It’s Getting Hot In Here

It’s Getting Hot in Here is the voice of a growing movement, a collection of voices from the student and youth leaders of the global movement to stop global warming. Originally created by youth leaders to allow youth to report from the International Climate Negotiations in Montreal, It’s Getting Hot in Here has since grown into a global online community, with over 100 writers from countries around the world.

Special Events

Youth Delegation - Bali 2007
Power Shift 07
Youth Delegation - Nairobi 2006

Contributor Resources

If you are a contributor, please go here to access more in-depth resources.
These include the following:

Contributor’s Handbook
Author’s Handbook
Contributing Editor Handbook

As well as best practices and pointers on your rights.

Contributing Editors

It’s Getting Hot in Here is a community media project supported by the work of a network of Contributing Editors that provide guidance, content, and critical support for the online community. Contributing Editors work with a network of writers focused on various topic areas. Contact us to apply to become a Contributing Editor.

Climate Justice

Shadia Wood
Shadia began at age seven as an advocate for justice and the environment, in an eight-year campaign to pass state legislation to take responsibility and act against the cancer clusters and deaths in her community. In recognition of her efforts, she received the Yoshiyama Award from the Hitachi Foundation and the Brower Youth Award from the Earth Island Institute. At age fifteen, She attended the World Summit on Sustainable Development, joining the youth energy caucus’ efforts to create the Official Global Youth Energy Policy Statement. Months later, Shadia attended the Second National People of Color Summit and there she helped create the Environmental Justice Youth Platform. She is a member of the Environmental Justice Climate Coalition Youth Committee and is on the Kids Against Pollution National Board of Trustees. Shadia graduated from West Canada Valley High School and has worked for the last two years as a leader of the Youth Climate Movement. She currently works for the EJCC, as the youngest Campus Climate Challenge Coordinator in the Energy Action Coalition. She will attend the American University of Beirut next spring and study Arabic and Photography.

Dirty Energy

Matt Reitman
Matt/Mattie Reitman got introduced to climate activism with the Student Environmental Action Coalition at Syracuse University. Through SEAC, he helped start a successful campaign to get the university to buy 20% clean renewable energy (and, of course, eventually 100%). Mattie is focusing this year on state-based youth climate movement building in Ohio. He has a degree in women’s studies and sociology, and splits his time between Columbus, OH and Philadelphia, PA.

Scott Parkin
Scott Parkin is a grassroots campaigner with the Rainforest Action Network and Bay Rising affinity group. Originally from Texas, Scott now lives in San Francisco where he city treks, hikes, bikes, camps, listens to live music, plays fetch with his cat Barlow, spends time with his friends and works on different direct democracy and direct action campaigns.

Matt Leonard
Matt likes to ride his bike around the San Francisco area, climb rocks, play soccer, wrestle with dogs, hit the drums, strum the guitar, eat yummy vegan food, and find ways to constructively challenge the social and ecological destruction capitalism presents us with. He spends his days working with Rainforest Action Network, Rising Tide North America, and Bay Rising Affinity Group.

Liz Veazey
While at the University of North Carolina, Liz led one of the first successful campus renewable energy campaigns in the southeast and won the Morris K. Udall scholarship in both 2002 & 2003. She organized the first Southeast Student Renewable Energy Conference April 2-4, 2004, to engage other Southern schools beyond UNC in energy and climate work. In the summer of 2004 she became a co-founding member of Energy Action Coalition, which she has been actively involved with since then. She is now co-chairing the Energy Action Coalition Steering Committee and coordinating the Southern Energy Network, which works with students in the Southeast on clean energy and climate initiatives as part of Energy Action Coalition’s Campus Climate Challenge. In late fall 2005, she attended the UN Climate Negotiations in Montreal and helped found www.itsgettinghotinhere.org.

News & Media/Politics

Richard Graves - Former Blogmaster
Richard is a climate activist, social entrepreneur, and online journalist. Currently, he is Program Director for Global Environment & Youth Voice/Youth Vote 2008 for Americans for Informed Democracy. A member of the international committee of the Online News Association, he is a producer for Fired Up Media which helps youth leaders from around the world tell their stories in the fight against global warming and for a more just and sustainable world. He graduated from Macalester College with a B.A. in Asian and Environmental History, after founding the student group MacCARES and winning campaigns around green building, renewable energy investment, and energy conservation. He thinks that young people can use new media to create the revolutionary change necessary to solve global warming and has told people that at the World Bank, UN, CNN, and other stuffy institutions. He is a semifinalist for a 2008 Echoing Green Social Entrepreneur Fellowship, and is proud to have served as the communications coordinator for the SustainUS youth delegation to the International Climate Negotiations in Bali, December 2007. He loves to cook food from around the world and to sculpt. He speaks English, Spanish, and really terrible Japanese.

Arthur Coulston - Webmaster
Arthur is the Digital Organizer for Energy Action Coalition and the Campus Climate Challenge. Arthur got his start in organizing at the University of California Santa Cruz where he worked with the California Student Sustainability Coalition and Greenpeace to push forward an ambitious statewide renewable energy policy.

[Editor's Note: He also is ridiculously talented and far too humble for his own good, as he basically built It's Getting Hot in Here from scratch]

Jesse Jenkins - Policy Editor
Jesse is a graduate of the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon (Class of 2006). While at the U of O, Jesse worked on a number of campus sustainability initiatives, including helping kick-start the Campus Climate Challenge at the UO and starting an initiative to bring clean wind power to UO dorm students. Jesse is still an active youth climate activist and recently helped found the Cascade Climate Network, the first ever, region-wide effort by Northwest youth to launch a coordinated campaign for climate solutions and a sustainable, just, and prosperous future. Jesse currently works as a renewable energy policy analyst and advocate with the Renewable Northwest Project, a Portland, OR-based non-profit promoting renewable energy development in the Pacific Northwest. He recently helped win a major clean energy victory in Oregon with the passage of the Oregon Renewable Energy Act which establishes a 25% by 2025 renewable energy standard for Oregon utilities. Jesse is also a veteran blogger, having maintained the energy and climate change news and commentary blog, WattHead for the past two years.

United Nations/International Policy

Zoë Caron
A student of Environmental Science/International Development at Dalhousie University, Zoë is a founding member of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition and is co-authoring the upcoming “Global Warming for Dummies” with Elizabeth May.
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Étant étudiante en Sciences de l’environnement/développement internationale à l’Université de Dalhousie, Zoë est une membre fondateure de la CJCC et elle écriver “Les Changements Climatiques pour les nuls”.

Juan Hoffmaister
Juan Pablo Hoffmaister has been part of SustainUS since 2004 when he co-founded SustainUS Maine. Originally from Costa Rica and now studying in the United States, Juan is devoted to improving global climate policy. He is currently focusing in potential mechanisms to include developing countries into a post-2012 Kyoto Protocol and is organizing a youth delegation to the upcoming session of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol in Bali, Indonesia.

Anna Rose
Anna Rose, 24, founded the Australian Youth Climate Coalition in November 2006. The coalition unites a diversity of youth organisations to mobilise our generation in the struggle for climate justice and a clean energy future. A final year Arts/ Law student at the University of Sydney holding the University Scholarship with Distinction, Anna was a National Organiser for the National Union of Students in 2005 and is past National Convenor of the Australian Student Environment Network. She is a former editor of the Sydney University student paper, member of the United Nations Pacific Youth Environment Network, Sustainability Team Leader for Project Australia, and holds training sessions for young climate activists.

Youth Movement/Campuses

Josh Lynch
Josh is co-founder and Partnerships Director for Energy Action Coalition where he works to bring a diversity of new organizations into the coalition and support climate organizing amongst our members. He has been organizing clean energy campaigns on campuses since 2003 and led a campaign that won a groundbreaking sustainable energy policy at Cal State University in 2005. Having grown up in a family of six in Vermont, he now lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Jamie Henn
Jamie is the co-coordinator of 350.org, an international global warming campaign. A recent college graduate, he lives in San Francisco, CA. In 2007, he co-organized Step It Up, a campaign that pulled together over 2,000 climate rallies across the United States to push for strong climate action at the federal level. He’s also an early member of the youth climate movement, leading one of Energy Action’s first campaigns in 2005: Road to Detroit, a nationwide veggie-oil bus tour to promote sustainable transportation. He’s traveled to Montreal and Bali to lobby the UN with youth, but he’s a strong believer that change happens in the streets not in meetings. Jamie received the Morris K. Udall award in 2007 and has been recognized by the mighty state of Vermont for his work on climate change. You can also find him blogging at Campus Progress’ “Pushback,” Changents.com, and 350.org.

Christine Irvine
Christine became an organizer within the youth climate movement after spending the summer of 2006 in the Greenpeace Organizing Term. She spent her sophomore year at Elon University running a successful Campus Climate Challenge campaign for carbon neutrality as a Sierra Student Coalition Building Environmental Campus Communities Fellow. In the summer of 2007, she worked as the New Media Fellow of the Energy Action Coalition. By the fall, she’d decided to leave school and dedicate herself to the movement full time. She worked with students throughout North Carolina organizing the North Carolina Student Climate Coalition and spent time in DC with Energy Action coordinating multimedia production for Power Shift 2007. Christine now works from Nashville, as the Tennessee Campus Organizer for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and the Southern Energy Network. She feels privileged and honored to be working with the staff of SEN. She looks forward to helping build youth power for clean, safe, and just solutions to dirty energy and climate chaos. Christine is also a photographer who enjoys documenting youth climate events: www.flickr.com/christineirvine