campus activism

Youth activists in China gear up for an environmental video contest

Almost two years ago, I had the chance to meet students in China working hard to raise environmental and energy issues on local campuses. Since then, I've tried to stay in touch and keep up with the progress of student organizations there.

Since my Mandarin is a little rusty, I've done this in part by keeping in touch with a number of young Americans who are there working on various endeavors after graduating from college -- my future bosses, I am sure, by virtue of the language skills they're developing. One particularly cool project that's getting started is a blog/vlog called China's Green Beat, started by a friend based in Beijing and a Chinese friend of his. You can check out videos shot in different parts of China exploring different energy and environmental issues here.

Activists worldwide target coal plants and banks

Rainforest Action Network's Matt Leonard provides this roundup of Fossil Fools Day actions targeting coal plants, coal minings, and the banks funding it all. Rising Tide (North America, U.K., and International units) spearheaded these efforts and others.

Cliffside: 8 Arrested as North Carolina residents shut down construction at Cliffside coal plant
At 6:30 a.m., North Carolina residents locked themselves to bulldozers to stop the construction of Duke Energy's massive Cliffside coal-fired power plant being built 50 miles west of Charlotte, N.C. "In the face of catastrophic climate change, building a new coal plant is tantamount to signing a death sentence for our generation," said local farmer Matt Wallace while locked to a bulldozer. The concerned citizens also roped off the construction site with "Global Warming Crime Scene" tape and held banners that read "Coal Fuels Climate Change" and "Social Change, not Climate Change." (more)

700 college students and the Clinton Global Initiative in New Orleans for spring break

Commitments to start social-change initiatives and spirited discussions of global issues -- these aren't typical results of 700 college students heading to New Orleans during spring break season. But last weekend, students from a diverse group of colleges, several dozen university presidents, and prominent social change agents -- not to mention Bill Clinton -- spent a day and a half on Tulane University's campus for Clinton Global Initiative University (with a cameo by Brad Pitt).

Trying to live-blog an event while you're also trying to finish your senior thesis -- not a good idea. Nonetheless, a belated report from the Clinton Global Initiative's new youth event:

Pushing for ‘fair food’ on campus in the land of hog factories

Last year, a bunch of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got tired of the industrial dreck served up in the cafeteria. They discovered that the landscape around them was producing some amazing, chemical-free meat and produce and set about figuring out how to get some in school dining halls. Photo: […]

Focus the Nation events aim for interactivity, accountability

This week, college campuses across the country held events for Focus the Nation, a major education and action campaign around climate change. To see what it was all about, I headed to Seattle’s University of Washington campus to find out if the students behind Focus the Nation could teach me a thing or two. The […]

Focus the Nation events to heat up campuses across the U.S.

Focus the Nation, a series of climate-change-focused educational events on over 1,000 campuses across the United States, is basically the student-centered cousin of Step It Up. And if you were one of the thousands who attended SIU (or SIU 2), you know that raising climate consciousness doesn't have to be a drab affair. It can be a colorful, creative, youth-infused party of a time. Enter Focus the Nation.

Hoping to pick up where SIU left off, Focus the Nation is gathering together thousands of students and teachers for climate festivities, billing it as the largest teach-in in U.S. history. It all goes down Jan. 31. (Or, you know, whatever the kids say these days.)

Schools should be talking about climate change solutions

At some point in the 1980s or 1990s, environmental issues became hopelessly and depressingly politicized. By "politicized," I mean it stopped being acceptable to talk about environmental issues in, for instance, a high-school setting, in the same way that evolution was made into a controversial subject to talk about in many school settings. I'm not sure when I would pinpoint that this politicization really sunk in, but I'd be interested in what those who were around at that point might have to say. By the Republican revolution of 1994 -- around the time I first became aware of something called "politics" -- this seems to have already definitively taken place.

But in the past of couple years, while it has remained fairly partisan, climate change has been rapidly depoliticizing as an issue. Even with a former Democratic vice president as its standard-bearer, it's now acceptable for companies, organizations, and institutions that would never consider taking what they see to be a political stance on an environmental issue -- or any other issue not directly concerning their core business -- to take a stance on climate change.

In my role as a grassroots organizer with a student environmental organization, it has only recently become possible to approach a wide variety of potential coalition partners for the very first time. My organization could never have approached a typical university president to register the school's public opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- but we can and do approach hundreds to work on climate change.

This is phenomenally important in repositioning the environmental movement beyond its role in the '90s as a "special interest." It's an immense boon to anyone trying to figure out how to spark the political moment that could result in good clean-energy legislation getting to the president's desk, and the society-wide coalition that will succeed in getting her or him to sign it.

I'd measure the completion of this depoliticization process to be when primary and secondary schools start including climate change -- and then carbon reductions and clean energy -- in their curricula, assemblies, and more. I'm not talking about when high schools stop teaching kids that there's a scientific climate debate -- I mean when they take the only step a responsible educator could take and ask students to consider this: Now that we have a problem, what are the solutions to this problem?

Obviously, we're not there yet.

How one group is convincing U.S. colleges to invest responsibly

It doesn’t take long to gauge the depths of Morgan Simon’s passion: you can hear it in her voice. Or what’s left of her voice, anyway. The first time I spoke with the activist, she apologized for being hoarse — a recent presentation at Grinnell College had taken its toll, she explained. But the next […]

The youth climate movement proves itself at Power Shift

Van Jones gets youth activists riled up at Power Shift rally. Photo: Fritz Myer About 5,500 people, most under the age of 21, traveled from all over the country to the unremarkable suburb of College Park, Md., this past weekend to take part in the largest climate-change conference and rally in U.S. history. At Power […]