Shale Maulana, Center for Environmental Citizenship

Shale Maulana is Northwest summit coordinator for the Center for Environmental Citizenship and a student and activist at Seattle Central Community College.

EnviroCitizen has several ongoing campaigns that aim to engage students in the environmental movement and enable them to make changes at their schools and elsewhere. These campaigns include: Stop ExxonMobil, Clean Energy Now, and Campus Divestment. Part of my internship is to help shape these campaigns and spread the word about them to students.

The goal of all of our campaigns is to empower students and help them learn organizing skills so they can alter political relationships on campus and make changes to environmental policies. We offer paid internships to college students to run these campaigns at their schools, giving them the information and support they need while allowing them room to learn and experiment.

The Stop ExxonMobil campaign is run in partnership with Greenpeace. Since 1997, ExxonMobil has spent more than $46 million on lobbying to sabotage clean energy efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that addresses global warming. Internationally, ExxonMobil has a greasy record of polluting, committing labor and human rights violations, and destroying whole communities. ExxonMobil not only refuses to invest in any clean-energy alternatives, but does its best to stop them.

The way ExxonMobil operates is also contributing to environmental racism. The company destroys rainforests in West Africa, where the people do not have the resources to stop them. It exploits labor in Indonesia, taking advantage of the nation's poverty. Pipelines are run under poor communities of color. It's not a coincidence. ExxonMobil deliberately targets these communities of color because the company knows that they do not have the resources or political might to force them out.

In our campaigns, we support students in educating other students on this issue. We have postcards for students to sign and we send them to regional ExxonMobil affiliates. We also take pictures of students with speech bubbles that say, "ExxonMobil does not fill my tank" and other messages like that. We support students doing actions at ExxonMobil stations, but we do not offer legal support so all action is taken at one's own risk. This multi-tiered campaign has shut down several ExxonMobil stations in cities around the country, including Los Angeles and New York.

Our Clean Energy Now campaign is focused on pressuring campuses to choose clean-energy alternatives. Students who intern with us on this campaign work to ensure that new buildings built on campuses are built "green," taking advantage of clean energy and efficient lighting systems. Students work with cafeterias to see that biodegradable cups, plates, and utensils are used instead of Styrofoam and non-biodegradable plastics.

The Campus Divestment campaign works to make colleges and universities divest from companies that have environmentally unsound policies. Students mobilize and pressure their administrations to use the schools' financial power to invest in environmentally sound companies. Students pay several thousands of dollars annually to institutions of higher education and should have a say about what is done with that money, especially making sure that the money isn't damaging our environment and communities.

Students, by working together, have a lot of power within their schools. It's a critical time for students to get involved in campaigns such as these. To help them, EnviroCitizen will be offering a student summit Nov. 14-15 at Seattle Central Community College -- "Powered By Justice: Skills to Build Energy Alternatives." This summit will be a great opportunity for students to learn organizing and action skills as well as get involved in our campaigns. We hope that by bringing students into these campaigns we will push clean energy and issues of environmental racism onto the political agenda, so that we can truly affect policy. It's a free event, with travel scholarships available. Email or call 206.256.6429 for more information.