Wash your hands and a small blue sticker will remind you to "turn off the tap." Throw away a piece of garbage and you will find clearly marked containers separating different types of recyclable materials.
As the effects of global warming become increasingly apparent across the world, reminders of ways to conserve energy continue to multiply across the Tufts campus.
Yet climate change activism goes much further than merely recycling or conserving water. This summer, recent Tufts graduates Casey Beck (LA '07) and Austin Blair (LA '07) won a $10,000 grant from the "100 Projects for Peace" program, a philanthropic organization that invites undergrads to compete for the chance to win funding for grassroots projects for peace. Beck and Blair nabbed one of the 100 grants with a proposal to bring awareness about climate change to islands in the Pacific Ocean.
After earning degrees as Peace and Justice Studies majors at Tufts, Beck and Blair decided to focus their energy on the Republic of Kiribati, a country in the central Pacific Ocean spread across many islands. Their culminating project, a series of photographs and a documentary film entitled "Rising Tide, Sinking Nation: The Effect of Global Warming on Kiribati," depicts Kiribati residents' lifestyles and explores how they are directly affected by global warming.
Beck and Blair unveiled their project Monday with a panel discussion and reception in the Slater Concourse. The project is part of an exhibit there that will kick off a year-long educational series on climate change and climate justice.
Assistant Director of Peace and Justice Studies Dale Bryan helped choose Beck and Blair's project for the exhibit.
"We're going to provide a context for them to show their wares and a panel to begin to frame analytically and politically the context," he said.
While in the Pacific, Blair recognized that the people of Kiribati, whose resources depend solely on their environment, were changing their lives in order to deal with the impacts of global warming.
"High tides and changing currents already have affected how close people can live to the water or what kinds of fish they can fish," he said.
Beck stressed the importance of bringing attention to a place like Kiribati, whose resources pale in comparison to other Pacific countries that benefit from tourism money.
"The people who are getting press are the people who have money," she said. "The longer we were there, the more we saw, and the more we realized how critical it was to bring this story back to the United States."
In their stay in the Central Pacific, the former Tufts students were also struck by the way of life in the islands.
"This is a very unique culture," Beck said. "This is not something that most Americans have any experience with, and it's something that we are greatly affecting."
Blair also hoped that with their presentation, they would be able to provide insight into the lives of the islanders.
"The idea of the exhibit was to come back with photographs and with our video," he said. "[And] to sort of dispel the image of an island paradise, to show that life isn't just all coconuts and sun and that life is really difficult under these circumstances. In telling this story, we're [also] telling the story of how global warming is inextricably linked from problems of overpopulation, pollution, lack of sanitation and general issues of inequality."
Another dimension of the issue that surfaced during their research was the issue of race in global warming. According to Beck, the "brunt of effects of global warming will fall on people of color."
At the same time, she said, those making decisions about the policies and protocol regarding climate change are white.
"There's an injustice in who's making the decisions and who's impacting the environment and who's suffering the consequences," Beck said.
Gender and class lines also emerged as an issue in the pair's research.
"Women and children are more disproportionately impacted, and people of lower income standings are greater impacted," Bryan said.
While "Rising Tide, Sinking Nation" makes a distinct effort to acknowledge the problems of global warming, the project, according the Beck and Blair, is also aimed at providing solutions for students interested in becoming involved in climate change and climate justice. They said they hope to address "active citizenship" as a reality rather than an abstraction.
"[Beck and Blair] are the students who have been educated for active citizenship," Bryan said. "It's not just a branding. It's what people are actually doing."
Blair agreed. To him, the first step in solving the problem is to take action rather than just talk about it.
"There are so many different departments that are doing research and teaching classes on these things," Blair said. "The idea of talking about climate justice is also talking about it in terms of solutions and not problems. We know the issues, and now it's, 'What can we do?'"
