Patrick wrote: > you've left out the really crucial process of bringing people from > awareness to the kind of commitment we saw when the kids did direct > action last Monday in Washington at that power plant: "keep the coal in > the hole, leave the oil in the soil!"
You are right. Assume the conversation is successful. The person the students are visiting says he or she sees the importance and is willing to act. What can we offer them to do? If the door-to-door visits are organized by an environmental advocacy group as a mass outreach campaign, then that group probably has thought about something, an action or a mailing list or some informational seminars, to integrate the new members. If the door-to-door visits are part of a class, then we should be very upfront about it that this is not an organization but a class, and that the partner in our conversation has to take the next steps without us. But we can inform them about local organizations and upcoming events. This is a tedious but important part of the class preparation: compile a listing of local organizations with brief characterizations of what they are doing, contact info, etc., and consult with these organizations whether and how they can absorb volunteers. 30 students from the University of Utah went to the power shift conference, and these students are still meeting as a group. This would be one of the organizations in our list. This list should probably also contain any upcoming green jobs training sessions at the Community College etc. Btw, regarding the slogan "keep the coal in the hole, leave the oil in the soil", one of the factual points that needs to be made in our conversations is that we cannot wait until we have run out of fossil fuels. If we burn all the fossil fuels that are available, we are grilling the planet. Another point that needs to be made is that, despite the complexities of the climate situation, policies must be simple and intuitive. If a policy is so complicated that it cannot be explained in a few minutes, then it should not be trusted because it probably has hidden loopholes. For instance, the Spiegel article http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,606532,00.html describes vividly (unfortunately in German) a huge embarrassment: all the progress of renewable energy in Germany had zero effect on the climate because the number of emission credits in the ETS was not diminished to account for the higher than predicted renewable output in Germany. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
