100+ campuses taking action this Earth Day.
In coalition with
Students demanding climate justice
Reclaim Earth Day is a coalition of students across the world demanding that our colleges and universities be leaders in addressing the climate crisis. In 1970, Earth Day represented a shift towards addressing pollution. Today, it has been coopted by fossil fuel interests and billionaires, who use it to greenwash.
We must Reclaim Earth Day. We are using this day to demand more of our universities and we need you to be a part of this.
Our demands
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We call on our universities to divest from the dying fossil fuel industry and its enablers, including the military-industrial complex. Intertwined, these destructive industries are actively harming communities around the world. Universities must disclose what they choose to invest in, and should democratize investments to involve shared governance with faculty and student associations. Universities must also go beyond divestment; we demand investments in transformative climate solutions, environmental justice, anti-oppression education/research, and fair partnerships with local environmental justice organizations, local municipalities, and K-12 schools.
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The fossil fuel industry and its enablers have embedded themselves within our institutions, taking over research agendas and wielding their influence in the interests of their own profits. We call on our universities to ban and end all current and future partnerships with fossil fuel companies and the military-industrial complex and to completely dissociate from these industries. This means excluding the industries from research, career fairs, job recruitment, and advisory boards. Instead, universities must give students, faculty, staff, and the broader community the power to determine and shape university priorities, values, and research agendas. Community leaders must be included on inclusive and diverse advisory boards and schools should provide community grants to conduct projects led by local interests. Universities have the power to forge reciprocal relationships with local communities and organizations, or they can choose to stand apart and channel their political and economic power toward inequity and gentrification.
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To be true climate leaders, our colleges and universities must lead on their own campuses. This means decarbonizing buildings, transportation, and energy sources in ways that are just and equitable. When we call for transformative climate solutions, we mean that we don’t want “solutions” that conform to the same extractive, exploitative system that brought us the climate crisis in the first place. We reject industry-friendly false solutions like biofuels, “natural” gas, carbon capture and sequestration, and reliance on carbon offsets. Colleges and universities must lead a just transition on their campuses away from fossil fuels, shutting down on-campus fossil fuel plants and maximizing on-campus renewables. Universities should consider the impact of their policies beyond campus boundaries. For example, universities set an example for and directly influence K-12 schools in their region, from their attitudes towards fossil fuels to their climate justice curriculum. Ultimately, colleges and universities should act as leaders in a just transition to clean and renewable energy that the climate crisis requires, a transition that will lead to a livable future for their students, staff, faculty, young people, and frontline communities. At the same time, they should prepare for the climate disasters we are already seeing by strengthening policies that promote the health and safety of students, workers, and community members and investing in community climate resilience.
Our op ed
Why we’re mobilizing
We are living in a climate emergency. The climate crisis is endangering us and the people and places we love. It is devastating communities around the world with raging fires, floods, and storms like we have never seen before. It is impacting those already marginalized by systems of oppression most severely and immediately.
As college students, young people, and those who live with the worsening impacts of the climate crisis, we are reclaiming Earth Day to demand that our colleges and universities take action. We come from across the country, from bustling cities to rolling plains. We represent communities of color and of faith, communities on the frontlines of surging seas and empty aquifers. From fires to floods, from treeless neighborhoods to unbreathable air, from drinking water mixed with fracking fluid to pipeline expansions through Indigenous lands, we are all facing different disasters stemming from the same crisis. On behalf of our families, communities, and homes, we are scared and we are furious.
Our movement is demanding action from the highest powers in our government and our institutions. We support calls for Biden to declare a climate emergency, end the era of fossil fuels, and center climate justice in policy. We believe our universities can also be guided by these same values of climate justice.
Our colleges and universities hold power. They produce research at the forefront of shaping public policy, host conversations that shift cultural and societal norms, and play an important role in educating the next generation of workers and decision-makers. We are demanding that they act with the urgency and at the scale that this crisis requires. While mobilizing the full weight of the resources and power they hold, our colleges and universities must center communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis and pollution. They have the opportunity to end their complicity in the climate crisis. Colleges and universities must reject the power and profits of the fossil fuel industry and position themselves as leaders in the research, education, and climate action we need to build a better world, where workers are empowered, everyone has clean air and water, and all of us can thrive.