- by Ellen Grafton -

On Feb. 27 to March 2, almost 12,000 young people gathered at the Convention Center in Washington D.C. for Power Shift 2009.

Power Shift is an annual event that encourages young people to lobby for environmental causes. This year, participants attended three days of forums, lectures and workshops about environmental issues and lobbying. The event culminated on March 2 with a day of lobbying on capitol hill.

The lobby of the Washington Convention Center was filled with people passionate about the environment during PowerShift 2009.Photo by Christopher Toothman

The second largest student group at Power Shift 2009 came from Middlebury College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Nearly 10% of Middlebury’s student population—194 students—travelled 500 miles to attend Power Shift.

Middlebury’s enthusiastic participation is due, in part, to a campus-based environmental activist group called the Saturday Night Group, or SNG. As Middlebury senior Chester Harvey explains, “SNG is a group of kids on the Middlebury Campus—anywhere from 15 kids on a night to 150 kids on a night—that meet in a room on campus every Sunday night at 9pm. And we talk about issues related to climate change, energy use, and other environmental issues.”

Nate Blumenshine, another senior member of SNG, calls Power Shift the “logical national coalition for us [SNG] to be a part of.” Both groups focus on empowering individuals within the environmental movement. “That’s what I think a grassroots movement is all about,” Blumenshine says. “People feeling really important in their role, and feeling really unique in their role, but at the same time being way, way bigger.”

Nate Blumenshine attends a PowerShift rally on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Photo by Christopher Toothman

At the end of their second day at Power Shift, the students from Middlebury College gathered in the Convention Center Lobby and walked to the National Mall to take pictures of the group in front of the capitol. While walking downtown, first-year student Kelsey Calhoun told me about the lasting impression Power Shift had made on her. The panels and speakers had convinced her to continue lobbying after she returned to Vermont. “I’m going to go home and start writing letters, start talking, start making my voice heard—to use the cliché,” Calhoun said.

One of the panels that made such a strong impression on Calhoun was “The Road To Copenhagen.” The panel featured several speakers including Middlebury professor Bill McKibben. The forum was so popular that it filled to capacity both days that it ran, and organizers had to turn away people at the door. The panel discussed the expectations and goals that need to be met in the upcoming global Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

McKibben is one of the founders of www.350.org, an organization focused on reducing carbon emissions and combating climate change. 350.org emphasizes the need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million—a number identified by some scientists as the upper limit of CO2 that can exist in the atmosphere without catastrophic results.

McKibben re-iterated the timely importance of Power Shift: “2009 is the most important year we’ve ever had in dealing with climate,” McKibben insists. “We’ve got this huge international meeting in Copenhagen coming up, we’ve got the Obama administration so there’s the possibility of doing something right—we’ve got to make it happen.”

Posted by Christopher Toothman