I took a long and winding road to activism, considering how long I’ve been sustainability-obsessed. Before January of 2020, I was fully bought into the individual carbon footprint. I weighed nearly every purchase I made: Do I really need this? Is it worth the carbon emissions? I went vegan. I carpooled. And I believed that in order to solve the climate crisis, we just needed to make sustainable technologies that were cheaper and more convenient than their polluting alternatives, and people and companies would switch. In fact, that’s why I wanted to become an engineer in the first place: to design those technologies.

However, the more I dove into the sustainability community at Dartmouth and abroad, the more I read about all of the crises we are facing, and the more I learned about all of the technologies and solutions that (technically) already exist, the less sure I became of this belief. I looked at numbers, I looked at graphs, projections, and models, and I read some seriously scary articles. When I was at home for my winter internship, I became climate-depressed and -anxious. And so I read and researched some more, and I discovered the Sunrise Movement.

I had never paid too much attention to politics before, besides voting when the time came. I didn’t really believe that the government would change anything with climate. To be clear, it’s not that I didn’t think they could, if they wanted to. I just didn’t hear the climate crisis being taken seriously or see a situation in which they actually would do something significant about it. But the Sunrise Movement, and the attention it was commanding, gave me a glimmer of hope– one that I have hung on to desperately.

I phone banked in the spring of 2020 for the first time in my life with Sunrise, and made it a hobby. I loved it. I couldn’t count the number of times I was hung up on, or rudely dismissed, but the honest, open conversations I had with some of my fellow citizens halfway across the country made it all worth it.

I continued to phone bank through the winter and the Georgia special election, while getting more involved with Dartmouth’s new Sunrise Hub.

And then came Earth Week 2021. The Dartmouth Sustainability Office was planning events, as per usual, so I joined the committee working on them. Our focus for the year was the Dartmouth Our Green Future Report, a document released in 2017 by a Sustainability Working Group assembled by the president of the college. It laid out 6 areas in which the College should focus its sustainability efforts, as well as numerous recommended goals for each. Most were ignored, although President Hanlon did commit to a not-so-ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goal of reducing campus greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 from the 2010 numbers.

Our goal for Earth Week was to reinvigorate the OGF, which it seemed all of campus and the administration had forgotten. I took on letter writing, which involved working with my friend Lucas to write an open letter of demands to the Dartmouth administration and Board of Trustees, which we sent around campus for students, faculty, staff, and alumni to sign. I also coordinated with an alumnus who had previously helped to write an open letter to the administration that successfully stopped the investment in a biomass plant. He drafted a sister letter to mine and Lucas’s, which we asked alumni experts in the fields of climate science and energy to sign. The student letter ended up with over 580 Dartmouth community signatures.

Unfortunately, neither letter seemed to have much impact on the administration or Board of Trustees– I can only hope that as I and other students continue to remind them of the importance of minimizing Dartmouth’s contributions to the climate crisis, they will begin to take larger action. I will keep showing up.

Action is the antidote to my anxiety. Or maybe more realistically it is numbing novocaine. 

I still try to be a conscious consumer. I choose to buy second hand and from companies whose values I support, when I can. I choose not to feel buckling guilt with every purchase I make, and simultaneously reckon with the fact that I often inadvertently support systems unaligned with my values. I talk about my anxiety with others, and my imperfect intersectional environmentalism. I accept the irony of my place in this movement: I place weight on my positive actions and sometimes choose to ignore the negative ones. Maybe they balance out. I take comfort, but not an excuse, in the fact that I am an insignificant fraction of this problem, “a rounding error.”* I have accepted that I, alone, will not solve the climate crisis, and I have accepted that we as a society, as a species, might not even solve it. But I have not accepted that the future– be it weeks, years, or decades– is undeserving of better. I have not accepted defeat.

 

* A quote from my favorite podcast, How to Save a Planet.