The Next Eco-Warriors (6 page)

Copenhagen helped focus public attention on climate as an international issue, and as the meetings approached, more and more people turned to
350.org
as a way to do something about the issue. As usual, we welcomed everyone who wanted to chip in—other than corporations, which we couldn't ensure wouldn't just use our events for their own personal greenwash. But otherwise, we were confident that a diversity of partners would bring the type of creativity and energy we knew a successful campaign needed. Soon, artists and athletes were on board; churches, mosques, and temples were planning events; and students, always a strong base for us, were organizing alongside grandparents. We adopted the informal slogan “Just say yes!” and did our best to remain as transparent and responsive as possible, even as our email inbox began to reach the breaking point.

I was reminded every day in the office that our campaign wouldn't be possible without the new online tools that allowed us to communicate with people around the world. I often found myself in San Francisco G-Chatting with an organizer in Beijing while on a Skype call with a volunteer in Malaysia and editing a Google Doc with partners in Vietnam, while telling everyone about it on Twitter. One day, I tracked down a guy from Brunei on Facebook who seemed interested in climate change and told him about 350, and a few days later, he sent me back a link to a
350.org
Brunei Facebook group with more than three thousand members. I was thrilled but mostly stunned that no one had contacted him before. Despite the increasing prevalence of the Internet in our everyday lives, I think many organizations or campaigns still haven't grasped its full potential.

At the same time, I knew that online organizing wasn't enough. For one thing, even the Internet doesn't reach everywhere, and even when an email can get through, a face-to-face interaction is still preferable. So, tapping into some funding from a number of foundations that were willing to take a risk on our campaign, I took a few trips to Asia to try to track down potential partners in person. On my first trip to China, I met up with the Green Long March, a student conservation movement. We first met in Beijing, but the organizers invited me to join one of the ten marches across the country that they were holding that summer. I eagerly accepted and joined a group of students for a few days outside of Guangzhou. Watching student discuss climate change and other environmental challenges with local townspeople we met was a revelatory experience for me. I'd been talking for months about how people
“all around the world” were taking action to fight climate change, but the phrase didn't really hit home until I was halfway across the planet.

On another trip, I spent three weeks traveling through Southeast Asia after attending a climate meeting in Bangkok. In Northern Thailand, I spoke with a monk I met outside a temple about Buddhism and protecting the environment. An hour later, he pledged to organize an event for October 24. In Laos, I tracked down the one environmental reporter in the country at the
Vientiane Times
, and we shared ideas about different storylines and articles he was working on. I squeezed in five meetings a day in Phnom Penh by hiring a motorcycle driver for ten dollars and zipping from meeting to meeting on the back of his bike, clutching my pamphlets. In Hanoi, I met up with ten Vietnamese journalists who thought that I was Dr. James Hansen—I guess
Jamie Henn
looks similar enough in Vietnamese—but who were still willing to talk with me when I admitted I wasn't a NASA scientist, rather an organizer fresh out of college.

Contact by contact, meeting by meeting, a network began to take shape. I remember being exhausted in the end, sitting in the youth hostel in downtown Bangkok, dripping in sweat but with a big smile on my face as I watched new friends make banners and signs to take back to their home countries for October 24.

Along with organizing East Asia, I took on the role of communications director. As October 24 approached, I began to try to map out how we could leverage the day to make a real impact on the public imagination. Soon, we'd assembled a global communications team with members ranging from individuals like Landry Ninteretse, who had to move from internet café to internet café as the power failed in his home city of Bujumbura to keep sending press releases, to a cheap public relations firm in India that committed to taking on the whole subcontinent. Linked together by Skype and Google Docs, our ragtag crew quickly prepared itself to try to channel the tidal wave of actions that we saw headed our way.

With a week left until October 24 and more than four thousand events registered across the planet, our core team of friends and some of our now thirty-five global staff convened on an office in downtown New York City
for the final push. Those last few days felt like juggling a thousand balls at once, just trying to keep them moving through the air until the final moment when they were all supposed to fall into place. And as the pizza boxes began to stack higher and higher and our action counter skyrocketed up above five thousand rallies in more than 180 countries, we all began to get that tingling feeling that this whole crazy experiment might just work.

The day itself really proved to be the ultimate test for our open-source organizing. It was a nail-biting moment of waiting to see whether this would all end up as a failed dream or as a spectacular reality. Just forty-eight hours before October 24, I remember our South African media coordinator, Adam, was calling through to organizers on Skype to make sure they were actually doing their events. Two sisters of his were organizing an event. They'd come down to a workshop we'd run in South Africa before and gone back to Ethiopia fired up to organize, but we hadn't heard much from them since. Over a crackling Skype–to–cell phone connection, one of his sisters told Adam that not only were they having the event, but also that fifteen thousand schoolchildren would be in the streets the next day, marching for 350.

Adam and I nearly fell out of our chairs when we heard the news. Here was the event that could kick off the entire day! Ethiopia holding the first 350 event. Adam quickly asked them if they had a video camera and could send us footage of the rally. “Hmmm,” said the sister, “we hadn't thought about that.” Then Adam and I really fell on the ground. Here was our biggest event, and with just forty-eight hours to go, we had no way of getting the footage together to show the world. I think the technical public relations term for the situation was
we're screwed
.

Not ready to have our dreams shattered so quickly, Adam rushed to recharge his Skype account with more money and got busy tracking down someone to film the event. With only a few hours to go till the Ethiopian event would start, Adam ended up calling his father's friend's uncle's cousin's girlfriend—or something like that—and eventually tracked down a young woman. A woman who was not only near the 350 Ethiopian event, but also had a high-definition camera and would share the footage online. The next morning, the woman got on her bicycle, biked to the event, shot the footage,
biked over to the one hotel in town that had high-speed Internet, bought an obligatory drink at the bar in order to use the connection, and uploaded the footage to our online video library. Sure enough, we got them out to the media a few hours later. Skype, plus cell phones, plus bicycles, plus cameras, plus Internet, plus laptops, (plus alcohol?) equals a new organizing frontier!

The images from Ethiopia were only some of the thousands of stunning photos that came across our laptops on October 24. I was captivated by images of thousands of people forming a giant sun in Mexico City, a human 350 with a peace symbol for the 0 in war-torn Serbia, and the video of climbers hanging with 350 banners off of Table Mountain in South Africa. I was driven to tears by the stories of the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh who held 350 signs at their sewing machines because they couldn't get off work to join an event and of the children in Indonesia who held banners that read
NO ONE CARES ABOUT US, BUT WE CARE ABOUT THE PLANET
outside of their orphanage. And I was inspired by the single young woman in Iraq who held a banner on her own because her friends were too afraid to join her; the citizens in El Salvador who marched through their tumultuous capital despite a ban on demonstrations of any kind; and the soldiers in Iraq who formed a 350 out of sandbags and told us they'd left their Hummers, walking on patrol to save gas.

In a single day, we'd put to rest the idea that the climate movement was just for rich, white people in Europe and North America. Instead, our photos were filled with young and old; poor and rich; black, brown, and white; faces and places that represented the entire planet.

Those were also the faces that made it onto front pages and newscasts around the world. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of organizers around the world,
350.org
hit the media jackpot on October 24, making it into nearly every major international news outlet and becoming the most popular story on Google News of the day—meaning it was the most covered event in the world.

_________

OVER THE COURSE OF THE TWENTY-FIVE HOURS I was awake around October 24, I must have talked with one hundred reporters, doing my final
interview with Radio Australia at two in the morning after the big day had finally come to a close in New York. After I hung up the phone, I sat for a while in the darkness of our rented Manhattan apartment where the rest of our team was asleep on their desks. I just stared into the blackness, exhausted and fulfilled, seeing image after image from the day in my mind. In that moment, I felt truly connected as a movement, as if every single person who took part in the day was reaching out from their photos, reminding me that we're all in this together.

Six weeks later, our team at
350.org
brought all those photographs and stories (and about fifty youth organizers from the global South) to the historic UN climate meetings in Copenhagen, Denmark. Our goal was to bring the full force of this growing movement to bear on our political leaders and push them to create a fair, ambitious, and legally binding climate treaty that could take the world back to 350 ppm carbon dioxide. From the outset, I knew this was near impossible: two weeks of meetings weren't going to suddenly convince the United States to take on ambitious policies or heal the divides between rich and poor countries. Nevertheless, I was hopeful. Copenhagen was a chance for the world, and our movement, to come together and chart a new course that at least pointed towards a sustainable and just future.

Sadly, Copenhagen proved to be a disappointment. I remember standing outside the AP Television room on the Saturday before the final weeks of negotiations and watching images of protestors being beaten by police outside the convention center. Stunning as the pictures were, I couldn't help but feel that the real crime was taking place inside, where negotiators from developed countries continued to block substantial progress on a strong treaty. Even though 117 countries adopted the 350 ppm target, they were, in a sense, the wrong 117—the poor and most vulnerable nations, not the rich and addicted ones.

Copenhagen didn't produce the treaty we desperately need, but it did strengthen our movement. Organizers and activists from around the world had the chance to work, celebrate, and protest together. As the meetings ended in failure, youth from around the world made a video repeating the phrase
You're not done yet. And neither are we
, in different languages. It was a message that I'd take home with me.

So, as I write this in the spring of 2010, I'm back to emailing everyone I know and helping get another campaign off the ground. On October 10, 2010,
350.org
hosted a Global Work Party, with actions in thousands of places around the world. Folks put up solar panels, dug community gardens, and laid out bike paths. Not because we think we'll solve climate change one bike path at a time—we won't. But because we want to send a strong message to our leaders: If we can get to work, so can you. If we can climb on the roof of the school and hammer in a solar panel, you can climb to the floor of the Senate or Parliament and pass a strong new climate policy.

Each new event for October 10 that I heard about was like a jolt of energy. Students in Malaysia installed homemade wind turbines. Across the United States, communities planned to retrofit schools and low-income homes. In Ghana, one town planted 350 trees. For me, it's proof that our movement is still strong and we're still growing. That even on the days when I'm feeling tired or hopeless about the state of the world, there's someone else out there who's also working hard to make a difference. Because now, we've got a movement.

Jamie Henn is the communications and East Asia director for
350.org.
He continues to help lead
350.org's
innovative efforts to use the web to connect a grassroots climate movement around the world
.

Thirty-two
Diné
Political Progressor