Something has been bothering me lately. In terms of messaging for the climate movement, we talk about the need to promote positive solutions that will help us build a more sustainable society, rather than just stopping our current patterns of destructive resource consumption. This is absolutely right. We do need to talk about building the future we want to see. But we need to do more than just talk about it.
A recent Power Shift outreach email wrote:
Instead, we will raise our voices to demand more from our elected officials, to demand that they consider our fate, and to demand that the next President will not only be proactive on climate change, but that that person will lead the United States (and the world) toward a clean energy future.
While this is a good message, it highlights a way of thinking about this movement which I think limits our actions. To get technical, the dominant verb in that sentence is demand. Yes, we need to demand all those things, but we need to be doing so much more. Along with calling on our leaders to take action to build a sustainable future, we can and should be doing this work as well.
Students all over the country and world are doing great work on campus implementing ambitious climate policies and developing the sustainable practices. Students are doing amazing work fighting coal-fired power plants, mountaintop removal, liquefied natural gas plants and other dirty energy sources. Students are working with their local, state, and soon to be national elected officials to pass climate policies. All of these things are good and necessary to our movement.
But I can’t shake the feeling that this will not be enough. It is necessary to call on our leaders to take action, but the truth is, most of them don’t know how to actually build this future that we want. I recognize that most young people are not experts in climate or energy policy, but anyone can get involved in community energy efficiency projects; anyone can work in their communities to develop renewable energy, or reduce energy consumption or work to transform a former automotive factory into a wind turbine production facility (as students are working on in Minnesota). We need to be out in our communities helping to implement the kinds of solutions we want to see. Simply demanding that other people put policies in place to accomplish this is not enough. We need to get our hands dirty and take part in community development. So far the youth part of the climate movement has been primarily focused either on campus or on policy, but we have been missing that crucial middle step of community development.
Let’s prove to our leaders that not only will we demand that they lead us towards a sustainable future, but that we are already doing it on both our campuses and our communities.
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Excellent post Juliana.
I agree wholeheartedly. In the culture we’ve grown up in, living locations have become so homogenized that our generation doesn’t think of our local community as a place of action. But really, it’s where we are, and thus one of the major places we can have an effect. And we need to make change wherever we can, so rock on.