Student activists descend on Penn

Thousands came to the national ECOnference 2000 this past weekend. With the environment on their minds and activism in their hearts, more than 2,500 college students representing 200 campuses and all 50 states descended on the Penn campus this past weekend to rally together and discuss ways to better protect our planet. Penn hosted ECOnference 2000 -- the largest-ever event held for student environmentalists -- from Friday to Sunday. Conference attendees listened to world-renowned speakers and attended workshops on topics ranging from the impact of the global economy to effective coalition building. ECOnference 2000 kicked off with a lineup of noteworthy speakers, including Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Jan Schlictmann, the Boston attorney made famous by the book and subsequent movie A Civil Action. On Friday evening, Irvine Auditorium reverberated with a chant that was to become the battle cry of the weekend: "We are the people; now is the time." Rendell welcomed the crowd to the City of Philadelphia and spoke of his administration's effort to be environmentally sensitive as a member of the Cities for Planetary Protection Campaign. "Young people can make a difference [and] can affect policy," the mayor stressed. "A big part of the future environmental movement is right here in this room tonight," said Josh Karliner, founder and executive director of the Transnational Resource and Action Center. Karliner spoke of the chokehold that global corporations have over the environment. "The world should not be this way," he shouted to the cheering crowd. Karliner claimed that transnational corporations are central to the world's environmental problems, citing the statistic that 51 corporations rank among the world's 100 largest economies in terms of gross national product. He challenged the student environmentalists "to act both locally and globally at the same time." Saturday morning, students chose from over 160 different workshops, ranging from "How to Plan a Press Conference" to "Battling Mitsubishi" to "Save the Last Pristine Whale Breeding Ground." One workshop, entitled "Turning Your Volunteers into the Next Lois Gibbs and Ralph Nader," focused on community leadership tactics. "Change is the unifying characteristic among the students here, though each person has a different focus and different skills," said Chris Lindstrom, organizing director of the Massachusetts Student Public Interest Research Group, who led the workshop along with B.J. Cortis, a senior at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and chairperson of the MASSPIRG Board of Directors. Students drove from as far as Oregon for the three-day event. "We came to try to figure out better organizational skills, to learn how to recruit volunteers," said Matt Bucholz, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin and chairperson of the Wisconsin Public Interest Resource Group. He and his friends drove for more than 19 hours to attend. The conference, sponsored by over 50 organizations, also featured live music on College Green Saturday night and culminated in a parade to City Hall on Sunday afternoon. "It was such a wonderful event, though I was disappointed that not many Penn students were exposed to the event because of fall break," said College junior Kristina Rencic, co-chairperson of the Penn Environmental Group and acting liaison between the national organizers of ECOnference and University students. ECOnference 2000 also introduced the idea of a "Dirty Jobs Boycott." The goal for the boycott is for half a million students to sign a pledge stating that they will not work for Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Co. or British Petroleum, corporations identified as being harmful to the environment. The boycott campaign will target one company at a time from a given sector of the economy.