This past week I was lucky enough to hang out with the Greenpeace Youth Network for a few days at their annual youth camp, Change It, in Seattle. I e-mailed some Greenpeace friends to ask if I could come help at the camp for a few reasons. 1) I went to the Greenpeace sponsored Direct Action Camp this past June and wanted to keep tabs on what Greenpeace is up to in my neck of the woods. 2) I’ll be a trainer at Oregon’s SPROG this upcoming week and I wanted to get a taste for what was to come. 3) I work for the Sierra Club now and I’m already seeing the debilitating effects of environmental infighting.
I went to the Greenpeace’s Change It camp as a personal attempt at abnormal environmental networking. I’m currently reading a book, Greenpeace, by Rex Weyler about the early years of Greenpeace and the birth of the ecology movement. It’s clear that in the beginning there was much more of a shared concern for this earth. The movement was new and everyone was jumping on board. The Sierra Club was just finding its activist legs and Greenpeace was only a ragtag group of newly minted concerned ecologists. The two groups interacted closely in the early days and the club went so far as to funnel money toward the Greenpeace cause.
It’s this shared sense of concern that I hope we can find our way back to. With so many well established groups and so much history behind each, we sometimes forget we’re on the same side.
It amazed me how much Greenpeace’s Change It camp felt similar to the Sierra Student Coalition’s SPROG. Both are attempting to create a movement of young people equipped with the necessary tools to take the cause back to their campus and community. The only real difference was a dash of non-violent direct action training and a culminating day of action. The day of action, a big departure from my Sierra Club desk job, involved bannering and petitioning, all to get Representative Reichert to be a leader on global warming. The direct action was visible and effective and a great compliment to any more formal work a group like the Sierra Club might do.
As the youth who are quickly becoming leaders in the fight against climate change, we must remember to continue our diverse partnerships and recognize that we’ll need all the tools in the box if we’re going to effectively stop climate change.
The Power Vote campaign is a great example of the work we can accomplish if we all put out heads together. Onward, towards collaboration!
To collaboration!