People Not Profit: Fridays for Future 2022
National Chengchi University’s sustainability club held a seven-hour action yesterday (March 25) in honor of Fridays for Future’s global climate strike day. Read on to hear members discussing demands for the university, cross-organization coalition building, peer mobilization and more.
When I got to National Chengchi University’s (NCCU) campus yesterday, just before noon, I was greeted by a long, bright row of red and white tents, teeming with students.
On a stage behind the tents hung a large blue banner explaining the excitement: NCCU Career Day. Speakers cried out introductions and instructions over microphones as students walked up and down the row of tents, each one a booth for a company trying to recruit young minds to their ranks.
A little ways away from the career fair was another event, with a starkly different take on prepping for the future. Underneath a flower-covered terrace lay a smattering of signs around a suspended yellow banner that read, in black ink: 氣候危機 — climate crisis. A few meters off, two students stood holding handmade posters and calling out to passersby.
In honor of global climate strike day, NCCU’s sustainability club — Green 24 — had organized an all-day action to raise awareness about Fridays for Future and pressure the university to take concerted steps to lessen its carbon footprint. The action wasn’t quite a strike, as most students were switching off shifts during free periods in between classes, but members said it was their way of participating in the global mobilization. From 10 to 5 on Friday, club members stood at a busy intersection and urged their peers to take photos with their signs and support their demands.
As more students got out of class, the protest grew. Among the organizers was Jess, who told me that Green 24 has five demands for the university:
1) to set concrete goals of carbon neutrality, 2) to establish a department specifically for environmental initiatives, 3) to make data on pollution and carbon emissions from the university readily and publicly available, 4) to involve stakeholders like local community members, students, and faculty with climate conversations, and 5) to institute more climate-related courses.
Founded in 1927 by former Taiwanese president and leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-Shek, NCCU is now one of Taiwan’s top universities. Green 24 is in the middle of a fight to get NCCU to divest from fossil fuels and commit to staying divested in the future, but club leader Zhong Cheng told me they’ve struggled with a lack of transparency from the administration on its current affiliations.
Jess said when they were planning yesterday’s action, they didn’t know that the career fair would be the same day, but the coincidence was an opportunity to drill their message home.
“Yes, we’re talking about our future jobs and future careers,” Jess said. “But most importantly, why should we focus on careers if we won’t have a future?”
She said Green 24 members had spent the morning going up and down the booths and asking each company what they planned to do about their own climate impact, with a goal of increasing awareness about the urgency of climate action and inspiring nearby students to get involved.
“Once people see that others are standing up for [something], then they have the courage to stand up as well,” she said.
Xin Fang, another club member, said she’d first started caring about climate change and environmental protection in junior high school when she had some free time after a big round of exams. She remembered consuming more and more media about the crisis and getting increasingly anxious about the future.
Xin Fang said she thinks most of her peers know that the climate crisis is a serious problem, but that when it comes to their daily lives, they don’t feel compelled to action.
Partnering with Green 24 for today’s action was the NCCU Lu Ren Jia Club, an LGBTQ rights and gender equality advocacy organization. Leon, a sophomore from Macau and the club’s leader, said one of the club’s goals is to reform the on-campus atmosphere around gender and sexual identity to build a more open community. He said that since both student organizations were focused on sustainable development and human rights, it made sense to partner up.
“If we want to promote gender equality, we need to work together with other [like-minded] organizations,” he said. “Only then can we strengthen our capacity.”
Leon was one of the few students who actually did strike today. He said he went to one of his classes – which had to do with global LGBT rights issues — and skipped the rest to participate in the action.
“I’m the leader [of the club], so I absolutely have to stand up,” he said, explaining why he made the decision to prioritize the action over classes. “If I don’t, there really wouldn’t be any people here.”
The students organizing the action were energetic and in high spirits — laughing, exchanging signs, and happily greeting friends who passed by — but they did also express frustration with the relative lack of interest from their peers.
When I asked sophomores Ruby and Jun Xuan (郡宣）how they thought their classmates felt about climate change, they both laughed.
“My view is just that [the other students] don’t have any feelings [about it],” Ruby said while Jun Xuan voiced her agreement. “When you talk to them, they’ll say, ‘oh, I know, I know,’ but they won’t really think they have to do anything or that this issue is really important and urgent.”
Jun Xuan added that one of the club’s main goals now is to get other students to feel more invested in the crisis, but that they haven’t quite figured out how to spread their passion.
It’s a feeling that anyone who’s ever campaigned for anything can relate to. Most students walking by paused only briefly to read the organizers’ signs. Meanwhile, behind us, the career fair was still packed with students.
“Changing other people’s ways of thinking is really difficult,” Jun Xuan said.
Still, some people did hear their call to action. Ronald van Velzen, a masters student from the Netherlands, isn’t a member of Green 24 but heard about the strike and was inspired to join in.
“For me, it’s the first time I really strike,” he said. “When you care about this topic…you read about it and you see so many things that you feel like you want to change but you can’t really do anything. [When you strike] you have the feeling you are doing something.”
He paused, then continued.
“I would say it is the least I can do.”
