By Timmons Roberts 

The day after the People’s Climate March, and I’m awash with emotion. I’m exhausted, and exhilarated, from having gotten up before dawn to take a four-hour bus ride from Providence, Rhode Island to march for six hours through the streets of New York City with my 11-year-old daughter.

By Timmons Roberts, Guy Edwards and David Ciplet 

As world leaders gather at the United Nations in New York next Tuesday to discuss how to increase global action to confront global warming, tens of thousands will take to the streets demanding they act. Most leaders have been woefully behind the curve. Now they need to listen and pay attention to citizens, who in growing numbers are calling for action.

By Timmons Roberts 

The Seekonk is five miles of beautiful open water, alive with fish, eels, crabs, cormorants, osprey, herons, ducks, kingfishers, muskrats and many other forms of life. Though it’s right here in town, the Seekonk is “rewilding” after its de-industrialization: the wood pilings are rotting, sea walls collapsing, and the trees, vines, bushes and flowers are returning. Still, the Seekonk bears fascinating remnants of a storied industrial past.

Twice each day, millions of gallons of salty water swirl up from the ocean past Fox Point into the Seekonk, and thousands of gallons of fresh water fall from the Blackstone and Ten Mile Rivers (the latter falls over the dam at Omega pond, where the fish ladder project stands incomplete and seemingly abandoned). Other smaller creeks and sewer outlets pour in a lot or a little, depending on the rain.

Kayakers, people fishing on the banks and in small boats, and dozens of rowers from the Narragansett Boat Club and the Brown Boat House, motor and paddle their way up and down this five-mile playground of sun and wind and water. I’m one of the rowers.

By J. Timmons Roberts

Almost every year since 2008, a quixotic state representative in Rhode Island has introduced the “Climate Solutions Act,” which lays out a series of targets for emissions reductions in the tiny state.  Each year, the bill has died in committee.

It wasn’t that Representative Art Handy, a Democrat in a state with about 90 percent of its legislature on the blue side of the aisle, was in the minority party.  (Full disclosure: Representative Handy has worked with climate stakeholders across the state, including with Brown University, where I teach.) In fact, Democrats have all but one small row of six seats in the 70-some seat legislature.  It wasn’t a hostile committee he had to make it through either—Handy himself chaired the House Environment Committee. And it wasn’t that Rhode Island would be way out in front of other states: Rhode Island’s neighbor Massachusetts passed identical wording to the Rhode Island bill in 2008, establishing a program that with other legislation is credited with lowering the state’s emissions, bringing over a billion dollars in economic benefits, and generating more than 12,000 new jobs.  Another neighbor, Connecticut, has also passed climate targets and begun statewide efforts to reduce its emissions.