In the week before thanksgiving break, a group of Columbia University students went on hunger strike as members of Extinction Rebellion to draw attention to and protest their school's complicity with the fossil fuel industry. The bellow article comes from these students for Union Library Blog's readership as a guest post:
The week before Thanksgiving, four Columbia University students slept, met, and starved beneath the gaze of a portrait of Athena hanging in the main staircase of Butler Library (above). Athena—Greek goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law, justice, strategic warfare, mathematics, strength, strategy, the arts, crafts, and skill—guides those who follow her not only to understand the challenges they face, but to take action to solve them. The description hanging beside the portrait in the library describes the goddess as directing a group of figures struggling to determine “how they shall apply hand and brain and escape the chaos and suffering that could engulf them” as she holds “her shield in opposition to the spirits of malignant ignorance and greed.”
These four students, members of Extinction Rebellion (XR), camped out for five days on hunger strike to demand that the university take meaningful action on the climate emergency. At the same time, over 400 other XR rebels around the world conducted similar hunger strikes to foreshadow the mass starvation that will accompany the widespread crop failures and desertification caused by anthropogenic climate change —these changes and the suffering they come with have already begun.
The Columbia hunger strikers’ demands, still unmet, stem from the XR movement’s foundational demands:
1. TELL THE TRUTH: The university must declare a climate and ecological emergency, acknowledging that its current plan is a lie of omission, eliding the hundreds of thousands already dead and the weight of the crises to come.
2. ACT NOW: The university must plan to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions-including complete divestment from fossil fuels-by 2025.
3. FORM A COMMUNITY ASSEMBLY: The university must create an assembly of community members, modeled on Citizens’ Assemblies, in order to deliver a binding resolution on the university's path towards divestment and net-zero emissions.
4. ENACT A JUST TRANSITION: This assembly must include leaders from the surrounding communities and foreground the voices of frontline populations, in addition to representative numbers from all stakeholders within the University (staff, students, faculty, and administrators alike).
Columbia University presents itself as a leader in the fight to stave off the worst consequences of the climate emergency (read: the extinction of humanity.) When the hunger strikers met with representatives of the university administration, senior faculty touted the university’s publications on climate law, research into technologies like battery storage and carbon capture, plans to retrofit campus buildings, and even the possibility of establishing a school of climate change based on the recommendations of the 24-member Climate Change Task Force. Extinction Rebellion Columbia University celebrates these intellectual efforts. However, they also know that—given the dire consensus of the scientific community and the students’ dwindling possibilities of a livable future—these efforts are simply not good enough.
Under the portrait of Athena the strikers—all under the age of 25—conversed with hundreds of supportive Columbia community members each day. The portrait itself serves as an apt metaphor for this community’s struggle to reconcile what they teach and learn in classes about the science of the climate emergency, the necessity of inclusivity, and the history of social change with Columbia’s notorious history as a bad neighbor and unwillingness to divest the ~$11 billion endowment from fossil fuels.
If Columbia truly wants to lead the fight against human extinction, it must--like Athena--hold a shield against this ignorance and greed and apply its hands in harmony with its brain. In other words: Columbia, as an institution, must practice what it preaches.
The hunger strikers, and Extinction Rebellion as a whole, understand that their demands seem challenging to meet. However, the climate crisis is—at its foundation—a crisis of values. These demands only seem unreasonable under the current dominant value system that holds profit over life, prioritizes the present over the future, and fails to recognize that we are all in the same sinking boat and inextricably dependent on one another. In fact, the overwhelming consensus of the students, staff, faculty, and visitors who stopped to talk with the strikers was that these demands are not only reasonable, but obvious, urgent, and morally imperative next steps.
Values survive through symbols, like the names of the eight dead white men carved into the stone face of Butler Library, and they can’t be redefined by simply tacking up a temporary banner (below) or re-arranging professorships into a school of climate change. If we are going to justly rebuild our values into something that allows for young people like the Columbia hunger strikers to live to the age of the administration officials they met with, we’re going to have to do some demolition first.
Facebook: Extinction Rebellion Columbia University
Instagram: @xrcolumbia
