Mount Pleasant’s Water-front Memorial Park overflow parking area is covered with the sort of course grass and sand which naturally devolves here when ground isn’t watered or fertilized. At 3:50 p.m. last Saturday,  it became the location of a political demonstration about climate change.
It is one of several political demonstrations taking place in the new park.  Mount Pleasant has historically had little or no activity of this kind because there wasn’t anywhere for it to happen.  
There was a protest against “feline euthanasia,” the cats killed due to the burgeoning population of feral cats and unwanted kittens arriving at animal shelters. The organizers put together a symbolic paper chain of about 5000 links to raise awareness, strung across the grass near the visitor’s center.
This week, opponents of efforts to control climate change through reductions in carbon emissions plan a demonstration using a hot air balloon, to support their position that people concerned about the level of carbon in the atmosphere are full of hot air.
I was at the 350 demonstration on Saturday.   Proponents believe that 350 parts per million is the maximum sustainable level of atmospheric carbon.
The planet is currently passing 390.
You were supposed to get there without “emitting” carbon. We came by electric golf cart. Most people came by bicycle. This held attendance down to 73 people, but when you’re committed to putting on an activity without consuming fossil fuels, small and local is supposed to be beautiful.
We formed the number out of people and bicycles, got our picture and made our point. It was transmitted around the earth to be combined with hundreds of others. The resulting slide show includes people forming the numbers surrounded by an Aztec Sun Symbol in the main square of Mexico City, divers with a sign underwater at the Great Barrier Reef, and Kayakers forming the numbers with the hulls of their colorful boats while floating in the river in Portland, Oregon.  Groups formed on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, before the Eiffel Tower and beside the great pyramid.
Most of the slideshow images were more interesting than our basic effort here on the patchy grass east of the parking lot, but if you wait long enough on Flickr, you’ll see Mount Pleasant.   
We were able to join the global effort, within our own community. We could show our children what we believed in as our example what it means to take responsibility for the planet we share, where an overheated atmosphere is getting too warm, too fast and two unpredictable for the good of the species who depend on it, including us.
If you disagree with that, your side will be bringing a hot air balloon this week. You can bring your own signs and your own kids. You can emit without any sense of guilt and never bother to calculate how much carbon ends up in the atmosphere when a tank of propane is burned up making a hot air balloon work. Just make sure you get a permit from the town and clean up afterwards.
Demonstration politics has found a place at Mount Pleasant’s Memorial Water-front Park, where there is room for free speech by doing something.  
By the time this newspaper is published I have the box score at Cats 1, Conservatives 1 and Lib-erals 1.
We’ll see how it goes.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I’On Village.)