Changing the Climate on Campus

By Bryan Walsh

In the 1960s and early '70s, civil rights and the Vietnam War were the defining issues on college campuses. In the 1980s, it was apartheid. Today, that issue is climate change — or at least it will be, if Eban Goodstein has anything to do about it. An economics professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., Goodstein became convinced of the threat from climate change in the early 1990s. He started writing and speaking about it and eventually created the Green House Network in 1999 to train other global warming advocates — doing Al Gore's work before Gore was. But a couple of years ago, Goodstein came to realize that his response wasn't meeting the sheer scale of the climate change risk. "Americans don't really understand," he says. "They think global warming is scary, but they don't realize how short a window of time we have." The message needed to get bigger — and so Focus the Nation was born.

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