Jarvis Cocker Pens Essay in Support of the People’s Climate March, This Weekend in New York City

Photo by Lindsey Best

Jarvis Cocker of Pulp has penned an essay for Creative Time Reports (via The Guardian) in support of the People’s Climate March, taking place this Sunday, September 21, in New York City. Organizers of the March have called it the “largest climate march in history.” It has the potential to gather over 100,000 marchers, showing “a level of demand for action” not seen since the 1960s.

Cocker’s essay calls for individual action for climate change, highlighting politicians’ refusal to acknowledge that big business is destroying the Earth. He reflects on the global anti-war protests that took place on February 15, 2003 in opposition of the Iraq War—how “nothing really changed… [it] was effectively ignored”—and mentioned the song he wrote about it, 2006′s “Running the World”.

He also described a 2008 trip to Greenland, where he “saw the effects of global warming firsthand,” just days before the stock market collapsed. Cocker compared the issue of the economy to that of the environment:

It was the morning of the stock market crash and I learned that Iceland, the country I had been visiting not four hours previously, was effectively bankrupt. 

That gave me a strange feeling because I hadn’t noticed. The sun had still been shining as I walked through the airport terminal. People had gone about their everyday business as usual, there had been air to breathe and nothing to betray the cataclysm that had befallen the entire country. How could that be? This was a financial crisis! The Big One! THE ECONOMY was at risk! Why was the world still turning?

You whisper now, but could it be that there is a higher power than … THE ECONOMY? I know that sounds a bit sacrilegious, but could it be that THE ECOLOGY is actually the biggie? That maybe having air to breathe, water to drink and land to inhabit could be more important than the fluctuations of the FTSE or the Dow Jones? It’s just a thought – a thought that most people instinctively understand, but that the political classes have yet to grasp.

And he described the need for Sunday’s march:

Exactly when did “government for the people” become “government of the people”? When did the function of government change from public service to crowd control? From protector to pimp?

The People’s Climate March this Sunday is important. Because governments won’t put the case for action on climate change too strongly – no, that might be interpreted as being “anti-business”. It might dissuade corporations from building factories in countries that sign on to climate agreements. It might be harmful to THE ECONOMY. So once again it will be left to ordinary people to point out the blindingly obvious fact that destroying the place you live in is not a good idea. It really isn’t. And the powers that be would do well to heed the cold, hard truth that there are more of us than them, that we are heartily sick and tired of being ignored.

Read the entire essay here.

Watch Cocker’s video for “Running the World”:

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