Cross posted on ItsGettingHotInHere.org as part of the Climate Generation series. This is a series a friend and I helped organize, inspired by the success of DK-Greenroots.
It all began when I found myself leading climate activism cheers and marching through the August heat of New Hampshire in 2007... No, let me back up. It began when I signed my campus group up on the Campus Climate Challenge website because we’d been running the campaign but no one had bothered to tell anyone outside our campus. No, not quite, it really began when Billy Parish spoke on an Earthday panel at my school in the spring of 2006. Well, it really began...
For the Climate Generation series, as we look at how the climate crisis shapes and unites our generation, I want to start with what got me really excited about being part of the movement to stop climate change. Hopefully this can offer some insight into how we organize ourselves at a generational level and win.
In Sierra Student Coalition trainings like I attended, participants all share what makes them tick. Its called green fire, a reference to an Aldo Leopold essay on the love of wilderness and the spark that makes us fight to protect what we love. He saw the green fire in a wolf’s eyes as it heaved its last breaths. He saw the fierce determination of a mother to protect her domain, to defend her young, and he linked that to his love for the rugged land, vowing to defend it to his last breath.
Listening to Billy talk about the Campus Climate Challenge, I started to get a little fire in my eyes. It felt like someone had let the sunlight in to my little corner where I was busily doing my part, sorting bottles and trying to use both sides of printer paper. His 10 minute slide-show contained a big idea that I’d never heard be: that there was this whole network of people doing important, real things, like reducing the emissions from entire campuses, all over the country.
(A note on terms: ‘young people’ and ‘our generation’ nominally refer to millenials, people born between 1980 and 2000. Or you can use the UN definition of youth, which is under 35. Some things are objectively true about this group of people – relative diversity, size, connectedness, voting strength and preference. Other aspects I refer to are less about the year of birth and more about mindset, in which I gladly include everyone. I try not to get to hung up on it.)
Of course I didn’t drop what I was doing overnight. I take a while to make decisions. The excitement of a national youth climate movement, of a large and coordinated Campus Climate Challenge, simmered for a while. That next fall I started pushing, gradually at first, but eventually with more and more of my time. Pushing to get our campus group to set our sights a lot higher. One little in-between moment, when I was probably waiting impatiently for email responses, I found the Climate Challenge map and saw this big empty spot where my school was, so I signed up. I felt a little sheepish, actually, because I wasn’t the one who had run the Challenge campaign – they had graduated. It was one of those, ‘just do it and see if anyone even notices’ moments and I went for it.
I know, I’m making a relatively minor thing seem like a knife-edge decision. Filling out a web-form is about as mundane as it gets. And yet, I hadn’t done it in the 6 months since I’d heard Billy talk, and apparently no one else at my school had either. I’m glad I eventually did. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from Maura Cowley, the SSC northeast organizer at the time, to check in on how the campaign was going. Wow, there was a person on the other end of that website? There are people who work on this more than a couple hours a week? I dragged Maura’s phone call on for an hour, trying to get every last question answered about what other campuses were doing, what the Climate Challenge was, and who knows what else. I felt connected to something outside my school, something bigger.
By sharing a ‘green fire’ moment around the campfire with newfound compatriots, students bind themselves to a tradition of protecting this world, and to a family of people doing that important work. Taken out of context, a bunch of high school and college students telling personal stories around the campfire is a little cheesy, I admit. But lets keep in mind that it works: SSC-trained youth can be found in every corner of this movement, loosely but stubbornly connected by a shared experience and shared organizing models. Feeling connected to a group of inspiring peers is a powerful force. People join social movements because they are passionate about an issue, but they stay in movements because of the people they meet.
Maura told me about an idea that students had come up with and were putting into action. They were going to spend the summer of 2007 working to mobilize thousands of people in New Hampshire and Iowa to march for climate solutions. The presidential candidates, buzzing through those states all summer, would be surrounded by a flurry of climate organizing, climate awareness and climate priorities, enough to shape their platform and make it the climate election.
When I showed up in New Hampshire that summer, I quickly found out the vision of thousands of people marching was overly ambitious. But the process of bringing passionate students together for the summer was invaluable. The 15-30 people (depending on how many weeks they were there) feverishly working to organize the march shared a deep experience of commitment to the cause, and shared an understanding of just how much more work we have ahead of us. And the people involved that summer went on to organize bigger and bigger things.
Andrew Nazdin and I and a bunch of cool people at the NH State House. Photo credit Christine Irvine
Leading a chant on the NH State house steps with Andrew Nazdin might have wrapped up the march, but it was the beginning of an uptick in organizing. Andrew went back to Maryland to continue developing the awesome Maryland Student Climate Coalition. I helped found Massachusetts version, what evolved into Mass Powershift. A lot of the team that had already graduated became the Step It Up 2 team, and have continued doing phenomenal work.
Just as green fire moments urge us towards individual action, I think there are green fire moments for entire generations. Just like for individuals, those moments sometimes simmer for months or years and pop up in unexpected ways, serving as sign posts as a generation shapes itself and chooses its direction.
September eleventh. Hurricane Katrina. Obama’s election. Some moments are burned into our generations consciousness. As a young people we need to tell the stories of those experiences because if we don’t, politicians, advertisers and media conglomerates will do it for us. We need to talk about the massive youth turnout that gave Obama his massive margin of victory as the climate generation in action. The White House invited 200 youth leaders to a forum on climate change and not another issue in December because they know we’re the climate generation.
So what good does all this do? Yeah, there are lots of young people out there. No, they’re not all climate activists (yet).
There are things about our generation that make us more inclined to get involved in causes for social justice, positive change and creating a more sustainable way of life. And there is a great need for leaders in our generation to pull us together.
* We’re more likely to get involved for one huge reason: we’re the first generation to experience a quality of life that is relatively less than our parents. Our jobs are less secure, our purchasing power is less. The promises that things would get better by the time we grew up turned out to be relatively empty. The inequality in this country has increased. Environmental pollution, instead of declining, has become more insidious, more irreversible.
* We’re the first generation to get our news primarily from each other. We don’t watch the nightly news, we get the stop stories in our Facebook news feeds.
* Our diversity and ability to easily identify across boundaries our parents found challenging means that when an issue effects a group of young people somewhere, it effects us all. Look at the Iranian elections last spring.
We need more leaders. We need people to draw out personal green fire moments, and define group green fire moments, and bring us together around a common vision. We need people who are motivated to gather the opinions of the people around them and contextualize them in a bigger picture that makes sense. We don’t need A leader, rather, we need a lot more of us to take on leadership roles, to help tell our story and bring people together.
If we don’t create the leadership we need from within our own ranks, profit-motivated media companies and power-hungry politicians will. Obama succeeded with our generation because he could offer us a vision of who we were, and what kind of country we wanted. He did an amazing job, but when his campaign ended, the involvement of young people collapsed to a fraction of what it was. Billy and Maura have done this tireless work for the better part of the decade. They, and many others like them are doing the crucial work to bring people together, to create the momentum of a movement, and they both continue to do this phenomenal work.
Our generation’s power stems from our openness to diversity, our inclination to stand in solidarity with one another and our realization of the connectedness of our issues. But our generation has teeth because of our numbers – there are a lot of us. Our numbers mattered in the past election and they will mattered in the coming one. Politicians, power-holders and marketers see us through our numbers. Ten businessmen can meet with a politician and sway her opinion. Ten clergy can make a big impact. It takes two hundred youth to make that same impact.
Our numbers are our greatest asset, and lets build the leadership to organize that way. We have the numbers to defeat the threats to the Clean Air Action (vote on Jan 20th!), stop mountaintop removal, pass a clean energy bill this year, and finish the climate treaty started in Copenhagen, pass an even better climate bill and put youth in elected office, shut down all the coal plants and make local food systems, switch over transportation infrastructure and then pass even better climate legislation... it’ll take a lot of work and a lot of young people to do that.
I found my passion by listening to charismatic youth leaders who knew how to capture the doubts and ambitions of a generation. We can build a movement ten times bigger than what we have now if we take it upon ourselves to define our generation, bring people together and galvanize our peers around our common challenge. Our generation’s green fire moment may have already happened, or it might lie in the future. I suspect it will be a combination of a shocking catastrophe and a collective realization that we have the power, the numbers and the resources to create the world that we so desperately need.
It’s Getting Hot in Here: Climate Generation is a month-long series reflecting on the state of the youth climate movement. As we pivot into 2010, the series will provide a forum for discussion on the history of the youth climate movement, recent victories and setbacks, potential for growth in capacity and influence, and how to orient the movement in the post-Copenhagen landscape. Please join youth leaders for posts on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and early evenings.