The global, the local and the college garden

I’m packing for the trip to Copenhagen, site next month of arguably the most important international negotiations in the planet’s history. There will be big rallies, speeches to give, delegates from every corner of the world, grand conference halls, lots of press. But I’ll be thinking, often, of home. Not just because I miss it, but because for me it’s the source of many of the ideas we deeply need right now.

The tension between the global and the local is the most interesting and fruitful fact in our ongoing environmental debate, and few places symbolize it better, or more hopefully, than our Middlebury campus.

We face the first truly global crisis — they don’t call it global warming for nothing — and that clearly demands planet-scale action. So it’s useful work to try and build that worldwide coalition. CNN called our international day of action for 350.org “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history” — we stood in halls of our temporary offices in New York as pictures poured in from 5,200 actions in 181 countries and almost giggled to think we’d pulled it off with a crew of seven core staff, all 2006 graduates of this college. They’ve turned themselves into some of the finest organizers now at work anywhere — each one took a continent and managed to reach places and people who had never been active on this issue before. They found some of their best allies in students and faculty at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (350.org is a poster child for why this merger makes so much sense). It all came together quite beautifully — if you look at the pictures on 350.org, you’ll see women in burkas with 350 signs, slumdwellers from Mombasa, soldiers in Afghanistan. The idea that environmentalism is for rich white people is simply not true.

On the other hand, those organizers got their start in the privileged hallways of this college — in the classroom and in the library and in the college garden. They cut their teeth helping build support for the biomass plant, and the plantation of fast-growing willows that is the best hope of making it truly sustainable. All of these young people, and I as well, are as deeply interested in the local as in the global.

Which makes sense. Because on the one hand, any global solution is only as useful as the sum of the local actions it motivates. Leaders in Copenhagen won’t actually erect any windmills — even their governments, though they have a huge role to play, can’t actually make change happen on the scale and at the pace we need. By the same token, inspired action in one town or on one campus — oreven hundreds of campuses — won’t make a real dent in the carbon concentration of the atmosphere. For that we need worldwide action — we’re past solving this crisis one lightbulb at a time.

How to reconcile these different ends of the spectrum? By mobilizing those forces that work everywhere at once. Economics, for instance: the deep goal of the Copenhagen meeting will be finally to put a stiff enough cap on carbon that the cost of fossil fuel will rise enough to begin to change behavior — that every institution, and not just green-oriented campuses, will start looking for alternatives to coal and gas and oil.

Or religion. One of the best parts of 350.org was the involvement of thousands of local churches and mosques and synagogues — across America, for instance, congregations rung the bells in their steeples 350 times. That filters up — as popes and patriarchs begin to enunciate the message that social justice demands climate sanity, behavior will start to shift. The link may not be as easy to model as a price rise, but it’s real.

One of the great forces we need to muster is youth itself, the surging, idealistic, hopeful power that’s been applied so often to so many local and national tasks. As we worked around the world on 350.org, we couldn’t help but notice that our best organizers were often very young — 20-year-olds in Ethiopia organizing giant rallies in the streets of Addis Ababa, college-age networks across Australia, New Zealand, India, China. Linking them together is ever more possible thanks to the new technology (we have 23,000 photos of actions in our Flickr account at 350.org).

And their power comes only in part from their youth. College campuses are the perfect place for ideas like these to incubate, because people have time, and they have each other — there’s a group of people gathered together not because they work for the same employer but because they’re engaged in the same search for understanding. Watching people reach for that understanding, try to put it in into practice, is the great privilege of the professor — I’ve enjoyed few things so much in my years in Vermont as watching the Sunday Night Group turn into one of the nation’s premier environmental outfits, developing precisely the kind of people we desperately need.

So it was fun standing in Times Square on 350 Day, showing photos from across the planet on the Jumbotron advertising screens. But when the pictures from Middlebury’s 350 potluck came across the computer, I was suddenly deeply homesick. We all need to be citizens of the world, but it’s impossible unless you really live someplace. Thank heaven for Addison County.