The year’s almost over, and YSEC is looking for a new board! There are four positions open: president, vice president, treasurer, and events coordinator. If you have any questions as to what these roles entail, please email any of the current board members.
Here’s the application: 2013 Board Application
Email your completed applications to kathryn.culhane@yale.edu. Applications are due on Wednesday (April 24, 2013).
You’ve heard of the divestment movement. Bill McKibben sparked the conversation about responsible endowments this summer with his article in the Rolling Stone. Since then, countless other articles about it have been published in the New York Times, Huff Post, the Nation and our very own YDN. Even Harvard has developed a robust campaign.
Now the students of Yale are stepping up. Help us become leaders in the national campaign for sustainable endowment investments.
SIGN THE PETITION at fossilfreeyale.org.
And like the Facebook page while you’re at it: www.facebook.com/FossilFreeYale
If you’re on campus, attend the huge kick-off event for Fossil Free Yale on Saturday, February 2 at 4:00pm in LC 211.
Dinner in Branford College Dining Hall, Monday, 11/5/12, 6 p.m. with Florence Williams
YSEC is invited to join Florence Williams, founder of YSEC, for dinner in Branford, either in the small dining room just beyond the fireplace at the far end of the dining hall or perhaps at a table near the fireplace. This will be a fun chance to hear about the early days of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition and about the modern work of an environmental writer. Acclaimed popular science writer and Yale Fellow, Carl Zimmer, plans to be in attendance as well.
If anyone wants to look at some articles by Florence William, a collection is at <http://www.florencewilliams.com/article>, and here are three for easy reference:
Florence Williams, “How a Bunch of Scrappy Marines Could Help Vanquish Breast Cancer,” Mother Jones, May/June 2012, available at <http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/05/camp-lejeune-marines-breast-cancer-florence-williams?page=1>;
Florence Williams, “A Mighty Wind,” Outside , January 2007, available at <http://www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/A-Mighty-Wind.html>;
Florence Williams, “Toxic Breast Milk?” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2005, via <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/magazine/09TOXIC.html>.
By Ariana Shapiro:
People are catching on to the debate over fracking in New York State. They are catching on so much so that over 200 of them were crammed into Burke Auditorium in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; in Connecticut, a state significantly removed from projected drilling and wastewater disposal sites. People crowded the aisles, sat on windowsills, and leaned against walls. A live stream was made available for hundreds of others, and is still available online.
The debate was broadly titled “Hydraulic Fracturing: Bridge to a Clean Energy Future?”, but upstate New York was clearly the main region of discussion. On one side was Bill McKibben of 350.org, who pushed the environment/climate argument against fracking, while recognizing that other arguments abound. His opponent, former Shell Energy president John Hofmeister, conceded that fracking is dirty but necessary and the highly complex practice (which he compared to heart surgery) is being improved continually. In the middle of the spectrum were Sheila Olmstead, a fellow at Resources for the Future, and James Saiers, a professor of hydrology and chemical engineering at the Yale Engineering School. Their arguments at times leaned towards McKibben’s, by acknowledging the health and social impacts of fracking, but never far enough to admit that fracking is inherently unsafe and therefore unviable. Saiers predicted that the moratorium will be lifted in New York and fracking will hit the state.
A couple lively exchanges of rhetoric between McKibben and Hofmeister roused the audience. In response to the title question, the former Shell exec said that hydrofracking is not a bridge, but “a highway to the future”. McKibben eloquently capitalized on that statement retorting: “hydrofracking is a rickety pier out into the lake of hydrocarbons”.
Later on, Hofmeister gave an impassioned speech condemning private campaign donations and declaring that Shell never has and never will contribute to political campaigns. He got an impressive round of applause from the audience, but his smugness disappeared when McKibben pointedly asked if Shell is a member of the Chamber of Commerce. “I don’t know”, Hofmeister responded after an awkward pause, “We were when I was president.” McKibben went on to explain that the Chamber of Commerce is the largest lobbying group in Congress.
Having watched Bill speak many times before, I couldn’t help but pick up on a melancholy tone in his voice. He’s been saying the same things since 1989 – that we need to start acting soon on the climate crisis because the consequences will be extreme – and twenty-three years later, with the evidence of climate change affronting us every day, we’re still battling bureaucrats and plutocrats in basic defense of the planet. In Albany, Governor Cuomo has been trying hard to show he’ll follow the path of money, repeatedly refusing over the last four years to listen to the demands of a significant percentage of New York residents who oppose hydrofracking. However, with increasingly frequent and innovative actions against fracking, like Don’t Frack New York and a shutdown of Schlumberger in August, we’re finally seeing a change in Cuomo. Today, the New York Times reports that the fracking process in New York will likely be delayed another year, until the completion of another review, including a public comment period.
This is huge news for the movement.
Bill McKibben needn’t be quite so grim. The news is looking up, and though we haven’t won yet, we can be grateful for the vibrant spirit of solidarity present on campus after the panel and a speech Bill gave later that evening calling for divestment from the fossil fuel industry. He inspired and enlightened a diverse cross-section of the Yale student body, convincing me that whether or not we are resting on the Marcellus shale, college students across the United States are getting fired up and ready to face up to the fossil fuel industry in all its manifestations. We won’t stop until they stop.
The summer has come and gone, and we’re already two weeks into classes…so it’s the perfect time to create some change on campus! YSEC has some very exciting projects in the works for this year, ranging from divestment to reusable to-go containers. Come to general meetings and get involved in project groups to learn more about the upcoming action.
Upcoming events:
General Meeting – Tuesday, Sept. 11; 8pm-9pm
Our last meeting seemed a little…tedious. So during this meeting we’ll be mixing it up with some games and an episode of the Simpsons (guess which one), followed by a friendly discussion and snacks (no nuts this time). Come to the Dwight Hall Library on Old Campus.
Farm Volunteering – Friday, Sept 14; 1pm-6pm
Have you made it to the Farm yet? Do you know what/where the Farm is? (Hint: it’s on Yale’s campus.) We don’t care what your answer to those questions are, because either way you should come volunteer with YSEC. We’ll be working from 1pm to 5pm (come whenever you can), and then eating delicious pizza (fresh from the oven!) from 5pm to 6pm. Here are directions to the farm: directions (scroll to the bottom of the page). Please RSVP to Justine (justine.appel@yale.edu), but feel free to show up without notice! Also, email anyone on the Board if you want to walk/bike/shuttle/cartwheel to the Farm with someone.
Green Drinks – Friday, Sept. 14; 9:30pm-11:00ish
Come chill with your favorite tree-huggers. Beverages may or may not be strangely hued. Davenport, Suite B32 (call Kat at 360-529-9052 to be let in).
Finally:
YSEC! YSEC!
NEVER ASK US YSECS.
WE’LL SAY “BECAUSE WE’RE HOT AS HELL”
AND YOUR CLIMATE’S HOT AS WELL.
SO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
TO SAVE THE EARTH.
YSEC WILL HELP, FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH.
Love YSEC? Want to see it be even more active and awesome in the coming year? Want to know what it’s like to run a 501(c)(3) non-profit? Want to be a part of a long history and a broad network of advocates of the environment and environmental justice? Want to be a Lorax?
Apply for the 2012-2013 YSEC Board! Applications are due March 23 at midnight to julie.botnick@yale.edu, subject YSEC Board. Good luck!
What’s it like to fight for…
THE LAST MOUNTAIN?
Movie screening + discussion
Wednesday, February 22 | 7 PM | Dwight Hall Library | Movie snacks
Because of mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia:
Over 500 mountains have been leveled
More than 1,200 miles of fragile headwaters have been polluted by valley fill
Thousands of acres of timber have been clear-cut
Hundreds have been killed, and thousands more have developed diseases
And mining jobs have decreased by up to 40-60% in coal mining regions
Hey everyone,
Looking for something to do tonight through April 30??
1. Green Drinks. Tonight at 9. SM K-12. Bring your friends.
2. Earth Month Planning Meetings! They happen all the time! Or, rather, any time you would like to talk about planning an event for April, Earth Month, we will hold an Earth Month Planning Meeting. The first one was on Wednesday, and we made up a great first draft list of events (check out our calendar). The next one will be on Sunday at 1 in the Branford Common Room, talking specifically about an Eco-Feminism workshop, but we welcome any other ideas for events, projects, workshops, etc. that you want to discuss!
3. Ken Gillingham will be with us on Wednesday at 8 in the Dwight Hall library to discuss renewable energy. As always, local food and great discussion will abound!
In this cross-post from Dwight Hall at Yale’s blog, Sam Bendinelli reflects on his year as President of YSEC.
Last month, I entered the Dwight Hall Library for the first Yale Student Environmental Coalition meeting of the spring semester. After grabbing a slice of lemon cake—the person in charge of food had decided to forgo the traditional offering of donuts, perhaps out of respect for many of our recently-minted New Years’ resolutions—I chose an inconspicuous seat away from the draft-prone windows and listened to people introduce themselves.
It was the first YSEC meeting in nearly a year that I had not begun; as the group’s former president, I had been used to arriving early, plucking a spot front and center on the deep-set sofa, and rehearsing that night’s agenda in my head as people trickled in. Recalling the well-worn Wednesday evening ritual, it felt nice not to have the floor.
***
YSEC, Yale’s largest undergraduate environmental group, was founded in 1988 with the mission to support sustainability at Yale. It was a pretty novel idea: Recycling had yet to come to campus, and composting was something practiced in the backyards of hippies, not in Ivy League dining halls. Most people wouldn’t even find out about the environmental issue du jour—global warming—for another year. (1989 saw the publication of Bill McKibben’s End of Nature, the first general audience book on the subject.)
Since its inception, YSEC has seen its influence wax and wane, depending on the year you choose to look at. By 2011, when I took over as president, I was happy to find a solid core of enthusiastic members. This was a welcome sight, because though Yale is now more sustainable than it ever has been, the challenges confronting the environment are no doubt greater today than in any generation that’s come before. It can be easy to lose your spirit when fighting deforestation, dirty power plants, undue corporate influence, commercial carbon emissions, unsustainable lifestyles, and a list of other issues so long I would have to resort to using my toes to count them.
But through YSEC project groups, which generally tackle specific, local issues, the coalition has been able to boast an outsize impact over the past two and a half decades. Indeed, many of Yale’s most prominent environmental policies, including the Office of Sustainability, have grown out of YSEC initiatives.
Occasionally, YSEC has been able to be a part of something even larger. Since I’ve been involved, at least one project group each semester has been dedicated to a regional or national issue. This past term, our politically-oriented project group decided to team up with the entire coalition to fight the construction of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, which would ship tar sands from Alberta, Canada, down to Texas for refinement. James Hansen, one of the planet’s most esteemed climatologists, declared early last year that building a pipeline the scale of Keystone XL would be “essentially game over” for the climate.
***
As the 2011 YSEC Board began its term, many of our initiatives focused on developing and strengthening partnerships with other environmental groups. Through increased collaboration with student clubs, the Yale administration, local New Haven leaders, and other Connecticut colleges, we figured we could better forward our goals of sustainable policy and environmental justice. Some of YSEC’s organizing efforts were pointed inward, too: As the first board not to comprise three co-chairs, we and the previous board reasoned that YSEC could be more efficiently led through a traditional board with clearly-defined positions. (Quite by happenstance, then, I found myself as YSEC’s first president.)
Our five-person board hit the ground running, and in September, we participated in Moving Connecticut, a major climate rally on the New Haven Green, connecting with other schools in the process. At the rally and at a social gathering afterwards, we fortified our ties with Wesleyan’s dynamic environmental group and started coordinating a joint trip to Washington, D.C., for a day of national protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline.
***
It is by now worth admitting the well-known fact that environmental victories don’t come easily, and as a movement, there haven’t been many moments to celebrate in the past several years. Fuel efficiency standards stagnate before tiptoeing up to the meet an attenuated mpg increase; despite decades of publicity, the same number of U.S. citizens who believe in anthropogenic climate change don’t; and a long-sought-after carbon trading market seems to have the same chance of being instituted in America as does a return to the gold standard.
And yet there we were—25 Yalies and 25 Wesleyan students—on a bus headed to the capital at the cruel hour of 5:30 am. It was a sunny but crisp November morning, and 5,000 people were supposedly rendezvousing in Washington, D.C., to voice their collective disapproval of the Keystone XL Pipeline. But if we were bleary-eyed boarding the bus, we weren’t as we got off: A sea of people, armed in vests and signs and conviction, surrounded a stage so far off I could only hear the voice of McKibben as he implored Obama to shelve the Keystone XL Pipeline. (Because the pipeline crosses an international boundary, it can only be built with the president’s approval.) As McKibben listed off the reasons why the pipeline was a folly—it poses a tremendous spill risk, its product results in disproportionate emissions of greenhouse gases, its building requires swaths of deforestation, its job-creating claims are wildly exaggerated, the State Department’s official review has been tarnished with signs of corruption—the crowd, borrowing a tool from the Occupy movement, repeated each phrase in turn through the “people’s microphone.”
It was an organic response befitting the people who would soon form a human chain around the White House. Our goal was to interlock arms entirely around the president’s enclave, but there wasn’t enough space for everyone, so we encircled the White House a second time. And then a third. Cars honked as they drove by, and a parade, featuring a giant mock pipeline, wormed by the thousands of links in the human chain. For a moment, all we could do was soak up the energy of the movement.
Four days later, after word had gotten out that the rally wasn’t composed of 5,000 but 12,000 boisterous participants, the president decided to postpone a decision on the pipeline until after the upcoming election. And so YSEC turned an eye to more domestic matters. We started compiling an alumni network, finished work on the YSEC office, and made a few choice additions to the burgeoning YSEC library. Then, in December, our term nearing an end, we fielded applications for the 2012 board.
***
The funny thing about environmental issues is that even when they’ve ostensibly been “taken care of,” they always manage to reappear. It’s as if they’re back from the dead, which is why YSEC has taken to categorizing a number of them as “zombie problems.” Naturally, the Keystone XL Pipeline resurfaced in an unctuous congressional showdown, with Republicans forcing Obama’s hand through a provision attached to the payroll tax cut extension that demanded a decision on Keystone by the end of February. Being seasoned environmentalists, we’ve learned to take setbacks in stride, though none seems to hurt any less than the last. But being seasoned environmentalists, we’ve also grown accustomed to looking on the bright side. The beauty with zombie problems then, is that because your work is never quite over, you end up making friends that last as long as the issues do themselves, and sometimes even longer.
For this very reason, I found myself at the second YSEC meeting of the semester, once again taking an inconspicuous chair away from the windows against the wall. They might as well label it ex-president, because it’s where I’ll be the rest of the semester, as well as next semester, as well as the one after that. The discussion that night was to be on the pros and cons of eco-tourism, though we didn’t spend too much time on the subject. That’s because earlier that afternoon, President Obama announced that he would reject the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline—two months simply wasn’t enough time to complete the thorough review that a project of its scale required. Against all odds, the environmentalists had scored a W. The victory hadn’t come easy, but in the end I suppose that only made it sweeter.
