“We don’t know how many people it takes to encircle the White House, but we’re about to find out,” Bill McKibben told a crowd of over 12,000 gathered in Lafayette Square on Sunday afternoon.

Such a prospect would have been hard to imagine eleven weeks earlier, when McKibben was standing in the same park with no more than a hundred people listening. It was the first day of what would become a two-week long campaign of mass civil disobedience targeting the planned construction of TransCanada’s 1,700-mile KeystoneXL oil pipeline from the tar sands of Northern Alberta to the refineries of the Texas Gulf Coast.

Shortly before leading a group of 65 people (including this author) into the DC jail system for the next two nights, McKibben told the small crowd, “We’ve already succeeded in nationalizing this fight in a way no one thought was possible. It’s not just a group of people along the pipeline route who are opposing this project anymore. People from all 50 states will be joining us over the coming weeks.”

He was right. Over 1,200 people from across the United States and Canada with all different kinds of backgrounds—farmers, ranchers, Gulf Coast residents, faith leaders, indigenous people and climate activists—came to put their bodies on the line and send a clear message to the president that tar sands oil is a death sentence for the planet. Many echoed the words of NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who said further development of the tar sands would be “game over for the planet.”

What no one could have expected on that day in August was the explosion of mass sustained protest that would soon follow in this country. Occupy Wall Street was only in the planning stages at that point, but its emergence weeks later helped foster the sense that change is only going to come through dedication and relentless pressure.

In the two months since the last tar sands protester was arrested, a series of calamitous events has befallen the pipeline and what seemed like a rubber-stamped process leading up to its construction. First a scandal emerged, detailing a cozy relationship between TransCanada and the State Department, the US Agency tasked with determining whether the pipeline is in the “national interest.” Uncovered emails show that the State Department allowed TransCanada to play a major role in choosing the firm that conducted the pipeline’s environmental impact study.

Then, last week, it was revealed that the State Department lost tens of thousands of public comments on the pipeline and wouldn’t say how the remaining will be handled. And finally, just days ago, the Washington Post did a little digging into the industry’s reports on job creation only to discover that the numbers are based on fabrication and fuzzy math.

There’s little doubt these trip-ups would have occurred—let alone surfaced—if not for the continued pressure of the tar sands organizers and protesters. Over the course of those two months, they protested at Obama campaign events, gained the support of the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and seven other Nobel Peace Laureates, and found allies in Congress and the Senate. Even celebrities like Robert Redford and Marc Ruffalo took up their cause.

Perhaps sensing the shift in winds and it’s potential blowback effect on the 2012 presidential elections, President Obama stepped forward last week and addressed the issue for the first time, saying that he would take full ownership for the final decision—something that only a day earlier his press secretary said would be made by the State Department. He also made it clear that he was not going to let the red herring that is the jobs versus the environment debate cloud his decision, adding, “I think folks in Nebraska, like all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, “We’ll take a few thousand jobs if it means that our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health…”

This was all just in time for Sunday’s Surround the White House action, which had the stated objective of showing the president that “he has the support needed to reject the pipeline – and that there will be real consequences if he doesn’t.” Tim DeChristopher, the imprisoned climate activist who may be more responsible than anyone for the recent radical shift toward civil disobedience within the environmental movement, said something similar in a message released last week. “There’s a deep instinctual sense of intimidation,” he wrote, “that comes from being completely surrounded, and that might be healthy for our president right now.”

Unfortunately, as rumor had it, the president was out golfing, perhaps to return home later in the day. In the meantime, McKibben dispatched a third of the crowd toward the south side of the White House. Throngs of people, young and old, paraded behind a snaking DIY-KeystoneXL pipeline that was hundreds of feet long. There were chants—such as “leave the tar sands in the soil, we don’t want your dirt oil”—and group sing-a longs. Most popular was a rendition of “Stand By Me” directed at Obama.

Within 40 minutes a text had been sent out by the organizers saying, “We are completely circling the White House!” It ended up taking far less than 12,000 people to encircle the White House. One organizer said there were enough people that the lines around the White House were “four deep.”

The stunt was over after an hour and everyone returned to the rally staging ground in Lafayette Square for series of concluding speeches. The general mood was uplifting, almost party-like. And while the celebration may have been warranted, there wasn’t a single speaker who didn’t hint at the prospect of challenges to come.

Earlier in the day, Canadian author Naomi Klein spoke with a hardened realism, saying “If this pipeline isn’t built, they’re going to build another one in my country across the Rockies and ship the oil to China. We must stop any pipeline that they try to build.” With a note of optimism, she added, “We have the tar sands surrounded, not just the White House.”

No one seemed more surprised by the momentum supporting such a statement than McKibben himself. In his closing remarks, he went back to that first day of action:

When they arrested that first bunch of us on August 20th and took us off to Central Cell Block in DC, where we spent three days, I was a little worried. I was worried about being in Central Cell Block—that’s about as much fun as it sounds like it might be—but I was more worried because the guys who were doing it, the police, said to us, ‘We’re going to try to deter other people from coming. We don’t want to deal with two weeks of people getting arrested and we figured if we treat you tough no one else will come.’

McKibben was suddenly interrupted by a whisper in his ear. “There goes the president’s motorcade,” he said, pointing toward H Street. The crowd immediately followed in unison: “Yes we can. Stop the pipeline.” McKibben settled them down, saying, “Alright, he’s heard us. We’ve given him his chance.” Then he returned to the story.

That day in the jail, the main thing I was worried about was that maybe they were right… I was only able to get out one little scrawled message, and I knew that people were worried about us in jail and the note just said, ‘We don’t need sympathy, we need company.’ The next day people showed up to get arrested and the next day and then all over the country and now this unbelievable crowd here today… We are in the middle of this game now. We are in this fight so deep and so hard that if we’re going to win it, we need you to go home today and fight like hell… This is the definition of a grassroots, wildflower movement. Nobody knew, nobody in that building [the White House] paid the slightest attention to the Keystone pipeline until August and now it is the biggest environmental and political flashpoint that they have to deal with and if we do our jobs, all of us right, then they are going to have to deal with it in the deepest way and that’s what we need. Damn it, we are going to win this thing if we do it right!

Only time will tell, of course, and that time is fast drawing close, with a decision that must be rendered by the president before the end of the year. There have been hints that the period may be extended, but the longer it takes, the more money it’s costing TransCanada. More importantly, though, the longer it takes, the more it plays into the newfound strength of protesters in this country.

The EPA did their job, following scientific advice, hearing from impacted communities, environmental justice, and health organizations. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson worked to set new standards for communities, which would have helped protect kids and keep people working instead of out of work sick or in the ER taking care of their kids and likely spurred investments in scrubbers and pollution control equipment manufactured here in the United States.

Instead, the President sided with the US Chamber of Commerce, echoing the very language they used in their letter scrambling to find justifications for why these polluting corporations wanted to put off essential protections for the lives and health of kids and seniors exposed to toxic air pollutants. The Chamber of Commerce, reveling in the power they are exercising in a post-Citizens United world of unlimited corporate cash in US elections, said:

U.S. Chamber Praises White House Decision to Withdraw Potentially Disastrous Ozone Standards
Donohue Calls Move a ‘Big First Step in What Needs to be a Broader Regulatory Reform Effort’. Source

This is after over a thousand people have been arrested in front of the White House, desperately trying to get President Obama to halt the Keystone XL pipeline that the nation’s top climate scientist said would be ‘game over’ for the climate, if built. A White House conspicuously without solar panels, that the Administration had promised to install by this spring. Another in a string of promises broken and priorities downgraded on the environmental front. As the protestors outside the White House have been singing, “Pick a side Obama”, and it appears that he has.

70 people from across the US and Canada were arrested at the White House this morning for the first day of a two week sit-in aimed at pressuring President Obama to deny the permit for a massive new oil pipeline. Over 2,000 more people are expected to join the daily civil disobedience over the coming days.

At stake is what has quickly become the largest environmental test for President Obama before the 2012 election. The President must choose whether or not to grant a Canadian company a permit to build a 1,700 mile pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the gulf of mexico.

Environmentalists warn that the pipeline could cause a BP disaster right in America’s heartland, over the largest source of fresh drinking water in the country. The world’s top climatologist, Dr. James Hansen, has warned that if the Canadian tar sands are fully developed it could be “game over” for the climate.

“It’s not the easiest thing on earth for law-abiding folk to come risk arrest. But this pipeline has emerged as the single clear test of the president’s willingness to fight for the environment,” said environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, who is spearheading the protests and was arrested this morning. “So I wore my Obama ’08 button, and I carry a great deal of hope in my heart that we will see that old Obama emerge. It’s hot out here today, especially when you’re wearing a suit and tie. But it’s nowhere near as hot as it’s going to get if we lose this fight.”

McKibben was amongst those arrested today, along with the co-founder of NRDC and former White House official Gus Speth, gay rights activist Lt. Dan Choi, author and activist Mike Tidwell, Firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher, and many others.

Environmentalists say that the President’s failure to take any substantive steps to protect the environment and stop the climate crisis has left his base disheartened and desperate. While the President can blame Congress for the Democrats’ failure to pass a climate bill despite unprecedented majorities, the decision whether or not to grant the Keystone XL the permit necessary for construction is his and only his.

The protest began with a small rally in Lafeyette Park, where participants listened to McKibben address the crowd and prepared themselves for what will likely be an afternoon in jail. At about 11:00 AM, the group formed two lines and marched to the White House fence to the applause of onlookers. A group of participants lined the fence, holding two large banners that read “Climate Change is Not in Our National Interest: Stop the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline” and “We Sit In Against the Keystone XL Pipeline. Obama Will You Stand Up to Big Oil?” The rest of the group sat-in on the sidewalk infront of the fence.

Within a few minutes, police began issuing warnings to clear the area. At 11:30 AM, a young woman from Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, AK was the first person to be arrested. Arrests proceeded for over an hour as van-loads of protestors were taken away from the White House.

Jane Kleeb, an outspoken opponent of the pipeline and founder of BOLD Nebraska, stood in Lafayette Park this morning and cheered on the protestors as they were arrested.

“Nebraskans are counting on President Obama to do the right thing,” said Kleeb, who is planning to risk arrest on Monday with a delegation of farmers and ranchers who are coming in from Nebraska. “Back home we are fighting to protect our land and water. We decided to bring that fight to the President’s doorstep because our families’ legacies, those that homesteaded the very land now threatened by a foreign oil company, are too important for us sit on the sidelines. We are acting on our values and expect our President to act as well.”

The coalition organizing the protest, Tarsandsaction.org, is accepting donations and new sign-ups for the sit-in throughout the next two weeks. For more information, the public can visit tarsandsaction.org or follow the group on Twitter at @tarsandsaction.

VIDEO: ‘A LINK BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND JOPLIN TORNADOES? NEVER.’ | Watch and share this powerful visualization of Bill McKibben’s scathing Washington Post op-ed on our dangerously polluted world, narrated by Stephen Thomson:

At Power Shift 2009, everything seemed to be lined up for a clean victory. Van Jones, the keynote of the 2007 conference, was going to be the new Green Jobs czar, almost every high ranking administration official came for a rockstar welcome and made huge promises, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Chairman Ed Markey promised a climate bill. Big environmental organizations weren’t exactly praised for their strategies to move climate legislation, but there was this sense that with this President, this Congress, and the momentum behind them fueled by their generation’s political engagement, we were going to see real change.

Instead, while Speaker Pelosi held up her end of the bargain, they watched as they were cut out of a process dominated by backroom deals by major environmental organizations, un-transparent ‘war rooms’, and a hostile senate and indifferent President. The narrative of the tea party dominated the year, bankrolled by mountains of corporate cash, as the health care fight seemingly exhausted the policy making capacity of the Democratic party, but those youth activists were not called upon, brought in, or presented with a way to engage. Even the worst environmental disaster in recent history, the Gulf Oil spill, seemed to derail progress, with a feckless response by the US government.

So, they came to Power Shift, this year, pissed off and determined not to take a back seat again. Speeches by Bill McKibben, Van Jones, and Tim DeChristopher hammered home the idea that change was not going to come without radical changes to business as usual. In fact, the US Chamber of Commerce, seen by many of the face of American business, was singled out for its mask slipping and it being revealed as a front group for big polluters trying to appropriate the mom and pop image of local chambers of commerce to block climate legislation. Direct action, sit-ins, movement building, and working to get people out into the streets were prioritized over lobbying and other politer political activity.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81EZUkYzrxU]

Money pollution and the distorting effect on US politics was prioritized over carbon pollution. Bill McKibben got roars from the crowd as he stood in front of a banner reading “The US Chamber of Commerce Doesn’t speak for Me”, focusing on the political arm of big coal, oil, and industry as the biggest obstacle to climate action. In fact, leaders of the youth climate movement broke another taboo, when they got an invite to the White House after a week of bad press about how former youth Obama campaign staff were disappointed with the President’s endorsement of dirty energy technologies. Instead of being content with an audience and equating access with influence, one youth leader interrupted President Obama after being talked to for fifteen minutes and asked for bold leadership on climate.

After $368 million dollars in foundation spending on advocacy on an insider cap-and-trade policy centric advocacy model, Power Shift 2011 started the expose the growing rift between grassroots youth and environmental justice advocates prioritizing direct action, hard-hitting corporate accountability, and targeting the impact of polluter cash in US politics and a policy centered approach dominated by insider lobbying and ephemeral, expensive warroom and commercial ad buy focused campaigns. Whatever happens over the next year, Power Shift 2011 heralded the end of business as usual.

Ten thousand young people descended on Washington for the Power Shift conference this weekend to call for bold action from government leaders to address climate change and create a clean energy economy for all. Many of these young people had a more specific, and personal, message for Congress: “I need a job.”

Inspired by passionate speeches addressing youth unemployment by AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and green jobs visionary Van Jones, the members of the Briefcase Brigades are bringing attention to the epidemic of un- and under-employed millennials:

We are ready to work. We know the economy is in bad shape. We know the country is in trouble. We want to help. But first, we need jobs.

Watch the story of the Briefcase Brigades at Power Shift 2011:

On April 27th, while Congress is in recess and members are back in their districts, young people are creating Briefcase Brigades and going to their offices all around the country to demand Congress prioritize jobs over budget cuts.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over 5 million young people who are out of work. That doesn’t count people with unpaid internships, people with low-wage jobs that don’t have health insurance, and people who went back to school because they couldn’t find a job.

Chances are you know one of these young people. Someone living with their parents long after they decided they wanted to move out. Someone working their second or third unpaid internship. Someone working several part time jobs, with no health insurance, who still struggles to make ends meet.

What if instead, these young people were given an opportunity to address some of the problems we hear about on television everyday? What if they were given the opportunity to help develop and deploy renewable energy technology? What if they were put to work repairing our crumbling infrastructure? What if they were given a chance to help design and build new products to help us compete with the rest of the world?

Then those youth would be working, paying taxes, paying their own rent, buying things, opening bank accounts and making investments. They might even start their own businesses and create more new jobs. They would be helping to get the economy working again.

Many young people, such as the leaders of WeatherizeDC and Solar Mosaic who came to the Power Shift conference, are already taking steps to create jobs and build a strong green economy. But we should not be left to try and solve the jobs crisis alone. Our elected officials, our representatives, should be a partner to young people in this challenge.

It’s time for Congress to stop talking about cuts and start talking about jobs.

Join us on April 27th. Get dressed up for a job interview, bring your resumé and a briefcase, and a few of your friends too. Go to your local Congressperson’s office and ask them what their plan is to address youth unemployment. Tell them we are ready to work, and ask them “Where are the jobs?”

Sign up to join an event or host on of your own at www.BriefcaseBrigades.org and follow @april27brigades on Twitter.

Full transcript is Below the Fold.

All right, listen up. Very few people can ever say that they are in
the single most important place they could possibly be doing the
single most important thing they could possibly be doing. That’s you,
here, now.

You are the movement that we need if we are going to win in the few
years that we have. You have the skills now. You are making the
connections. And there is no one else. It is you.

That is a great honor and that is a terrible burden. There is no one else.

The science is the easy part in this, grim, but easy. 2010 was the
warmest year on record. And it was warm. We were on the phone one day
with our 350 crew in Pakistan and one of them said, “It’s hot out here
today,” and I was surprised to hear him say it  because it’s usely hot
in Pakistan during the summer. He said, no it’s really hot . We just
set the new, all time Asia temperature record, 129 degrees. That kind
of heat melts the arctic. That kind of heat causes drought so deep
across Russia  that the Kremlin stops all grain exports. That kind of
heat  causes the flooding that still has 4 million people across
Pakistan homeless tonight.

It’s tough, it’s grim, but the good news at least is that it’s clear,
the science. We have a number: 350 parts per million. 350, the most
important number on earth. As the NASA team put it in January 2008,
“any value in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million  is
not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and
which life on earth is adapted.”  Getting back to 350 pars per million
will be very very tough, the toughest thing human beings have ever
done, but there is no use complaining about it, it’s just physics and
chemistry. That’s what we have to do.

But if the scientific method has worked splendidly to outline our
dilemma, that’s how badly the political method has worked to solve it.
Think about our own country, historically the biggest source of carbon
emissions. Last summer, the Senate refused to even take a vote on the
tepid, moderate, tame climate bill that was before it. Last week, the
House voted 248 to 174 to pass a resolution saying global warming
wasn’t real. It was one of the most embarrassing votes that Congress
has ever taken. They believe that because they can amend the tax laws
they can amend the laws of nature too, but they can’t. I’m awful glad
a few of you went up to the visitors gallery to talk some sense to
them last week.

Even the White House. Two weeks ago, the interior secretary, who spoke
here two years ago, Ken Salazar, signed a piece of paper opening up
250 million tonnes of coal under federal land in Wyoming to mining.
That’s like opening 300 new coal fired power plants and running them
for a year. That’s a disgrace.

But you know what. We understand the physics and chemistry of
political power. In this case, it’s not carbon dioxide that rules the
day: it’s money.

Many of you are in the District of Columbia for the first time and it
looks clean and it looks sparkling. No, this city is as polluted as
Beijing. But instead of coal smoke it’s polluted by money. Money warps
our political life, it obscures our vision, but just like with physics
in chemistry there is no use whining. We know now what we need to do
and the first thing we need to do is build a movement.

We will never have as much money as the oil companies so we need a
different currency to work in, we need bodies, we need creativity, we
need spirit.

350.org has been like a beta-test for that movement. It began with
youth here at Power Shift four years ago. It’s now spread around the
planet. In the last two years, there have been 15,000 demonstrations
in 189 nations. CNN called it the most widespread political activity
in the planet’s history. But it needs to get bigger still. On the
first Earth Day in 1970 there 20 million Americans in the street, one
in ten Americans. That’s the kind of size we need.

And so, on September 24 we need your help. September 24 is the next
big day of action. We’re calling it Moving Planet and in those 189
nations, people will be in motion. Much of it will be on bicycles,
because the bicycles is one of the few tools that rich and poor both
use. Who here knows how to ride a bike? All right, September 24, I
cannot wait to see the pictures. We are not going to wait for the
politicians to move, we’re going to create the future that we need
ourselves.

But that movement doesn’t just need to be bigger, it needs to sharper
too, more aggressive.

You know what, at Copenhagen we got 117 nations to sign on to that 350
target. That was good, but they were the wrong 117 nations. They were
the poorest and most vulnerable nations. The most addicted nations,
led by our own, weren’t yet willing to bit the bullet, so that’s where
we’ve got to go to work.

That work, to deal with that money pollution, that work starts Monday
at ten o’clock in Lafayette Square, across from the White House and
next to a place called the US Chamber of Commerce.

The Koch Brothers are high peaks of corruption, but the US Chamber of
Commerce is the Everest of dirty money. It boasts on its web page that
it is the biggest lobby in Washington. In fact, it spends more money
lobbying than the next five lobbies combined. It spent more money on
politics last year than the Republican National Committee and the
Democratic National Committee combined and 94% of that went to climate
deniers.

We cannot stop their money, but we can strip them of their
credibility. They claim to represent all American business, but they
don’t. 55% of their funding came from 16 companies. They don’t have to
say who those companies are, but it’s easy to tell when you watch what
they do. They spend their time lobbying to make sure the planet heats
up as fast it possibly can.

They sent a legal brief to the EPA last year, saying that they should
take no action on climate change, because if the planet warmed, humans
could alter their behavior and their physiology to deal with the
problem. I don’t even really know what that means, alter your
physiology. Grow gills? I don’t know. But I can tell you this. I am
too old to change my physiology and you all are too good looking. But
I will adapt my behavior. Every day now I will roll out of bed and go
to work fighting them. Hell, I will go to bed at night and try to
dream up new ways to fight.

We’re going to adapt our behavior all right. We’re going to adapt our
behavior now to fight on every front. I’m sorry if that sounds
aggressive, but there we are.

Twenty-two years ago, I wrote the first book about climate change and
I’ve gotten to watch it all, and I know that simply persuasion will
not do. We need to fight. Now, we need to fight non-violently and with
civil disobedience. You will hear from my friend Tim DeChristopher in
a moment and more to come, but if you’re going to go that route, one
thing you need to make sure that you manage to get across in your
witness is that you are not the radicals in this fight.

The radicals are the people are the people who are fundamentally
altering the composition of the atmosphere. That is the most radical
thing people have ever done.

We need to fight with art and with music, too. Not just the side with
our brain that likes bar graphs and pie graphs, but with all our heart
and all our soul. Tomorrow or tonight, you need to go down behind Hall
B downstairs and help them build the art work for Monday morning.

We need to fight with unity. We need to have a coherent voice. That’s
why, last week we joined with our friends at 1Sky to build this
bigger, stronger 350.org. We need to speak with one loud voice,
because we are fighting for your future.

So far, we’ve raised the temperature of the planet one degree and
that’s done all that I’ve described, it’s melted the arctic, it’s
changed the oceans. The climatologists tell us that unless we act with
great speed and courage that one degree will be five degrees before
this century is out. And if we do that, then the world that we leave
behind will be a ruined world.

We fight not just for ourselves, we fight for the beauty of this
place. For cool trout streams and deep spruce woods. For chilly fog
rising off the Pacific and deep snow blanketing the mountains. We
fight for all the creation that shares this planet with us. We don’t
know half the species on Earth we’re wiping out.

And of course, we fight alongside our brothers and sisters around the
world. You’ve seen the pictures as I talk: these are our comrades.
Most of these people, as you see, come from places that have not
caused this problem, and yet they’re willing to be in deep solidarity
with us. That’s truly admirable and it puts a real moral burden on us.
Never let anyone tell you, that environmentalism is something that
rich, white people do. Most of the people that we work with around the
world are poor and black and brown and Asian and young, because that’s
what most of the world is made up of, and they care about the future
as anyone else.

We have to fight, finally, without any guarantee that we are going to
win. We have waited late to get started and our adversaries are strong
and we do not know how this is going to come out. If you were a
betting person, you might bet we were going to lose because so far
that’s what happened, but that’s not a bet you’re allowed to make. The
only thing that a morally awake person to do when the worst thing
that’s ever happened is happening is try to change those odds.

I have spent most of my last few years in rooms around the world with
great people, many of whom will be refugees before this century is
out, some of whom may be dead from climate change before this century
is out. No guarantee that we will win, but from them a complete
guarantee that we will fight with everything we have. It is always an
honor for me to be in those rooms. It is the greatest honor for me to
be with you tonight.

No guarantee that we will win, but we will fight side by side, as long
as we’ve got. Thank you all so much.

Did you just go to Power Shift 2011? If so, you probably participated in the largest grassroots organizing training in our movement’s history. Hopefully, you learned how to tell your story of what motivates you to do this work and rise to the climate challenge. Perhaps you learned how to tell the story of your community, the struggles, hopes, and challenges of your friends, neighbors, dorm-mates, or co-workers.

I think you might have learned how to the story of now, why now is the time to get involved, to make the change needed to head off the climate crisis and build a clean energy economy strong enough to pull us out of the financial wreckage our out-of-control Wall street banks left us.

Guess what? Those stories can move people, motivate your friends and family to join the fight, and fire up a nationwide movement. However, you don’t have to always tell those stories one at a time. You can tell them to thousands of our friends, to our movement. I want to read these stories and learn about you, why you get up to take on climate change, your struggles, your victories.

So, consider It’s Getting Hot in Here an extension of your voice. The megaphone you need to tell the world, your movement, and your new friends all about you. We just broke two million views, so somebody out here is paying attention. Once you tell your story, stick around. You are going to learn from people, from all over the country, who just like you, care a whole hell of lot.

They may be nearby or clear across the country, organizing at an Ivy League or in the hollers of Appalachia, but if you read their stories, hear their heartbreak, their tears of joy, and their brilliant, beautiful ideas, you will slowly change.

They will become your new friends, your allies, those whose work keeps you going during the tough times and those who celebrate with you in the best of times. We need you and you will grow to find you need them too.

So, if you are that storyteller, email me: richard[at]firedupmedia.com and let’s get you started telling your stories right here on It’s Getting Hot in Here. All my love and in solidarity for a future worth fighting for.