Students, community leaders and Massachusetts residents will descend on Beacon Hill today to show their support for a new bill to cut greenhouse gas emissions, ending a four-day conference to rally environmental awareness and activism.
More than 1,000 people attended the weekend event, which was modeled after the larger Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C., and hosted by Massachusetts Power Shift, according to a MAPS press release. The event included lectures, workshops and educational training about global warming to spread awareness and inspire positive environmental action among attendees.
The conference ends today with a large-scale lobbying effort at the Massachusetts State House, where participants are pushing to pass the Global Warming Solutions Act through the House of Representatives. The bill, the first of its kind, has already passed through the Senate and will cut statewide greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, according to a press release.
Craig Altemose, MAPS lead organizer, said he was optimistic about the bill and said the question is not if the bill will be passed, but if it needs to. "And it certainly does," he said.
"In my book, necessity dictates action, so if it needs to happen, it will happen, and we'll make it happen," he said.
"It's a threat amplifier, climate change," he said. "You take any single issue out there . . . It would just become 10 times worse if we don't fix this problem."
Altemose co-founded MAPS after attending the D.C. conference last year, said global warming is interconnected with other world issues like poverty.
"This started off with four students in a bagel shop, and I think for four students in a bagel shop, we did a pretty good job of planning a conference having fairly little experience of this magnitude," Altemose, a Harvard University graduate student, said of the Massachusetts conference. "I couldn't be happier with the result."
The event featured a motivational concert and rally on Boston Common, with a performance by band Melodeego and speeches by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, former CIA director Jim Woolsey and Rev. Fred Small, environmental activist and minister of the First Parish in Cambridge.
The conference boasted a wide variety of attendees, united by the common cause of reversing climate change.
"I act as if it is solvable because you just have to do that," said Ruth Shafer, a Northfield Mount Hermon High School junior. "If you're going to get really into something, you have to believe that it will work. And if it doesn't work, we've had a good ride, I guess. I mean, if it doesn't work, I'll melt along with everyone else."
Shafer said she plans to pursue a career in environmental activism and said the global warming problem outweighs other social and economic problems in importance.
"If we don't have a planet that we can we live on, we won't have to worry about racism [or other issues]," she said. "We'll all be dead."
Hannah Leone, a Boston University College of Arts and Sciences sophomore and Environmental Student Organization member, said she walked away from a group discussion not with a feeling of doom, but with motivation.
"It's nice to see that there are people out there who are going to make a difference," she said.
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