Environmentalism, Millennial-Style

Marcie Smith came relatively late to the climate change movement — like many people, she hadn't really thought about it until she saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 — but she's made up for lost time. The 21-year-old senior at Transylvania University in Kentucky has interned at the Institute for Environmental Security in The Hague, studied ecology in Madagascar and attended last year's U.N. climate change negotiations in Poland. She also founded her school's environmental action group and helped launch the Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition — one of the few statewide organizations of its kind in the country.

When I met her on Feb. 27 in Washington, she was polishing the testimony she is set to deliver in a few days to a Congressional committee on climate change. But despite her resume, Smith doesn't think of herself as a global warming activist — not if that means she cares only about global warming. "The climate change movement is bigger than just climate change," she says. "It's emblematic of all the issues that we have to address in 2009 — health and labor and racism and sexism. All these issues are intimately related for us."

Smith went to Washington with more than 11,000 other college-age activists for Power Shift '09, a three-day conference and celebration of all things climate change. The sheer size and scope of the event (the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Secretary of the Interior addressed Power Shift on its opening night) was a sign that for these young people, coming of age after 9/11 and indoctrinated in politics in the time of Obama, global warming has emerged as their movement — their civil rights or Vietnam. "The fight for a clean and just energy future is the defining issue of our time and the defining issue of this generation," says Jessy Tolkan, the executive director of the Energy Action Coalition, a global warming umbrella group and organizer of Power Shift.

As Smith makes clear, the issue goes beyond cutting carbon emissions. The slogan on conference-goers' lips wasn't "global warming," but "environmental justice" — a catch-all term that includes everything from clearing the air in cities, where asthma has become a scourge in poor neighborhoods, to supporting wind and solar projects on the Native American reservations to making sure developing nations don't suffer the consequences of a climate problem they barely helped cause. "We have to make sure our work doesn't look like what past environmentalism looked like," says Nia Robinson, the director of the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative and a former student activist.

For this younger generation, it's not only the fate of the polar ice caps that matters, nor is it the cool clean tech that so many environmentalists tout as a near cure-all. Rather, it's the need to upend the establishment completely, beginning with the creation of green jobs that will put blue-collar Americans back to work. "One of the biggest problems of the environmental movement to date is that it has been so technology focused," says Billy Parish, an activist who put his Yale University studies on hold to co-found the Energy Action Coalition. "It hasn't been focused on building power and changing institutions. We want this coalition to build a movement that represents this generation — the most diverse generation in history."

The multicultural makeup of this generation was visible at Power Shift. Instead of the mostly white faces that typically fill environmental conferences, Power Shift included local African-American students from Washington, Hispanics from the Little Village neighborhood in West Chicago and Native-American activists from the reservations of North Dakota. There was even some political heterogeneity — panel speakers included Christian youth who belonged to the emerging Creation Care movement of green evangelicals. (Sandals and dreadlocks were still in evidence — some things don't change.)

In a Washington where three of the four major White House players in environmental affairs are non-white, that sort of inclusiveness is a reflection of a new reality — and a necessary one, if going green is to become truly mainstream in America. This generation is not only the most multicultural in American history, it's also the most urban and the most divorced from nature; most of its members are far more comfortable with Twitter than with trees. They're changing the meaning of "environmentalism" — conserving nature is important, yes, but so is creating a new class of jobs that can pay a decent wage without poisoning the environment. That's a message that may have greater resonance with ordinary Americans than the impassioned pleas of the Sierra Club. It's no coincidence that President Obama talks far more about green jobs than he does the environment itself. "You have to make the issue relevant," says Robinson. "If all you talk about are polar bears and melting glaciers, it won't work."

The challenge for the rising generation of environmental leaders will be keeping this big tent together. Environmental justice matters, but the scale of the climate challenge is so great that the need to cut carbon — by any means necessary — could end up taking precedence. And there's no guarantee that the environment justice movement would survive. But what's certain is that the choices of this generation — threatened by climate change the way its predecessors were by nuclear war — will be decisive for the environment. "In this century, based on what you do, the whole human family will decide what kind of species we are," the green jobs activist Van Jones told the Power Shift crowd on the opening night of the conference. "You are the final hope for humanity." But, hey, millennials — no pressure.