The new student activism

How do you eat a whale?

That’s an analogy one UNC environmentalist used for the scale of the challenge of creating a world with clean energy and environmental security.

One weekend ago, 10,000 students gathered in Washington, D.C. for Power Shift, a national conference hosted by the Energy Action Coalition.

The last time Power Shift was held, back in 2009, Obama had just been elected president with a host of clean energy promises, and the global climate summit at Copenhagen was just months away.

Little wonder attendees thought their task was easy.

UNC senior Chris Lazinski describes the sentiments at the time, “Now that Obama was in office, it was like our work was already done — we could just sit back and wait for our environmental goals to happen.”

Things didn’t quite pan out as hoped — the president’s energy efforts didn’t really follow him off the campaign trail, and Copenhagen was an abject failure.

But if they’ve lost the naive optimism this time around, student environmentalists are digging in with a little more practical determination.

Lazinski came up to D.C. for Power Shift 2011 with about 50 UNC undergraduates, a dozen of whom crashed with my housemates and me.

Each evening they came back animated, discussing actionable ideas they had learned involving technology, finance and local organizing, and planning out how to reach their goals.

I’m told some Power Shift attendees even went door-to-door in D.C. neighborhoods, connecting residents with local contractors to save them money on energy bills through efficiency improvements.

Their solution-focused activism is a world away from empty slogans, arrests or even vandalism often associated with students.

Rather than “fighting the system,” these students are working within it, in their towns and cities, toward realistic policy goals.

And this solution-focused activism is taking hold at UNC.

Environmentalists (with Student Body President Mary Cooper among their fiercest advocates) are building a string of respectable successes across our campus: Chancellor Holden Thorp set up an energy task force, and committed last May to taking the university off coal by 2020.

In October, Morrison Residence Hall won the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Building Competition for energy reduction, beating out malls and office blocks across the country.

And other proposals from across the country, such as a revolving loan fund to support cost-effective energy efficiency improvements, are being implemented on campus.

Admittedly, there have been hitches along the way.

For all the student and administration efforts in the energy task force, it’s been a struggle to find the woodchip suppliers necessary to begin the transition from coal at the University’s electricity cogeneration plant.

And a tight schedule for this year’s coal contracts prevented the University meeting its commitment to stop buying from mountain-top removal sources.

So these successes are just small steps forward, after all.

But the takeaway message is that students can do more than just get “fired up,” whatever one’s political orientation.

Each step is a proof point, showing that as students, we can act on the power of our ideas and have impact in our communities.

And that’s not a lesson limited to energy and the environment: there’s a role students can play in the future of education, economic development and a host of other big issues.
Still wondering how to eat that whale?

One bite at a time.

Mark Laichena is a guest columnist for the Daily Tar Heel. He is a junior political science and peace, war and defense major from London, UK. Contact him at laichena@email.unc.edu.