Our action project was a struggle but through pressure, like carbon, turned into something wonderful in the end. We had an intense start with lots of motivation and ideas flowing like a river. We wanted to find our place to make an impact on the immediate world around us and we felt like we had all the power in the world to do so. We wanted to target an audience that was less mobilized or active around climate politics so we chose to the right wing base of UW. We considered issues this demographic cared about and debated how we could link it to the Anthropocene. After many suggestions, we arrived at the topic of the increase in climate refugees around the world and chose to frame it from the perspective of national security, a high value issue for many in the political right.
A Kurdish Refugee Camp
For our medium to share this information, we wanted to do an event with speakers. Things were well at first but as the quarter continued, our conviction eroded. Courses upped their workload, this course continued with the seemingly never ending doom and gloom of the Anthropocene and from when I’ve talked to others in the class, we were all feeling some form of depression. It was two weeks before our event and we only had one speaker who had heard back from. I couldn’t get advertising out early enough at that point due to not enough speakers so we kinda fell apart for a day or two.
Claire suggested we move towards making a website instead of an event. Having not much of an alternative, we each chose a topic to work with related to climate refugees and wrote a page on it, along with collectively working on intro and outro pages. What really made this shift work for me was the potential to keep working with it. We could make an ad campaign using QR codes to get the word out about our site across campus using minimal amounts of paper. Our audience went from 60 at best to potentially over 60,000 students and staff. More realistically, maybe 5,000 will view the website but that in itself is still a huge success. I look forward to seeing where our site will go during the winter.
This experience has taught me that it will take innovative thinking more than hard work to make an impact on the Anthropocene. It’s not about singular successes. It’s about the trends you set, the information you spread, the seeds you lay for a better future. Our project is laying the seeds of ideas for other people to build off of and perhaps one day take action of their own accord. That to me is what it will take to reach the Good Anthropocene.
Being a citizen of the Anthropocene, my work is to try. To never give up in the face of bad odds but rather work with what you have to do what you can. It’s not much, but it’s the least we can do as humans who are all in this together.
If you want to check out our site, you can do so here :
