From Treehugger.com: Jeremy is a recent college graduate, and leading up to the Step It Up effort, Jeremy was also involved in the inception and advocacy work of the Middlebury College Sunday Night Group. He also spent a summer driving the country advocating fuel efficiency with Road to Detroit, a project of Energy Action. Now that Step It Up was such an overwhelming success, Jeremy and the rest of the crew are helping to document what happened, and are already at work on the next steps of this national movement.
TH: Did [Step it Up] work? Did you get the anticipated numbers, and what are the indications that the media, and ultimately, congress were listening?
JO: Completely, overwhelmingly, yes, it worked. We had originally hoped for something on the order of a hundred actions. Fourteen hundred pretty much blew our socks off, and it seemed to blow the socks off of everyone else as well. Local organizers worked hard pulling in their local papers, and blogs (including yours) helped us go viral with the message. We just recently received a (incomplete) compiled list of media on Step It Up events that is 322 pages long! As for Congress, over twenty members (from both the House and Senate) attended rallies, and Bill was called to testify before a House committee three days after Step It Up. The real test on the quality of Congressional ears, however, will be the strength of climate legislation – anything less than 80% by 2050 doesn’t measure up to the science, or to the call of the 1400 Step It Up rallies around the country.
Find out what is next and more of what Jeremy has to say about Step it Up here.
