Social crusader, sociology major and all-around nice guy, Dave is back on campus after having taken last semester off to work as an environmental organizer. I spoke with him over the phone from Boston, where he was helping plan an upcoming climate change conference at Harvard, and fighting a cold in the process.
JY: You took last semester off. Could you tell me a bit about what you were doing with your time?
DC: Yeah, I was organizing with the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC). Probably the biggest thing I did was, along with a whole ton of people in EON [Environmental Organizers’ Network, Wesleyan’s largest environmental group], I organized a regional activist training at Wesleyan that drew about 150 participants. They came from eight states around the Northeast, where people got trained in different organizing skills and they were educated about different environmental and social justice issues. The other main thing I did was help to organize a national day of action on clean energy, and about 65 campus groups participated from around the country.
JY: What was it like assembling an environmental conference here at Wesleyan?
DC: Definitely really rewarding. It’s amazing that there can be so many really great organizers from around the region who, in each of their communities and campuses, are doing just amazing projects on their own, and to see so many of those people come together was just very exciting.
JY: What are you looking forward to throughout the next semester?
DC: The big thing I’m working on now, along with EON, is our campaign to get Wesleyan to buy green energy. As a lot of people probably remember, a couple of years ago, in response to a student forum, the University did start buying green energy and then abruptly stopped, backing out on what they’d agreed to do. So now we’re coming back and asking the administration to live up to its original agreement and support green energy. Connecticut College, Brown, the University of California system – all of these places are buying green energy or supporting green building standards or in some way living up to their responsibility to adjust to the threat of global warming and Wesleyan is falling behind, despite its reputation as a relatively progressive school.
JY: Do you think the Administration gets a bad rap for not cooperating with a lot of activist initiatives? What’s been your personal experience?
DC: My personal experience is that, despite the very progressive image of the school and a very strong progressive tradition among the students, the Administration is relatively resistant both to those ideas and to student influence in decision-making in particular. Whether approaching the Administration with groups on sweatshops or green energy or whatever the issue happens to be, the Administration has almost uniformly been resistant to the idea of student input in decision-making and student control of how the school is run. It’s one of the things the University was cited for in the recent review of the school that was made last year by outside reviewers.
JY: How would you characterize the environmental movement today? What issues does it face?
DC: I think the two biggest challenges the movement faces are life-stylism and race. We need to get past the idea of environmentalism as buying certain products or liking hiking or any of these things. It needs to be about building a broad-based mass movement that targets institutional arrangements. We also need to deal with the fact that we’re an overwhelmingly white movement that’s highly distrusted by the environmental justice movement and that there’s reasons for that.
JY: What do you appreciate about being on campus now that you’re back?
DC: Just getting a chance to be more of a student again, to reconnect with all of the friends I didn’t get so much of a chance to see when I was taking time off, even if there’s nowhere to eat on campus.
JY: Do you find it frustrating to come back to campus and find that vegan and vegetarian dining options have been scaled back?
DC: Yeah, that was one of the things I most enjoyed last year on campus, finally being able to have really good vegan food that was readily available, the kind of food that even non-vegans were happy to eat. It’s not just veggie options—trying to find anything to eat on the weekends is impossible no matter what you eat.
JY: What have you been up to lately on campus?
DC: I’ve just been buried in books so far this semester. I’m hoping to get back involved with Prometheus, the campus fire-spinning troupe. I performed with them freshman year, and then kinda fell off.
JY: How do you feel about how the 2004 presidential contest is shaping up? Do you think that social and environmental justice may become major issues on the campaign trail at all?
DC: I think they have to be. A lot of these issues get pushed out of mainstream political discourse. I think it’s important that people get out there and force the candidates to address those issues.
DC: I’m actually kind of happy that Kerry looks like he’ll be the nominee for the Democrats. It was slightly unsettling to see so many young progressives flock to Dean when his record, as I understand it, shows him to be much more of a centrist.
JY: What are your prospects for the future beyond Wes?
DC: Definitely somewhere in the field of social change or non-profit, but there’s not a whole lot of money out there so it’s hard to find the kind of job you want. So I’ll probably wind up at whatever non-profit happens to have a little money at the time.
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