Ball State students and Muncie residents joined about 2,700 communities around the world in satellite rallies showing support for a climate march demanding change Sept. 21 in New York City.
“Of all the sustainability issues, I am convinced climate change is the most important of all,” said John Vann, director of the Ball State sustainability minor and one of the rally organizers. “It isn’t going to matter if we get things right in terms of recycling or toxins in our water, if we allow the climate to go off the rails.”
The climate rally at the Riverside United Methodist Church on Wheeling Avenue was organized to show support for The People’s Climate March in New York City, which aimed to attract the attention of about 120 world leaders planning to attend a U.N. Climate Summit on Sept. 23. Ten Ball State students attended the 400,000-person march on Sept. 21.
“I really think civilization is at a critical juncture, and if we don’t do something about it in a 100 years there may not be a civilization,” Vann said. “There may be pockets of humanity here or there, but we are going to have a huge crash.”
The Muncie rally attracted about 60 people, including Rep. Sue Errington and Ball State faculty. They held signs to cars passing by, which honked back in response.
“Indiana is one of the polluters in the country [and] I think people are realizing climate change is happening now,” Errington said. “I think we are getting more in your face about it than we were.”
Kiara Goodwine, a 17-year-old senior at The Indiana Academy, held her sign at the rally because she said climate is the biggest threat to civilization.
“I think it’s really important to speak out about it, especially our generation because we are the ones who are going to have to make a difference in this,” Goodwine said.
Change in Activism
With the more than 400,000 people that attended the march in New York and the couple hundred thousand that hosted satellite rallies around the world, the question remains of whether or not activism has changed and if it has increased.
With factors such as media coverage, multi-generational participation and the differences between Millennials and the Baby Boomers, the answer is multi-faceted.
The Millennials are the 77 million people born between about 1981 and 1996 between the ages of 18 and 30, and the Baby Boomers consist of the 76 million born between 1946 and 1964.
Michael Doyle, director of the Ball State public history program and a Baby Boomer who participated in the 1960s counter-culture, said he doesn’t think activism has significantly grown in the past 10 years.
“I think the activism we are seeing right now has been going on for a long time, but it hasn’t actually been singled out by the news media for comment,” Doyle said.
He said there was evidence of this after the attacks on Sept. 11, which led to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Both of those were met with mass protests in this country, and yet who remembers that there were mass protests around those?” he said. “You did not find anti-war groups springing up on campuses throughout the country.”
There was action in the Muncie area against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which coincided with protests across the nation, according to reports from The Daily News.
In recent memory, Muncie residents and Ball State students have been voicing their opinions on national issues at least once a semester, ranging from sexual assault, Ferguson, Guantanamo Bay and Occupy Wall Street.
One stark difference between the protests today and the ‘60s era is social media, he said.
“So much of the time people spent creating a community came from attending meetings and interacting face-to-face with people for hours and arriving at consensus of what was going to happen,” Doyle said.
He added the interaction people had 50 years ago has migrated to the web, but possibly at a cost because face-to-face communication and its benefits are lost at the expense of interacting with people anywhere in the world.
“Is there any documented evidence that any law maker has actually changed his or her position because of a Facebook petition?” he said. “If you could point to multiple examples where that happened, that would be fantastic.”
Signing online petitions, sharing or liking something is referred to as "slacktivism." It typically has little to no effect on social change because of its small, personal scale.
However, Doyle cited an instance in 2012 where Starbucks abandoned a red dye for a strawberry drink due to consumer activism on the internet.
Ariana Brown, alumna and former president of Students for Creative Social Activism, said social media has benefited activism
“With the growth of social media, it’s easier to communicate what’s going on,” said Brown, who attended a satellite event for the People’s Climate March in Austin, Texas Sept. 21. “You can hop on Facebook and see what’s happening in Quebec [or] Palestine. It’s just easier to get the information out there.”
It’s not all youth voicing their opinions online or in the streets, Doyle said.
“To say the Baby Boomers and the Millennials are related is trite because it’s the Baby Boomers’ children who occupy this category, and in some cases, grandchildren,” he said. “So, there is some direct continuity in the passage of values from one generation to the next.”
Erica Walsh, a senior economics major and president of the College Democrats of Indiana, said she is often the youngest person when she attends political- or issued-based events.
“I think the attitude has changed a lot in terms of who is active now,” Walsh said. “It’s the old people who are there in large numbers now.”
Doyle has taught at Ball State since 1996. And while activism seems to be multi-generational, from teaching courses to Millennials, he said he recognizes something he himself and others in his generation had: idealism.
“This idealism is going to be the salvation of our nation because young people are an exhaustible resource and we are blessed to have so many of them,” he said. “For them, against all odds, to look at the world, as broken as it is right now, and to see their way through it to a world that is better than that and to see they have a role in bringing that about, that’s inspired.”
According to a Pew Research Center series of reports on Millennials in 2010, they are more positive than adults about America’s future, with 49 percent saying the country’s best years are ahead, and Generation X, Boomers and the Silent Generation falling in at 42, 44 and 39 percent respectively.
When the Boomers were the age of the Millennials, half of them under the age of 30 said they had “quite a lot” of confidence in America’s future, according to the reports.
Doyle works with Pakistan scholars on ways to improve their higher education system. When comparing their generation of youth to American Millennials, they aren’t the same, he said.
“I’m not detecting in the young people — that I have had the opportunity to come into contact with — a sense of hope and idealism generalized through the younger population in Pakistan the way I find it generalized and acted upon in this country,” he said.
Young people are resources, one that should be treasured, he said.
“Any society that has young people that they don’t look to as a resource with great potential and in which they foster a sense of idealism that motivates action to improve the world is doomed,” Doyle said. “So that gives me hope.”
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