This interview constitutes part of a series in which writers for the Prog sit down with leaders of progressive student groups on campus. Interviews are intended to highlight the work of these groups, to learn more about the mission driving their efforts, and to encourage interested students to get involved.
On September 20th, more than 600 Princeton community members gathered in Hynes Plaza for the Princeton Climate Strike, part of the global climate strike in which an estimated 4 million people participated. The strike was organized by the Princeton Environmental Action Coalition (PEAC), a group committed to building awareness of and organizing actions about climate change concerns and environmental justice issues on campus. I sat down with Naomi Cohen-Shields ’20 and Sarah Brown ’22, the co-organizers of the Princeton Climate Strike, to talk about the event, its goals, and their hopes for future climate action organizing at Princeton.
What was your role in organizing the strike? What did it look like here? What was attendance like?
NCS: I just started the action rolling in Princeton because I noticed that no one else had. This was the beginning of August, and so I started by bringing people together who I thought would be interested in helping, people from PEAC, like Sarah. And then also reached out to some high schoolers that have been involved in organizing Princeton climate action in the past two years, because they’ve been doing that, so we got them on board. And then some grad students reached out to me because, again, this is a global movement, so whenever someone was like “Is something happening in Princeton?” they would eventually get connected with me. And so we built this group of six to ten people that were working on it. It took a lot of work to put together in the month leading up, but we really tried to build connections with as many people as possible in the university and in the community, and got a lot of support from all sorts of different members. So we’re building that up, we had a lot of social media about it, trying to spread the word through emails and posters, in town and on campus. We had some poster making sessions before the event that were well attended, and that was kind of a fun way to bring people together. The day itself went really well— we’ve been estimating upwards of 600 people come out to rally at Hynes Plaza and then we marched through town and onto campus. So all ages, different backgrounds, different perspectives, some performances. It was a really good show of unity, I think, and people really coming out because they care about this. People stuck with it— they came to the rally, they marched, they rallied on campus. There was a lot of energy and a lot of momentum.
SB: I worked on a team of University, high school, and graduate students to organize the strike. This included finding speakers and meeting with them, coming up with a schedule, thinking about legal logistics, and meeting with town and University officials. Way more people attended the strike than we anticipated. It seemed like there were about triple the number of people that we initially had hoped would come. Seeing it start as a video call at the end of the summer and then turn into productive conversations that eventually turned into an energized and cohesive event was pretty powerful. Pretty much everyone we reached out were very supportive and helped us to create a better event. I was pretty blown away by the professor and student support. I got to have conversations with people I would have never crossed paths with and connect over common concern.
Can you describe the organizing process? Who in the community did you reach out to help you organize, how are those relationships continuing now, after the protest?
NCS: It was really a mix of reaching out to people, and people reaching out to us. I think once we got our names out there, there were a lot of people who were interested, and all they needed to know was that someone was doing this, that there was a point person and that they could jump into that. In terms of the community, we reached out to the high schoolers, and then some local businesses that we thought would be interested in supporting us in different ways. We connected with Labyrinth, and we had a poster making session there. On campus we reached out to a lot of different student groups, and got responses from some of them. A lot of the connections have definitely remained strong. There’s definitely more of a sense of unity around these issues going forward from the strike. It definitely served to put our names out there, and this mission out there, and people have come to it from different directions, being like “I support this, I would come again” or getting involved with the group.
If you could organize the strike again, what would you do differently?
SB: If I were to start over with organizing the strike I would’ve started a bit earlier with the planning. Also, the day of the strike many student groups from different colleges and high schools came and asked how they could help. We hadn’t anticipated so many different schools coming and it would have been helpful if we could have gotten them involved in the planning process, not only so we could have their pre-strike organizational support but also to have a strike that even better brings together the wider community. During pre-strike planning I was pretty focused on all of the things that needed to get done and if I were to do it again I would better enjoy the moments of high energy in planning, the complicated conversations, and the artistic bursts of poster making.
NCS: Be more organized. I’ve never coordinated such a big event before, so I was kind of drawing off of strategies that I’d seen work. I think as we went on, we got better about it, but it would have been good to have more dispersed responsibilities for things, which was hard because it was the beginning of the school year and people were able to commit in different ways and to different capacities. Dividing the organizing up, like someone in charge of publicity, logistics of the day, social media, making connections with other groups. Dispersing responsibilities to as niche tasks as possible would have been good in helping spread the weight of things and keep us better on track. I think always the thought is, if I did it again, it could have been bigger— could have started earlier, reached more people, stuff like that. The other thing I think is specificity of demands. It didn’t feel like we were really in a place to make specific demands, like we kind of just aligned ourselves with this global movement. But I think the more you give people something direct to ask for, the stronger it is and the stronger impact it can have on the university or the community.
How did you incorporate consideration of environmental justice and inequality into the protest?
SB: In planning, we were very conscious to try to have voices at the table that were from a wide variety of backgrounds. We looked for speakers that would not just reinforce the most prominent environmental ideas but offer new insight. We tried to counteract the tendency which is so often seen in activist movements where the goal is to portray an image of diversity instead of recognizing that different backgrounds change the way in which we experience the world while allowing this to guide the movement. We tried to lift young people’s voices up and let them be the anchor of the day. We intentionally asked professors that were already engaging in climate change dialogue in a radically intersectional way to speak. Knowing that we are living on stolen land, we reached out to Indigenous leaders and nearby reservations in an effort to include their invaluable points of view and learn from their reflections. In pre-strike planning we reached out to organizations that we hoped could help us reach different communities than those directly tied to the University.
What do you see as your relationship with other climate strike organizations? What do you think organizers on this issue at Princeton can do for a larger movement?
NCS: I think we really started to create relationships from this strike. I was just on a call last night with Sunrise New Jersey, and Sunrise is this grassroots environmental activism organization that really pushes policy-level things and gets involved in elections. Connections like that are starting to form, and we’re hoping to align with them, and connect students at Princeton with larger activism happening in New Jersey, because I think there’s a big disconnect there. I think there are a lot of ways that we can bring these global or nations initiatives to Princeton, and I think it’s important because it should be in every locality, and also because of Princeton’s status in the national and global community, it’s especially important to show that we’re doing what we can here.
What are your immediate and long term next steps?
NCS: Immediate next step is through PEAC actions building baseline support on campus around issues of climate changes. It is in people’s consciousness, but making sure that that is sustained. We’re really looking at increasing this civic responsibility, maybe that will be through some sort of training with other activism organizations or on our own, but show people the power that they have as citizens of the state or the country, and how they can use that power to push for policy changes or elect certain leaders. And then hopefully planning more strikes in line with the global movement, and more events around Princeton asking the institution and the students to do what they can to align with these global movements. It’s going in a lot of different directions.
If you would like to get involved in PEAC, email Sarah Brown (s.brown@princeton.edu) or Naomi Cohen-Shields (naomic@princeton.edu).
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