Madd About Midd Warming up to the issues

Author: Dave Barker

When I first heard about the Sunday Night Group, which was formed last January to take action on global warming, I pictured a rather smelly group of students who fresh from rock climbing or hookah smoking, needed an extra hour to wail about the Bush Administration and Kyoto. I thought of it as a rally of veggie oil vehicles, a secret society of Middlebury's own Monkey Wrench Gang.

But when I entered Chateau's Grand Salon on Sunday night at 9 p.m., it became immediately clear that the secret was out on the Sunday Night Group. I arrived on time, yet there were already 45 students circling around the Grand Salon. Of course, it helped that Scholar in Residence Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, the seminal work on global warming had come to chat, but I would soon get the feeling that the group needjfghjed McKibben there like a bald man needs a stylist.

McKibben talked off the cuff for 15 minutes, relaying the good news that political leaders are finally waking up to warming. Republicans in Congress are stepping up to oppose drilling in the Arctic Refuge for the first time. In China, where air quality compares to the quality of some of those trinkets they export to us - very poor - leaders are fully aware of the need to address the environmental impacts of hyper-growth.

The best news of all came at the end of his talk, when he added to the list of accomplishments worldwide by mentioning the work of Middlebury students. "I don't think there's a college campus more energized around this issue [global warming] than this one," he said. He applauded last summer's Road to Detroit campaign for putting pressure on automakers. The bus used for that journey was recently spotlighted in Rolling Stone.

My eyes really started to bulge when the students started sharing recent progress. Instead of talking about the latest plot to maliciously foil a developer's plans, Kat Cooley and Emily Egginton, both '06, discussed their recent trip to Ticonderoga, N.Y., to observe the re-permitting process for International Paper's proposal to test-burn tires. Other students were there with plans for issuing policy on wind energy through the Roosevelt Institution or to solicit help for a local goat farmer looking to run a farm powered by solar and wind energy.

Excitement heightened over the Nov. 28 -Dec. 9 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal, the largest intergovernmental climate conference since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997. May Boeve '06.5 and Jamie Henn '07 hope to get 100 students to attend as Official Observers and to participate in a planned march on Dec. 3, slated as the International Day of Action.

As I learned, every Sunday in Chateau is a day of action. You can shrug off the group as a bunch of twenty-first century hippies, but until you sit in on a meeting, watch your mouth. These guys walk the walk more than they talk the talk.