As most of my fellow Earth Lodgers, I spent three hours volunteering for Sierra Club’s annual Environmental Film Festival on Saturday. The experience game\u00a0me\u00a0valuable insight into the local environmental advocacy community; insight that was\u00a0honestly a bit disheartening.<\/p>\n
Through working with GreenUR I have encountered the Sierra Club many times over the past year and a half.\u00a0Our relationship is actually rather\u00a0entangled, as\u00a0almost all of GreenUR’s funding comes from the Sierra Club-run\u00a0yard sale that happens at the end of the academic\u00a0year.\u00a0 Because of our unique position outside of SOBAC, GreenUR is able to help various initiatives and events from clubs as wide ranging as SEEDS,\u00a0The Roosevelt Institute, and Stop Hunger Now. Without the\u00a0yard sale (and therefore without Sierra Club), we wouldn’t\u00a0be able to fund any of these projects or any of our own. Despite this seemingly-intimate relationship, the\u00a0yard sale’s timing\u00a0disallows almost all UofR students from volunteering (it is held\u00a0the week after graduation, where very few students are left on campus). This awkwardness has always\u00a0held an unspoken tension between the two groups, as both realize it’s a little problematic but largely unsolvable. This year, GreenUR decided to amend this tension by volunteering at the Sierra Club’s other annual event: The Environmental Film Festival.<\/p>\n
On Saturday morning I\u00a0was driven over to\u00a0The Byrd Theatre with ex-Earth Lodgers Shannon, Shelby, and Curly.\u00a0We arrived to find John and Kevin already there, and were quickly joined by Jenni (who was taxied over by Jules).\u00a0I was super excited to see so many familiar faces, impressed by how many Earth Lodgers were giving up a bit of their weekend. This excitement, however, quickly faded as I looked around the theatre lobby:\u00a0yes, I saw a\u00a0lot of familiar faces, but I also didn’t see any new ones.\u00a0Despite arriving in between two films, there was virtually no traffic through the theatre – the seats inside, almost completely empty.<\/p>\n
Shelby approached the woman in charge to let her know we had arrived (a woman we’ve been in continual contact with over the last month), and the women excitedly introduced herself – not realizing we’d already met. After realizing\u00a0who we were, she assigned us to various tasks around the theatre (tabling upstairs, handing out programs, encouraging people to submit to the raffle). After a few minutes we all realized that there simply weren’t enough people in the theatre to occupy us all, and we asked if there was something more productive we could help with. We were then given\u00a0petition-filled clipboards and sent outside –\u00a0We were supposed to be encouraging people to\u00a0sign onto these prefilled letters to Obama, encouraging him to “toughen up his act” and to “make American a leader in regard to climate change”.<\/p>\n
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m totally all about the cause we were pushing, I just felt uncomfortable\u00a0with the way it was going about.\u00a0Our only\u00a0training was something along the lines of, “So Obama needs to be a leader,\u00a0but he won’t do so without grassroots support. Go get as many people to sign this petition. Oh, and don’t\u00a0forget to encourage them to\u00a0come to the huge protest next week –\u00a0You know about that, right?” Basically I felt like I\u00a0was entirely unqualified to explain to people why the petition was important or even\u00a0ethical. I also don’t think signing a petition is particularly educational or productive\u00a0– especially when there’s an educational film festival going on in an empty theatre! Shelby and I spent\u00a0the next two hours trying to get people off the street to\u00a0go see a movie –\u00a0obviously most passerbys\u00a0had plans or weren’t interested. Upon going\u00a0back inside when we were done, we were praised for getting petitions signed (mostly by\u00a0people who needed a way to justify not going to the festival itself). I couldn’t help but feel a little bad.<\/p>\n
Through talking with the Sierra Club members I know the Film Festival took a LOT of work. There were many incredible films showing that covered a diverse range of relevant topics. But all this work doesn’t go anywhere if no one attends. I just felt bad seeing the\u00a0boxes of paper programs, raffle cards, and petitions, all printed for no reason. Yes, we had succeeded in gathering a strong group of volunteers, but GreenUR hadn’t\u00a0been involved until it was too late to make a difference. It just made me realize\u00a0how little\u00a0communication and\u00a0collaboration\u00a0we are actually doing with the environmental community outside of UofR.\u00a0One of the woman in charge speculated that the poor turnout was due to VCU having an environmental film festival that same weekend. I couldn’t help but be confounded that that hadn’t\u00a0been\u00a0considered. I also had to wonder: why\u00a0is that we were all willing to hop onto\u00a0the bandwagon after it was done, but unwilling to help in the festival’s development or marketing? Why is that I was so unaware of the Sierra\u00a0Club’s\u00a0various campaigns and affiliate protests?<\/p>\n
I guess all in all it was a valuable experience. It was a sort of wake-up call. At the end of the day we are all in the same community, fighting for a cause that affects all of us. So why is there\u00a0such a lack of\u00a0continuity? Yes, we all say “solidarity” and mean it – but we’re not actually collaborating. Hopefully this will change. Sierra Club\u00a0now has their meeting in Jepson, and we realized it’s too silly for us not to attend. There will also be a large group of us going next weekend to the Keystone XL protest in DC. Between the two I think the ball will get rolling.<\/p>\n
I went because I recognized that\u00a0GreenUR (and a lot of other campus initiatives) is dependent upon the Sierra Club financially. But I left realizing that we\u00a0are tied much more intimately than that.\u00a0As we’ve been talking about with watersheds, we are connected through our environment and\u00a0our environment’s health. The protection of this link, however,\u00a0relies on us\u00a0working together as\u00a0One.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As most of my fellow Earth Lodgers, I spent three hours volunteering for Sierra Club’s annual Environmental Film Festival on Saturday. The experience game\u00a0me\u00a0valuable insight into the local environmental advocacy community; insight that was\u00a0honestly a bit disheartening. Through working with … Continue reading