People
Generation Y not?
Greg Roughan - Green Ideas editor
Generation Y: lazy, self-centred and apathetic, right? No way, says Brittany Packer. The 21-year-old is part of a youth movement that believes apathy is not an option when it comes to climate change, and is shouldering the responsibility for doing something about it. After all, it’s their future at stake.
“It is the defining issue of our time,” says Brittany. “It’s the biggest thing that we can face as a planet. It’s happening now. And every day the cost of preventing and adapting to climate change increases – so the longer we wait to fix it, the more it’s going to cost my generation to pay for it.”
Brittany helped organise a large climate action youth meeting called Power Shift which took place in Auckland in December last year. Part of an international youth climate change movement, the inaugural New Zealand and Pacific Power Shift meeting added 750 voices to the 25,000 who have already joined forces around the world.
The event saw young Kiwis come together – some cycling all the way from Dunedin to show their enthusiasm for a low-carbon future – to workshop practical, achievable ways to build a safe climate future. The meeting’s tone of fun, realistic action grabbed attention, with a Queen Street flashmob making the pages of the New Zealand Herald and television interviews and coverage across TV One, TV3, Maori Television and Chinese TV. (You can watch Brittany’s interview about Power Shift on TV One’s Breakfast here.)
Ironically for such a positive movement, Power Shift events are motivated in large part by disappointment at climate inaction – they aim to literally shift power from those who have so far failed to do enough about climate upheaval, and put it in the hands of the generation with the most to lose. Many Power Shifters have come to believe political efforts on climate change are being tarnished by game-playing and stalling; for Brittany, learning that lesson at the Copenhagen conference of 2009 would be particularly bitter.
Starting young
Born in Dunedin in 1991, Brittany moved with her family to New York at age six when her biochemist father took a job Stateside.
The young Kiwi soon realised that American attitudes to rubbish were different to those back home. “I just noticed how much stuff there was lying around the place” she says – and at age eight she organised her first beach clean-up. That led her to start a small environmental magazine, with some help from her parents, which was printed and distributed around her school. From there came regular small projects – raising money for the WWF, more beach clean-ups, and clean-ups in parks. By the time the family moved back to New Zealand, Brittany had her head right in the environmental space.
At 13 Brittany was sponsored by the Sir Peter Blake Trust to attend a children’s environmental summit in Japan, and came back itching to do something worthwhile and measurable in the Nelson community where the family had settled. So she and the two other teenagers from Nelson who had attended the summit set a goal of cutting down the city’s use of plastic bags.
The teens organised an eco bag art exhibition, roped in celebrities, and held paint-your-own reusable bag days at the Nelson market. “And we did little fun things – like a couple of times we rolled out a red carpet outside a supermarket door and when people walked out with an eco bag we had a whole bunch of our friends clapping for them – and when someone walked out with a plastic bag everyone would just go silent… it was really cheeky!”
Most impressively, the group claim to have achieved their goal – a reduction in bag use of 20 per cent. How did they know they’d hit their target? “We sat in supermarkets for hours and counted!”
The path to Copenhagen
By the time she was 17 Brittany had decided that the dangers of climate change were very real, very serious, yet very avoidable. It was no surprise then that the much-touted Copenhagen conference of 2009 would seem like a beacon of hope – the moment in history when the world would come together to save itself.
Fresh out of high school Brittany formed a youth delegation to the conference with 12 other young New Zealanders. Together they spent a year fundraising and lobbying the government to negotiate an ambitious, fair and legally binding treaty, then left for Denmark. The world’s leaders gathered. Two-hundred thousand citizens gathered outside the conference in hope. A newly elected Obama flew in for the final days … and nothing happened.
“It was a massive let-down,” recalls Brittany. The dejected delegates flew home sadder and wiser than when they left – and saw the world’s leaders fail to do much more than talk again and again in the years that followed. “There was Cancun, which was the follow up conference the next year; then there was the Rio +20 conference … but neither produced the treaty for action on climate change that the world was calling for.
“And that’s been happening for 20 years. Climate change was first discussed the year I was born – in Rio de Janeiro in 1991 at the first Earth Summit. And we’re still waiting”.
Taking charge
The heartbreak of Copenhagen proved a powerful motivator. Brittany and her fellow delegates returned to New Zealand resolved to tackle climate change at a grassroots level.
“I still really strongly believe that the quickest way to make a change is through international policy. And I still think we need an ambitious and legally binding policy,” states Brittany. But her new direction reflects an unwillingness to put time and money into projects that change as the winds of political enthusiasm shift.
Instead her aim now is to generate awareness of the risks of an unstable climate future – less and less of a hard task as alarm grows at the state of the arctic icesheets and severe weather events. More important than highlighting the negatives, though, is showing the realistic things that can be done to combat those dangers. The master plan is to create a mandate for action from the public that local and central government can’t ignore – and Power Shift has proved the
perfect vehicle for that.
The Power Shift movement’s backers – international groups 350.org and WWF, and local group Generation Zero – are now behind a campaign cooked up at the Power Shift meeting called 100 Percent Possible. Echoing the 100% Pure brand, which was slammed by the New York Times for failing to match reality as our government pulled out of round two of the Kyoto Protocol, 100 Percent Possible highlights how realistic tackling climate change can be.
Through a nationwide speaking tour, demonstrations, submissions to government, its own research and through a growing groundswell of support on social media, 100 Percent Possible is now highlighting the options already available to us – things like renewable energy technologies, and changing our cities into low carbon transport hubs with more public transport, bike lanes and pedestrian access so we needn’t be so reliant on fossil fuels.
“A lot of people think of climate change as doom and gloom – too big to take on and too hard,” says Brittany. “But what we’re saying is that the solutions are already there – they already exist. It’s just about saying ‘yes’ to them.”
With the 2014 elections now on the horizon Brittany and the other Power Shifters will be using their blend of vision, realism, a blistering work ethic and sense of fun to make sure voters are thinking about climate action. They’ll be doing that by blowing away the sense of gloomy inevitability that hangs over the issue; at the same time they seem to be blowing away the myth of Generation Y apathy.
As Brittany puts it: “We’re completely solutions-focussed. It’s about creating the world that we want to live in.”
Brittany's top 10 tips for climate-friendly Kiwis
- Vote climate. Vote for a Government that has a fair, ambitious, and long-term plan for reducing emissions
- Vote with your wallet. Choose products that minimise greenhouse gas emissions, such as those from local, environmentally-friendly businesses. Look for low carbon certification
- Submission and petition for climate recognition. It’s an easy ways to have your say. If you want to be more involved, run for a position!
- Join a group. Check out Generation Zero, 350 Aotearoa, Climate Justice Aotearoa and the 100 Percent Possible campaign – see below for links.
- Support groups and iwi that are fighting fossil fuel extraction in their backyards. Fossil fuels not only contribute to climate change, but their extraction also affects communities. And while the focus is on fracking, mining, and drilling permits, our country overlooks an investment in a more sustainable future with renewable energy
- Drive less. Research shows us that more than half of all car trips in New Zealand are less than 6km long. Try walking those short trips, or hop on your bike! Added bonus: bikers get toned, sexy legs!
- Eat less meat. I don’t think everyone should become vegan, but dropping meat from one meal a week can make a difference. Raising animals, in partic ular for red meat, tends to have a significant environmental impact and agriculture makes up approximately half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. Websites like www.meatlessmonday.com can help you get started!
- Reduce your consumption. At home and work you can make small changes that add up: insulate your hot water supply, replace old incandescent light bulbs with energy efficient varieties, start a home compost, have shorter showers: all of these small things you have probably heard before, but they can reduce your carbon footprint – and your energy bill!
- Choose an eco-friendly energy company. Explore the environmental impacts of various companies. Better yet, install solar panels and other renewable energy generators
- Plant trees and shrubs. Nature has her own climate cure: plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so the more we grow, the less impact we have
Handy links
Brittany’s interview about Power Shift on TV One’s Breakfast
Check out the 100% Possible campaign
Watch a video of the Power Shift flashmob
Website for Youngo, the United Nations affiliated Youth United for Climate Progress movement
Generation Zero
350 Aotearoa
Climate Justice Aotearoa
What are your views on climate change?
Let us know by commenting below.