Very nice piece in the New York Times today on Step It Up 2007's National Day of Climate Action Apr. 14 and the general attempt to get lawmakers to take climate change seriously. Step It Up is currently the gargantuan Distributed Event in the DIA universe, closing in on 1,000 separate local actions a month out from the action. (There's a short description of what the Meetup-like tool does on this page.) And the seamless blending of online components with in-the-flesh activities testifies to the capacity for creative activism to inspire passion and get big in a hurry:

To his Middlebury acolytes, [Bill McKibben] is Billy the Kibbs. They admire his knowledge and passion but not his computer skills. They got to know him in the college’s dining halls. It was there last fall that Jon Warnow, 22, suggested the name Step It Up for the Internet-connected rallies. It was there that Will Bates, 23, started figuring out how to be the quartermaster for last summer’s five-day march across Vermont, which begat the idea of a series of nationwide actions.

... with an assist from the brilliant social change geeks at Radical Designs. Incidentally, D.C. denizens can ask McKibben all about it this Saturday at a fundraiser he's headlining for another DIA group, the Cheapeake Climate Action Network.