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.
Me and Andrew Nazdin 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 mattere 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.
Beautifully written Morgan! I’m honored to have been able to live a small part of your story with you.
And you’re definitely right — we need lots of leaders to step up and be counted, and we all need to tell our stories – to each other, and to everyone else.
Let’s get it done!
You got my head noddin’. Let’s do it!
Thanks for sharing your story Morgan, and for all that you do.
We certainly need to get far larger and far more influential to secure even half of the ambitious goals you outline above. That much is clear.
That said, do you think we can expand our ranks and reach deep new constituencies while organizing centrally around climate change? I worry that the issue remains far too low on the salience scale for far too many constituencies, and I’m not sure we’ve made much true progress on changing that picture. I worry that we don’t have the time to try to make everyone care as much about climate change as you and I do. Can we light a “green fire” in enough millennials (and our allies in other generations), or are their other central motivations that we can harness to organize around, reach broad new swaths of the public, and inspire new leaders to rise up?
As you note, our generation faces deep economic uncertainties, as well as environmental ones. And for most Americans (and most humans really, particularly our fellow millennials in the developing world), these economic concerns rise to the top of our priorities. Should we be organizing more centrally around the kind of economic future we want to see — the kinds of jobs we want to have, the ways that economy distributes benefits, the way that economy impacts our health and relates with and exists within the world’s ecosystems and non-human communities — rather than the kind of environmental future we want to see?
We’ve dubbed ourselves “a climate movement.” You call us “the climate generation.” And climate change certainly intersects many of the issues our generation will face. We’ve also seen a shift in recent years towards a more expansive definition of what it means to be a “climate movement.” But is it enough to form the core of a broad-based social movement powerful enough to reshape the way the world makes and uses energy or structures it’s economies?
As you may have guessed, I increasingly worry that organizing centrally around climate change limits the rate and scale at which our movement can grow (and the impact our generation can have on the shape of our future). I’m not sure how exactly to shape an alternative, but this is something to think about at least in light of the contours of recent months…
Your friend,
Jesse Jenkins
Jesse, I think you bring up an interesting point about the term climate. I feel like many people in the environmental movement recognized that the term “environmental” was too restrictive in its cultural meaning to capture their work, so instead of reclaiming the term they switched to using the term climate. By switching terms, they also shifted the scope of their work and of the people who were motivated by it. It encompasses energy issues, development trajectories, social justice concerns, and the urgency of dealing with climate change. It was a much better term. A similar story can be told about the “sustainability movement.”
But as you point out, although climate is better, it may still be too limiting. So what term, then, do we use to describe this movement?
It’s not a silly question. People make sense of the world around them through language, and our choice of words influences their perceptions. I think that we need a term to describe this movement, beyond just “The Movement,” as if this was the only one in the world. Settling on a description of our movement allows people to identify with it, to tangibly perceive that they are a part of something larger, something imaginable, something with momentum.
My concern with focusing on economic uncertainties, while an important and immediate concern for many, is that is based on mechanisms of trade and development which reinforce the necessity of current economic systems. True, we can talk about redefining economic systems, but again, that will be an uphill battle like reclaiming “environmental.”
We need to look at what the common concerns of our generation and find a term inspiring and descriptive, yet not exclusive. This is a difficult thing to deliberately seek, but we may as well start the conversation. So what are we?
The innovation generation? The longevity movement? the prosperity movement?
These are late-night thoughts off the top of my head, but it’s a serious question: How can we redefine our movement to be more inclusive and more mainstream?
One suggestion I would like to share with you, which you might be able to share with your colleagues: while our purchasing power is less than previous generations, our generation does have enormous clout in some areas where we refuse to exercise it.
For example, we are the target market for many News Corporation products, including movies like Avatar and TV shows like Glee. We may not have much direct influence over how climate change is presented on Fox News or the Wall Street Journal, but we can cripple the parent company by organizing a national protest against all their holdings, and use this lever to change how climate is reported in their subsidiaries.
The trouble is that we tend to *like* those services that are intended for our consumption. We can fume about ridiculous media portrayals of climate issues, but we are not the group they are trying to sell to with that reporting. We are, however, an enormous part of the parent companies’ overall revenue stream, and if we put our foot down, they will change their line.
Is it too much to ask the Youth Climate Movement to challenge News Corp?
The new economy movement? But perhaps that may be too vague.
BTW, I’ve always thought it a bit odd to classify ourselves as the “climate change movement.” After all, it was the civil rights movement, not the racial discrimination and segregation movement. We should capture and convey what we’re fighting for, not what we’re fighting against.
The young people of today is the greatest generation. I hear that from my parents all the time. I can see that also in the perseverance of this generation as well. Like you said this generation has teeth. I definitely like “The Movement” but that could be misunderstood…so lets add to it: “The Movement for Climate Change”
athelstan: I don’t think taking on News Corporation its too much to ask at all. Some great work is being done by our allies at Color of Change, who have succeeded in getting 80 companies to stop advertising on Beck’s show. More really scary stuff on Rupert Murdoch here if you really want to get into it: http://www.dailykos.com/user/unenergy
If you think you have an idea of how we can go about doing that in a strategic way, in a way that gets results and builds our power, there will absolutely be people passionate to work on it.
Jesse, Juliana, Aleta: yes, we need a better way to refer to ourselves. Not just a word, although that’s important, but also phrases, visions, struggles that resonate with more people. And once we find those (or if we have those already), we need to keep hammering a way at them. There’s a reason that right-wing talk radio plays almost 24/7 – its because there are always more people out there and there are always people who need to refresh and get excited all over again about the message.
The Climate Movement, the Movement to Stop Climate Change, the New Economy Movement, the Sustainability Movement, the Movement for Peace and Justice… Names work partly because they are descriptive enough for people to use them. I’m not convinced the name is as crucial as what we say right after (or before the name). Its ok to have an identity around a narrower issue if we can still network and stand in solidarity with, and cross pollinate with activist in a wide range of causes. All the while bringing in people who don’t identify as activists but have every reason to demand a change in the world.
yeah, lets keep working on this one.
The average person will pay attention if is accessible and something they can get behind. Right-wing radio has an audience of regular people who can easily access the discussion and want to get the blood boiling. If this cause can get in front of that audience, then we may have something.
There’s a Swedish word with no direct equivalent in English. “Lagom.” The best way I’ve heard to describe it is with an aphorism: “Enough is as good as a feast.”
From Wikipedia:
“The origin of the term is an archaic dative plural form of lag (“law”), in this case referring not necessarily to judicial law but common sense law. A translation of this could be “according to common sense”. A popular folk etymology claims that it is a contraction of “laget om” (“around the team”), a phrase used in Viking times to specify how much mead one should drink from the horn as it was passed around in order for everyone to receive a fair share. This story is recounted widely, including on the website of the Swedish Institute.”
It’s a concept that’s creeping into US culture (the shift from consumerism to transumerism is an early sign). Our generation especially has embraced the idea that if we each have our needs met sufficiently, and not to excess, then there will be enough to go around.
We recognize rampant consumerism has contributed to many of the disparities and inequities on earth. We’re willing to “settle” with sufficiency in the name of peace, sustainability and equal opportunity.
We’re the Sufficiency Generation. That’s lagom.
(But let’s be honest. Some freelance reporter or blogger is going to name us, on accident probably.)