Powershift 2009 (Part 1, the Depressing Stuff)

For those of you who don’t know, Powershift is a youth climate rally in Washington, DC (the other Washington), and it is huge.  They’re telling us there are 11,000 kids from all over the United States and Canada (and a girl I met who is apparently from Austria) coming together to talk about the solutions to climate  change.

Fun times

This is the third night of the conference, and each day, it’s gotten a tad bit better.  After the madness of the last few days, I turned to my friend and told her I needed to “blog it all out,” so here I am, sitting in the “business center” of a Hampton Inn, typing away.  I hope that some people out there who read this (assuming there are, in fact, people who read this) are in attendance.  If so, please post here and let me know if my forthcoming analysis is at all correct.

The reason the weekend has been overwhelming goes beyond the weighty presence of the thousands of people.  It’s also been overwhelming in that there is so much to think about, talk about, and write about.  I’ll definitely be writing a few posts, so please be patient.

If I can compare Powershift to a cute girl, then Friday night would have been the first date.  Everything was well planned out and clearly orchestrated.  My companions and I arrived and took our seats in a large auditorium (more like a giant room…I don’t even know how to describe it, but imagine a room that can hold 11,000 cheering college students), and the event began.

While on the plane trip over (this is a digression, I know, but it’s a worthy one, I swear), I was preparing myself for what I knew was going to be an intense experience.  But the one worry that kept gnawing at me was this:  was Powershift going to be an orgy of self-congratulation?  “We are the youth!  We are so powerful!  We are so awesome for being here!  Fuck yeah, we are cool!”

It wasn’t quite like that, in fairness.  But Friday night was pretty depressing.

The speakers were okay…nothing too inspiring.  Van Jones got the crowd super excited, not surprisingly.  But what made me the most worried was the way people shouted and screamed almost impulsively.  I feel that if I simply walked onstage with a list of quotes from Martin Luther King and Ghandi and read them off, the crowd would’ve responded just as loudly.

In other words, I was disturbed that there did not seem to be a great deal of intelligent, rational discourse.  Granted, it was the first night of the conference.  Rational discourse would come later in the weekend.  But is it appropriate for a movement to indulge in ideological masturbation?  I’m unsure.  I do know that on Friday night I felt like I was at a church tent revival.

The reason I find the whole business disturbing is that I firmly believe that the health of any political movement depends on its openness to other ideas from other people.  The ecological crisis is extremely serious.  It is dangerous.  People already have and will continue to die, and we have a great deal of responsibility as informed environmentalists to change the world for the better.  But the only effective way to do that is to not allow ourselves to fall prey to the temptation of ideological thinking.

Do I think that this one event tonight doomed the movement?  Absolutely not.  But while I was there, in that moment, I certainly wondered if this was going to really solve our problem.