For young people, the fight for climate solutions is not distant or abstract. We aren’t fighting for future generations, we’re fighting for the future of our own. If we succeed in creating a new clean energy economy our generation will reap the benefits of millions of new jobs; if we fail, we will be the ones to face the consequences of catastrophic climate change.
That’s why young people have been mobilizing like never before. One great example of the clean energy activism taking place all over the country is a group of Maine students who organized a sleep out for clean energy at Bates College.
Students write letters demanding action at the Bates Climate Sleep Out
The Bates Climate Sleep Out successfully drew 150 students for your typical evening of live music, smores, and urgent letter writing. The event was not just a protest, it was about making their voice heard, and getting the message to Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins that our generation demands a strong climate bill.
Maayan Cohen, one of the event’s organizers, explained why they held the sleep out and what they planned to achieve:
The climate crisis is the challenge of our generation and we are asking our Senators Snowe and Collins to act with urgency in helping to pass strong, just, and comprehensive federal climate and clean energy legislation. In order to resolve the climate crisis, I think we need to be working to make changes from both the ‘bottom up’ at the grassroots level and from the ‘top down’ through federal legislation. As constituents, I think that it is our responsibility to express our concerns and ideas to our representatives and demand that they listen and act accordingly.
The Bates Climate Sleep Out was used to achieve several goals: to acknowledge the great initiatives that have been taken to move Bates College towards carbon neutrality and to think about ways in which we can continue to improve and move forward as a college community, to create awareness of current climate and energy legislation and to express our voices through writing letters to our senators, and symbolically, to sleep out away from the comfort of our homes in solidarity with those who have or will become climate refugees in our lifetime.
Check out some more pictures from the sleep out:
We’ glad to see the support for alternate energy solutions. Maine is in a very good position to use biomass for energy. This would be a big investment, but it would pay off in many ways.