The Ithacan

Accuracy • Independence • Integrity

On April 20th, Heather Doyle plead guilty to her actions at Dominion’s Cove Point LNG export terminal in Lusby, Maryland on Feb.

My participation in the Great March for Climate Action over the course of five months changed my thoughts and perceptions on a lot of things. One thing I didn’t expect it to change was my firmly held plans about motherhood.

One of the best things Ithaca College can do to fulfill its goal of benefiting others, in specific regards to communities and individuals affected by industry and climate change, is to remove all ties to fossil fuels. That includes divesting our endowment.

On Wednesday, March 18, my back-and-forth with Judge Berry finally came to a close. Along with 41 others, my case was dropped in the “interest of justice” — no jail, no fine, no trial and nothing held against me. Our team of devoted lawyers and the district attorney, Joe Fazzary, reached an agreement on this, one that is now being lauded as historical and potentially precedent-setting.

I found myself a nice piece of bus station floor and spread out my sleeping bag. I sat down and ate my fries quickly, hoping to catch a nap before my next bus. A man with his own basket of fries, smothered in cheese sauce, approached me.

“That’s a nice set up you got there, mind if I join you?”

It’s been over five months since the Climate March arrived in D.C. It’s been about two months since I came back to college, and I am still adjusting. Moments of restlessness hit me at least once a day. I never left the United States, and yet I seem to be experiencing something akin to culture shock.

Like the We Are Seneca Lake movement in New York, Lusby has also developed its own resistance, dubbed We Are Cove Point. To date, around 20 people have been arrested for various acts of civil disobedience, including blockading gates, trespassing onto active construction sites and locking down to construction equipment and doors.

While the powers of Reading and Schuyler County have realized that sending the We Are Seneca Lake protesters to jail is costly and only fuels our movement, many in my activist cohort believe that Judge Berry’s hesitance to sentence me runs deeper than that. They joke that he sees me as an incarnation of his own young granddaughter, who, according to Berry, refuses to speak to him when he sends people to jail.

College is extremely stressful. It leads us to binge eat junk food, drink spastic amounts of coffee, pull all-nighters and spend countless hours in front of computer screens without exercise. And many of us, myself included, feel our future careers hinge on the quality of our performance in these four years. Talk about pressure.

Just yesterday, about 1,400 workers from two more oil refineries — BP’s Whiting and Toledo, Ohio operations — joined the strike, now 11 refineries strong. The Climate March walked through both of these refineries. I imagine some of the very same workers we spoke to in Whiting are now risking their livelihood to demand better working conditions.

Can you imagine what would happen if our representatives sat down to vote on whether homosexuals are born with their sexuality or if they choose it? Or what if there was a vote deciding that, despite hard numbers clearly demonstrating women are paid less than men for the same work, this was not actually the case?

Tonight I have filled the hiking backpack I got for Christmas to the brim with all the supplies and equipment I will need for a five day, 53 mile journey from my home in Geneva to my second home in Ithaca. After I finish this blog post I will go to bed and try to get a full night’s rest, because tomorrow, for the first time in a while, I will be rising with the sun to walk.