100% clean energy

On Monday April 15th, the Environmental Action Group at Bowling Green State University launched a week-long “Call-In” drive to our President’s office to demand a 100% clean energy future for BGSU with an end goal of 2020.

The day started off slow at 10am, when most college students are still half asleep and just rolling out of bed. By 11:30, our administration had really begun to hear the students’ demands in numbers. The administration sent the University’s police captain out to where we were standing in our Student Union’s Oval to tell us that having students call into President Mazey’s office was “illegal” because it was “disrupting the work that could be done in the office” and supposedly “harassment”, ultimately threatening us by saying that he “could write us a ticket.”

Today (April 3rd) BGSU president, Dr. Mary Ellen Mazey, and her cabinet hosted a National Start! Walking Day event. This event aimed to raise awareness about healthier lifestyles for faculty and students at BGSU by leading a 30 minute walk around campus. While this helps promote personal health, students believe that Bowling Green State University has a greater responsibility as a higher-education institution to promote/ support health across the globe.

Bowling Green State University’s student organization, Environmental Action Group, has been campaigning all year for its campus to switch from dangerous and costly fossil fuels to 100% clean energy. After 2,700 student and faculty petition signatures, one meeting with the university’s president, Dr. Mary Ellen Mazey, and numerous events to raise support on campus, the school year is coming to an end and EAG is doing what it can to show President Mazey that the students are not giving up on our future.

Today (March 21st, 2013) EAG held a “Rally For Our Future” on the lawn outside of President Mazey’s office. Around 40 students, faculty and community members attended to support the movement and tell President Mazey that they want her to lead BGSU to a 100% clean energy future by 2020. The rally began with 3 speakers, Dr. Neocles Leontis (a university professor), Josh Chamberland (President of EAG) and I (Madison Thomas, EAG’s coalition builder). The speeches contained information about the economic benefits of renewable energy, the problem of climate change and how to combat it with the use of renewable energy, and the opportunity for BGSU to become a global example in clean energy solutions.

If you haven’t heard yet… it’s about to get HOT in Ohio this summer. Not just the post-finals-week-at-the-beach kinda hot… we’re talking about something even better; the politically-hot-cause-we’re-taking-the-fracking-industry-to-task-and-making-’em-sweat-on-home-turf HOTT. OSEC is kicking off summer vacation by teaming up with 350.org for Don’t Frack Ohio: a long weekend full of movement building strategies, trainings, and especially a big huge action that’s gonna rock Ohio’s statehouse the way earthquakes rocked Youngstown last fall (but better).

You might be asking yourself.. “Ohio? What’s so important about Ohio?” …. Well, Ohio and the Midwest, are Ground Zero for the Climate Fight, and Ohio especially has become the new front-line for the movement to end fracking; in just two years Ohio has gone from 4 permitted horizontally fracked wells to over 85, and the industry doesn’t plan on stopping until it hits a few thousand. Which means OSEC students aren’t planning on stopping anytime soon either; check out what we’ve done since Midwest PowerShift, and join us in Ohio June 14th-17th.