A crowd of about 200 black-clad members of the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion gathered Monday morning at the southern end of New York City’s financial district. Some held banners painted with ghostly white animals or cardboard cutouts of trees and waves. In the background, a New Orleans-style jazz funeral band warmed up tubas, and one of the march’s emcees instructed people on the proper way to wail. (“Dig down and pull out your grief — because you gotta cry!”)
A crowd 200 strong was gathered in the park, dressed in shades of black. It was a delightfully macabre scene. There were protesters done up as skeletons with papier-mâché masks. Others carried mobiles of fish, paper bones picked clean. Signs named extinct and soon-to-be-extinct species. White deer soared overhead, antlers made of twigs. The puppets gave an eerie, ghostly charm to the proceedings, as we planned to bury not the dead but the living.
New York – The provocative climate group is trying to disrupt the city, hoping for the success it has had in London and elsewhere in Europe.