Hello, I'm calling to leave a message for Senator Snow.
My name is Heather White and I live in Bar Harbor.
As your constituent, I'm calling to ask you to support strong climate legislation.
That includes a science-based cap on greenhouse gas emissions with no loopholes or giveaways
to polluters.
I urge you to protect Maine's way of life and our economy by supporting strong policies
in Congress that will generate main jobs for the people of Maine.
This is incredibly important to me and I hope you will use your key votes to support strong
climate legislation for the people of Maine and of this country.
Thank you for your leadership so far on this issue.
Thank you for your leadership so far on this issue.
The planet's heating up and the planet's heating up at a rate that is surprising most people.
Climate change is happening, it's here, and the time to act is now.
So what I'm doing, what the students are doing in the practical activism class is just getting
those skills to be able to act, to be able to put pressure on their legislators, on Congress
people, to be able to help other people understand how to engage, and to, you know, they're becoming
the leaders of tomorrow.
They're going to be our climate leaders and it's the folks in the practical activism
class that are really going to be making change and making sure that we've got a plan at 50
years or 100 years from now.
They went through a process of mapping out the climate issue and trying to figure out
what their own resources were to see what as students at COA they might engage in where
they'd have some impact, they'd have some effect on the climate issue.
So that was the first thing, it was just trying to figure out where they could best put their
effort.
And then they decided it was to focus on the two senators of Maine, the two Republican
senators Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, because they're moderate Republicans so they're really
going to be quite important in the vote on climate and what we want to do is push them
on to the right side of the fence into supporting strong climate legislation.
And after the students decided that that's what they wanted to do, then we started developing
skills, media skills, organizing skills and putting the pieces together.
The students did a lot of organizing on campus of letters, getting letters to deliver to
the senators, thinking about how to use this wind tower event as a communication platform.
Some students went and lobbied a staff person of Olympia Snow, and now they're working
on a more elaborate communication media strategy which involves letters to the editor and opinion
pieces in Maine newspapers, just to continue to put political pressure on the senators.
Here we are at the Bar Harbor Farmers Market, it's Sunday and it's raining and everybody
is out here still, and we came here to interview the farmers to see how climate changes impact
in them.
As an American, I am contributing 25% of the carbon footprint, the carbon into the atmosphere
that's envengering the planet.
It's a very intimate kind of relationship between the farmer and the land and the weather.
It's different this year, it was a little bit different last year, but it's much different
this year, and I expect it will be even more different next year.
An increase in the amount of heat in the atmosphere is an increase in the amount of energy in
the weather system, and we can't really tell what that's going to do, it might make it
rain like for three months of the year, and that would be basically the end of farming
as we know it if we keep that.
It's just all around messed everything up, it really has.
I don't know, of course everybody, well a lot of people now, you know, that this is
happening, yes, really I guess coming down to it, it's really happening, but a lot of
it is just, most of it is our own fault, you know, people's money, they're too greedy,
and they want money all the time.
We might not be able to grow warm season crops like tomatoes and peppers, and these things
that are kind of marginal for us now, we might not be able to grow them at all.
I have one greenhouse, I have some farms that pretty much expand their greenhouse because
of season extension in Mainwood, limited with the shorter growing season.
Last year I had grain all through my season, and already the main sources is sold out,
so we'll be getting ours from Canada and Shampoos Valley.
It's a shame, but as far as I'm concerned, you know, when it all falls through, I'm still
going to be growing as well as the rest of us here, I'm going to be growing and eating
out our own livelihood with the rest of them, they can eat the dollar bills as far as I'm
concerned.
And all I've said is sort of just the tip of the iceberg, this is something that we
have to work on internationally, we have to address with every fiber of our being.
We've been generating power now for two weeks almost, but this is a great, fun occasion and
I want to welcome you all here.
And I particularly want to welcome Andrew Risco and Sean Noyes from Senator Snow and
Collins office, respectively.
I would hope that this kind of is also a window into our future, and that we can imagine
a time when we don't have to send any electricity onto Mount Desert Island.
A few weeks ago, Senator Collins said, and I quote, the impact of your actions will make
a difference today for seven generations to come.
We wholeheartedly agree.
It's our collective action that will make the difference in the lives of the next generations
and beyond.
The students in the wind power class are taking the first step to create a renewable energy
economy.
Maine has the second highest energy cost in the country.
We cannot afford to continue relying upon non-renewable, non-local sources of energy.
But we also have a solution.
We as a state have the potential to become energy independent.
The most remarkable thing about this turbine is that it harnesses local energy that is
both economically viable and environmentally sustainable.
Imagine how many green jobs we could create if we keep harnessing local energy throughout
the state.
A few weeks ago, Senator Collins also stated that sitting on the sidelines cannot be an
option when it comes to climate change.
We are not sitting on the sidelines.
Students are creating alternative sources of energy, running climate campaigns and becoming
involved citizens.
We need more motivated individuals, such as the ones here today, to harvest alternative
sources of energy.
Our elected officials should follow our lead and support strong climate legislation that
would fund renewable energy and create clean energy jobs in Maine.
Thank you.
Believe me, there's a lot of politics in terms of just setting one small turbine in the community.
You have to figure out ways to communicate to the general public about the importance
of this turbine.
We have to talk about dollars and cents with them, environmental impacts and a lot of different
things.
What we've learned is if you want to have a project like this in a community, the first
thing you have to do is to get participation from the community.
I think this event was a big success and I was really surprised at all the different
people from different walks of life from the community who came out in support of this.
I really feel it's been a positive initiative, both for the school, is taking a really important
step for renewable energy, but also just because we're really engaging the community at large.
From elementary school students to just residents, to people with different non-profits, and we
even had a few people from the media here, so just that exposure I think is really good.
It's really been frustrating the last couple of weeks because what we hear from Capitol
Hill and certainly the behavior that we've seen of the Obama administration at the last
bond negotiating session is not optimistic in terms of the U.S. position internationally.
We really expected more from the Obama administration, in a sense it's what we should have expected
that this is still going to be a tough political fight.
I wanted to give you this fact sheet about the wind tower and just the heads, also just
about wind power in Maine in general.
Okay.
We wanted to get the senators to come to this winter buying and urban cutting event and
they sent their staff, which was good as well, we spoke to them.
Yeah, so essentially our campaign is to try to urge legislators to support strong climate
legislation that also encompasses lots of funding for renewable energy to create clean
energy jobs.
Okay.
That's the way to go right now at this point.
And it's seen by the gas price spikes and the concerns over environmental issues.
So when you start looking more with, I know both senators have been focusing on that a
lot more.
Especially in Maine.
I mean they've talked about making Downey's Maine the energy corridor with wind, tidal
and a lot of these different places that won't affect the environment but at the same
time it's a continual renewable source.
Hopefully we don't keep working that right and input like this is actually very helpful
for us.
Yes.
Good.
Wonderful.
So it was a great event.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you for giving us a call.
Thanks for coming out.
Yeah, and frankly the Lighthouse.
Sure.
Thank you.
The wind tower and wind energy in Maine.
Definitely.
I'll definitely pass this on to the staff and our office because the stuff is really
important.
And when we have this type of information, it's a lot easier for us to help the Maine
that are actually trying to see up to this type of work.
Well, it's good to keep reiterating it and be obviously advocating for it.
So that's what they're doing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming out.
We've generated, we have 80 letters from students from the College of Atlantic and Colby College.
Those will be coming your way.
I'll keep an eye out on the mail.
Will you mail them?
I think we're going to have a meeting.
Okay.
Which office are you in?
In Bangor.
You're in Bangor?
Yeah.
Great.
Maybe we could set up a meeting.
The idea behind the letter writing campaign was to get as many letters as possible from
COA students and any other college.
And we collaborated with Colby College and they sent us like 15 letters and we sat and
take a break and harassed everybody, probably really obnoxiously, into writing letters either
from a script or their own about the impacts of climate change on Maine, on them, on students
to send to Senator Collins.
We're going to lobby Senator Collins staff.
So we have a meeting.
We are going to do a whole spiel sort of.
We have a student from Maine.
We have international students like talking, which would be me.
We also have letters to deliver to Collins and we also have Lindsay talking about our
message, which is...
We want a strong science-based cap of 20 to 30% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020.
We're going to try to initiate collaboration with the senators.
How successful do you think the activism will turn out?
It's a really difficult political challenge.
All of our targets that we've set, all of our actions, we've come up with a lot of letters
and we did the phone banking and we went and lobby and Lindsay and I went and met with
Snow staff last week and we'll be going to Collins staff this week.
So I think that's really instrumental to be meeting with the people that our whole campaign
was structured around.
The really cool thing is that the campaign definitely won't end with the end of the term.
But I do think it's a really hard political fight and it takes, you know, we need every
single person fighting that fight.
So I think COA students are going to be important contributors.
What do we want? Strong climate legislation!
Strong climate legislation!
What do we need it? No!
What do we want? Strong climate legislation!
Are you going to do what it's now?
