The following is a Day 4 update by Elisabeth Hoffman, who’s on the trail of the Walk for Our Grandchildren, July 19th-July 27th.
For our children, we would do anything.
From the mundane to the extraordinary, we have done what ever was necessary to protect, clothe, educate, and help them grow.
Parents on the 2013 Walk For Our Grandchildren baby-proofed the house, stayed up all night with sick children, coached, and volunteered in schools. Some gave up lucrative jobs to work from home for their children or to go sledding on snow days. Those memories are now the fuel that moves them onward step by step to Washington, DC.
Bill Ramsey of Asheville, NC instilled a love of nature in his children with summer backpacking and camping trips. But they also participated in protests, including once when his oldest son, then two years old and out of view in a backpack, was inadvertently arrested with him at a farm workers’ strike. “They’ve seen me, day after day, working and acting as if we can create change,” he said. Bill now walks for his grandchildren, age eight and three.

Jim Russ, a day walker from DC, knows what it means to fully commit to the well being of a child. He raised two children with special needs and then added a stepson with special needs to his family. Although his time and energy were taken up with family, he says our culture could benefit from that perspective. “Career, business, and making money don’t do lasting service to culture. The Walk goes beyond fossil fuels to living for another, and not just for oneself.”

Melinda Tuhus from New Haven, CT would agree. She said she set the example that “consumerism isn’t the be all and end all.” She loved to take her two children camping and, in so doing, taught them to appreciate the fragility of nature. She saved over the years to put her children through college with no debt. She walks with a photo of her granddaughter, Eliza, pinned to her shirt.
For Jenny Lisak of Punxutawney, PA, who home-schooled her three children on their family’s organic vegetable farm, parental love and care had to find expression in a series of hard choices. Jenny found herself agreeing to send her fifteen year old son off to college when her family was faced with the threat of a drill pad and vast waste pit for fracking chemicals near her home. She challenged the drilling company and eventually forced at least a temporary retreat, but sending her son away felt like the only safe path. Her community remains surrounded by drill rigs for fracked natural gas, injection wells, and frack ponds that send benzene and other chemicals wafting over their homes.
And now as these four parents on the Walk lace on their walking shoes each morning, they and the others like them find themselves asking what more they must do to secure a safe climate for the children and grandchildren they cherish. What sacrifices and commitments need to be made to take the path to a future free of fossil fuels?
The younger people along the Walk likewise feel the urgency.
“If you recognize our interdependence with plants and animals…then you can’t live a lifestyle of complete disregard of all life forms,” said 18-year-old Alex Hunter-Nickels of Shenandoah Valley, VA.
“This is the critical moment,” said Jerry Stewart of Aldie, VA, walking for his nephew born July 2 and wearing white ribbons on his backpack for all his family members and friends. “We must be the ones to act. It can’t be that ‘someone’ will figure it out. That someone must be us.”
–Elisabeth Hoffman for the 2013 Walk For Our Grandchildren
Click here to read Elisabeth’s personal essay on why she’s walking.