The Life of a Climate Activist

My last post talked about the goals of the movement at Williams right now. I thought this might be a good time to jot down what I've been up to this week, both for my sake to keep in mind how everything is going, and for those interested in what kinds of things I actually do. Sorry its long, but that's what the scroll button's for.

Working backwards, I checked itsgettinghotinhere.org for the umptienth time this week to see what news and inspiration there was. This visit led me to treehugger.com where I voted on a number of videos as part of a video contest. This afternoon I had coffee with Kate Merrigan who is organizing a county youth conference. I agreed to lead the workshop on environmentalism and sustainability, even though it will mean rescheduling a tutorial, because the chance to inspire a bunch of bright-eyed high school students is too good to pass up.

Last night was Thursday Night Group, arguably the best student group on campus. The meeting started off slowly, but people filtered in slowly and we got down to having a productive meeting, talking about planning high school visits, influencing the curriculum for Focus the Nation and planning the spring Do It In The Dark. We also had Lauren stop by from MassPIRG to introduce herself and talk about what MCLA and BCC students are working on. We pitched MassPIRG jobs as well as the LUCE grant jobs and the upcoming Boston Climate Summit (sign up for any of those!).

Earlier that day, in between finishing a late paper and running between meetings I finally got access to itsgettinghotinhere.org and published a post that I had prepared earlier for that, see here. I was a little nervous and excited about posting this, since the site is read by over 4,000 people daily.

In between blog posts and meetings on Thursday, I filled out an application for summer funding from the OCC to work in Concord, NH this summer on the presidential primary with a bunch of Middlebury and Dartmouth students. Hopefully they'll give me 3,200.

Wednesday I had an interview with my CC co-president, Kim Dacres, on WCFM with Nathan Friend. He asked us lots of questions about our goals for the year, one of which is absolutely sustainability. I said one of the most important things that I'm doing is simply being elected, showing that an activist can become the president of the mainstream student government - climate change is an issue for everyone, not just environmentalists. But I also hope that the CC position will give us more leverage and insight into making changes at school. For example, earlier that day I had lunch with the dean of the college, Dean Roseman, and we talked about how to reduce student driving on campus.

Tuesday we had lunch with Stephanie Boyd, unofficial sustainability coordinator. She wanted to hear about the various projects we're working on and stay in regular communication. Tuesday evening was Greensense, always a nice relaxing evening. We were planning earth day's water challenge activities. And Monday I met with Sara, Justin and Adrian to talk long-term planning, which was the subject of my last post. Then, Monday evening I listened in on a phone training about working with the media and writing good press releases. Useful for sure.

With a quick glance at my sent email for this week I can see arranging coffee, getting ighih blog access and summer funding, a request for someone to lead an environmentally focused college tour for prospective students. There are requests from students about CFLs, planning for Step it Up 2007 with the Congregational Church, a panel that I can't serve on during spring break, updates from the Youth Environmental Squad at Mt. Greylock high school.

So its been a busy week, but not any busier than usual. Just thought I'd write a bit of this down so it feels like I've done a lot.