ill_assist_you

Alison, the treasure of Skidmore College’s Environmental Action Club (EAC) is inspired to work for environmental change because she's concerned for the current and future well-being of humans and other forms of life. Jonathan, co-president of the EAC, because he can’t imagine not being part of the solution. Thanks to the EAC’s effective campaign, Skidmore has sent a letter to KC declaring that the College disapproves of the company’s practices. Even though we all disapprove of clearcutting virgin forests to make toilet paper, I’m sure we all can agree that getting this letter was no small feat. After a long Thanksgiving weekend, Jonathan, Alison and I finally met up online. Read on to find out about more about the KC campaign at Skidmore.

Ill_Assist_You [IAY]: My good friend from high school went to Skidmore. She has really fun stories about taking gym but no other stories about college. What’s Skidmore like anyway?
Alison [A]: Skidmore is a small (2,400 undergrad students) private liberal arts college in upstate New York. Skidmore is known for its arts curriculums, though it offers degrees in all major areas of study. Most students live on campus (in dorms or on-campus apartments). We are located in the city of Saratoga Springs, a beautiful tourist destination with a lively downtown area, close rural landscapes, and the Adirondack Mountains a short car ride away.
Jonathan [J]: The student body is politically liberal and thus generally concerned about environmental issues. However, activist/political groups on campus find it difficult to draw people to meetings and events. Because of this, many see Skidmore students as apathetic. Some believe that Skidmore College is lacking in its institutional commitment to sustainability. After many years of talk about recycling, this year we are finally putting significant resources into creating an effective recycling program. There are also a couple of buildings on campus that are being heated by geothermal.

IAY: How did the EAC decide to get involved with the KC campaign?
J: This summer I had the wonderful opportunity of attending a week-long Greenpeace training in Washington D.C. called ChangeIt 06. This is where I heard about the campaign and applied to be the campus coordinator.

IAY:  Have you worked on other campaigns before? If so, how does the KC campaign compare?
A: Yes, I've been involved in student environmental action for 4 years now, and this campaign has been very successful compared to some others I have been involved in.
J: I have worked on many EAC campaigns but no national campaigns until now. Last year, the leadership of the EAC decided to localize our actions. As a general rule, every campaign we work on should be local, as in having direct impact on the Skidmore community. In many cases this rule prevents any involvement in national campaigns. Additionally, we seek to choose campaigns that have lasting and sustained results while being relatively easy to carry out (these types of projects we have coined as “big impact, little effort” projects). The KC campaign is wonderful because it fits our criteria but is still within a national movement. I believe this sort of campaign is significantly more empowering for everyone involved.

IAY: What techniques/tactics have proved effective for you in this campaign?
A: Talking to administrators has been the most effective so far. They have been very supportive of our efforts and our conversations with them have lead to them doing more research by themselves and coming back to us for more discussion. Also, we organized a consumer education campaign which reached a broad audience: we passed out flyers about the Kleercut campaign, collected 330 petition signatures to send to Kimberly-Clark, and handed out free boxes of Seventh Generation Tissues to the first 30 people who signed our petition!

IAY:  What have been some of the highlights of this campaign?
A: Talking to people and educating them about the campaign when we were collecting petition signatures - people were surprised to hear that Kleenex wasn't good, willing to do what they could to help the cause, and overall very supportive. Also, talking to our Director of Purchasing, who is a wonderful lady - she is always interested in the information we bring to her and enthusiastic to find out more.
J: It was also good to see the amazing retention in the EAC committee working on the campaign. The committee for the K-C campaign was 7 or 8 strong at every meeting in our general EAC meetings and in other meetings with the purchasing director. I have also enjoyed working with Lindsey at Greenpeace through each step of the process.

IAY: What have been some of the challenges of this campaign?
A: Dealing with the fact that the institutional products that Skidmore buys from Kimberly-Clark aren't as environmentally-offensive as K-C's consumer products. This has made it difficult to convince decision-makers that boycotting K-C's LEED certified institutional products would help our cause.

IAY: With whom (student groups, professors, faculty, etc) have you been working?
A: Other students in the Environmental Action Club, members of the Campus Environmental Committee, people from the facilities department, the director of purchasing, and the buyer for the campus bookstore.
J: Also the Skidmore Shop, which decided to look into alternative products.

IAY: The activist life never stops— with the KC letter under your belts, the EAC is currently tackling four more projects. What are these projects?
J: One EAC committee put together a Ride Board. Another is working on developing support for a solar panel installation on campus. The 3rd group is focusing on developing a marketing plan for the new recycling program that was instituted just a couple of weeks ago at Skidmore. The last group is looking at ways to reduce paper use on campus. We are pushing for all the library printers to print double sided as well as get IT to change the margins in Word to 1 inch.

 

That's all for now, see you suckers in December!  

 Feel like you missed the activist boat because you weren't chaining yourself to a toilet  in Italy or a bus Washington or perching yourself on those tripod-y things in Ontario? Welll, why not join hundreds (thousands?) of other activists, and take an online action. Click on the link below to send a letter to KC demanding that they meet with us to discuss their destructive forest practices.

http://members.greenpeace.org/action/start/125/

Maybe you don't check out Kleercut.net as often as you  ought. If that's the case, no problem; I'm posting some recent articles from the site on here now. Check it out!!

Everett, Washington. – On the morning of November 13, Greenpeace activists blocked the entrance of Kimberly-Clark's largest mill facility in North America using a bus outfitted as a giant tissue box. For a full nine hours, the activists refused to move. The activists urged Kimberly-Clark to meet with Greenpeace representatives and establishe a timeline to end sourcing wood fiber from logging operations in the Boreal forest.

Two activists locked their arms into the giant tissue box, with a banner between them reading “Kleenex=Ancient Forest Destruction.” The protest is the latest in Greenpeace's campaign to highlight Kimberly-Clark's irresponsible logging practices and continuing deception about these practices to consumers and investors alike. This action follows a blockade set up last week at the company's headquarters in Turin, Italy.

“Time and again, Kimberly-Clark has refused to admit what we have proven to be true -- that they are engaged in the destruction of ancient forests,” said Ginger Cassady, Greenpeace forests campaigner. “Greenpeace is here to expose the company's role in forest destruction. We will stay here until they meet with us and agree to stop destroying our world's oldest and most precious forests.”

The giant tissue box was deployed at the main entrance of the facility which Greenpeace revealed to be a key processing facility for old-growth trees from the Boreal forest. The Boreal forest is considered one of the best defenses against global warming pollution because it stores large amounts of land-bound carbon. When the forest is clearcut for products like Kleenex, the trees and plants release this carbon becoming a significant contributor to global warming pollution. Greenpeace has been actively campaigning to expose and change Kimberly-Clark's practices since 2005.

More than 680 companies have signed up to participate in Greenpeace's “Forest Friendly 500” program and have pledged not to buy Kimberly-Clark brands. Recent Leger Marketing polling shows that over 80 percent of Americans are likely to buy recycled tissue paper products and even pay more to protect ancient forests.
“Clearly, Kimberly-Clark is not concerned about what consumers want or the growing trend of environmentally sustainable marketing,” continued Cassady. “Many companies have implemented policies to protect ancient forests, it's time for Kimberly-Clark to do the same.”

http://kleercut.net/en/

 

In the early morning hours of November 9th, Greenpeace activists confronted Kimberly-Clark at its regional headquarters in Turin, Italy demanding that the company “Stop Flushing Canada’s Boreal forest Down Europe’s toilets."
While activists suspended a massive banner from the rooftop, others locked themselves to toilet bowls outside the office with trees being ‘flushed down’ them, symbolic of the company’s destruction of Canada’s ancient Boreal forest to make toilet paper and other disposable tissue products.

 

Last Friday morning I spoke by phone with Heather, coordinator of the KC campaign for the Chicago area, and David, campus coordinator for the University of Chicago. Heather’s cell phone was passed back and forth, sometimes with background noise, sometimes with cutting out (“we’re in a basement,” Heather explained) but—technical difficulties aside— I got to learn about the work Heather and David have done and are doing to kick KC off Chicago-area campuses.

Ill_Assist_You [IAY]: How did you get involved in this campaign?
Heather [H]: I got involved with the campaign last year through a University of Chicago student who had interned at Greenpeace.
David [D]: When I started working with the campus environmental group [ECO—Environmental Concerns Organization], Heather was already working on this campaign.

IAY: What techniques and activities have you been using/doing at U of C and in the greater Chicago area?
H: Last year we targeted Cafferty [KC board member and Professor Emeritus at U of C]. We did street theater, reenacting The Lorax with a tissue box as the bad guy. We also did a lot of petitioning and tabling. This year, we are working on targeting Linda Johnson Rice [KC board member and president and chief executive officer of Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., publishers of Ebony and Jet magazines, based in downtown Chicago]. We’ll do basically the same things as we did with Cafferty, and we will also create a media packet on the campaign to give to Rice.

IAY: What have been some of the challenges of this campaign?
D: One of the challenges is that we were stonewalled by Cafferty last year.
H: We talked to Cafferty once; she said she’d send us information that KC had sent her, but then she never got back to us.
D: This year, we’ve been after Rice. She’s impenetrable by phone, but we’re working on creative ways to deliver our message to her. Some of our ideas are having a bike messenger drop off a package for her and have a singing telegram go up to her office. We’ll make as much noise as possible in front of her office, and distribute fliers to her employees to let them know what KC is doing. To deal with being ignored, we’ve got to make it impossible to be ignored.   

IAY: What’s been the response from people at U of C and in the Chicago area to this campaign?
D: The response on campus has been really good. We’ve got a high response rate to the petitions we asked people to sign—the highest rate I’ve ever had with a campaign. Also, when we did The Lorax demonstration, people walking around the quad joined in, put on silly tree costumes. The trick is to channel this willingness to be involved in the campaign into lasting volunteers. I think people respond to the campaign because it’s hard to find us unreasonable. We’re asking a corporation to be responsible. It resonates that KC is ridiculous; there are no rational grounds for people to object. People also respond to the brochures we’re handing out. The brochures explain the campaign on one side and on the other list legit forest friendly paper products. It makes it easy for people to switch; it’s pragmatic and reasonable.
H: I’ve been talking to other environmentalists in Chicago and they are interested in the campaign. So far the activist community is very responsive.

IAY: What’s your inspiration for doing environmental work?
H: I study geoscience, so there are a lot of logical reasons why it makes sense to be an environmentalist. Drastic climate change will hurt the environment. Also, on a personal level, I really like the environment and I want others to experience it. I’m interested in the connections between environmentalism and human health and environmentalism and environmental justice.
D: I grew up in South Dakota but it wasn’t until I moved to Chicago that I really started to appreciate the environment. After my 1st year in Chicago, I went home and did a lot of camping with my father. I find being in a forest, being near mountains, very moving. I love that these places exist, and that humans and nonhumans experience them. With ECO, I push field trips because I want other people to experience how incredible the earth is. The KC campaign is a great way to protect old growth forests.

 

PS: I'll be posting Lorax photos from Heather soon!!  

Kyle is a former GOTer who in the fall of 06 decided to bring the KC Campaign to his school. Now, in the late fall of 06, his school is almost completely KC free. How did this happen? Read on and find out.  

Ill_Assist_You [IAY]: How did you get involved with this campaign?
Kyle [K]: I was in the GOT in Spring 06. One of the first weeks, we were briefed on the campaign by Richard Brooks [Greenpeace Canada Forest Coordinator].  After some training, we went to Knoxville and organized at the University of Tennessee campus. [KC has an administrative center in Knoxville, TN.] In Knoxville, I spoke with lots of people about the campaign, and by the time I left, felt deeply connected to it. I wanted to continue working on the issue, so over the summer I went to Wisconsin with the summer GOT students and did work there.  Now that I am back at school, I still feel very passionate about the campaign and am doing what I can on my campus.

IAY: Have you worked on other campaigns before?
K: Last fall [05] I worked with Sierra Club to combat the expansion of a landfill in Houston and worked to get a toxic waste site cleaned up.

IAY: With whom are you working on this campaign?
K: There is a handful of students at my school who are very active with the many campus environmental groups, and a number of other students who see this as a good opportunity to do something important. Everything we do [in the KC Campaign] that involves the administration is through our campus Sustainability Planner. He’s the best resource we could ask for.

IAY: What’s going on with the KC campaign on your campus?
K: Our Sustainability Planner talked with the purchaser for our custodial organizations and discovered that the only KC product they used was Kleenex tissues. We found out
that the brand we use for many other products, SCA, is cheaper and is made from recycled fiber. The decision to stop purchasing Kleenex tissue was a no-brainer. However, the university is not KC free—in many labs on campus we use KC’s Kimwipes for cleaning delicate surfaces.

IAY: There’s a KC board member affiliated with your school. How has this affected your campaign?
K: We tried to contact him. We wanted to hear his opinions and explain why we’re doing what we’re doing. The company sent us a copy of KC’s sustainability report, the generic propaganda they give to everyone who asks them about this issue, but we received no actual response from him until this week. He sent me a KC press release that explained how KC was named a leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index. This means that the communication is still open, so I requested a meeting with him, and am curious to see if he responds. I’m also going to try for a big media hit. I plan to have a bunch of students on campus do the Kleercut Challenge, show people our school’s statement that we will not use Kleenex tissues, and ask students to sign petitions to our board member. We’re going to try to get into the Houston Chronicle, which would be great because the board member lives in Houston.

IAY: Sounds like you’ve basically accomplished your campaign goals. For the sake of others who are thinking about starting a KC Campaign on their campus, what kinds of techniques have worked really well for you?
K: To get people interested in the campaign, we organized a phone bank and asked students to come to the first meeting. About 50 people showed up. At the first meeting, I acted very dramatic and enthusiastic and showed the Kleercut video. I also created a Facebook group, and continue to spread the message through word-of-mouth. A good percentage of students on campus know about the campaign. This creates a buzz, and when people are asked if they want to take action on the campaign, hopefully they will be a little more excited about it because they have heard about it before.

IAY: What are you future plans?
K: Long term: I want to go to law school to become the most effective advocate for the environment I can be. Shorter term: I’m working on Kleercut and other campus sustainability issues. Very soon, I want to see my campus buy clean energy or carbon credits because right now, we spend about $12- 13 million on energy, and less than 1% of that is renewable. I also want to see a big push for energy conservation and for recycling on campus.  Next semester, I’ll be in Duluth, MN organizing for energy campaigns, and in April I’m going to Antarctica to do research on ice core samples and learn more about global warming. Next fall, I’m going to Buenos Aires, Argentina to learn Spanish and I will try to help Greenpeace Argentina while I’m there.

IAY: Why are you an environmentalist?
K: Because I don’t want to the natural world to be dominated, depleted, or destroyed by the manmade world. The two can, and must, coexist, or the Earth will not be a very good place to live for long. I always think about the big picture, and nothing is as large-scale and all-important as protecting the environment.

A little while ago, I interviewed Lauren who worked on getting  American University to go KC free. In this interview with Noah from Guilford College, the “series” (is 2 blogs a series?) continues. Noah is doing really great work on his campus (read and find out!)-- Guilford is on its way to going KC free. Noah was introduced to the KC campaign as a student in the summer ‘06 GOT program, and though this is his first campaign (besides from working with the College Democrats), this fall, he decided to take the campaign home.

Ill_assist_you [IAY]: Describe Guilford College.
Noah [N]: Guilford College is a small liberal arts school; it is well known and has a reputation for being very liberal. Guilford is a Quaker school and a lot of Quaker aspects show through especially during decision making. Every angle has to be considered and discussed and then come to consensus about the issue. It’s really great though and everyone is very open minded. Plus Guilford is trying to become as green as possible so that helps.

IAY: What’s the current situation at Guilford with this campaign?
N: As of right now, the main KC campaign work is centered around compiling a feasibility report about how realistic it's going to be for Guilford to switch. We've identified Cascades as the product we're switching to and have basically been putting together a proposal to satisfy all the parties interested. The facilities department, student body, religious department, purchasing department, the board of trustees (only to determine if Guilford will publicly take a stand), and our distributor, Diamond Paper. We've been continuously updating the proposal. In the next two weeks, we'll be doing a test run in a men’s bathroom and a women’s bathroom along with an administered survey to determine the student body's opinion which hopefully won't be against it. This is the final piece of information for our report and then it will be presented to all the departments for a consensus.

IAY: You mentioned that you’ve been working with faculty and the business community at Guilford. How did you start this? How has it been going?
N: The purchasing department directed us towards our distributor and the sustainability director mentioned a few companies. But mainly it has been our interaction with Diamond Paper our distributor in determining products and prices. It was sort of frustrating getting their attention and respect though.

IAY: What have been some of the challenges running the campaign at Guilford? How are you overcoming these challenges?
N: Basically the amount of research. There hasn't been any "opposition" just a lot, a lot research. Also, satisfying everyone's stake in the matter is a challenge.

IAY: I see that you have done an action with Greenpeace in Mexico (check out Noah’s blog: http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/noah1/2006/10/11/mexico_1), and I believe that you were at Change It. What inspires you to do environmental work?
N: It’s Sexy, but besides that I want to see a greater respect and understanding of the environment at large. It’s not ours to tamper with, and the more people who understand this, the more healthy the world will become.

IAY: What are your future plans—both for the KC campaign at Guilford and for yourself personally?
N: I want to finish out the KC campaign hopefully with a good result. If it’s a negative result, I want to bring in as many new ideas as possible. For myself, I just want to spend as much time outside as possible.