The Merrimack power station in Bow, New Hampshire, is the last big coal plant in New England, and it doesn’t have a shutdown date. Instead it has huge heaps of fuel leaching into the banks of the Merrimack River.
When I first heard that 350 VT was planning a five-day walk from Middlebury to Montpelier beginning in April of 2019, I immediately decided to join it. A few months later I was asked to help organize the walk, so my walk began long before the opening ceremony on the Middlebury green. Wolfger Schneider, another Charlotter, joined me for the first (and last) day as Bill McKibben ended the ceremony saying, “We’re all going to have to go on strike in one way or another, to disrupt business as usual, because it is precisely business as usual that’s wrecking the planet.”
On Saturday, March 24, 2018, 14 youth and adults from the Charlotte Congregational Church (UCC) assembled with thousands of others at the March for Our Lives: Montpelier. It was a solemn event, held simultaneously with similar events all over the country, in the wake of the shootings at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and in the wakes of countless other mass shootings in the U.S. I can’t speak for others, but I participated in this event for many reasons.