The Winter Conference

For the past two days we have been engaging in the Jokkmokk Winter Conference. The conference is the 4th annual dialogue concerning climate change and how it relates to the arctic and the people living here. The title of this year's conference is "Pathways to Sustainable Northern Communities, Regional Empowerment for Change. We have heard lectures and have had much time for small group discussion. All of our food is locally produced and traditional Sami dishes. (It's some of the best food we have had on this trip.) Today we were served lunch in traditional tents. I'm glad everything we eat is locally produced and sustainable as the last "energy" conference I attended served everything in individually plastic wrapped containers. I had a really exciting theatre kid moment today when I got to talk to a man who is developing social justice theatre for children dealing with solving the climate crisis in Sweden.

This conference is teaching me a lot and making me consider things I had not thought about before. The ice is literally melting out from under the feet of the people living in the arctic as we experience more and more global climate changes. Why do we not think of them? There are approximately 4 million people living in the arctic and one third of them are indigenous people. We are borrowing resources from the future with no way to pay them back. Most of the things I am hearing are things I may have already known but I enjoy hearing things explained in different perspectives. It is interesting for me to be re acquainted with the issues of climate change as I read an article in the New York Times yesterday about how we are searching for life on other planets for the event in which we are no longer able to inhabit this one. Human beings are pushing the planet to its limit. We have created such an irresponsible society.

There are people from all over the world here. I attended a workshop today where when we broke off into small groups, I was joined by people from Finland, Canada, Austria, and France. We discussed food and how many different things "local food" can mean. Example- I learned today that using geothermal energy in Iceland, bananas can be grown year round, making bananas local to Iceland. (I am pleased to announce that they were all impressed with Gustavus' own Big Hill Farm, which gowns much of the produce served on campus. )

I have heard many times over the course of the last couple of days that it is my generation who need to fix these issues. I have also been told that there is much hope to be found in young people. This is daunting to hear, especially when I find myself wondering so intently why the U.S is not doing as much as other places in the world. Of course, I am so happy that the new academic building which is going up on campus will have solar panels and we are seeing the development and construction of more and more wind turbines. I learned in a lecture yesterday that in just one hour the Earth receives as much energy from the sun as humanity uses during a whole year, we just don't know how to harness this energy and it could take as long as decades to learn how to do this. As I see more and more graphs and projections of what the planet will look like in the future, I can't help but wonder, at what point we will be too late?

I always find hope though when attending conferences like this one. I am surrounded by people who are determined to find new solutions to this climate crisis. Though it sounds idealistic, someone asked who would solve this vision of sustainable energy. The answer? "The actors for the vision are in this room because no one else will." Knowledge is power. So, here we are, learning all we can and hopefully developing solutions.