A campaign is mounted to get young people to fight for clean energy
By Anika Clark
Sentinel Staff
Monday, September 15, 2008
Anyone who complains about the apathy of youth probably hasn’t met 20-year-old Anastasia Dubrovina.
With November’s presidential and state elections barreling forward, the Keene State College freshman hopes to get 2,500 of her fellow students to make a simple pledge — to cast their votes for clean energy.
“Students do have a lot of power,” Dubrovina said Wednesday at Keene coffee joint Prime Roast Coffee Co. “If they all voted, then we can turn the election any way, which is pretty powerful.”
Along with like-minded Keene Staters, Dubrovina is planning a host of activities to energize students on campus — everything from presidential debate viewing parties to “Trick or Vote,” an October energy-themed costume event where participants will trick-or-treat for pledges.
Flipping through a notebook decorated with eco-friendly stickers featuring polar bears and the Greenpeace logo, Dubrovina detailed her plans for dorm canvassing and holding a symposium that would examine the current state of the environment.
As of Wednesday, more than 60 people had expressed interest in helping her out.
These students, in turn, are part of a much wider grass-roots movement hitting college campuses across the nation.
Campaign focuseson ‘millennial’ voters
Power Vote is a campaign spearheaded by Energy Action Coalition, an umbrella organization for 48 different groups, to engage millions of youth in the fight for clean energy.
“Our generation has the power to change our country,” says a lizard-green postcard that urges people to “Get Your Power Vote On.”
“Young people are already successfully fighting for a clean energy future on their campuses and in their communities,” the postcard says, with a picture of faceless figures pulling up a wind turbine like it’s the flag at Iwo Jima.
The non-partisan Power Vote initiative has a massive potential base: The latest-available U.S. Census statistics estimated about 20 percent of the population would be ages 20 to 34 by July 2007.
Power Vote caters to the huge, so-called “millennial generation” of 18- to 31-year-olds through everything from a pledge-signing Web site picture of actor Kal Penn — aka Kumar from the film “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” — to a blog that shares its name with a Nelly song, www.ItsGettingHotinHere.org.
But instead of encouraging the youth of America to take off all their clothes — as the song does — the blog rallies young adults to “build a more just and sustainable future.”
And students such as Caroline C. Henderson, a Keene resident who attends Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and Cynthia R. Sebian-Lander from Antioch University New England are ready to answer the call.
The ‘perfect time’ to address environment
“I think this election has really brought a lot of the youth vote out,” said Sebian-Lander, who signed the Power Vote pledge at the Bonnaroo concert in Tennessee and believes now is the perfect time to press environmental issues forward.
Antioch students are launching their own Power Vote initiative as part of the syllabus for the course “Organizing Social Movements & Campaigns,” and Sebian-Lander was joined Thursday at a Keene State Power Vote meeting by two fellow classmates.
Power Vote campaigns are also happening throughout the Granite State, at the University of New Hampshire, Dartmouth College, Plymouth State University and Southern New Hampshire University, according to 23-year-old Zo Tobi.
Tobi, of Lyndeborough, deferred graduate studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., to work as Northeast coordinator for the Sierra Student Coalition, the student arm of the Sierra Club. Through that position, he’s helped college representatives throughout the Northeast organize Power Vote campaigns on their campuses.
Putting the heaton the candidates
While each campus movement follows its own format, they’re all steered by a distinct set of principles that campaign participants plan to make politicians accountable to before and after November’s elections, Tobi said. These include the need to invest in green jobs, cut global warming pollution, end dependence on “dirty energy,” remove “dirty energy” money from politics and make the United States a leader in international cooperation.
“Young people are already doing amazing work on their campuses to build a clean energy economy,” Tobi said. “What we’re trying to do is build all that local power at the grass-roots level while amplifying and unifying our voices toward this national goal.”
Joining the fight is Katherine J. Briggs, a 21-year-old Maine native who is helping to lead the Power Vote charge at Dartmouth.
“In this election, it’s hard to say, ‘I’m voting for the environment’ and have that be visible,” said Briggs, who plans to move into a new sustainable living center on campus this fall. “Power Vote for me, I hope, is going to just show the candidates and whoever becomes the next president that people really care about this.”
And according to her, the time to act is now.
“This is one of those things that in 10 years, if we haven’t done anything about it, we really can’t go back,” she said, adding that climate change carries wide-ranging effects on everything from worldwide poverty rates to national security.
The same agenda, different motivations
For Briggs, Power Vote represents something that all of Dartmouth’s environmental groups on campus can work toward.
For Dubrovina, Power Vote is a way for her to turn her anger about climate change to action.
For Eric W. Spencer and Christopher E. Wuelper, two Keene State College Republicans who attended Thursday’s Power Vote meeting, the initiative may not even be something they can support.
But while significant ideological differences — such as their enthusiasm for the use of so-called “clean coal” — leaves the jury out on whether they’ll participate in the campaign, Spencer and Wuelper found a significant common goal with Power Vote: getting young people to the polls.
And meanwhile, Tobi voiced a strong message for today’s politicians: “Listen to us. We’re here. We’re young. We’re voting,” he said. “And we get it.”
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