Oxfam America Blog

Moey Newbold at the Copenhagen talks.

You’ve probably read about the giant, many-thousand-person march this weekend at the Copenhagen climate talks. One of those in the crowd was Moey Newbold, an Oxfam America CHANGE Leader and University of Oregon student who raised her own funds to attend the conference.

“I believe my generation has the unique opportunity to save the world. If no action is taken, the world will see catastrophic climate change within the next half century, the cost of which will be measured in human lives,” Newbold writes on her blog. “But at this pivotal moment, we have a window of opportunity. We can create the just, sustainable and prosperous future that we seek.”

Here’s her take on Saturday’s massive and colorful demonstration:

We began to walk with the march.  The crowd went on for days (or, rather ~4 miles I am told), and the general attitude was one of collective joy and determination.

My group was kind of moving through the crowd because we were trying to find the ‘youth’ section,’ so we saw the variety of the people involved.  There were people with communist flags, a party bus that was blaring techno music and shooting gold confetti, about 20 humans dressed as panda bears, a campfire on wheels (this was great because it was freezing out!), a group of people wearing green construction hats who every few minutes would stop then run forward, a life-sized marionette with people acting out the roles of world leaders being played by big business, several sails, an ark, and so much more. It was very easy to get separated from each other, and once we were separated, it was very hard to find each other again, but the instructions for how to meet were something like “meet me by the giant purple balloon next to the pandas with flames on their heads and after the dragon.”

You can keep up with her adventures here.

University of Kansas students Zach Bealer and Christina Henning show off their (temporary!) Oxfam tattoos at a Kansas City climate change event. Photo: Liliana Rodriguez / Oxfam America

I went to college in the late 1990s, at the tail end of the decade of the slacker. Back then, you might have seen a few activists here and there on campus, but mostly we cultivated an aura of general apathy right down to the laces of our Doc Martens. It was okay to care vaguely about stuff like women’s rights or the environment, but it wasn’t necessarily cool to show too much enthusiasm. If you wanted to make a statement, you might scrawl something enigmatic on your t-shirt with magic marker, dye your hair pink, and leave it at that.
At risk of showing my age, I’ll just go ahead and say it: things have changed.

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