likely.) But this isn’t over.

After the announcement of the Copenhagen “Accord” by President Obama this evening, the room was, to put it mildly, absolutely furious. But we aren’t done yet.

This train may have derailed a bit tonight, but we will not give up. We are mad, we are unsatisfied, and more than anything we are disappointed in our leadership. But we aren’t about to throw in the towel.

In the past 24 hours I’ve been working alongside the most incredible people in the entire environmental movement. Bloggers, journalists, columnists, organizers–even the famous faces of our movement like Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben. I’ve been working with people blogging, writing, tweeting and representing organizations like tcktcktck, Oxfam and Greenpeace. I’ve learned from them, I’ve seen them do their magic, and I’ve even tried to jump in and play a role by tweeting, blogging, passing on information and taking care of a lot of the behind-the-scenes work at the Fresh Air Center, so they can keep this movement alive.

I saw it in the room tonight–people are pissed off and sick of cold, dreary Denmark already, but they’re ready to keep fighting and keep moving. These past few months have brought the environmental movement closer together and made it stronger and more resilient than ever before.

Mr. Obama, world leaders, those in opposition to our cause, I say this–be ready. Step it up. We’re changing this game.

If you won’t save the world by yourselves, we’ll push you until you have to. Every time you turn around, we’ll be demonstrating. We’ll be rallying. We’ll be shouting and screaming at you, holding vigils, fasting for weeks on end. We’ll be standing in the cold at all hours of the night, making you listen to us. This problem isn’t going away, and neither are we. It’s taken me a while to get involved in this movement. But I’m here now, I’m inspired, I’m motivated and I’m here to stay.