In a few weeks, I will celebrate seven years to the day since becoming involved in the youth climate movement. A few weeks after that, I will officially be an old lady at the ripe old age of 27. Back in my day, we walked uphill both ways in the snow to youth climate conferences, which we ran on zero dollars and planned while subsisting on only one flavor of (stale) Clif Bar for days on end. I jest a little, but the point is this: It’s getting old in here.
Self-conscious about that growing realization, I scaled back my own involvement with Energy Action Coalition and the U.S. youth climate movement more broadly a few years ago. I scaled back when I’d seen a couple waves of national leadership move through Energy Action Coalition. I scaled back when a student leader, exhausted after a marathon conference-planning season, apologized for crying in front of me, apparently perceiving me as some sort of higher authority figure (much to my dismay). I scaled back when I started feeling just a little out of place camping out on college students’ futons and floors. I scaled back when I started to forget what it’s like to be a student squeezing in late-night conference calls and signature drives between marathon paper-writing sessions. I scaled back when I started to feel that in occupying my specific leadership role, I was taking that opportunity away from someone else. And I scaled back because I believed that in style and in substance, the youth climate movement was developing a promising new model of organizing, and some of us needed to go share it with the “grown-ups.”
In thinking about what I wanted to contribute to this series of Climate Generation posts, I pulled up the email I wrote upon leaving my last official role within Energy Action Coalition. How can you possibly express enough gratitude for the people you love and the experiences that have defined your life? “I have loved knowing each of you,” I wrote at the time. “I have loved learning that everything is possible. Thank you is insufficient.”
To be perfectly clear: personal growth aside, at the end of the day I care very much how many greenhouse gas emissions we do or do not put into the atmosphere. I care very much how much global temperatures do or do not rise. I care very much who we are unfairly asking to bear the burden of others’ unsustainable lifestyles. And I care about building a movement that efficiently and unapologetically delivers at an unprecedented scale. I care about setting big concrete goals, and building power to win. As a movement, we should expect and plan to win more often. And with Copenhagen over, inadequate U.S. climate legislation stalled, and climate champions in Congress at risk–compounded by my own sense of personal responsibility for what I have or have not done toward those outcomes over the past seven years— I am more aware than ever of the need to define our movement by unforgiving metrics of success. More of my thoughts on what that should look like here and here. But also I remain convinced that reaching our climate goals will rely heavily on the way we shepherd one another through the profound and profoundly personal process of becoming the leaders we most want to be.
To its credit, the U.S. youth climate movement has succeeded famously in creating a leadership pipeline that gives youth leaders unprecedented access, skills, experience, and confidence. But a few years later, at the end of that pipeline, I have to admit I’m still struggling to find a place to fit in now, and it seems I’m not alone, as evidenced by just how many people are sticking around the youth climate movement. Many paid “youth” leadership roles are now occupied by leaders 25 or even 30+ with years of experience. Some of these staff have grown up through the youth climate movement, while others are coming to it for the first time. Similarly, hundreds or thousands of volunteers 25, 30, and even 40+ are participating youth climate conferences, list-servs, and activities, presumably because they identify with the organizing model and the youth climate community and aren’t finding something comparable elsewhere. While there is a tremendous amount to be said for a unified climate movement, and for the wealth of experiences, skills, and perspectives these older leaders bring to our work, this aging youth climate movement comes with concerns as well. To the extent that those leadership roles are no longer available to younger candidates, for instance, we may have inadvertently put the ability of youth leaders to climb all rungs of the movement leadership ladder at risk.
One potential solution is to emphasize a generational (rather than youth) call to leadership and take Energy Action Coalition and other youth climate movement structures with us as we age. One obvious drawback to this approach is that younger climate leaders will not have access to, or will need to rebuild, the opportunities we had at their age. Similarly, this approach may not adequately incorporate older leaders into the climate movement.
Another potential solution is for more youth climate “alumni” to assume positions of power within the so-called mainstream climate movement and/or the government and private sector, and to bring unique perspectives and approaches from the youth movement to those roles. In my experience, one of the catches to this approach is that in many business-as-usual organizational cultures and hierarchies, rising to key leadership and decision making-roles, even for skilled youth movement alumni, takes more time than the climate crisis allows. Nonetheless, large national organizations also come with a wealth of expertise and decades of victories and lessons learned, substantial financial resources, significant membership, strong relationships with elected leaders, etc.; the potential here cannot be discounted.
A third and promising option is to build new networks around business-as-usual organizing, and in so doing bring core elements of youth climate organizing philosophy to climate leaders of all ages. 350.org and Step It Up are great examples of youth leaders going on to very successfully do just that.
Whatever the approach, it’s increasingly clear that we need to move toward a truly unified movement that meets local leaders where they’re at regardless of age, all while ensuring youth retain their access to movement leadership positions. As Bill McKibben recently said so well here on the blog, “My only advice to young activists in general would be to not let yourselves get too marginalized as young. My colleagues at 350.org are all young, as it happens, but I don’t work with them because they’re young. I work with them because they’re the best in the world at what they do.”
One of those 350.org phenoms, Phil, has put together a little something to brighten your day over at http://itsgettingoldinhere.wordpress.com (the ingenious name is all his doing). I’ve posted a series of questions there to help keep this conversation going, so please do wander there as well as the comment section to this post to share your own thoughts and reflections on what it’s like to be part of an aging youth movement and where we go from here.
In my case, one of the symptoms of my nearly-27 “old lady-dom” has been more frequent thoughts about what kind of life I’ll want to build, fates allowing, for my own as-of-yet-hypothetical kids someday. I want them to have endless adventures and enormous amounts of fun in life. I want them to do good in the world and be good to other people. I want them to feel safe and supported and like the most loved kids on the face of the planet. I want them to know they are capable of everything. I want, in short, for them to have an option on the kind of life I have known through the youth climate movement. How can I possibly express enough gratitude for the people I love and the experiences that have defined my life, and that could help define theirs, too? Words still aren’t enough. But know I have loved knowing each of you. I have loved learning that everything is possible. And thank you is insufficient.
PS- Thanks for making it through world’s longest blog post. A lot happens in seven years, you know?
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.
Thanks for this post. As a 25 year old trying to figure out that transition from the SSC to the SC, it’s great to hear other folks debating the same problem. I do think we can take the superb tactics and views of what youth have been building and take it to the “mainstream.” Also, we’re not that old yet, right? Still some fire burning….