On September 17th, an estimated 75,000 people took to the streets of Manhattan to demand that President Biden ‘end fossil fuels’ by “stopping oil and gas projects, phasing down drilling, and declaring a climate emergency.” The event was the largest climate mobilization in the US since President Biden took office and since before the pandemic began.
My research team and I surveyed participants at the march to learn about who they were, what motivated them to participate, and their perspectives on the growing climate movement. Of the people whom we randomly sampled, 170 people completed the survey (representing an 80% response rate). Here are some of the most interesting findings:
- Participants included a large percentage of first-time protesters. 16% reported that the march was the first time they had ever participated in a protest. Only two activists in our sample reported having participated in the two other large-scale climate marches in the US: the People’s Climate March in NYC in 2014 and the People’s Climate March in 2017.
- Participants reported having personally experienced the effects of climate change in the past six months. An overwhelming majority had experienced extreme heat and wildfires or the smoke from them.
- Participants reported a range of emotions in response to climate change. More than three-quarters of march participants report strongly feeling anger (75%) and sadness (81%) about climate change.
- Almost half of participants reported participating in direct action/civil disobedience in the past year and 95% of participants reported supporting organizations engaged in non-violent civil disobedience. In other words, these activists are not being turned off to the climate movement by those groups and individuals who are turning to direct action; they are supporting this expansion of tactics.
In addition to surveying the crowd, I worked with a team to field these questions to a national sample so we can compare people who are mobilizing within the climate movement to the general American population. We will have those results soon, so stay tuned.
Dana R Fisher 