Where are all the eco-conscious college students? Sitting back in front of a warm fire with a hot spiked beverage in hand, where we’d all like to be during the holiday season? No, indeed – thousands of them are in Copenhagen right now, pushing for urgent action on climate change.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.N. climate conference has become a “Woodstock-like moment” for young people concerned about the earth.
The U.N. expects more than 1,500 youth to participate in the conference. That’s triple the amount that participated a year ago at the last major climate summit in Poznan, Poland, according to the United Nations.
Lisa Curtis, a senior from Whitman College, who is here as part of a youth-run advocacy group called SustainUS, is tracking the policy discussion and can talk in detail about the technical topics being discussed in negotiations here, such as technology transfer and carbon offsets.
But Ms. Curtis has also joined a group of young people who stripped down to their underwear outside the U.N. climate conference hall in Copenhagen. Ms. Curtis and about a dozen activists and danced around in the cold, calling aloud for negotiators to adopt a fair and binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“A lot of times being a youth here it’s hard to try and figure out how we can best make an impact,” said Ms. Curtis. “One of the best ways to get attention in this world is to take off your clothes.”
Hey, if you’re going to strip in public – which thousands of college kids do every day – you might as well do it sober, for a cause, right? Of course, not all of them engaged in that particular protest – many more marched in demonstrations and held up signs saying things like “There is no planet B.”
It’s nice to know that while all the skeptics and deniers out there keep trying to make the so-called “ClimateGate” into something worth talking about, the world’s youth are still focused on the reality of what’s at stake.
Link [The Wall Street Journal]
Photo credit: University of Toronto
