Countdown begins to Focus the Nation
With Focus the Nation, the message is the immediate necessity to do something about global warming.
The messengers are the nation’s college students.
Eban Goodstein, Northwest regional director for Focus the Nation, says that more than 1,000 college campuses and more than 1 million college students have become involved in a movement that is pointing to one day – Jan. 31, 2008 – to deliver a statement the USA will never forget.
It will be the largest teach-in in American history.
Leading the effort at Lewis & Clark College, the area base for Focus the Nation, are students Kiel Johnson and David Norse. They are highly optimistic that Focus the Nation can change the nation.
“This is an amazing opportunity to really do something about global warming,” said Johnson, a junior majoring in economics. “It’s important to use it to get involved and make it successful.
“Focus the Nation is not going to solve global warming. But it will get the discussion going.”
“Once college students hear about Focus the Nation they become incredibly supportive,” said Norse, a senior majoring in religious studies. “Even though we have a small campus, it’s hard to reach everyone. Once that happens, they want to get involved.”
Being college students, Johnson and Norse are using humor and ingenuity to get their message across.
Johnson will be busy organizing students and plastering the campus with posters and banners about the upcoming “Warm-Coming Dance,” for which swimsuits will be suitable attire.
This past November, Norse organized the Green Torch Relay, a most unique way to get Oregon politicians involved with Focus the Nation. Norse worked diligently for weeks to line up riders, runners, students on scooters and longboards, and rowing crew team members to convey a most imaginative, and large, invitation to Salem: A 15-foot long scroll signed by 4,000 people.
Norse still smiles when he thinks about the photo opp provided when the scroll was rolled down the steps of the state capitol while cameras from newspapers flashed.
When it comes to the call to action on global warming, everyone has his or her own tale of personal awakening. For many it was viewing the Al Gore movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” For Johnson and Norse it was Goodstein’s presence at Lewis & Clark.
“His talk really raised my awareness,” Johnson said. “It made me question what is happening and made me realize we need to change what we’re doing if we’re going to survive.”
“I’m a student life intern with Student Support Services,” said Norse. “I met with Eban at the start of the year and heard what global warming was all about.”
For Norse, the light went on when he saw how drastically global warming would affect the people he wanted to serve.
“The main thing about climate change is what it will do to the world’s poor,” Norse said. “Governments will be destabilized. It will affect the people making the smallest carbon footprint. They will be the ones paying the greatest price, not the people making the biggest carbon footprint.
“Because of my faith I feel really responsible for caring about the people who are most vulnerable. I think this movement will pick up momentum when people in church see how much it affects the poor.”
Johnson has found his inspiration for action in other college students.
“I joined the Cascade Climate Network, which has 10 other Northwest schools,” he said. “We all met in a cabin at Reed College and made a plan and a declaration and talked about Focus the Nation, and we pledged to make it a success.
“That’s what is really exciting. A lot of motivated people are working to make this happen.”
But Johnson has found less inspiration in his elders.
“I went to the Oregon Business Leadership Conference, and it had about a thousand governors, senators and business leaders,” Johnson said. “They started out saying good things. But they ended up talking about how they could make a profit from going green, rather than really addressing the problem.
“Older generations have been raised with the mentality of ‘We need more things, we need to consume more, your happiness comes from consuming.’ We have to be the generation that turns this country around.”
Norse is all for his generation leading the way, but he also wants older generations to quickly get in step about global warming.
“My generation will inherit the leadership role,” Norse said. “But the businessmen and politicians are the ones who have to start acting now and start actually leading, because I doubt if my generation will win every Congressional seat in 2008.
“We will inherit the leadership role. I just hope it’s not too late when we do inherit it.”
On Jan. 31 at Lewis & Clark College, there will be 36 teach-ins with professors addressing global warming in their own areas of expertise, such as philosophy, law, economics and religion.
Then comes the big Northwest gathering at the Chiles Center in Portland, with thousands of students and (hopefully) lots of politicians around a roundtable for non-partisan discussion. The whole affair will be broadcast by an area radio station and will be jazzed up by local performers and comedians.
When it is all over, the aim is to have many more people as fired up to challenge global warming as Johnson and Norse.
“It’s not a youth movement, it’s a humanitarian movement,” Norse said.
“That’s what I like about it.”