Making climate change an issue

How 350.org went from “strange kid” to head of the green class

By Heather Smith
Grist

May Boeve grew up in the ’90s, in a world where environmentalism was presented less as a social movement than as a personal lifestyle choice: buy a car that doesn’t use much gas, insulate your house, use energy-efficient lightbulbs, compost.

So when she was an undergraduate at Middlebury College, she and a group of friends set out to practice environmentalism differently, taking their cues from the social justice movements they were learning about in history class (civil rights) and seeing play out in the world around them (marriage equality).

“Clearly, a lot of people were concerned about climate change,” Boeve said in an interview earlier this year. “But it didn’t look like the movements we’d studied in school, with protests and songs and visual imagery and analyses of power and all these intricate things.”

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