Its Here

Focus the Nation is today! The long hours and days of hard work are about to pay off (or not). Every time I hear that a professor mentioned this in class, or that someone's excited to go to a panel discussion, or even a remark that there's just so much going on, it makes me feel good.

The organizing team itself has done an amazing job at coalescing into a lean, mean, event planning machine. Over the last few weeks I've been able to step way back and let people do the work that they know needs to get done. In terms of organizing, we've already achieved a major goal, which is empowering students, many of whom have no experience doing this, to take on big things.

I met some of the presenters tonight and could hardly control my emotion as they shared their stories of mountain top removal and dirty industry in West Virginia and the Bronx. This day is not only for the attendees, but it is also for the people who will be brought together here and get to know each other.

Ok, time to try and sleep before the big day.

Focus The Nation Press

Williams College Focus The Nation gets its first local press coverage!

Below is the copy of our press release that was printed in iBerkshires earlier today.

Williams College Holds Focus The Nation

- January 29, 2008

Engaging everyone in working towards global warming solutions

On February 5th, the Williams Community can help build a climate positive world. Focus the Nation is a student-run event that promotes big picture policy changes as well as local innovation. Participants will hear from local voices, including the Williamstown Carbon Dioxide Lowering Committee and solar technology designer Craig Robertson. They will also hear perspectives from the frontiers of insurance, marketing, and global social, environmental and economic trends.

“It’s amazing how many people from all areas of the college and community are coming together to make Focus the Nation happen,” said Caroline Henry ’10, one of the day’s student organizers. “Global warming is so complex that it’s the ultimate problem for a liberal arts community to tackle.”

Participants will engage with global warming through class time, panel discussions, and ongoing action. Over 60 professors from all disciplines have pledged to focus class time on the issue, including Professor Zimmerberg of the psychology department, who will discuss the links between global warming, red tide, and Alzheimer’s disease.

The entire Williams college campus will transform into a forum, with speakers from the cutting edge of global warming solutions. On one panel, activists from West Virginia and the South Bronx will share stories from the dirty side of the fossil fuel economy. “Most people don’t realize the disastrous effect dirty energy has on the lives of the disadvantaged,” said Julia Sendor ’08, who is writing her senior thesis on grassroots opposition to Coal.

Another panel features youth activists Will Bates of the Step It Up organizing team and Morgan Goodwin ’08, founder of Mass Youth Climate Action. “Youth have been at the forefront of social transformation,” said Morgan. “The youth climate movement is winning campus victories, implementing state policies, and gaining a national voice”.

Students and community members can speak out to their elected officials in the Action Center, located in Paresky from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Participants can learn more about local businesses, student groups, and community organizations.

In the late afternoon, attendees can discuss the college’s ongoing sustainability efforts with President Schapiro and senior staff. They will answer questions about the college’s carbon reduction goals and the impact of new building projects.

Focus the Nation will culminate in an address by Christopher Flavin (’77) entitled “The Climate of Hope: The Path to a Low Carbon Economy.” President of the Worldwatch Institute, Flavin will speak to the opportunities available when everyone engages in finding solutions to global warming.

“The greatest thing about Focus the Nation is that the events and speakers come from all parts of the community, which is exactly the way we need to approach solutions to global warming,” said Elizabeth Irvin ’10. "Large scale events such as these expand the boundaries of what is possible."

For more information and a full schedule of the day’s events, visit the Williams home page

Global Warming Solutions and Herding Cats

Holding a big event at Williams is like herding cats. In an institution run by independent and motivated professors and administrators, getting collaboration and consensus is very difficult. That is why I’m very proud to announce plans for Focus the Nation, an event which really will capture the attention of the entire school, at least for a day.

A little background on Focus the Nation: conceived of and promoted by Eban Goodstein ’80, this day-long symposium for global warming solutions will take place at over 1500 schools, churches and businesses across the country. Held on Jan. 31st nationally, the eve of super Tuesday, the goal is to engage 5 million citizens in active and intelligent conversations about global warming solutions.

The classic problem in any sort of activism is that when you throw an event, only the people who are interested come. In order to address this age old problem, we’re going to the students. Starting in September, we embarked on a campaign to speak to every single faculty member individually and ask for some or all of class time on February 5th to discuss climate change from the stance of their department. To speak to over 300 faculty is a big project, and I applaud Meredith Annex ’11 and Martin Sawyer ’08 who have coordinated those efforts.

Its paying off. Currently over 60 faculty will use between 5 minutes and all of their class time to talk about where their passion for a better world intersects with their discipline and subject matter. And more new commitments are coming in every day. We’ve actually been surprised at how many faculty are genuinely eager to participate in an event that addresses a big issue and uses their particular strengths. Maybe it’s not that surprising after all.


With so much faculty involvement, the next step is to hold big, flashy events to bring the campus together. The first will be a town-hall style forum to discuss the college’s commitments and challenges in becoming truly sustainable. President Schapiro and members of senior staff will have a conversation with students about light bulbs, solar panels, the new library and Paresky hours. Later in the evening, for our key note address, Christopher Flavin ’77 will discuss the climate of hope and the path to a low carbon economy.

In addition, throughout the day, several panel discussions will hit on issues such as environmental justice, the growing grassroots youth movement, marketing, insurance, Williamstown and college architecture.

In short, we’re throwing a huge event. We’re taking a big risk, and trying out methods of organizing ourselves and team building that are more ambitious than most groups ever attempt. After all, we’re students; we can take big risks because we don’t have that much to lose, but everything to gain. An event of this size requires coordination of a lot of administrators’ time, faculty time, and the resources of two departments (environmental studies and the Zilkha center) as well as lots of support from the president’s office.

Is it worth all this effort? Putting so much time into bringing people to talk together? Yes. Global warming is not a single problem and it will not be solved with a single solution. It will take collaboration and the sharing of resources among people with different strengths and interests, and it will provide opportunities for those who have visions of a better world to find each other, grow that vision and start building it.

For more information, see our current schedule here: (note: the williams.edu schedule is out of date, it should be fixed soon.)

Re-Focusing the Mission

Sometimes you just need to re-focus everything that's going on. Life has been hectically split between College Council and climate change. There are lots of actions that we've worked on talked about doing, but its good to set down what the main goals are. This comes from a frank conversation with Justin, Adrian and Sarah Gardner this afternoon about goals and plans.

This week at Thursday Night Group we will continue with three groups. The one with raising campus awareness has expressed interest in running Do It In The Dark during April. It seems this is the most visible and popular thing that we do and its important to maintain that status and message.

Another group will continue to pursue the visits to local high schools. The two visits we've done so far (link) have been hugely successful and this is a model that should be expanded. The presentation will probably undergo some editing (again, this is great), but the biggest task for this group will be setting up the contacts and schedule for each school we want to visit.

And the other group will be pushing the planning of Focus the Nation and looking for ways to integrate sustainability into the curriculum. The Focus the Nation team needs to work with professors directly and personally to ask them to teach us more about climate change as it relates to their discipline. The LUCE Grant has given us a lot of money for all sorts of work in this field, and Dave Dethier has largely let this money sit un-utilized. We need to give him a way to spend that money by paying students to work on projects of this kind.

Beyond that, are there other things that deserve to be worked on? Absolutely, Earthweek, Step it up, first days and many more are all important. Can we do them all at once? Of course not. We'll get to them.

Focus the Nation - the Video

Yes, its worth watching.

Slide Show Available

The high school slide show is available to download. You can get it by clicking on the following link:
http://www.filehosting.cc/?d=0E0D2C65. Scroll down, fill in the three numbers, wait 30 seconds and then click 'download file'. Sorry for the invonvenience, but that's what it takes to do something for free.

It takes about 40 minutes to run through and emphasizes the science and effects of climate change before moving on to the possibilities for student action individually, in their school and in politics.

Please suggest changes and corrections, since there's a lot of room for improvement.

MiddShift Inspiration

Over 120 students from the north east gathered at Middlebury College to discuss plans to shift their colleges to carbon neutrality. The weekend was held by Middlebury students working with the Sierra Student Coalition, the Campus Climate Challenge, Step It Up 2007 and Focus the Nation to inspire and educate student activists. The conference was entirely student run and many thanks go out to Middlebury students for making it all possible.

I got there late, so I missed a lot of the early talks, but the later ones I attended on education, organizing with an action plan and leapfrogging towards distant goals were all very informative. The best part might have been Saturday night, where we had dinner and hung out in the envi house. Good food and good beer was provided by Middlebury and lots of people just wanted to talk about the awesome things they were doing. It was a great way to peer into how other schools were organized and hear lots of amazing ideas. But even cooler was to feel like we were in part of a movement. The power of so many motivated people was palpable and many students said they felt like it was a life changing experience. Some compared it to the civil rights movement in its scope, ambition and support, and I would be inclined (optimistically) to agree. At the end we gathered in the middle of their science library for more snacks, greeting people and saying farewell, and of course some of Middlebury's classic climate action songs and dances.


Most of our good ideas and goals from the weekend can be found on a Willipedia page here. If you are a Williams student please edit and update this document so that we can have some unifying goals to work from.

One final thought on climate action. I admire the ambition that goes into calling something 'carbon neutral'. It means a large monetary and institutional commitment. But its also a loose term. A school might be able to become carbon neutral overnight for as little as $300,000 a year if they simply purchase enough carbon credits to offset their operation. Sort of a modern day buying-of-indulgences. Middlebury is going to use carbon offsets for a large portion of its emissions, but they are using a time frame of the next 10 years to also make other changes. The issue becomes that its not clear how much they are changing and how much they are just offsetting. They aren't just doing offsets, which means education and infrastructure changes will be important, but its not clear to the casual observer how much they can save through efficiency measures.

Why not divide it up. Offset all of Campus immediately to do our part in achieving 'carbon neutrality' and at the same time work to reduce our Campus Emission Reduction by setting goals for local cuts in energy use. With these twin strategies the school would be doing its part immediately for the larger picture while being held to very high and obvious standards of operation at home.

Mt. Greylock Climate Action

Justin Bates starts his talk on global warming in the Berkshires at Mt. Greylock High School

Thursday marked the second day of the Williams regional outreach program. Five Ephs spoke to six periods of classes and one period of lunch at Mt. Greylock High School, reaching about 250 students and inspiring the creation of an environmental club at the school. The talk was based on the slide show developed over our Winter Study class on student activism with professor Singham. The show is intended to bring up some scary and local possible effects of climate change and then turn the focus to student climate action movement. The goal is to inspire students to become leader and motivate their schools and communities to reduce energy use, seek alternative energy sources and raise awareness on the issue.

When we arrived at the school, all we had was contact with a few teachers through email and a presentation that none of them had seen. By the time we left the students had already created an environmental club, they had their first important discussions on what they wanted to work on and we had over 30 email addresses to add to our contact lists.

The class periods before lunch were led by Williams students giving the presentation for the first time, offering them a valuable, 'trial by fire' learning experience into speaking to groups of students in an engaging manner. Then the lunch discussion involved 10 students who were interested learning whether it was possible to motivate students, even Mt. Greylock students, to act on climate change. We assured these potential leaders that a very wide range of people can become invested in climate change, but they must be approached on their own terms. Not everyone will come to a meeting and table to get signatures on a petition. Rather, students interested in engineering should be engaged in installing solar panels or producing bio-diesel and students who have more talent at art or theatre can use their skills to raise awareness and reach people in a different way.

In talking to this group of students I sensed it was very important to emphasize the group aspect of climate action, and really activism in general. Acting as individuals can be extremely frustrating, and pleas to the student body as a whole are rarely effective (if only everyone did this one small thing, then...). Instead, cultivating a group with a strong sense of membership and momentum, while being inclusive and fun is the best way to expand the scope and effectiveness of student actions.

By the time we left after the last bell our table at the front was crowded by dozens of students signing up their email address and asking lots of good questions. Maybe the most rewarding part for me was giving away the last two DO IT IN THE DARK stickers. We had given them out as prizes for answering questions correctly throughout the day and they were a hot item, probably for their scandalous nature. I thought the best way to give them out was based on a quick question: "Who is going to do the best climate action in the next month?" People's hands jumped up to say things like "convince my family to switch to CFL bulbs", "write a letter to the editor of the newspaper", and "sign my school up for Focus the Nation." I couldn't have been more pleased by the energy.

Outreach

Four Williams climate action heroes drove down to Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington today. We visited four classes to present our slide show and talk about student involvement in global warming. I have given the slide show a few times, and Becca, John Dingee and Collette all took a turn of giving it themselves. The reactions were very good, especially when we gave out DO IT IN THE DARK bumper stickers to anyone who got a question right. We also had lots of props like hats, CFLs, posters and movies which kept the students entertained. The 9th and 10th graders were excellent, asking very good questions and looked very interested.


Perhaps the highlight of my day was speaking to 5 students during their lunch period about what sorts of activism they'd already started on. They have a newly formed club, and at first they said they didn't have much of a plan. But once we started talking about projects like recycling and emissions reductions they knew exactly what they were talking about and how to go about doing it. I was very impressed and could only offer a few words of encouragement. We were sure to encourage them to sign up for Focus the Nation and the Campus Climate Challenge, if only for the resources available on those websites.

Tomorrow we're off to Mt. Greylock High School right here in Williamstown. Another long day, lots more climate action heroes to inspire.

Also, check out my Op-Ed in the Record today. (awaiting link)