Young and Green

By Jennifer Liss, WireTap
Posted on December 11, 2006, Printed on November 21, 2008
http://www.wiretapmag.org/activism/42887/

I finished my organic ginger apple juice and studied an intimidating row of trash bins. My cup looked like plastic, it felt like plastic, but this was the Bioneers Conference. How could a nonrecyclable cup have infiltrated a place like this? Recyclable, I decided and tossed it in the bin just as a young man jogged across the courtyard toward me. Slightly out of breath, he reached his hand into the bin and pulled the cup out. "It's biodegradable," he explained. The cup was made from sugar cane.

It's not every day that young men dig out your trash. And it's not every day that you drink from a cup made from the same stuff as candy corn. But this was the type of day when you learn how green life can be. Bioneers is just one of a number of green events that draw high school and college students as well as young people working and volunteering for environmental agencies and nonprofits around the nation. And while many of them, like my trash man, care about recycling, it is clear that was their parents' fight. Social justice, climate control, food and farming, green cities -- these are the issues driving today's young environmentalists.

Take Tiferet Zimmern-Kahan. The 23-year-old recent Barnard College graduate enthusiastically recounts a conference highlight, a workshop about using nomadic goats for land management. ("Let's get the goats and go to Washington," she exclaimed.) Zimmern-Kahan majored in environmental science and refers to the movement of the '70s as a "dark time" when the party message was that the Earth was dying and there was a shortage of practical solutions. Now, she said, her peers are more optimistic, and they have the science to back up their solutions.

Science may be one side of the coin. Passion, says Shalini Kantayya, is the other. Kantayya, a 28-year-old filmmaker and activist from Brooklyn, spoke as part of a Youth Leadership panel at the conference. "None of it is intellectual. It is all about falling in love," she said.

Kantayya fell in love with water. She recently produced A Drop of Life, a fictional film about two women working to save the world's drinking water. Kantayya went to India to make the film, but a young activist doesn't need to travel halfway around the world to change it, she says. We have an impact every day, she continues, whether it's where we put our dollar or how long we leave the water running. During the panel, she asked a tent full of young activists: "How many of you have something to fight for?" Almost everyone stood. "I don't know about you, but this looks like a movement to me," she responded, smiling.

At the Bioneers Conference -- like the green consumer events that are popping up all over the country -- the conscious shopper will find everything from paper made of elephant poop, to hemp milkshakes, to a pinup calendar of "ecobabes." But the Bioneers Conference is not just a marketplace; it's where the curious and the converted are drawn to rally around one another to share ideas and inspiration.

Bioneers has been actively recruiting youth since 2000, when the legendary activist Julia Butterfly Hill called an impromptu meeting at the conference to strategize about how to get more young environmentalists involved. Kristin Rothballer, an attendee at the time, is now the youth and satellite program director for Bioneers. Since she started, the number of young participants has grown from dozens to hundreds. "Youth have a tremendous amount to contribute," she adds, "and their leadership now, not just in the future, is critical to restoring health, equality, justice and vitality to the Earth."

According to Rothballer, there has been a shift in the last few years in the issues that inspire youth participation. Food and farming issues -- such as the industrialization of food, preserving family farms, and localizing food sources -- and independence from oil are two that top the list. The Iraq war has pushed the national conversation about energy upstage, she says, and young people are asking questions like, "Why are we fighting about oil when we have other alternatives?"

"What were once considered fringe issues are now becoming mainstream," says Rothballer. "I think it is becoming increasingly cool to care about the environment. It almost feels like there is peer pressure to give a shit."

Ravi Rajan, associate professor at the Department of Environmental Studies at U.C. Santa Cruz, says he's also noticed an increase in the environmental sensitivity of his entering students, regardless of their major. They enter college informed and ready to fight, at the very least, for a more sustainable campus, he says.

And college is no longer the only way young people enter the movement. Rothballer recounts a story about a teenager who applied to a Bioneers program. He came from an urban neighborhood in Los Angeles and was asthmatic. His condition woke him up to the pollution in his community and motivated him to take action.

Rajan defines this generation of environmental activists as having a strong streak of individualism, a skepticism about government, and a deep moral responsibility to care for the planet.

Someone like May Boeve might fit the profile. The 21-year-old student from Middlebury College in Vermont is a leader of the Sunday Night group that helped lead the campus-based movement to curb global climate change and also coordinated Road to Detroit and Project BioBus. She was also a 2006 Brower Youth Award winner.

She spoke to me early in the morning on the day of the award ceremony, and I could tell she was getting over a cold, but Boeve didn't complain about an early meeting. Like many of her peers, she spoke with poise and eloquence, the stuff of a leader. She says that she's been an activist since she fought for animal rights at age 10, but it wasn't until her involvement in climate change that she found a cause to really put her passion behind. She calls it the "defining challenge" of her generation. And, she says, changing our approach to the climate is a struggle she anticipates engaging in for the "rest of the foreseeable future."

When asked about racial diversity within the movement, she rose to the occasion. "We have a long way to go to make this a diverse movement. But young people recognize that. This generation has always been taught the value of diversity. There are still meetings I go to where everyone is white. But everyone is asking, what voices aren't we hearing right now?"

This movement, her movement, is no longer a subculture, she says. Young people want to be taken seriously. They're involved in environmental activism not because they studied it in school but because, she says, they are simply concerned.

Ravi Rajan points out what he sees as several different types of young activists. There's the "practical activist"; he or she is someone who "gets it done" -- composting, building a local green business, or setting up a farm. And then there is the activist who is interested in process and structure: the media, government, or corporation. Yes, Rajan emphasizes, corporation. "It used to be it was a no-brainer division between public and private," he says. "But many kids today are perfectly happy to work at making large corporations green."

Perhaps one of the most interesting defining characteristics of young environmentalists is who they'll tell you they look up to: each other.

"I really do look to my peers as my models. If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have had a hard time [saying] who my mentor was, until I looked around at my peers," Boeve explained. "We tried to take on auto companies," she says, citing the Road to Detroit project. "The bolder it is, the more we want to do it."

Jennifer Liss is a frequent contributor for WireTap and a freelance writer living in San Francisco.

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