It’s Getting Hot In Here

The Climate Generation series has brought much-needed reflection, history, and  vision to this blog, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

The internet: our movement is like this

Some back-history on my journey: I started out organizing in the public high school system in Hudson County New Jersey in 2004 trying to connect big-picture energy and climate issues with daily life in the inner city. I met up with some cool folks who were helping launch the Energy Action Coalition during the summer of 2005 and immediately launched into campus and regional level work when I headed to college in Minnesota a few weeks later. I’ve done project work on campus around energy efficiency and green roofs, developed cool campus innovations like the Clean Energy Revolving Fund that led to a powerful campus carbon neutrality strategy while developing state and regional networks in Minnesota and the Midwest. I started reconnecting to the national climate movement in 2007, and have been closely involved ever since. Simultaneously, I’ve also been focusing intensively on community level work across the Twin Cities and Minnesota, helping launch intergenerational community energy efficiency and green manufacturing initiatives that build a green economy. Through that work, I helped found and am now helping lead The Summer of Solutions, a nation-wide program that trains youth leaders in  sustainable community development while pioneering innovative green economy solutions in communities across the country.

In the process, I’ve learned a lot, seen so many successes and victories, gotten inspired by more leaders than I can name, and been an agent for inspiration for many more. I keep meeting new people in new places, many of whom don’t identify as “the youth climate movement” but that nevertheless are part of our Great Work. I think this movement is vaster than any of us imagine, and deep beyond our wildest dreams. I think it’s just beginning. I’m glad you are part of the journey.

In this post, I’m going to highlight three priorities that I have noticed the movement struggling with over the past years and that I think we need to focus on intensively as we move forward:

1. Embrace Community Power (Energy-wise and Political)
2. Think For the Century
3. Show the Solutions

Check it out!

Continue reading ‘Climate Generation: Our Power in a Century of Solutions’

During PowerShift 2009, I was lucky enough to be able to speak these words to Representative Markey’s Select Committee on Global Warming:

“The $100,000 Clean Energy Revolving Fund I helped build at Macalester College invests in efficiency projects on campus and puts the savings back into the fund. In its first year, we got a 40% annual return on investment. That’s a bunch of college sophomores with no financial training doing four times better than the stock market – when it’s not collapsing! What would it be like if we harnessed these opportunities, which a green economy provides all across the country?”

In this third post in the series (you can also check out Part 1 and Part 2), I’m going to cut to the chase:

If we want to get real, fundamental, and adequate action taken on climate change, it’s not enough to make it clear that we (even tens of millions of youth in that we), think it’s a good idea.

We have to make it clear that it’s 1. possible, and 2. a good thing all around.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but making that case convincingly can be hard.

A lot of the solutions that are most readily apparent – solar panels on roof-tops, hybrid cars, less consumption – are either way out of the reach of most people (and thus sound elitist), or are framed as a sacrifice. The mentality that a green economy is costly frequently creeps into our own thinking. It’s easy to advocate for spending more money on wind energy electricity or on a super-cool green building because it’s the right thing to do. Scaling up, I’m quite sure a lot of the debates you’ll hear at Copenhagen will revolve around how much wealth various countries should give up for the greater good of a sustainable planet and the well-being of future generations (us and those to come).

Sure it’s right, but is it smart?

I’m not arguing that smart is more important than right, or that we should ever advocate for things that are smart and not right. I’m simply suggesting that if we can’t demonstrate in actual real life that our vision is right AND smart, we’re going to lose.

I hope the insight of how to do so may be helpful as hundreds of youth climate leaders converge on Copenhagen and the struggle for a green economy continues on a thousand campuses and communities.

Read on for what the examples of the Clean Energy Revolving Fund and the Macalester EcoHouse – tales from my own experience that reflect the great work thousands of people across the globe are doing – have to say about being right and smart. Continue reading ‘The Green Economy: It’s Right AND Smart’

This video is of and by my friend and co-worker Matt Kazinka. He’s making the case why you should join the Summer of Solutions. The youth-led grassroots program is already growing rapidly – we had 1 program in St. Paul, Minnesota – last year it blossomed to nine nationwide. Dozens of grassroots activists have jumped on board the process of “making it happen“, and are generating climate and energy solutions that also build economic opportunity and social justice all across the country. As one of our grassroots leaders wrote last spring as the 2009 wave of solutions was ramping up – this is just the beginning. Its a grassroots movement led by young people who are creating solutions with their communities while building careers growing the green economy. We know you have the solutions, so please join in!

APPLY HERE to design and lead a Summer of Solutions program in a community you know and love!

Priority deadline is Wednesday, November 11th, so please act fast.

Seeking solutions? We’ll meet you there.  Let’s make it happen.

How do we take our calls for clean energy, climate justice, and a sustainable economy from being seen as neat ideas to being seen as the game plan?

Getting the institutions we are working with to see a green economy as their game plan is key to the big picture changes we are working for. When we demonstrate a solution as a route to success on existing goals, rather than just a cool side-project, we open up whole new reserves of commitment, ingenuity, and resources to make it possible. It also becomes much more important: conceding to obstacles is no longer acceptable.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Macalester College’s sustainability plan and the how that it provides to make big ambitious goals both meaningful and realistic. In this post, I’ll explore the importance of moving from neat ideas to game plans in creating the commitment to that process in the context of Macalester’s journey. I recognize that this is just one tiny microcosm of the bigger picture, but I hope that it will serve as an example about how we move much larger institutions towards viewing the green economy as a game plan for success, and thus working with us as collaborators. They might even go outside the traditional sustainability boxes to think about broad institutional strategy.

So let’s get started:

Continue reading ‘From Neat Idea to Game Plan’

Macalester College, a small liberal arts college I attend in Saint Paul Minnesota, released its Sustainability Plan on September 15th. In the midst of a flurry of action on the national policy level, internationally around Copenhagen, and in the local fights against mountain-top removal and other dirty energy, one more college sustainability plan seems almost insignificant. What’s important about this plan, however, is not what its goals are (though they include carbon neutrality by 2025, zero waste by 2020, and more) but how it plans to achieve them. I hope this focus on the method as well as the goals can inform and inspire the climate movement. Here’s a brief synopsis of the key features of the how, which I’ll explore in more detail below the fold.

1. Going carbon neutral will be revenue positive, meaning a carbon-free future is as much commonsense smart decision-making as it is a moral imperative.
2. Designing the vision was participatory – 400 students, faculty, and staff contributed at a college with a student body of 1900 – and implementation will continue to be. The plan clearly states that it is a baseline platform, not a ceiling.
3. The changes really matter – with a few exceptions, the plan identifies strategies to that make actual change, rather than check the boxes of conventional practice.
4. The college plans to create ripples of change that extend far beyond campus – emphasizing pathways to broader change through the supply-chains, education process, and community relationships it engages.
5. Sustainability is defined holistically as the ongoing process of nurturing a healthy environment, social justice, and a strong economy. It is a guiding quality of all the institution’s core values, not an addition to them.

I’m using this announcement to encourage us to dig deeper into figuring out the how, and to introduce future posts exploring what it really means to deliver the visions of a sustainable society that we advocate for constantly. To guide the story, I’ll use the case study of Macalester and the efforts I’ve been involved in that now extend far beyond it, not because the method is limited to this example (it would be flawed if so), but because I know them well. These posts will explore how campus leaders made success not only broad but also deep, meaningful, and transformative, the expansive horizons to which similar methods have grown our work far beyond campus, and the implications that each step has for the broader climate movement over the coming decades. Stay tuned for more stories from the process.

In the meantime, check out more details on what’s important about how Macalester seeks to achieve sustainability below.
Continue reading ‘The Macalester College Sustainability Plan – the Important Part is the How’

While many of my friend in the movement have been in DC and trying to mobilize for, against, or to strengthen the ACES bill t, I’ve been organizing in Minnesota as part of the Twin Cities Summer of Solutions program – you can read more posts on the programs around the country on solutionaries.net. In my work, I’m continually challenged by the persistent disconnect between the real implications of what we’re trying to achieve through bills like ACES, how most people understand it, and the results we get. This morning I wrote a blog post in major metro-wide paper – the Star Tribune – attempting to redefine what ACES means and how we should respond. I’m including it here because I think we really need to get better at saying what we’re about and why it is important.

As you read, feel free to check out the posts I’m responding to, remember its written for a Minnesota audience, and please share your thoughts on strategies to end the communications gridlock.

Article starts below here.

Continue reading ‘Reflections on redefining ACES from out in the sticks’

First, there was the Campus Climate Challenge, building a base of action on campuses nationwide. Then, there was PowerVote, mobilizing youth across the country to vote for a clean energy future and shift America’s political landscape. Recently PowerShift 2009 escalated the call for bold climate policy with 12,000 young people convening in Washington DC. And now…

As the youth climate movement reaches for major policy goals, we start to catch a glimpse of the long-term struggle still ahead — the one in which we must innovate and implement climate and energy solutions that also revitalize the economy and empower communities. In this struggle, we must wrest control of the economy from the fossil fuel industry that has run our society and put that control in the hands of millions of local innovators around the world who are harnessing the power of the wind, sun, and land to sustain their lives and their local economies. We must figure out how to make our buildings efficient, our urban planning smart, our agriculture sustainable, our grid system renewable, and our industries green. This is the epic economic, political, and social project of our generation and those that will follow – it will take decades and be global in scope. It must be participatory and people-supporting not only to be fair, but also to succeed.

Let’s be frank: we have a pretty good idea of why this needs to happen, and a somewhat more vague idea of what needs to happen, but relatively little sense of how to achieve it.  More news: our political leaders, scientists, and economists don’t know either. We are embarking on a societal process of figuring out how to create this new future, and unfortunately, much of the current planning is being done by supporters of unsustainable and unwise options (such as “clean coal”, nuclear, tar sands, suburban sprawl, agribusiness, central station transmission, etc.) who prefer “solutions” that will recreate the same failing system we have today.

If you want to spend your summer building your capacity and career as a creative leader helping develop the solutions we need – figuring out the how -  please join us for the Summer of Solutions. In 2008, we piloted a program in St. Paul Minnesota with 25 participants, while a sister program started in Portland Oregon. Now we’re going nationwide.

Continue reading ‘The Summer of Solutions 2009: Join Us’

As Minnesota went through an almost unprecedented heat wave on Thursday, with temperatures well above freezing in early March, college and high school students descended on the Capitol in St. Paul to rally for a Clean Cars standard allowing Minnesota to use California’s increased vehicle fuel efficiency standard for the state. Joined by Van Jones for a rally at the Capitol, they also rallied for important increases in weatherization programs that will help spur green jobs creation, and a Sustainable Communities Act that will help local communities take charge of their own energy future. The Will Steger Foundation, an organizational ally of our college state network TEAM Minnesota and our high school state network YEA Minnesota, produced this YouTube video of the event:

Continue reading ‘Minnesota Youth and Van Jones turn up the heat’

This past summer, about 25 students spent June and July in St. Paul Minnesota working on community-based solutions to the climate and energy crisis, social justice issues, and our falling economy through the Summer of Solutions. We posted a couple of times about the beginning of this program, but as we went along kept finding it difficult to communicate what was going on. As the movement moves into PowerVote, and starts to think about what happens during and after the first 100 days, we want to share the experience and invite participation in the future process.

The Summer of Solutions was a participant-created program where we spent the summer together creating a variety of initiatives and campaigns and a really remarkable community that integrated organizing, life, and planning. The summer helped us build a community energy efficiency coop, a green industrial design coalition, movement networking and messaging plans, and much more. One of our participants created this video to help share the experience:

Continue reading ‘Summer of Solutions: Design Challenge for a New Society’

[The author is currently part of The Summer of Solutions, but views are personal]

Over the past few days, we have seen a lot of contention on Its Getting Hot in Here over the critiques posed by the Breakthrough Generation fellows. On the one hand, recent posts call for open and collaborative discourse so we can more carefully evaluate our strategies and tactics, sentiments with which I generally agree. Conversely, responding comments took offense to the frequent posting of Breakthrough fellows, the perceived attack on certain tactics like “Direct Action”, and the privilege of a group whose alleged central organizing strategy is to think, talk and message (check the comments on the above linked posts to review these critiques). I have close friends on both sides of the argument, and I agree with much of the Breakthrough philosophy as much as I feel that many of its recent tactics are not in alignment with their frame. Far from seeking objectivity, I’m simply pointing out that as we start operating under an interest group mentality we lose the ability to appreciate the truth in the other person’s voice, obscuring participants’ internal conflict – as powerfully expressed by a recent Breakthrough Generation post. A friend here in Minnesota introduced me to a new term yesterday after we read all of the critical back-and-forth: “flame war” – something that happens on blogs and other internet sites when everybody’s well-reasoned arguments turn into fiery antagonism.

Friends – and the pun is intended: its time for a break through. Continue reading ‘On Movement Transformation’