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Foreword
Sometimes it's better not to know how little you know.
We began Step It Up in January of 2007, after six weeks of meetings around dining hall tables at Middlebury College. We'd just organized a successful march across Vermont to demand action on global warming, and we figured, why not try this on a national scale? Never mind that we had essentially no money, and no real organization. We had zeal, we had the Web, and we had energy to spare. (By “we,” I mean me and six kids about to graduate from Middlebury: Will Bates, Jon Warnow, Jamie Henn, May Boeve, Jeremy Osborn, and Phil Aroneanu). And we had the conviction that there needed to be a real climate movement in the United States, something more than the superstructure of economists and scientists and policy specialists that had been talking about the issue for a long time with little result.
And so we started sending out e-mails, asking people to organize rallies and demonstrations three months hence, in April of 2007. Now, that's a lot to ask—we hoped that maybe we'd find a hundred places ready and eager to participate. Instead, the thing took off like some kind