I spent the weekend at Midwest Powershift in Cleveland. Among the rallies, trainings, and speeches, I was able to catch some downtime with fellow Summer of Solutions program leaders and participants from around the Midwest. Especially valuable was a conversation I had with members of other Midwestern programs on Saturday night.

500 young people applaud Joshua Kahn Russell's keynote poem at Midwest Powershift in Cleveland. Photo credit Ben Hejkal.

This conversation helped me articulate two things: one, the “good environmentalists vs. the evil polluters” framing I saw a lot of other places during the conference makes me deeply uncomfortable, and two, if the green economy is going to work it needs to be the whole economy, not a side industry.

First: I heard a lot of people, excellent organizers and activists who I strongly respect, talking about how we need to stop them, the polluters and the fossil fuel barons. I fully believe that we urgently need to stop, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline. To me, the fundamental issue is that we don’t need to make them stop the pipeline, but we that need to stop us from building it. Our society is dependent on these fuels, and a “we” that includes every attendee of Midwest Powershift and President Obama and the CEO of TransCanada and every person that uses fossil fuels needs to do something different. Stopping them is, to me, deeply disempowering because I am not involved in the final decision. Finding something different for all of us to do is something I can be a part of.

Second: At that conversation, we talked about the realities of our own lives and financial situations. Many of us need to make money to cover needs we can’t meet in other ways. We talked about student debt traps and worries about health insurance. We talked about needing to work other jobs to meet our needs. I left the conversation with a strong need to find ways to support not only myself but my friends and people I have never met to live lives that sustain them and the planet and its people. To me, this means building businesses that generate their own revenue by providing needed services like energy, food, and transit. This may not sound new to my fellow solutionaries, but it felt realer to me leaving that conversation than it has in a while.

Third: (Surprise, there’s a third!) I could not have had this conversation without the three years and four programs I have spent with the Summer of Solutions. I have learned a sense of urgency and a deep-rooted narrative of my own power through my involvement in Summer of Solutions and from my fellow solutionaries in Grand Aspirations. I believe that I can move past the disempowering get-someone-else-to-do-it attitude I described in my first point. I believe that I have agency in moving us towards an economy where we don’t need to wait tables to support our farms or solar businesses — we work on our businesses to support our businesses.

If you want to join me and hundreds of other young people in this endeavor, consider starting a Summer of Solutions program in your community. You can also use that link to let us know if you want to be contacted when the application for participating goes up in the spring (just click the link to apply for a new program and it’s one of the options).

When I helped close the 2011 Twin Cities Summer of Solutions three weeks ago, I knew something amazing was happening, but in the flurry of it all I wasn’t really able to identify it. I started to get a sense of it when I first sat down at the Grand Aspirations August Gathering two weeks ago, when forty people from all over the country streamed in with wondrous stories of their work creating the green economy. By the end of the Gathering, last week, the full depth of the change was starting to dawn on me and was brought to the front of my attention when Ethan Buckner, a friend and Oakland Summer of Solutions Program Leader, said smiling at the end of a big group hug, ‘you know, we’ve created something really remarkable in the past few years’. Now, after a week of catching up and taking the next steps forward back in Minnesota, I’m finally seeing the view from four years out.

Four years ago was about 6 months after the events that got Cooperative Energy Futures and the Alliance to Reindustrialize for a Sustainable Economy off the ground – the seeds of my green economy work in the Twin Cities. It was about 6 months before the vision for the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations emerged. Four years ago, there had been no national gatherings of thousands of youth activists, candidate Barack Obama was barely a competitor, and the economy had not yet tanked. The dream of a green economy was barely starting to be voiced, and the idea that we could sustain ourselves, our communities, and the future of our world by creating new ways to feed, house, power, and transport our society was an exciting but utopian ideal.

So what has changed?

It wasn’t until I took the view from four years out that I really absorbed how much has changed. Here in the Twin Cities, and in so many of the other places where the leaders I’ve worked with are based, the idea of a green economy has rapidly become concrete and hundreds and thousands of people are all trying to figure out how to do it. It’s still an epic struggle with truly gargantuan economic competition, political obstacles, and cultural inertia, but suddenly, thousands – maybe millions nationally and tens of millions globally – of people are chugging away at the solutions. That indicates that a critical mass believe that it is a realistic possibility and they’re going for it. This wasn’t true four years ago.

The power structures that have managed our world for living memory are coming apart at the seams. The past fours years have seen a cascading collapse of many of the largest financial institutions on the planet, taking trust in the American economy and the jobs and homes of millions of people with them. Though we as a society may not have made the full connection between energy costs and their resulting effect on housing, food, and transportation and the connections of all those things with the housing and financial markets and the current recession, it is by now increasingly clear to the general public that the American Dream is not what it used to be. In the midst of this, the politics we have relied upon is failing. The promised wave of hope and change elected a president who has not been able to deliver in a national climate of hampered public participation and partisan deadlock. As climate organizers by the thousands, including many of my friends, go to protests at the White House and leave in handcuffs over the tar sands pipeline and repeated attacks on pollution controls, the inability of our political system to serve the needs of people in the face of economic chaos is becoming brilliantly clear.

The fallout from this chaos is tragic, but from a systems change perspective, it is a deeply promising sign. Public faith in the institutions that have propped up an unsustainable and unjust economy for living memory is breaking. As faith that the polluting economy that advances injustice and weakened communities erodes, it creates space for people to believe in emergent ways of supporting our communities that will actually sustain and uplift us. It is time to let go of the lie that was the old prosperity, recognize that it was founded on the abuse and destruction of people and places cross the planet as well as our own future, and move on. As long as this economy and politics continues to fail us, there is the opportunity for something better to win us.

En masse, distrust of the political process and disfunction in politics coupled with stark clarity of the challenges we face is driving people to innovate new ways to influence the world around them. Some of this is taking the not-very constructive form of building personal safety nets (buying gold, fighting taxation, etc.). Some of it is taking the positive form of collective support (finding community-based ways to provide the health, food, energy, finance etc. services that are evaporating in the current economy. And some of it is truly transformational – developing new models that outcompete business as usual, drawing money, people and resources out of the unsustainable economy and into the new one. We can work on doing more of the latter, but the point is, people are shifting from assuming that someone will take care of their problems for them to taking action (often because they are forced to by economic threats or other situational issues). Four years ago, efforts of this nature often had the feel of hobby projects or radical experiments. More and more, they are taking on the quality of emergent institutions.

Here in the Twin Cities, I’ve seen the transition from promising ideas to new realities happen before my eyes so smoothly that I almost didn’t notice it:

• Four years ago, our vision for green manufacturing at the 140 acre Ford Plant site was an intriguing research project. Now it has the City of St. Paul as a partner and Perkins and Will, a prominent green design firm, pulling together a development team for this multi-billion dollar project.
• Four years ago, our urban agriculture work was developing backyard gardens and learning how to grow things. Now there are new businesses employing people and feeding communities through urban farming.
• Four years ago, our energy efficiency models were cute ideas on paper and a lot of knowledge – now neighborhood associations are contracting for our services, a coalition of over a dozen organizations is working together to save energy and create green jobs in South Minneapolis, and I’ve created a job for myself while also supporting local youth helping the community save energy.

In the past four years, these nascent seeds of solutions have grown into the saplings of the new economy not just here in the Twin Cities, and not just in the 15+ places where Grand Aspirations has operated. They are growing in countless communities across the globe powered by communities and local businesses and forward-thinking public officials. These communities are starting to look towards each other and recognize in the solidarity and collaboration that will turns many small local things into transformation.

The view from four years out continues to remind me of this article by Sara Robinson that urges activists to remember history and act with patience and grounding. It describes the long and troubled process from business as usual to transformation that our society is now acting out on the grandest of scales.

The view from four years out makes this process visible – it even makes it look fast. It shows me how quickly the dreams that started the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations are becoming realities. It shows me how quickly the people I met at the August Gathering – over half of whom I did not even know 12 months ago, let alone 4 years ago – have become my fellow world-makers. And it whispers thrillingly all the things that this implies for the endless fountain of ideas that are only now emerging and the millions of people preparing to join in.

Which REALLY makes me look forward to the next four years … and the next … and the next.

The awesome.

Yeah, flashmobs, pranks, swiftly organized warroom tweetups, late-night dance parties of 15,000. Remember that rebellious side of us, that “we won’t take the past for an answer” side of us? Remember that “join us because this is awesome and you’re invited” side of us?

Politics is personal identity built into popular movements. The Tea Party is powerful because it ready-makes an identity for those who feel left behind by the 21st Century. It’s a safe space in a post-9/11, post financial collapse, peak-global-hegemony America. And the Tea Party’s done well wiping up a messy identity crisis by defining what they’re afraid of.

We’re also proud to define ourselves as what we’re not: we are cooler than the fossil forces of the past. They rail on chalkboards; we rally with giant puppets in the streets. They are talking heads for septuagenarians; we are sneaking into shareholder meetings and embarrassing giant fossil fuel companies. They are snarking about crosshairs on Facebook from defensive compounds in Wasilla. We are 10,000 lithe young people fighting for our future while a crotchety old pitbull like Tom Donohue screams to get off of his front yard at the US Chamber of Commerce. We are in the West Wing interrupting the President of the United States of America to remind him that energy shouldn’t kill.

But the past is where we leave the comparison. Those fearful forces haven’t got much vision for the future, and we sure do: we are identity awesome. We are the people not afraid to build something better than the assumptions handed to us.

Other American generations have staked their identities on propositions equally grand – rebelling from tyranny, beating back fascism, defending the world from communism. Our generation is staking its identity as the people responsible enough to face climate science for what it means, and political corruption for what it is. To build a cleaner, leaner, more durable and more prosperous way of life on our full tide of vibrant energy. The people smart enough to put our moral muscle to work.

But we need to remember how to have a blast doing it. Where’s the rebelliousness, the youthful energy pulling more pranks to call out our opposition? Remember when the Yes Men and the Avaaz Action Factory staged a mock press conference on the US Chamber’s “sudden” climate action? Remember when Tim DeChristopher tied on his bandanna and marched into the fray of a corrupt shareholder process? Remember when young people lay down on the train tracks against tremendous new coal facilities? (That hasn’t happened yet, but it should.)

We mustn’t abandon tried-and-true organizing tactics, nor our hard-earned insider game. And if we do rebel our way into a better world, we do so on the shoulders of giants: after all, we’re now defending the Clean Air Act that our foremothers first passed, celebrating Earth Day last week because our forefathers founded the first four decades ago. And we need the scientific white papers still, because after all, we’re fighting for a political reality that keeps pace with the chemical reality of the atmosphere. This is a movement of the young and young at heart – if you are awesome, you are in.

Crossposted from The Wonk Room,  WeArePowerShift.org, Climate Progress and Climate Solutions.

The Spring Edition of RTNA’s newsletter, Burning Issues, is out!  Click the image above, or HERE to download.  This season’s pieces include:

• direct action halting of heavy-haulers carrying tar-sands equipment shipments through Montana
• updates on Tim DeCristopher, his trial, and the next phase of resistance
• the resistance’s Nuclear Reaction- false dichotomies of energy, false solutions of nuclear, and where to go from there
• Kentuckians occupying their governor’s offices to demand the abolition of MTR
• shutdowns of the National Coal Council’s meeting in St. Louis
• Canadian resistance to the tar sands, including a takeover of trade ministerial office
• Olympia RT’s kickass campaign to stop a biomass power at Evergreen State College
• the March on Blair Mountain, and reports from the Coalfields
• a one-year lookback at the Gulf, from disaster to resumption of drilling
• and much more– take a look!

Students for a Just and Stable Future in front of the Massachusetts state house. The New England Coalition unites justice and sustainability issues and pressure the state government to act.

The Declaration for Clean Energy is a five page document written by 170 members of Students for a Just and Stable Future (SJSF), a New England based network of students who have united to fight climate change and work towards a just and stable future for all of humanity.  At the press conference in Cancun, student delegates presented our declaration with a statement demanding legitimate action from policymakers on all levels of United States government to pass meaningful comprehensive legislation on climate, and insisting that global leaders agree to a legally binding treaty that will return our global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to a safe level of less than 350 parts per million.

As the international negotiations begin to wrap up, it is clear that they will not produce any real results.  Powerful nations are refusing to hold themselves accountable, the seriousness of the science is still being ignored, and the voices of youth and disadvantaged communities are being shut out completely.  Ethan Buckner, a student delegate from the Sierra Student Coalition who presented on our behalf, had his badge taken away and was removed from the negotiations shortly after our press conference simply for participating in a march alongside youth from the global south, indigenous people, and environmental justice communities who are already suffering from the effects from climate change.  Simply put, International leaders are ignoring the voice of the people, and they think they can get away with it.

Well, we may not be able to change things in Cancun, but here in New England, we will not be discouraged.  Members of SJSF are entirely aware that the decisions made by leaders now will determine the state of the world we will inherit.  We are therefore unwilling to accept inaction, excuses, and easy outs, and have made clear in our press conference Tuesday that the youth voice is growing and will not be silenced.

“We are students.  We are not full time politicians or paid organizers.  We choose to make sacrifices for our future, because it is necessary, and because independent leadership is severely lacking in our country. We refuse to simply watch the world burn; we are getting to work, and we are calling on the international community to stop wasting time and do the same.” (Carra Cheslin, on behalf of SJSF at our UN COP press conference)

We are tired of watching time and again as our leaders do nothing, and we are not going to let them shut us out anymore.  If they won’t listen to us now, then we simply must raise our collective voice so loud that they will have no choice but to be real leaders, and to give us the future we deserve.

Click here to view our press conference. Our Declaration for Clean Energy can be viewed and signed here For more information about Students for a Just and Stable Future, visit www.justandstable.org.

In his address to the nation President Obama stated that he had frozen all off shore oil drilling permits for at least six months in order for new and better regulations to be created and implemented.  It was music to my ears.  Finally someone was realizing that regulation of business is sometimes necessary to protect both people and the planet.  However, recently it has been revealed that the Obama administration has approved plans by both BP and Shell Oil to drill a total of 11 exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas above Alaska.  Wait, WHAT?  We’re granting more permits to the very same company that has destroyed peoples lives, work, and ecological treasures in the Gulf?  We’re allowing them to potentially ruin the Alaska wilderness?  Really?  Is our government incapable of understanding that a fossil fuel economy is no longer justifiable?  When will our government finally wake up?  After every ecological treasure in the country is destroyed and everyone is jobless?

Luckily for humanity, communities and activists are working on solutions to protect people and the planet. In cities across the country, youth are engaging in a Summer of Solutions and creating community based solutions to climate change and injustice.  Today, Saturday the 26th of June, people across the world are joining Hand Across the Sand to stand up for the protection of coastal communities across the world.  In September, people will spend 5 days biking for climate change with the Brita Climate Ride.  Come fall, students will be back  kicking coal off campus and voting for leaders that support climate legislation.

In this case I think the message is clear: the true leaders are not the ones in elected office but the ones working in our communities and on our streets to create a better and more just future for us all.  I suggest that the next time you meet such a person you give them a hug and thank them.

I was shocked, once again, as I witnessed the lackadaisical cleanup efforts.  I know that an oil spill cannot be completely cleaned up, but there should at least be an honest and organized effort to do everything we can! I saw highly ineffective plastic booms along the Gulf Coast and a few boats scooping up very miniscule fractions of the spill. Some of the booms have floated ashore, crinkled up on the beach; some sit perpendicular to the shoreline; others are overturned by waves; some pieces of them have broken off and are floating lazily with the waves. The high volume flow of oil, certainly more than 5000 barrels per day, into the Gulf still hasn’t been stopped. What is going on? Why isn’t an effective, organized cleanup being mandated?! This is outrageous.

Several segments of the media are relying on erroneous information from BP and the Coast Guard in reporting the magnitude of the “ongoing cleanup” activities.  Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has it wrong. NOAA currently indicates on their maps that there are areas of “potential beached oil” in Venice, Louisiana when there is definite beached oil, whose magnitude of which is far greater than what is depicted on the maps. I have seen it with my own eyes.

Our government’s failure to hold corporations responsible has allowed the spill to run wild and completely out of control. Yes, get angry. It didn’t have to get to this point. We had the cleanup solution to a spill of this enormity. In 1993, nearly 800 million gallons of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf. They were not only able to prevent this spill from being an environmental catastrophe, but to also salvage 85 percent of the oil. Nick Pozzi, an engineer who worked on that spill, has been offering the lessons he learned to BP. The manager at BP in charge of this cleanup effort, told Pozzi simply not to bother him. BP will not even utilize the advice of educated and experienced scientists and engineers.

There should be someone other than BP directing the cleanup operation from the site of the spill to the threatened coastal estuaries. We are in a dire situation down here, and we need the most qualified people working on this spill.  We need all the help we can get here. It is going to be even more terrible as this slick continues to come onshore.

Please share my stories with all you know. We need this to be a massive wakeup call to the fact that our government is indeed run by the fossil fuel industries. We must stop this, and we need every one of us pushing as hard as we can for a clean energy economy.

Deep down, I am hopeful that positive change will come out of this if we all utilize our anger and momentum. Please know that we have a long, hard fight ahead.

Please stay strong and stay actively fighting with me.

Brinkley Hutchings

Video by John Wathen 5/17/10

Ways you can help:

Send a letter to the editor or host a rally

Contact Secretary Ken Salazar (202) 208-7351
Sample CALL SCRIPT: Hi, my name is _________________, I live in [city, state], and I want Secretary Salazar to stop Shell’s Alaskan drilling and to ban ALL new drilling on US off US coasts.

Send us some hair booms to protect our shorelines

Photo Credit: Dakota Fine

American adults under the age of 35 have come of age in the decades since the “discovery” of man-made climate change as a major societal problem. The oldest of this cohort was twelve in 1988, when NASA climate scientist James Hansen testified at a Senate Energy Committee hearing that global temperature rise was underway and that human-produced greenhouse gases were almost certainly responsible. For this reason, the conventional wisdom holds that young Americans, growing up in a world of ever more certain scientific evidence, increasing news attention, alarming entertainment portrayals, and school-based curricula, should be more engaged with and concerned about the issue of climate change than older Americans.

However, contrary to this conventional wisdom, Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are, for the most part, split on the issue of global warming and, on some indicators, relatively disengaged when compared to older generations.

Overall, the survey data offer no predictable portrait of young people when it comes to global warming: While less concerned about and preoccupied with global warming than older generations, they are slightly more likely to believe that global warming is caused by human factors and that there is scientific consensus that it is occurring. They are also somewhat more optimistic than their elders about the effectiveness of taking action to reduce global warming. And, while they are less open to new information about global warming than older generations, they are much more trusting of scientists and President Obama on the issue.  However, they also share older generations’ distrust of the mainstream news media.

Of note, young evangelicals, an increasingly important group politically, place strong levels of trust in religious leaders as sources of information about global warming, though they are also trusting of scientists and President Obama.

Nationwide, liberals and conservatives exhibit wide differences in their beliefs about global warming, with conservatives more skeptical and less engaged than liberals, and this ideological divide is no different among young Americans.

Members of the current college-age generation (18-22 year-olds), who have grown up with even less scientific uncertainty about climate change, are somewhat more concerned and engaged than their slightly older 23-34 year-old counterparts; however, this does not hold across the board. Still, the data suggest untapped potential to engage young Americans on the issue of global warming. Two important caveats, however:

1) These results are limited to Americans 18 years or older. The Center is currently collecting data on teenagers aged 13-17, but won’t have this analysis completed for a while.

2) It is also possible that there has been a surge in young people getting politically involved in climate action, but this has not (yet) translated to the entire age cohort. We have certainly heard (and seen) anecdotal evidence to support this hypothesis, but the Center wouldn’t be able to observe such a trend in their national survey data.
The full report is available here: http://environment.yale.edu/climate/

Take a moment and watch hundreds of those around the world taking action and inspiring others in the fight for climate justice.

All images (unless provided by 350.org) ©Robert van Waarden,
Music – “Open Road Kisses” by Small Affairs

The panelists touched on the importance of educating the masses, changing mindsets around energy usage, and how creating clean energy jobs could boost the local economy. Congressman Doyle explained how “the US will benefit from a green revolution,” and spoke about Pittsburgh’s importance as a hub for the new clean energy economy saying, “there doesn’t have to be a trade-off between a healthy environment and a good economy,” because clean energy jobs are just “good business sense.” The sentiment shared by all panelist was that even if we’re wrong about anthropogenic climate change, we’ll still have made the best economy in the world.

Angela Wiley, a student organizer at Chatham University remarked, “tonight, there was space for education, discourse, and political action — this needs to happen consistently if climate legislation is to be revived in the Senate to support what local governments and independent groups are already trying to accomplish with respect to a clean energy economy.”

Congressman Doyle went as far as to say that “we need a swell of grassroots support” and encouraged to keep the action going and build the dialogue in our communities. That’s exactly what the Pittsburgh Student Environmental Coalition, a new network of  local campuses and other area youth, did by hosting the forum. Forums like these, and hundreds of Define Our Decade events next month across the nation, will make climate and energy part of a real conversation, taking it from a transient topic in the media, to real solutions in our communities.