Environmental Conference Decries Warming

About 400 students descended on Harvard last Friday in an environmentalist convention organized by Harvard’s Environmental Action Committee (EAC) and the Climate Campaign, a coalition students against global warming from Northeastern universities.

Though the event’s attendees were primarily students at Northeast universities, the Northeast Climate Conference also brought together students hailing from Canada, Michigan and Montana.

Workshops were held throughout Harvard Yard, from the Science Center to Emerson Hall.

“This is the largest event of this kind focused on the environment,” said Zach D. Liscow ’05, one of the conference’s planners and co-chair of the EAC.

The convention took on a partisan flavor as keynote speakers attacked the Bush Administration’s apparent lack of concern for the environment.

The organizers of the conference also expressed hope that momentum from the weekend would motivate their campaign to convince the Harvard administration to invest in renewable energy.

Last year, the EAC started its campaign to make the new campus at Allston sustainable.

Though University President Lawrence H. Summers agreed to create a committee to push for campus-wide sustainability, EAC members said Harvard is far behind the University of California system, which hosted referendums wherein students agreed to each pay a few extra dollars to cover the expenses of renewable energy initiatives on campus.

“We are at a beginning stage. We hope that this conference will add to the discussion and increase awareness. If Harvard becomes a sustainable campus, it would be monumental,” said Allison I. Rogers ’04 who co-chairs the EAC and helped organize the conference.

The students spent three days listening to keynote speakers and participating in workshops with topics ranging from constructing a more viable activist network to crafting an environmentally-friendly building.

The workshop sessions included “State Break-Outs,” where students convened with others from their own states in an effort to coordinate environmental projects on campus.

“We are trying to make a more cohesive environmental network,” said Andrew Kroon, a Yale senior.

Although Rogers said the conference aimed to fight stereotypes of environmentalists as “super-hippie and anti-corporate,” there was a clear anti-Bush sentiment among participants.

Alongside a congregation of brochure tables for groups such as Green Peace and the Sierra Club was a table of bumper-stickers, bearing slogans like “Re-defeat Bush in 2004” and “More Trees, Less Bush.”

The keynote speakers seldom passed up an opportunity to take a jab at the Bush administration.

In his speech exhorting the environmentalist movement to embrace a platform of social justice, Ewuare Osayande, a poet, political activist, and author of 10 books, said “the number one thing you can do for the environment is beat Bush.” The remark drew the loudest applause of the night.

But his criticism extended beyond the White House.

Osayande criticized some environmental activists for turning a blind-eye to environmental racism.

He also drew a link between the industrialized nation’s disproportionate contribution to global warming and Western imperialism and colonialism.

“It is the children of the developing world who are most vulnerable to the global warming,” he said. “They don’t have the infrastructure to cope with it.”

He also called upon the environmentalist movement to radicalize and challenged them to reject tainted funding from corporations that might contribute to environmental destruction.

Another keynote speaker, David Orr, who chairs the Environmental Studies program at Oberlin, drew laughter and applause when he snuck into his slide-show a political cartoon of Vice President Cheney strumming a banjo against the backdrop of oil rigs, singing “this land is oiled land, this land is mined land.”

Orr accused the Bush administration of muddled thinking and pandering to polluting corporations, despite growing public support for sound environmental policy.

“The machinery that connects public values and public policy is broken,” he said. “We know what we are doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.”

Orr said as he mockingly followed a graph that demonstrated the correlation between energy consumption and global warming with a quote from President Bush that read “we need an energy bill that increases consumption.”

The rest of the talk was devoted to strategies for environmental activism. He called upon the collegiate community to fill in the “leadership vacuum” in the environmentalist movements as he related stories of how individual students had greatly furthered the cause.

He cited the example of an Oberlin graduate that established an environmentalist group in Ohio and a group of Oberlin students who bought out a city block to forestall the establishment of a Walmart.

Though he was clearly speaking to a predominantly anti-Bush audience, Orr reached out to conservatives in the audience.

“You can be a conservative,” he said. “But there has to be something to conserve.”