Burlington Free Press - 350.Org's Rise From Middlebury Ccollege

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A decade ago, for the January term at Middlebury College, Jon Isham taught a course titled "Building the New Climate Movement."

"They all got As," Isham said of his students.

Isham is a prescient and precise grader.

Four students from his January 2005 class, along with three other students who shared their interest, put learning into practice: They founded 350.org, the grassroots global climate movement with more than 1 million members in 188 countries. 350.org is concerned with building movements -- "pushing the envelope" in a spirit of creativity and collaboration, the founders say -- and supporting the work of thousands of local groups and people around the world, all engaged in efforts related to climate change.

"We knew at the time that something special was happening," Isham said. "But I still can't quite believe it."

The reach of 350.org was made plain earlier this fall at the People's Climate March, an event that drew an estimated 400,000 people to New York City on Sept. 21. The day of action encompassed 2,646 corresponding events in 162 countries.

"People are seeing the effects of climate change all around them, and so they're going to show up," said May Boeve, a February 2007 graduate of Middlebury College who is executive director of 350.org. "When you start to understand the nature of the problem, it becomes quite obvious quite quickly that small actions will be insignificant."

Boeve was not a student in Isham's J-term climate course. She took a class called "Voices of Rock in Latin America." But Boeve was active in campus endeavors concerning the climate movement. On graduating, she and several Middlebury classmates moved to Burlington to continue their advocacy. Their initial efforts were connected to a grassroots organization they founded called Step It Up, out of which 350.org was created.

"We expected to be involved in working on climate change for a long time to come," Boeve said. "But we could not have possibly predicted what form that would take. In 2007, we were not thinking about everything that was happening all over the world."

The friends shared two apartments in the Old North End, where they lived and worked together. They had no formal office, but gathered around a big table with their laptops and coffee thermoses. One laptop was adorned with a red-and-white Mad River Glen bumper sticker, another with a green-and-white sticker announcing April 14, 2007. This was the date of an event -- the National Day of Climate Change -- that the group helped organize within months of their college graduation. The Web-based organizing campaign, with little funding, resulted in a 50-state effort of more than 1,400 climate rallies.

"It was a mind-blowing success," said Jamie Henn, a Step It Up/350.org co-founder who majored in history at Middlebury. "We hit the zeitgeist right."

The cohort of activists was unpaid but raised some money to help cover expenses. They had a food stipend. They left the doors open in their apartment to circulate heat.

"Our hive mind was well developed," Henn said.

After the April action, the recent graduates continued their climate work. Their efforts included a trip to Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007 for the United Nations climate talks. The purpose of the trip "was to see if the model of distributed grassroots action could be applied at the global level," Henn wrote in an email.

In 2008, Step It Up changed its name to 350.org, choosing a number so it could be understood by people around the world. 350 is the safe level of atmospheric CO2 in parts per million, according to climate scientists. To achieve this level requires a reduction from about 400 ppm.

"It was all very homemade," Henn said of 350's origins. They made their own YouTube videos and accepted suggestions via email, such as the one that mentioned there was no news release on the website. Good idea, they thought; we'll write one.

"It was a learning experience, a community process. There was no grand plan, no level of expertise," Henn said by telephone from 350's Brooklyn, N.Y., office. "We were just naive/ambitious enough to try to do something at a large scale. It took off. People were looking for something."

U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D.Vt., calls 350.org "the ray of hope in a pretty bleak policy landscape."

"Congress should be leading the way on this issue, but it's not," Welch said. "In Congress, the policy discussion is led by some of the best minds of the 17th century."

A United Nations report issued earlier this month out of Copenhagen, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, described a grim -- even devastating -- picture of the impacts of climate change without fast and significant reduction of emissions. "Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system," according to news reports about the climate document.

'Americans like to be connected'

At Middlebury, Jon Isham directs the college's Center for Social Entrepreneurship, and he has a joint appointment in the departments of economics and environmental studies. A decade ago, the "climate movement" -- a term rarely heard -- was an aspect of the environmental movement.

Isham's thinking on creating and organizing a "new climate" movement grew out of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. Isham understood the campaign to be a kind of rediscovering of civil engagement, with roots in de Tocqueville.

"Americans at their heart like to be connected," Isham said. "The key to that campaign, as so many Vermonters discovered, was to say: 'The campaign will be what people make of it. Here are tools for you all to figure out what to do.' The Dean campaign was revolutionary in the way that it taught us how social change can happen if we get it right."

To get it right, a social movement must center on "giving up control and allowing people through meet-ups to connect in this open-source way," Isham said.

"Instead of being built around a hierarchy, we're going to build it from the bottom up," he said. "The climate movement had to look like a movement we never had before. It needed to be a diverse movement. Not because it's the right kind of thing to do, but because that would make it the best possible movement."

During a 2004 sabbatical, Isham thought about how to push the climate movement forward, what might ignite it. He designed his J-term class with a reading list of political organizing and climate books, and a service learning component.

"The key was this class," Isham said. "This magnificent episode."

The McKibben connection

The class concluded with a conference, "What Works? New Strategies for a Melting Planet," that Isham's students helped organize and present. National leaders of the green movement participated, including Bill McKibben, climate activist, author and scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.

"For me, the most impressive thing was the way that Middlebury students took over the whole process: They brainstormed, moved things along, kept the whole process going forward," McKibben is quoted as saying in a campus newsletter. "I was impressed by the to-my-mind unique way that a class turned into a conference, and students turned into colleagues. I've never seen anything like that."

When the class ended, students continued to explore the issues it raised and to advocate for environmental causes on campus. They forged a collaboration with McKibben that's been in place for a decade. McKibben co-founded 350.org with the Middlebury graduates.

"The key thing for 350 was obviously the kind of energy and the passion of the students, to be connected to the wisdom and the brilliance of Bill McKibben," Isham said. "Everything that has happened since the course has been the result of the students and Bill getting together."

The climate movement that grew out of the Middlebury classroom is book-ended by two events:

*A September 2006 walk from Ripton (where McKibben lives) to Burlington. The five-day trek concluded with a rally at Battery Park.

*The People's Climate March nine years later, whose outpouring of people in New York surpassed by about four times what organizers were expecting the morning of the event, 350.org executive director May Boeve said.

The Vermont march was "unlikely," McKibben wrote in an email: "We kind of invented it out of thin air."

From that 2006 walk he came to the "real understanding that we needed to build a movement," McKibben wrote. "It was one day while we were walking that I started to share with Jamie Henn and May Boeve and other future colleagues the idea for the big distributed nationwide and worldwide days of action that Step It Up and 350 later pioneered."

The People's Climate March, by contrast, was "inevitable," McKibben wrote.

"It took immense amounts of hard work, not much of it by me, but it reflected the momentum of that movement that had been building since 2006," McKibben wrote. "And in its wonderful diversity it reminded us that while Vermont may play a role in beginning certain things, it's only when they are embraced (and led) by a truly wide spectrum of people that they come to matter the way they must."

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