This past Friday I awoke to the sound of crashing waves and an e-mail from my mother. I got up from the floor of the Montecito beach house where I was staying and took a look at her e-mail. She had forwarded me an op/ed piece by The Earth Is Flat author and NYT columnist Thomas Friedman, called "The Greenest Generation," asking why every campus in the country did not make it a long-term goal to go "climate neutral," by reducing and then offsetting all emissions so as to have a net zero impact on the Earth's climate.
My first reaction, to be honest, was one of frustration. For the last two years I have been travelling the country, sleeping on couches, speaking to audiences from 5 - 200, and preaching this exact message. I have been dismissed by folks on the right as a radical, a hippy, an environmentalist, and a dreamer. I have been dismissed by folks on the left as a sell-out, a compromiser, a centrist, and a corporate shill. I have learned much from criticism on both sides.
The project is Campus Climate Neutral (CCN), conceived by visionary international environmental law guru, Durwood Zaelke and run by the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS). I am the group's Executive Director and have worked with a host of dedicated folks to take the group from a small student organization in 2000 to a staffed 501(c)(3) today.
CCN is an unprecedented, national, graduate student campaign to mobilize tomorrow's leaders around aggressive climate solutions, today. These students are working to get campuses, cities, counties, states, and nations to go climate neutral. In the process this project hopes to create the next generation of influential Modern Industrial Revolutionists.
So what has taken me two years of eating ramen, sleeping on floors, and passing up 6 figure attorney salaries to communicate to a couple of thousand folks, took Thomas Friedman 776 words to communicate to over 1 million readers.
After putting my ego in check and swallowing my pride, however, an irrepressible smile began to grow on my face. 1.1 million people would be talking about climate neutrality over their coffee! Many of them would bring up the topic to friends around the water cooler and 10 million people would be talking about it! A check-in mid-Friday afternoon revealed that the column was the 8th most popular e-mail forward of the day.
So the idea had legs! But what now? I began to rethink what it would actually mean to get to climate neutrality. Setting goals was one thing (Ford committing to 250,000 hybrids, Governor Schwarzenegger committing to 90% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050, most of the globe's nations committing to Kyoto) but what about the odds of actually achieving those goals, and climate neutrality, in the next 50 years?
And I realized that while there is a real need for Friedman to write op/ed's, for Laurie David to bring global warming into pop culture, and for Al Gore to spread the word about the seriousness of the problem, the long march to climate neutrality in the US will have to be led by the millions of today's youth. The ideal place to reach these folks, and to find the hidden multiplier that is so sorely needed, is on today's 4,000 US campuses where over 15,000,000 students are training every day to be the next generation of consumers, parents, and world leaders.
Here at UC-Santa Barbara, the movement is afoot. This past Wednesday five graduate students at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC - Santa Barbara, presented a report on how the campus could become "climate neutral". The initial results of their report were astounding. The students concluded that on the way to long-term climate neutrality, UC - Santa Barbara could meet the short-term goals set by Governor Schwarzenegger -- returning to 1990 levels by 2020 -- at a $5 million profit!
Even more revolutionary was the manner in which the students ran this project.
These students didn't take over their administration building, they took over the administration's legwork, research, and planning, overcoming lack of time and other institutional barriers in the process.
These students didn't occupy their university's Chancellor's office, except to meet with him and his staff to get their thoughts, advice, and buy-in.
These students didn't storm in on a Board of Trustees meeting, they took the campus community by storm -- winning over and engaging professors, facilities managers, administrators, and students.
This model graduate project, launched in collaboration with the Program on Governance for Sustainable Development, and supervised by famed social scientist and climate change expert Oran Young, will spread to campuses across the country next year through the more than 150 Environmental Law Societies in the NAELS network. At the Bren school, a new group of students, CCN 2, will pick up where the first group left off.
Committing to long-term climate neutrality is a big first step. Getting there will be an even more arduous, long-term process which will require the collaborative, bipartisan, multidiscilpinary work of tomorrow's leaders. Achieving climate neutrality will also require a mix of solution-oriented campus work and aggressive, new-age youth and student advocacy. A group called Energy Action is leading this youth movement through their Campus Climate Challenge, coming to a campus near you in 2007. Finally, it will take a receptive older generation, willing to change century-old habits and embrace innovation from the next generation. The US Partnership of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and other higher education groups are doing just that, injecting sustainability into every aspect of University planning and management across the US.
The combination of these three approaches has the potential to create a 21st century "Greene$t Generation," who possess the political clout to demand global change, the skills, ideas, and openness to bring everyone to the table to actually create it, and the ingenuity and entrepreneurship to profit from it.
So, to Mr Friedman, and to the rest of today's adults who marched, protested, and struck in the '60s and '70s, wondering where today's youth are, please rest assured that tomorrow's leaders have already taken up the challenge. In fact, it may eventually be the only thing that can save us.