A greener Eph: Power Shift 2007

If you haven't checked out the website, there's tons of info about the schedule,
talks, trainings and generally how awesome it will be. http://www.powershift2007.org You can also see who else from Williams is interested in going so far on the facebook group Power Shift - Williamstown.

As a climate activist here, a big priority for the year is getting a lot of students to DC for this event. Of course its important nationally for this conference to have a huge turnout, because that shows the strength of our movement, but there are also a lot of reasons why Williams students will get a lot out of this.

First, we live in the purple bubble. Its often hard to feel like we're doing anything significant when we don't see what's going on at other schools or what other students like us are working on. We're not the only ones, but we don't always see our peers.

Second, conferences get people excited. I come away from every conference even more excited about the possibilities for work, connections to be made, new arguments to talk about and a greater sense of the urgency of the climate crisis. Its often not the key-note speakers, but the random conversations in hallways, friends of friends, or hearing the questions/frustrations/experiences of other attendees. I thrive off that kind of excitement, and I think a lot of other people can get into this that way.

Third: trainings. It takes lots of skills to be an effective activist. No one wants to be an ineffective activist, but without the how-to knowledge of leadership, organizations, press, budgets, lobbying, recruitment, etc, a lot of people just get really frustrated. A lot of this weekend will be this type of skills training. We pay a lot for a Williams education, but you'll be shocked to find out how much you can learn in a weekend (and things taught by other students or recent students, too!).

Fourth, this weekend is going to be historic. I have a feeling that you'll be able to tell your grand-kids that you were at one of the major tipping points in the battle for citizens to have a voice in how the world is run, when we finally started to take power into our own hands the way a democracy should be run. There's a feeling that I'm getting from people that its time for a change.

So that was probably more intense than you were looking for. It'll mostly be really fun.