By Manuel Rueda
If you thought solidarity was dead in the borough, think back to Sunday, when small clusters of Brooklyn residents joined a global day of action against global warming.
Glove-wearing volunteers with big black trash-bags carried out street clean-ups in Red Hook, Fort Greene and near the waterfront in Brooklyn Heights.
Solar panels were installed in Park Slope homes, bicycles were fixed in Williamsburg, letters for assembly members were written in Prospect Heights and in Gowanus, residents of one apartment building handed out energy efficient CFL light bulbs, for free.
The unusual activities were part of a Global Work Party, promoted by the environmental website 350.org, which provided maps to make it easy for participants to find locations and times of activities.
In Brooklyn, where volunteers held 13 separate activities attended by anywhere from two to 50 people, three strangers met in Prospect Park to share their knowledge of sustainable lifestyles.
“I’m happy I came because even though it’s a small group I feel like I got to share a lot of things that I know about that need to be shared” said Margaret Rose de Cruz, a massage therapist and longtime resident of the area, who talked with her new friends about environmental literature and personal energy saving measures after showing them how to sow damaged socks using a gourd.
“As far as this occasion turned out I was a little bit disappointed,” said event organizer Colin Reis “it made me sad but it’s a bit telling of the movement at large.” he added as he reflected on the difficulties of making people more environmentally aware when they are not under the threat of an immediate ecological disaster.
In nearby Park Slope, about 35 members of a local Buddhist temple,the Zen Center for New York City, took to the streets with large black and transparent trash bags, picking up plastic bottles, soft drink cans and old flyers and separating recyclable trash.
Kohl Suddeth, an actor who attends the temple and participates in its recently established Green Dragon group, found a car battery lying amongst the bushes in Gore Park.
“Realistically it’s a small gesture, it’s a small thing” he said of the cleanup initiative. “But I can’t even count the number of people we talked to on the street that asked us about what we were doing…It’s as much about the visibility than about the gesture of the work itself.”
The 350.org website was funded by environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben, and it is part of a campaign to pressure global leaders to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
“’If we can get to work on solutions to the climate crisis,” the website reads, “so can you.”
350.org -–the number stands for the lowest number of carbon dioxide parts per million that experts say the atmosphere can handle– claims that people in 181 countries carried out environmentally friendly activities as part of the Sundays days of action, such as planting trees, campaigning against the use of plastic bags and forming human mosaics with green messages.
More than 7,000 separate activities took place worldwide according to the website, which shows pictures of Vietnamese volunteers planting a tree and a group of about 30 Israeli youngsters, posing with their bicycles in a lonely desert road.
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