This is what democracy looks like

The fall equinox arrived this week and a suitable chill was in the air. Traditionally, it’s thought of as a time to say goodbye to summer and begin to steel ourselves against the rigors of winter, but this year, heartening signs of renewal are everywhere.

One of those signs was an extraordinary gathering of hundreds of thousands of people making their voices heard in the ongoing debate on climate change. 

Heads of state from around the world are gathering at the United Nations to discuss the problem and, as the marchers who poured onto Manhattan streets from Central Park West in the Eighties to Eleventh Avenue and 34th Street kept chanting, it is imperative that they reach an accord.

Hundreds of northwest Bronx residents joined the throng. Much to their credit, our elected representatives weighed in also. 

Rep. Eliot Engel, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz and Councilman Andrew Cohen were all spotted in the crowd and Mr. Dinowitz was particulary thoughtful in his remarks afterwards.

Though the parade was anything but exclusive — with participants from across the United States and from countless foreign countries, high school students, mothers with strollers and grandparents who had first marched on the U.N. to protest nuclear weapons in the early 1960s — he was not alone in noting that large contingents of New York’s minority communities were not in evidence.

“Where I was, I did not see a lot of people of color. Maybe I was standing in the wrong place,” he said.

“I think it’s important for those people who consider themselves environmentalists to reach into every possible community and for people to understand that the people who are most impacted, in my opinion, are people who are poorer.”

That kind of outreach is essential to building the broad political coalition that will spur a sometimes reluctant President Barack Obama to engage with a Congress that has, so far, buried its head in the sand about this issue. 

 “You have to understand,” Mr. Engel said, “that I have colleagues that really think climate change doesn’t exist and global warming is a hoax.”

Last week, a New York Post columnist sniffed that only college educated Democrats cared about climate change, as though the fact that they were well-informed made their concerns invalid.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. raised his voice against the Vietnam War in a historic speech at Riverside Church, he made it a civil rights issue. We need leaders who can and will do the same for climate change today.

In the meantime, let us praise our own leaders for their involvement. 

After Hurricane Sandy, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined an ambitious plan to cope with the ravages of a coming era of super storms.

Mayor Bill de Blasio is raising the ante, making an announcement, timed to coincide with the march, of $1 billion in spending to make city-owned buildings more energy efficient in hopes of mitigating climate changes. 

The uplifting words of thousands of marchers as they passed Columbus Circle still resonate: “This is what democracy looks like.”