If Congress won’t listen, ask your mom.
The helpUSmom.com campaign’s goal is to start discussion and prompt action to address climate change in lieu of the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in December.
Thousands gathered in Copenhagen for the conference where more than 120 world leaders discussed the planet’s ecological future. Yet, it seemed to be all talk and no action. Leaders refused to commit to any deadline.
The New York Times reported that the clean energy and climate industry information firm New Energy Finance graded the Copenhagen agreement a two out of a possible 10. The chairman of the negotiating bloc of developing nations said the agreement was “the worst in history.”
Some Cal Poly alumni and fellow activists were so frustrated with the progress of the Conference that they began to write to local representatives while in Copenhagen. They couldn’t find a way to connect with this unknown person and express their feelings on climate change. They soon realized they could better express their argument as if they were writing to their mothers.
The idea of writing to their mothers was the beginning of a three-day sprint to create a campaign and Web site while world leaders continued to make no progress at the conference.
The Web site’s goal is to start the discussion between U.S. moms and their children about climate change. It seeks to gather as many letters as possible and deliver them to the U.S. Congress and President Obama by Mother’s Day.
Concerned citizens can visit helpUSmom.com and write a letter to their mother via e-mail. Mothers are then directed to the Web site to follow four steps: Call your child and tell them that you love them, share your child’s concern and passion about the climate with your friends and family, learn more at Web sites like 350.org and tcktcktck.org and take action by signing the 1Sky petition, calling the president and Congress and writing a letter to your editor.
This campaign demonstrates it’s easy to act on anything you feel passionately about. For this group of Californians, they simply had writers block and turned it into a campaign that gives many a voice and a course of action. Rather than idly wondering what difference one person can make, these simple steps are intact to facilitate the process.
Other campaigns like freetibet.org use similar tactics by notifying their followers of recent cases in Tibet. This allows people to write to their leaders to hopefully inspire change so they can speak up wherever they are and writing to people to urge action in Tibet.
Another campaign similar to helpUSmom.com is Canada’s Moms against Climate Change. This group made a YouTube video asking parents to upload photos of their children to remind Canadian Prime Minister Stephan Harper the consequences of climate change and who it will affect as he went to COP 15 to represent Canada, one of the top 10 worst global polluters in the world.
Rather than just being aware, act. Lead by example. You can’t change the world if you don’t start with yourself. Nothing will change if you focus on everything you can’t accomplish. With the inaction of our leaders in Copenhagen, we need to step up and take the initiative to show them what we are capable of. Things like voting with your dollar, moving your money to local banks and being conscious of your waste are a fews ways to make changes in your everyday life. If we start to change things on an individual level we can make large-scale changes.