This weekend Andy and I are headed to DC for Powershift ‘09 and the Capitol Climate Action.
Powershift is a youth environmental conference with about 11,000 confirmed participants and an amazing line up of speakers and performers that you will hear about throughout the weekend.
The Capitol Climate Action is a massive planned act of civil disobedience taking place at the coal fired power plant that supplies the capitol building with power. We hope to shut it down to send a clear message to those in power that the marriage between government and destructive energy MUST come to an end.
Thoughts and hopes for the weekend:
1~ I hope to liveblog my experience to the best of my ability this weekend, although time will be short.
2~ I hope to network with organizations and schools which may play a role in my future. I dred the thought of the job fair but I’ve got to do it sometime.
3~ I hope to meet some folks from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) who might be useful sources for my thesis and perhaps even friends for the future.
4~ I hope to work through some conflicting thoughts I have about the movement and begin to find my place. Much of that thought process will happen here.
5~ I hope to become inspired to take more of a leadership role in the community in which I live. I knew so many in progressive activism in Lubbock and it was much easier to get plugged in to the things that matter knowing when I showed up there would be familiar faces. Here, I have neglected my role as member of the community almost completely and become a hermit. I need to stand up and start something real here. NOTE (to self): sometime soon I must write about the history of environmental activism in Wyoming (Mike Roselle anyone?). The research will be inspiring and I must be convinced that this is not a rest period for me simply because I am uncomfortable here.
6~ I hope to make some tough decisions about my graduate school career and my summer that might facilitate my future ability to make a difference.
7~ I hope to contribute to a crying out of the people for justice and a future we can live with and in that is necesary for change.
8~ I hope to learn tactics for use in my activism and theories for my study that will ignite inspiration for something useful to say in the most individual and largest academic undertaking of my life. I want my thesis to be more than an analysis of the rhetorical tactics of RAN but a manifesto about the nature and direction of this movement. A position paper that will define for me my place in the movement and the vision of activism that I choose to explore.
A central theme here is that I want to be (re)connected to activists and the things they are doing. Because I spend so much of my time writing about social movements a little hands on learning is likely just what I need to jump start my personal role as an advocate. Studying a social movement from the outside is like reading about the Grand Canyon. Its just a disconnected, dead, useless hole in the ground… until you stand in the midst and look around.
