At the beginning of this Fall '12 semester, Bryn Mawr's Earth Justice League - a group dedicated to non-violent direct action - decided to join the national movement for fossil fuel divestment. Our major campaign is to push PNC bank to divest from Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining, and we wanted to extend the scope of this sentiment to Bryn Mawr College's endowment, and to do so by confronting not just MTR, but the entire fossil fuel industry.
Today, the moral arc of the universe tipped that much closer to justice when the Obama Administration announced an immediate halt to all deportations of young people that would be eligible for the DREAM Act. Because of this decision, over one million young people will be spared the risk of deportation.
It is an incredible victory for the DREAM movement and comes after years of struggle, agitation and mobilization by undocumented immigrants and immigrant rights activists. Over the last week, undocumented youth have been organizing sit-ins at Obama campaign offices across the country.
The stuggle is not over. There is still not a clear path for citizenship for these young people and the millions of other undocumented immigrants that live in the United States. But even with the struggle yet to come, today is an incredibly important and deserved day for everyone that worked to make this possible.
The DREAMers courage shows us that when our work is rooted in justice, our generation has the power to move mountains.
We've spent our summer spreading the message of Climate Summer: that we need to transition to clean energy now because for reasons of impending environmental doom, current national security, health, economy, and justice, we cannot afford to continue burning fossil fuels. We call for solar panels, wind, geothermal, and other awesome technologies. The type of change we're promoting is huge. It'll require a massive restructuring of our current infrastructure, but, we say, we have no choice but to follow through.
I'm totally down with spreading this message because I could not agree more. However, I think there's one piece of the infrastructural puzzle that we haven't acknowledging as fully as it deserves, and that is our food system. While we have the resources and technology to power our world without the use of fossil fuels, we cannot do it without some reduction in the obscene amount of energy we Americans use (and waste) collectively every year.