A Shift in Approach

The green movement now has its Woodstock. From February 27 to March 2, the National Lawn in Washington DC became to tree-huggers what upstate New York farmland was for the hippie generation: a field of dreams. For more than 12,000 participants, including 43 Columbia students, the youth summit Power Shift 2009 provided an opportunity for communication and education about national environmental initiatives and their proponents, as well as workshops about the practical aspects of activism—how to fundraise, organize, and advocate.

Like its ’60s parallel, the weekend had rock stars, of a sort. Instead of the wailing guitar licks of Jimi Hendrix or the screechy scream of Janis Joplin, though, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson’s speeches echoed over the loudspeakers. To be fair, music was not completely absent from the festivities—The Roots and Santogold played an exuberant opening ceremony—but it seemed that even they knew they were not the stars of the event. Instead of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the gathering praised organization, conversation, and information.

Movement leaders like Van Jones and Majora Carter—who support constructive advocacy, seeking the creation of solutions rather than just the identification of problems—drew an image of the movement’s trajectory. It is visually represented as a tree of change, whose low branches of education and planning must be climbed before the high-hanging fruits of labor can be plucked. Whereas Woodstock hoped to imbibe the juices of such fruits and revel in their sweetness, the green movement has yet to truly experience their ideas come to bloom, although their actions have brought the fruits of their labor tantalizingly close. Baseline goals must be accomplished before the higher ideals can be realized. Power Shift is a small step towards those initial accomplishments.

Rock and roll is youthful, sexy, and loud. Rock and roll rebels and revolutionizes—it is about improvisation and experimentation. It is music to revolt by. For this reason, Woodstock appealed for a particular age demographic. Power Shift, too, is referred to as a youth summit on its Web site. The idea, it seems, is that activism is an intrinsically young action. Students from Columbia College, Barnard, SEAS, and the School of Social Work represented the University, seeking ideas on how to work with the administration and new ways to be environmentally conscious. They were part of an informal mass of more than a thousand students on Saturday, Feb. 28, in a throwback to the days of sit-ins, to peacefully display the movement’s determined efforts. It is this level of energy that Columbia’s green groups wanted to bring back to campus. It will create new ways of reaching a broader student base of interest, drive the activities run out of the special interest house Green Borough brownstone, and bring dynamic ways of working within a University budget that is clamped tight. The 43 attendants of Power Shift bring back the spirit of the ’00s: enthusiastic but prepared action.

Perhaps that makes the new Bohemia “square”—that it has lost the inherent coolness that makes the hippie generation so romanticized. Times have changed, certainly, and the high-flying idealism of peace and love seems infantile now, or at least blindly naïve. The sentiment of the ’60s, that social change could be accomplished through a cultural awakening, has proven itself ineffective. By emphasizing the pragmatic instead of the ideal, the new crop of activists seek a new, more grounded path towards progressive action. Power Shift is indicative of a shift in approach.

I see it as a natural progression of a mentality, rather than the revolution of a revolution. Flower power defined the idealistic intangibles that still linger as vestiges of the liberated reaction to the socially restrictive 1950s. Thoreau wrote, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” The green movement, and the spirit of summits like Power Shift, is foundational. It represents the realization that significant change must be informed, prepared, and willing to play the political game. Hippie radicalism only took society so far—Woodstock believed change had arrived in our society. Power Shift realized that it has yet to come.