NEW YORK — Thousands of chanting protesters carrying signs and demanding action against climate change staged a peaceful sit-in Monday near Wall Street.
Beginning at Battery Park, the blue-clad marchers headed to Broadway, where they blocked the boulevard between Bowling Green Park and Morris Street. As police halted traffic, they unfurled banners with slogans that ranged from calls for action on climate change to denunciations of “corporate capitalism.”
Dubbed by organizers #FloodWallStreet, the demonstration followed Sunday’s People’s Climate March, which was billed as the largest climate protest ever and drew more than 310,000 people to Midtown and the Upper West Side, triple the original forecast. Today’s event attracted 3,000 people, planners said.
“We’re trying to raise awareness about our shared condition as humanity in peril and to stop greed and capitalism by divesting capital into funding 100 percent renewables,” said one of the protesters, Skylar Dunn-Lubin, 23, an artist and student at Columbia College in Chicago.
Maryam Adrangi, a Canadian climate activist and one of the organizers of #FloodWallStreet, called the U.S. financial industry “one of the global symbols of an economic system that favors the rich and powerful over the working, people of color, people with low incomes.”
“When it comes to fossil-fuel industries, they all have ties to Wall Street,” she said. “What they don’t have are ties to people impacted by these industries.”
Yesterday’s demonstrators, including homeowners flooded by Hurricane Sandy, New York political leaders and indigenous people fighting oil companies in Latin America, appealed to global leaders to act.
