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.)

Odds and Ends

Step it Up 2007 planning continued today with community members. Its going to be a cool event on April 14th in front of the Congo Church. We have Bill Moomaw, Convening Lead Author, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2001, music performances, student speakers and a few other things lined up for sure. We're also inviting various representatives, mayors and other people who would be important enough to mention when we know who they are. This planning is being done with the religious community, Mt. Greylock, Williams students and others. The highlight will probably be a 30' tall graph of carbon levels in the atmosphere which will extend up the church steeple.

Williams president Morty Schapiro will be at Thursday Night Group this week. He agreed to come and talk about what it means for Williams to commit to carbon reduction and talk with all of us about our goals and plans. This should be a great avenue to get new members excited about TNG and really broaden our efforts.

A meeting with security this morning might yield a partial parking/student driving solution. We talked about creating a 'long-term' type lot intended for students who only use their cars a few times a semester. The rate might be lower in this lot and thus encourage students to park there to save some money. They would then be a lot less likely to use their car to get around campus. Of course this isn't fool-proof since plenty of students won't mind paying more to have a better chance of getting a good spot next to their dorm. Who knows.

We thought of some new ideas yesterday at a tele-conference during Berkely climate activists. Tell first years they can't have fridges! We tell them they can't have candles or toasters, so why not these energy hogs? Create a 'green' co-op as a demonstration. Send a 'real-life' energy bill to all seniors, showing them what they will be paying for power once they graduate. And already on the agenda but now more than ever will be discussions with the tour-guides and campus life to align the institutions goals with these basic contacts incoming students have with the school.

Stay tuned for updates from our evening with Morty!

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.