More Than a Number
350.org campaign aims to influence global climate change legislation
By Carolyn Beeler
350 is not just a number. It’s a movement—the brainchild of several recent college graduates and a famous environmentalist, a goal for long-term environmental health. It’s the “red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet,” writes one of the movement’s founders, Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and author of several books about global warming and alternative energy.
350 has become the rallying cry of a campaign lobbying for global climate legislation. Last winter, a leading climatologist identified 350 parts per million as the most carbon dioxide the earth’s atmosphere can safely contain in the long term. The current concentration is already 387—and climbing.
Housed online at www.350.org, the grassroots effort aims to spread the number into the consciousness of people and institutions worldwide, says Will Bates, project 350 team member and Middlebury College graduate. Encouraging and enabling people to raise awareness in any way they can—like painting the number on a sign to hang from their house or taking a picture of a crowd forming the number with their bodies—the group hopes to pressure international law-makers to create earth-friendly legislation.
“We want to set 350 as a benchmark for international climate legislation,” Bates says. The group’s ultimate aim will be to influence lawmakers at the December 2009 U.N. meeting in Copenhagen, where world leaders will finalize the successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
The website is the life-blood of the movement and contains interactive features that allow users to collaborate on awareness-raising projects around the globe, as well as share the results of their efforts with an online community. Fully launched last June, the site hopes to provide content in up to ten languages to make it a truly international venture. “It’s been mind-blowing for us to see how responsive people around the world are,” Bates says.
The project is a testament to the potential for change that young community organizers have. Project 350 is being organized by the same team that spearheaded the national “Step it up” campaign, which successfully lobbied Congress to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent before 2050. As that initiative wrapped up last winter, the group landed on the “science of 350” as a way to expand its focus from the United States to the entire world.
“It’s been a totally wild couple of years,” says Bates, who graduated just as preparations for “Step it up” were beginning—a semester or two before the five other young organizers. “None of us really envisioned where this was going,” he says.
Now the team has expanded (though McKibben is still the only member over 25), and the global focus has changed the way the group does business. Bates, who studied abroad in India during college, is the point-person for south and central Asia.
The group hopes to involve study abroad students in the effort to spread awareness, providing a tangible global project to facilitate discussion and action. Bates recognizes study abroad students as a valuable resource in information exchange and hopes to encourage students to work with local NGOs during their stays, to get in touch with other environmentally conscious people, and to maintain the relationships students make while abroad.