With the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day right around the corner, students in the recently formed Students for a Just and Stable Future (SJSF) have planned a week-long Sleep Out in front of Olin Library to raise awareness for a campaign for clean electricity. The Sleep Out is part of Earth Month, which has been organized by the Environmental Organizers’ Network (EON) to raise awareness and create greater student participation in various environmental issues.
The Sleep Out begins on Thursday with speakers, workshops, and concerts to educate students on the campaign for completely clean electricity. The SJSF, which used to be the Wesleyan 350 group, plans to camp out for the entire week leading up to Earth Day.
“It’s a great way of attracting people to one place to talk about climate change,” said Sam Bernhardt ’10, one of the student planners. “It’s bringing in people who wouldn’t normally consider themselves climate activists in order to form a unified group. It’s a really fun time.”
The focus of the group is to create a coalition of Connecticut students to petition the state legislature for 100 percent clean electricity by 2020. This first Sleep Out is meant to create excitement on campus and build momentum for the local movement before taking the campaign statewide.
“We’re not trying to get a bill passed with this event; we’re trying to start a movement,” Bernhardt said.
The group recognizes that they need to build their support and membership by hosting events on campus that will create excitement for the campaign and allow it to continue into the future.
“We know we’re not going to transition to 100% clean energy overnight, but we are trying to build from the ground up and set up a solid foundation that we can build on,” said Josh Levine ’12, another student planner.
“Building these relationships is something that we want to focus on because you would much rather go to an event that your friend planned rather than something you only see a sign for.”
Each day of the Sleep Out will feature a speaker followed by a workshop, with student band performances at night. Planned events include a talk from Representative Matt Lesser, presentations from the Environmental Justice student forum, and the Mountain Justice Movement group.
The group borrowed the idea of a sleep out from the Boston segment of SJSF who have been camping out in the Boston Commons since October of last year. The Massachusetts-based coalition recently pushed for an Emergency Task Force in the Massachusetts legislature to look for ways to become solely reliant on clean energy by 2020.
“We’ve been motivated by their success because they are a group that has shown tremendous endurance,” Bernhardt said. “For months now, Massachusetts State Reps have been confronted on their walk into work by students calling for 100 percent clean energy.”
The Wesleyan group hopes to create a partnership with other area schools in a Connecticut campaign for clean electricity. Yale University and Fairfield University are also hosting sleep outs during April and the SJSF is working to get other schools on board in time for a Hartford Sleep Out next fall. The SJSF campaign is brand new in Connecticut and as momentum builds across New England, students hope to be able to influence real change in the region.
“This type of transformation [to completely clean electricity] is ambitious but is necessary,” said Dan Fischer ’12, one of the student planners. “It is going to have global implications because if we get New England to make the shift, we can influence the rest of the country and eventually the world.”
By gaining experience in organizing events and building efforts on campus, students hope to create a solid foundation for the group that can be continued next year in a quest for real political change.
“Forty years ago, twenty million people took to the streets and made the Nixon Administration pass the Clean Air Act and form the United States Environmental Protection Agency,” Fischer said. “They proved that grassroots action worked.”
Earth Month was kicked off with a screening of the Disney movie “Earth” at the beginning of April and will culminate in a food politics week and a May Day celebration. Events planned by students include a riverfront clean up, a trail maintenance outing, a bus to Washington D.C. for an Earth Day Rally, and screenings of the movies “Home” and “Food Inc.”