Let me count the ways!

3. The Safety

10. Everything That’s More Than I Can Count

There’s so much that I love about the Delhi Metro that if I didn’t know how many people walked through these doors every day, I would kiss the floor every time I entered it. It has changed this city for the better a million times over. I’d write more, but my ride’s over. Time to thank the Metro for my short commute!

While we all know that bicycling is a critical alternative mode of transportation, those living in cities of bike lanes and traffic laws often forget just how challenging riding bicycles can be, and just how empowering and emancipating it can be. The following is crossposted from the India Climate Solutions blog, written by Rudmila Rahman of Arohi Cycling

On Friday, February 25, a group of 30 passionate women from diverse walks of life got on their bicycles and rode through Dhaka to promote bicycles as an alternative means of mobility for women in Bangladesh. We cycled more than 5 kilometers together, through the streets of Dhaka, in the rally organized by Arohi – Bangladesh’s first women’s cycling initiative aimed to gather a critical mass of individuals who are interested to promote cycling for women in Bangladesh in order to ride a bicycle to work, school or for recreation, with an aim to break the stigma attached to a girl on a cycle.

They believe this, in turn, will promote freedom of mobility in Dhaka for women, as well as a cleaner environment. Bangladeshi women face significant barriers from family, neighbors and society in getting on a bike a riding around town in bright daylight. Freedom of mobility is seriously curtailed in Dhaka if women don’t feel safe to travel independently in their own city. Over 35% of female commuters in Dhaka depend on a cycle rickshaw and as more major roads ban these rickshaws, daily mobility for women is threatened furthermore. Arohi’s tagline: “Pedaling the way to empowerment” summarizes the links that we plan to draw between cycles, mobility and empowerment.

Arohi will follow in the coming months with awareness and advocacy events with the community and local government. The organization’s long term objectives include creating broader social impact by increasing uptake of cycling on target communities of highly mobile women such as students, garments workers, NGO field workers, etc through developing a model that will encourage urban cycling and provide rental bicycles to these communities. First create the path and then motivate others to follow!

Beyond the objective of empowerment, bicycling is a clean and green way to travel in a city which has one of the highest levels of air pollution in the world.  The density of airborne particulate matter can reach 463 micrograms per cubic meter- the highest level in the world. Pollution from vehicles is the main cause of smoke, smog and dust. Therefore, Arohi plans to combine the perception of cycling as an alternative to mobility through cars and public transport and work with the Dhaka City Corporation to promote cycle friendly interventions in the city for both men and women.

The response to a cycling initiative in Dhaka has been tremendous. But a major hurdle is the fact that the last time many women got on a bike was when they were 10 years old, for reasons such as social taboo, family displeasure or a lack of self-confidence. To commemorate international Women’s Day, Arohi will to host a bicycle training workshop to help interested women learn how to maneuver on two wheels in Dhaka and take the first step toward the path of empowerment.

Mission: We are a organization of passionate individuals who strive to empower women of all ages and backgrounds to demand freedom of mobility as a fundamental human right and promote bicycling as an alternative means of mobility for women in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Our objective is to break the stigma associated with a girl on a bicycle and ensure each and every woman in Bangladesh can cycle from point A to point B without fear for personal safety, fear of public harassment and fear of breaking social and cultural taboos. We believe riding a bicycle sends out a strong message against barriers to female mobility within a conservative society, promotes environmentally friendly lifestyle and creates a route towards opportunities for social and economic development. We will inspire collective action locally and globally in order to transform mobility in Bangladesh.

Meaning of name: Arohi (pron: aa-row-hee)  is the Bengali word for ‘rider’ as is apt for a cycling organization originating in Dhaka, Bangladesh. However the motivation came from the word’s sanskrit root ‘aarohana’ which means ascendance, with forms of the word used to describes things ranging from describe spiritual ascendancy to rising octaves in South Asian classical music or to describe the victorious in epic battles. We hope that each member of this organization defines themselves as an ‘Arohi’ and embraces the namesake to rise towards empowerment.

You can contact Rudmila Rahman at arohicycling @ gmail . com

When drought parches wells and streams,
someone must carry water. When storms bring devastation
and disease, someone has to nurse the sick.
Climate change hits hardest on the planet’s vulnerable edges.
If women hold up half the sky, what do we do
when it seems the sky is falling?

- Barbara Kingsolver, Ripple Effect Images

On International Women’s Day, it’s hard not to think about the most vulnerable, the women all around the world whose lives are being most impacted by climate change. As Kingsolver described, it’s women and girls who are travelling farther to bring water to their homes, walking for hours a day, eliminating many girls’ already-slim chance to attend school. It’s women who cook for hours in their kitchens, breathing in the smoke from cookstoves that pollute their lungs and their air. And, it’s women who are often last to eat, even when the first responsible for putting food on their families’ plates, even in the face of increasing food scarcity.

Hillary Clinton recently echoed Madeleine Albright in saying that issues of gender equality are issues of national and global security, and the impacts of climate change are woven tightly between the two. We cannot solve the challenges of climate change without empowering and educating women, and we cannot solve our other global challenges without addressing climate change. As Time recently wrote, “If you want to change the world, invest in girls.”

Empowering female entrepreneurs and political leaders has never been more needed nor more possible. There’s Solar Sister in Africa and Barefoot College in India, training women as solar engineers and entrepreneurs; Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement, planting trees and hope across Africa; dozens of groups of women constructing rainwater harvesting and catch dams. See the impact of giving female leaders better information about development decisions, training women on basic green technologies, and getting cleaner cookstoves into women’s homes.

These programs not only make women stronger, but help their families and communities. The World Food Programme reports that women who earn, invest 90 percent back into their families, and back into their communities. Investing in women means investing in communities, in truly sustainable development. Today, the problems and their solutions are closer than ever: “Help a Woman. Help the Planet.”

In Delhi, it’s easy to lose hope in the fight for environmental protection and climate mitigation – a thousand new cars every day; thousands of tons of garbage that make their way to the landfills coming from millions of homes, industries, and street sides; constant new construction of flyovers and widening of roads; and the sensation that it is too big for any individual, even any well-intentioned local politician to make a difference.

An overnight train ride away from Delhi, though, there exists another world. One that is full of enormous challenges in a rapidly changing climate, but also one full of Himalayan hope. The Environmental Defense Fund, in partnership with the Hunger Project and local NGOs in Uttarakhand, are giving female political and community leaders the tools they need to be able to engage in the development decisions happening every day.

One cold but warming day in mid-January, I had the honor to join Richie Ahuja to visit a leadership program, bringing together more than 100 of these female leaders from throughout the Kumaon district. Some of these women (and three generations of their family members) travelled by bus for more than 2 hours to reach this workshop, through winding mountain passes from their villages. Many of these women were Sarpanches (elected heads of villages) or members of their panchayat (an elected board of community representatives), while others were community leaders of other kinds, working with Self-Help Groups in their village.

While we waited for the last of the buses to arrive, several women led the group in a song that many of them learned by listening to the first group singing. Describing the interconnectedness between people and the environment, they spoke about how you can’t change one thing without changing the world around it. They sang other songs about the need for action, the need to fight to protect their communities, nature, and the beauty of the Himalayan mountainsides.

The majority of these community members had already seen EDF’s powerful climate film, a drama which unfolds along with the stories of community members in an area with serious environmental challenges directly impacting the lives of the main characters. (Film is a wildly popular medium in India; India’s own Bollywood now releases in excess of 1000 films a year.) Conveying as impactful a message as The Inconvenient Truth, but in a format that is easily digestible and appealing to its target audience, the film obviously had sparked dialogue and action in these women. The Hunger Project had conducted surveys of the women who saw the film to discuss the impacts of climate change in their own communities. After a few more songs, the training program began with a review of the survey’s results, while the women present shared their specific stories of impacts in their areas.

People shared a common sense of the changing water availability – the lack of snow in Nainital for the past 10 years after centuries of snowy winters, increase in cloudbursts and intense rainstorms, springs running dry – and common impacts from these changes. One woman observed: we used to find water nearby; now we walk for 2 hours to find water, and the children do this before they can go to school. The further they walk, the less school they attend. Another woman described the impact on the soil: with less water, and less rain, she said, “The soil is getting loose.”

Soil erosion came up as a common theme because of deforestation as well. One woman said, “This area used to be all forests, you could look over this valley and see only trees. Now you can see, we’ve cut down the jungle to build these villages and these cottages.” Some women didn’t know who was cutting their forests, but everyone knew it was happening – the best and biggest trees were disappearing. “Without these big trees, and without the rains,” another woman described, “there are bigger and bigger forest fires.” Disappearing forests made medicinal herbs hard to find and harder to find fodder for cattle, as well.

It wasn’t just changes in forests and precipitation, though, that these women described. They talked about changes in consumption – with one female leader passionately describing the rise in packaged foods. “We are eating food from plastic instead of food that helps our children and our farms grow.” They talked about the rise in polythene on street corners, on hillsides, all along the village roads. Other women described the increase in chemical consumption, in farms and in their homes. Instead of using dung or compost, farmers were using chemical fertilizers, and these women recognized that this was an increasing problem for the long-term fertility of the land.

But in the midst of these stories of significant changes, women shared the stories of what they had done to change things – what they had done to improve these conditions. One woman spoke of how her community was able to keep people from drawing from their remaining spring so that they could preserve it. Another woman lay down in the road when someone was trying to take trees out of her village. “You can roll over me, but you won’t take trees out of here.” This delay gave the police enough time to arrive, confirming that these particular men had no permit for logging.

Another community leader had recognized that their village didn’t have a need for a 40 foot wide road as much as they had a need for the trees that would be cut to build it, and so stopped the state government from the road-widening project. They preserved their 10 foot road, and hundreds of trees along the way.

These stories left me with hope, but the way they responded to questions about why they did this gave me even more inspiration. One participant said, “People from our cities, people from Nainital, have said ‘Why should we do anything? Let Delhi sort it out.’ But if we are the ones feeling the impacts, if we are the ones being impacted, then if we don’t take any action, how can we expect others to?”

Building on this, a woman added, “This is a global problem, but many of these challenges are in our hands, within our control. We can’t wait for others to solve it, we should do what we can with these problems. Polythene here is our problem, the polythene in the city is for them to solve.” One woman concluded by talking about transportation. More cars and more trucks in the mountains, she said, were leading to more pollution and more heat in their area. “I’m not saying don’t drive, but that we need cars that pollute less, and more thoughtful development of our regions’ transportation.”

After this discussion, a group of young people from a local NGO performed a street play set in the future, using the same tools of drama and humor, building intriguing and captivating characters that were being impacted by changes in their communities. In some ways, this street play brought to life the same dramas and dilemmas facing the characters in EDF’s film, demonstrating again the power of engaging people on an emotional level before asking them to engage intellectually or physically in combating these challenges in their communities.

It was wonderful watching women laugh as young men played characters of grandmothers and as their friends and neighbours made both comic and real the challenges they had been speaking about. It was even more wonderful to watching the understanding wash over the crowd as these characters faced the extreme challenges that may well face these communities in 10 or 20 years, certainly within the lifetimes of the women present, and to watch the discussions that were generated afterwards.

The group concluded on a powerful, inspiring, empowered note, recognizing that the challenges they could face could also be solved. They spoke about solar energy – “You may have to pay upfront, but from then on, it’s absolutely free!” – and water conservation – “There is enough, if we use it well.”

More importantly, though, they addressed the mindset change that would have to occur within each one of them, and within their neighbours. “If man can make a ton of metal fly in the sky, then we certainly can solve these problems on the ground,” one gentleman said, prompting a round of applause. For these men and women who have seen so much change – technological and environmental – in their lifetimes, they know that they do have the power to make these changes possible.

Before getting back onto the ton of metal taking me back down the mountain, I looked back to these women who were facing so much with so much courage and strength, and were able to do so because they were together. They were able to share their stories and learn from each other, as human beings, with emotions and needs, with courage and confidence. I took some of this with me and re-entered Delhi with a heart and head full of Himalayan hope.

If I were in Jaipur right now, in hot, dry western India, where it is more than 100 F, and yet feels like 70 inside the forts of the ancient Rajput kings. Admittedly, it may be hotter now than it was in the summer of 1734, when it was built, but these palaces were designed to keep their residents cool without electricity, conditioned air and refrigerants. How? By recognizing some fundamentals of heat and physics. If we want to design for the future, we need to learn from the past.We have known for hundreds of years that solids cool more than liquids which cool more than air. And yet, in US and in Indian corporate, we attempt to cool our spaces and ourselves with air. We also know that the human body loses its heat from radiation far more than from convection (moving air over your surface) or even perspiration (though, it sure feels like sweating is the only option, right now!). Yet, our air conditioning systems rely on convection – blowing cold air over all of us. Instead, we can design like the Rajputs.

In Rajasthan, ancient kings were masters of hydrology and thermodynamics; they captured rainwater across their territory and built hundreds of kilometres of pipes, eventually piping water underneath their floors. This cool water running underneath the floors creates a massive thermal mass, which both stores this coolness, and radiates it when you’re within the structures.

But this technology is not lost to the past. Rohan Parikh, head of Green Initiatives at Infosys, described today the incredible experiment current underway at Infosys. In one of the new office buildings in Hyderabad (one of the hottest cities in India), Infosys has divided the building perfectly in half. One half is conventionally cooled (with inefficient convection using inefficient air), and the other half using in-slab radiant cooling (piping cool water through the floors of each office). The metered measurements from this system will be launched in September, when the building becomes operational. Projections estimate that this building will use only 1/3 of the energy of a typical high-quality Infosys building!

As Rohan says, “We need to design for the future; the design — of a company, of a community, of a society — is its legacy.” Rajasthani kings have left a legacy of innovative thermal cooling; the traditional designs in Morocco use night-time radiation and thermal mass to keep buildings cool all day; and we’re on the path to leaving a legacy of consumption. But we can leave a legacy of energy innovation. But it may mean looking back before we move forward.

While innovative, upcycling is not new. The idea of “kabaad se jugaad” (making good from waste, or best out of waste, depending on how you translate it) is common practice in India. Whether making roofs from tarps or vinyl advertisements or turning every piece of valuable waste into a recycling commodity with every street’s kabaadi-wallahs (waste collectors, recyclables’ purchasers), India has long known how to convert waste into gold.

Composting, making khadh, is common in villages, where all waste is biodegradable, or at least, until a few years ago (or a few months from now). The process of plastic integration into these communities is not a question of if it will enter but when it will enter (sadly), and waste can no longer be managed in khadh piles in village corners. Yet, kabaad se jugaad can still apply for food waste – if we open our eyes to the value in every banana peel. The organizations that are looking into urban and rural composting and biogas generation from food waste are actively attempting to transform the perception that food scraps are waste into the understanding that these scraps are just raw compost!

Last Sunday, in the center of urban consumerism in Delhi, Khan Market, Manzil launched its composting system. With a street play in Hindi, bollywood songs with compost-focused rewritten lyrics, and great dancing, the compost party was the first step to young people feeling that waste was something to be discussed, even celebrated. Using Daily Dump units, Manzil has begun a small step towards sustainability for the market — one we’re working towards replicating on a much larger scale.

But why share it on IGHIH, a climate blog? Because every kilo of food waste composted is one kilo not transported for 15 kilometers to the landfill. It’s one kilo that doesn’t decompose creating methane emissions. And it’s one kilo that creates organic fertilizer to replace energy intensive and environmentally damaging chemical fertilizers.

And, most importantly, it’s one kilo of change. Change is addictive. Waste is a way for us to transform communities that allows them to see ways to change the even more challenging problems: of energy resources, of water recycling, and of our consumption patterns.

Plus, it’s one step closer to us living kabaad se jugaad — to take the wastes we are given and to turn it into value — whether an inherited energy system, governmental failures to regulate industry, or physical “wastes” and find a way to create transformation. Are you ready? Kabaad se Jugaad.

But the Gulf Coast oil spill IS. So why don’t they get it? When Barack Obama sent Organizing for America an email this morning, why did he first make me cry with the sadness of the real impact of communities there – the destruction of ecosystems, of livelihoods, of entire communities – and then make me cry with the deep sadness of his misunderstanding of what the real crisis is. The email said, “That is why, from the beginning, we have worked to deploy every tool at our disposal to respond to this crisis.” He’s wrong:

I have not seen a real response. I have not seen ambitious energy policy that will remove America from fossil fuels. I have not seen a ban on offshore drilling (which cannot be done without risks, no matter what BP says). I have not seen fierce speed in responding to a leak, nor fire in response to a company which did not plan for a disaster. This same email said, “If laws are inadequate, they will be changed.” All laws are inadequate that do not get the United States towards an clean energy economy and off of our fossil fuel addiction.

However, last night, on World Environment Day, I heard Farooq Abdullah, India’s Minister of New and Renewable Energy, (remind me why the US doesn’t have one?) say very clearly: You’ve seen the crisis in the Gulf Coast, and while it is far away, the same crisis could happen close to us if we continue our dependence on oil. “The time has come that our dependence on fossil fuels must end.”

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made a bold step, committing to 20,000 MW of solar in the next 10 years. Why can’t Obama? As Friedman said really nicely, “Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.” If Manmohan isn’t wasting the oil spill, why is Obama? If Farooq Abdullah gets it, why can’t America?

Area fire and ambulance crews arrive near the scene in Middletown, Conn., Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010. Multiple people have died in an explosion at a power plant in Connecticut and an unknown number of people are injured. (AP Photo/Richard Messina, Hartford Courant)

This morning, at 11:30 am, Middletown’s Kleen Energy Power Plant suffered a major explosion,  believed to be when a gas line caught fire during testing. Friends who work at the plant said that there were 50 – 100 construction workers, engineers, and plant managers who were inside. As of 12 pm, Middletown firefighters had only found 9 individuals. Since then, five* have been reported dead, with casualties and injuries expected to be many more. Firefighters from around the state came into the plant, with Hartford and Boston’s search-and-rescue teams both coming to Middletown to help clear the wreckage and free workers still stuck inside.

Workers at the plant were working long shifts, trying to finish the plant on a tight schedule. Matthew Lesser, Middletown’s representative to state government, said, “As I understand it, they were testing a gas line when the explosion took place but we’re not sure. Our first priority is making sure that everyone there is safe.”

I live about 5 miles away from this power plant, and felt my house shake from the explosion. The nearby Connecticut Valley Hospital had windows blown out from the explosion, and while most nearby homes had little damage done, nearby towns like mine are making house calls to reassure our communities that we are still safe. In Durham’s town store, the sidewalks and our skating pond, people shared the news they were receiving from our volunteer firefighters, from friends who were supposed to have gone into work, and from friends living nearby the plant.

Fossil fuels are not safe. They are not safe for our planet, they are not safe for our communities, and they are not safe for the workers inside of their power plants. This is not the first power plant explosion, this will not be the last. It is time for America to commit to a clean and safe energy economy – where our friends and neighbors can work in green jobs that give good wages and safe working environments. My heart and prayers are with the workers at the Kleen Energy Plant and with their families — and with the future of our nation to not face such a tragedy again.

It’s also been wonderful to read about what the movement here in the US has been mulling over the past two years, while I’ve been on the other side of the planet, working in India with the Indian Youth Climate Network and the early stages of so many other international youth movements on climate change. I have been so lucky to learn so much from my peers globally and to have been forced to rethink all assumptions, particularly about how change happens. In many ways, our theories of change differ dramatically worldwide, as do the tactics that feel most natural to create change. If we want to continue to build a global movement, we must continue building our respect for these diverse approaches and diverse tactics.

I think a respect of true diversity of tactics will allow our movements – wherever we are – to be so much stronger. Just as we recognize there is no technological “silver bullet”, I think we must accept that there is no silver bullet tactic, no one single approach to change that can transform the world.

Copenhagen shook many into the realization that change will not come from the top-down, nor always from effective grassroots demands for a better future. Change comes from local policy makers demonstrating political will, from innovative technology creators and distributors, from individuals living as examples, from positive examples and powerful campaigns. Our generation must not only recognize these diverse approaches but truly respect them.

Learning Globally: A Diversity of Tactics for Change
I have been fortunate to witness the growth of our global movement and the beauty of this work worldwide. In my work with the Indian Youth Climate Network, I’ve been forced to challenge my own conceptions of where change comes from – utilizing technology, music, art, direct action, corporate engagement, children’s education and political lobbying – by doing them all in a day’s work. The IYCN team includes musicians, engineers, artists, academics, activists and young professionals, working together in such different ways towards a common vision.

Need for difference approaches:

I learned the hard way that not every government operates the same way. While I was working with city legislators to implement green building codes in Hyderabad, a fast-growing city in central India, a friend was working in Newark, New Jersey, sharing notes. We both faced the same challenges of convincing politicians of the benefits of such a system, but I found a much greater need to work with businesses. Indian politicians listened even more closely to business leaders; if major businesses were ready to follow new laws, politicians considered it.

After three months of internal lobbying and as we were close to regulations being passed, the head of the Hyderabad Urban Development Authority left his post; he serves the government and Indian civil servants are moved at the will of the state. Had we only been lobbying, I would have (and did, momentarily) lost complete hope. Our work was wasted! However, as we had been working with businesses to convince them of the same needs, we were still able to make a positive impact. We couldn’t and didn’t lose hope – more green buildings were coming up, whether the government changed or not.
Combining Approaches:

There are so many incredible examples of youth organizing for long-term political change who are building their solutions in their own communities. Shwetha is running a powerful lobbying campaign in Bangalore to get rid of plastic bags, but she and her colleagues are making their own cloth bags to sell at their events while others distribute newspaper bags as plastic alternatives to stores in their neighborhoods.

Clinton has transformed the way waste is managed in Goa, a state in southern India, first by changing his own house’s waste stream, then his neighborhood’s, later convincing his town’s government that waste management would save money and resources. The district capital city government hired him to redesign their waste stream, directing more than 90 percent of waste out of landfills.

A team of young ornithologists in Vietnam are educating young people about biodiversity and petitioning the government to protect more land, but are also raising funds through sale of their photographs of birds to buy their own forest land.

In India, I have seen a recognition and an acceptance of this diversity of approaches. Engineers who are organizers, organizers who are entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who are lobbying their cities and states to put in better policies to support clean energy and green businesses. Yet, in the recent White House youth meeting, there was only one young entrepreneur representing our generation’s commitment to renewable energy and clean tech. Can this change?

Building Confidence, Maintaining Optimism

In many countries, where governments are just so slow to change or people are so disempowered that they feel (or know) that they cannot change their leaders through words, it doesn’t mean we have to give up  tactics many of us are used to — lobbying, organizing our community members to ask leaders for change, demonstrating in front of Capitol buildings. In combining our own direct actions that have immediate impact in our communities with larger scale campaigns, we can not only demonstrate to our leaders what the future looks like, but build that future while they wake up!

International Collaborations: Respecting Diversity of Tactics

In Poznan, during the UN climate negotiations in 2008, I was lucky to witness one of the most beautiful moments of our global movement, hundreds of youth from around the world joined to talk about how we could create one – most powerful – action to end COP 14. While dozens of individuals, primarily from the global north, from Australia, US, UK and Canada, had come up with a powerful idea to non-violently die-in during the final plenary of the UN, many of the youth from Asia were reluctant, not only to be involved, but to have the action happen at all.

With a beautiful eloquence and strength, Midori explained that in Japan, youth were working hard with their governments and were building the respect they needed for governments to listen to them. They believed a disruptive (even if non-violent) action would set them back in their work, whether or not they participated, because it would degrade their perspective of youth. In respecting Midori’s work, and that of the youth she spoke for, the youth present designed another kind of action to share our message the following day, the global movement showed enormous recognition for our diversity of tactics.

The incredible organizers of 350.org‘s global day of action on October 24, gave a common platform to youth worldwide, but in giving us the flexibility to organize what was most relevant to our local conditions, allowed for a beautiful diversity to emerge. In doing so, this encouraged all organizers to celebrate their own strengths. We saw engineers designing and showcasing their solar cookers; foresters publicly planting hundreds of trees; artists creating incredible masterpieces; organizers bringing together thousands for marches and aerial art; and lobbyists reaching local and national politicians with global messages. By giving a flexible platform that respected the diversity of tactics need to make change in different countries, 350 was able to engage more global youth than ever before.

In Copenhagen, at the failed UN climate negotiations, more youth than ever before were working within their official government delegations, drafting negotiating text and attending closed door meetings. Particularly those working with African nations and small island states were able to share what exactly their nations needed in order to protect their survival – mostly, they needed youth to amplify their voices. In a recent interview, a representative of Tuvalu said that activist support, including a youth-led demonstration, “was very helpful, I think, in highlighting the fact that our concerns couldn’t just be swept under the carpet.” While even this didn’t create a fair, ambitious or binding deal in Copenhagen, it showed what we could do when working in new ways, in collaboration.

On the very last day of COP15, amidst the failures of governments to act and the lock-out of civil society, there were fewer than 15 youth inside those final plenaries, with hundreds outside. But because of our personal connections, SMSing and tweet-ing updates from inside allowed those “wonky policy people” inside to connect with the “crazy activists” outside organizing demonstrations were able to create accurate responses. We needed to respect that inside and outside, our strategies depend on each other.

Moving Forward, Together:

In the post-Copenhagen world, I see so many young people questioning what is next, questioning the fundamental assumptions that have characterized our movement. In the United States, as Andrew explored in his recent post, we have often assumed that there is one “equation” for change — a certain number of actions on a given day, a certain number of petitions, or a certain number of partners on the inside. I am grateful for the explorations, as it may force us to question what our assumptions are about theories of change. How can we recognize that diverse tactics and diverse theories of change more accurately represent the transformation we need?

We may disagree with each other. We may believe we have a solution that is faster or more effective than another route of change. But we must respect that to build our future, we need our diversity to make change. It is only together that we can make the transformation our generation deserves.

It’s possible that I left Copenhagen with more hope than I entered, actually. I saw diverse tactics in use that can help build our movement through the tough road ahead. I saw more young people more committed than ever to building change in their own communities rather than waiting for governments to act. And, I saw youth able to learn from each other about what works in various communities. Cultures and countries may have different theories of change, but there is so much we can share about what can work that we may never have thought of! As our movement grows globally, our power will grow locally.