Posted on 01/30/2008 9:42:24 AM PST by NormsRevenge
At the University of Rhode Island, students placed 300-pound blocks of ice around their campus and let them melt to symbolize how global warming is affecting polar ice caps.
At Missouri State University, students will pile 20 tons of coal on campus to show how much of this air-polluting fossil fuel is needed to power their school for an hour.
At UCSD, young conservationists are preparing a performance-art show that will feature a faux polar bear in an 8-foot-tall “electric” chair. It's a creative riff on the theme of climate change harming the bears.
The activities are part of the inaugural Focus the Nation, a four-day event designed to turn the nation's college students and others into global-warming activists.
Organizers of the grass-roots campaign, which ends tomorrow, bill it as the largest teach-in in U.S. history. They said about 1,700 colleges – including San Diego State and the University of California San Diego – churches, high schools and civic groups are participating.
“It's really important that this is happening nationwide,” said Michelle Kizner, a Focus the Nation organizer at UCSD, where she's majoring in ecology, behavior and evolution. “That makes it more powerful – just the solidarity of the movement and really seeing that people are committed everywhere.”
The main ideas are to educate and energize hundreds of thousands of young people, who will inherit Earth's fast-changing physical environment. Toward that goal, Focus the Nation's leaders are bringing dozens of politicians to campuses so students can share their environmental concerns and get a taste of civic engagement.
“We have got the youth who feel this huge sense of urgency, but they don't have power. We want to combine that with the experience, the knowledge and the influence of the older generation,” said Alex Tinker from Focus the Nation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group from Portland, Ore., that's coordinating this week's programs.
The organization's founder is Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. He compares modern American attitudes about climate change to how people felt about civil rights in the early 1960s, saying that at the time, most Americans understood that segregation was wrong but figured that laws allowing it would never change.
“That is where we are now with (global warming),” Goodstein said. “Americans get that it is real and bad and wrong, but there is this sense of fatalism that we are somehow condemned to pass on to our children an impoverished planet.”
About two years ago, he started talking to professors and campus leaders at dozens of colleges nationwide who were sympathetic to the cause. Eventually, Goodstein created the Focus the Nation group and won financial support from Nike, Clif Bar and other organizations. The money enabled him to hire a staff and expand his teach-in concept, which led to this week's event.
The activities will include solutions-oriented discussions between students and elected lawmakers. Participants nationwide also have the chance to vote for various climate-change solutions at focusthenation.org, and the winning ideas will be announced in February.
“Young people get it,” Goodstein said. “They are sick of hearing that the world is coming to an end, and they want to be part of the solution.”
Focus the Nation builds not only on the civil rights movement but also on dynamics that inspired Earth Day, the ongoing climate-change campaign led by former Vice President Al Gore and a surge of support for anti-global-warming efforts by hundreds of mayors nationwide.
The call for action resonated at UCSD, home to cutting-edge climate science and a growing push to offer practical solutions for reducing energy use and curbing emissions of greenhouse gases, which hasten global warming.
Campus activities for Focus the Nation include a panel about careers in “environmentally conscious” industries, a display of eco-friendly vehicles and climate-themed lectures in dozens of classes.
Perhaps the most unusual event will be tomorrow's performance-art show with the giant “electric” chair. A student dressed in a polar-bear costume will be strapped into the chair and will hold a sign proclaiming, “You Have the Power.”
“We are helping people make the connection between their actions and those actions' impact on the environment,” said Kristin Blackler, a sustainability analyst at UCSD.
UCSD staffer Bryan Ward, in a full polar bear costume
for a performance-art show, sits in the 8-foot-tall
"electric" chair that will be used in the show. Maggie
Souder (right), a campus sustainability officer, assists.
Fools. Is everyone going to college to become an activist?
At UCSD, young conservationists are preparing a performance-art show that will feature a faux polar bear in an 8-foot-tall “electric” chair. It’s a creative riff on the theme of climate change harming the bears.
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Perhaps the most unusual event will be tomorrow’s performance-art show with the giant “electric” chair. A student dressed in a polar-bear costume will be strapped into the chair and will hold a sign proclaiming, “You Have the Power.”
“At the University of Rhode Island, students placed 300-pound blocks of ice around their campus and let them melt to symbolize how global warming is affecting polar ice caps.”
I’m going to buy the game “Operation” and remove the patient’s brain to symbolize the collective intelligence of the GW crowd.
“It’s really important that this is happening nationwide,” said Michelle Kizner, a Focus the Nation organizer at UCSD, where she’s majoring in ecology, behavior and evolution. “That makes it more powerful – just the solidarity of the movement and really seeing that people are committed everywhere.”
—
committed?
some of these folks may belong in another institution methinks where folks also are ‘committed’. jmo
-—our future “leadership”-—not—!!!
These are the same type of students that drop a car off of a three story building and say....”You mean it go dented?”. Look kids, leave the ice cubes in the freezer and they won’t melt. Don’t heat the school and see how you like it. As for the bear in the electric chair.....be sure and plug it in. If this is all they have to do in school, we best be closing down the school and save the money.
“Fools. Is everyone going to college to become an activist?”
No, not everyone. I guarantee that the Asian kids who come here to study computer science, mathematics & chemistry were all busy studying for real degrees. It’s the American kids, products of public schools that dispensed mush and who are now studying “ecology” and “women’s studies,” are the ones participating this this nonsense.
We had a Polar Bear named Major up here at the Stone Zoo. He was on the front page of the Boston Herald the same day that Al Gore gave a speech on Global Warming on the steps of the State House. Major was used as a yard stick to measure the snowfall we had gotten so far that year, which had gone over his height.
Major was nine feet tall.
The left would be very happy if that were true for ALL college students. /s
When you only go to class 2, maybe 3 hours a day, and you've got mom and dad's money to support you, what else is there to do but smoke dope and protest?
Morons brainwashed by Gore. Pathetic.
Yeah...With the stinking freezing temps here and the snowstorm in the Middle East, we certainly need to concern ourselves with Global Warming. /sarc
Bingo. I grew up here, but my parents were both legal immigrants, and they pushed me pretty hard to study useful subjects (computer science, mathematics). I picked accounting, economics, and commerce on my own.
Fools. Is everyone going to college to become an activist?
I'm not!
Isn't that sweet.
Wonder how many fossil fuels were burned by the forklifts/dumptrucks/whatever to transport this stuff? Or, is it only the thought that counts?
That block is only about 43 gallons or about the size of two gas tanks. That “symbol” seems pretty weak to me.
IMO, conservatives need to join the battle in education. The liberals have a stanglehold on these institutions from K through any level of college degree you care to name, making it nearly impossible for the conservative message to reach and influence enough of the future generations. Indeed, I think the future of conservatism in this country is bleak. I feel bad for people in their 20's or younger, as they will probably live in a different (and worse) America than the one we grew up in. But putting the brakes on some of the liberal stupidity being taught in the schools might help turn the tide a bit.
This is what a bear looks like. Go Nanooks...
University of Alaska Museum
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