For anyone following this, Anna and I have decided to do a joint blog for all of our eco-hearted adventures. Here goes:
Hey there! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Kristie Okimoto. I’m a first year, Conservation and Resource Studies major at UC Berkeley. And maybe a Portuguese or Chinese minor. Or both. (I’m Brazilian and Japanese, but I take Chinese.)
Anyways, for first semester I was having trouble deciding where to get involved in campus organizing. At first, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to get involved in at Berkeley. I mean, Berkeley kind of is a mecca of organizing. :) But then, it seemed like there was nothing I wanted to really get behind and organize around.
I got involved in some fun things: I set up a new ReUse station (a place where you can leave things you don’t want and take what you need, so that things are reused and kept out of the waste stream), I went to the California Student Sustainability Convergence, I tried to get involved in the Sustainability Team, and I was the House Dumpster Diver for my co-op! But I still hadn’t found something that I really wanted to get behind.
But this semester, two things happened. One, a friend of mine, Gabe, planned a direct action targeting Bank of America for being the #1 investor in mountaintop removal coal mining. I helped organize that and I was really stoked to be taking action and to be organizing again!
Also, the Berkeley student government just passed a bill to divest from fossil fuels! That would mean pulling $3-4 million of investments out of the fossil fuel industry! It was awesome to see that we could be a campus that could help lead the way for others. Our next step? Getting the UC Board of Regents to make sure that the UC’s $75 billion endowment is divested from fossil fuels. From that, I heard about Fossil Free Cal, a group that has just started out of that, to push the UC Regents to divest.
At first, I thought it was funny that Anna and I are both getting involved in divesment on our campuses at the same time. But then I realized, it’s because it’s part of a national movement to get universities divested from fossil fuels. Now here was a cause worth getting behind!
So today, let’s March forth on climate justice!
Want to take action for climate justice?
For more info, just click on the title.
