On Wednesday, Feb. 27, University of Massachusetts Amherst alumnus, activist and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, Varshini Prakash spoke to a crowd of over 60 people on climate activism’s past, present and future.
“I’m very grateful to be here back on this campus. This is my 10-year reunion since I graduated from UMass,” Prakash said.
Prakash began her talk by discussing her story, “growing up as a brown girl with curly hair in America,” right outside of Boston with two immigrant parents. She shared that she was already aware of and committed to climate issues in her early years, recalling turning off all the lights in her home and pushing her friends to recycle as acts of resistance.
“I was so angry about all this, and I was so angry about the way in which my home and our collective home, was being destroyed, and I didn’t really know what to do about it, but I was pissed off,” Prakash said.
While at UMass she was an environmental science and political science major. “When I got to campus at UMass, I was determined to do something different,” Prakash said.
Combining political and environmental science within her studies allowed Prakash to fully understand the work she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it. While at UMass, she took a grassroots organizing class and took a bus with 60 other students to protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline in 2013. Amidst the crowd, she “discovered the power and the transformation that is possible within social movements, within organizing, and [she] came back to campus with a mission.”
Prakash was deeply involved with the UMass Divest campaign during her time at UMass. The campaign spanned several years and aimed to get UMass to divest from fossil fuel companies. Students across the campus mobilized in sit-ins, protests and petitions to force change at UMass.
The UMass divestment campaign became Prakash’s life on campus.
“[UMass Divest] was a sustained campaign over several semesters, several years, that requires significant leadership development, training of new people, collective action, not just on this campus, but with actually dozens and hundreds of schools all across the nation as well,” Prakash said.
In 2016, UMass declared it was divesting from direct fossil fuel companies after a unanimous Board of Directors vote.
After her time at UMass, Prakash worked with climate activists across the country and within government. In 2017, Prakash and her colleagues founded the Sunrise Movement out of a simple vision, to make a climate movement “rooted in economic and racial justice” that would push climate issues to the forefront.
“[Sunrise] grew over time, and so we did training in dozens of different cities, and we had actions that were attempting to call out the way in which our politicians were taking money from fossil fuel PACs and CEOs, and the way in which our political system was really becoming captured and controlled by the fossil fuel industry,” Prakash said.
The Sunrise movement brought climate issues to the forefront and pushed the Green New Deal (GND), “a policy framework that was attempting to secure a vision of climate action that was rooted in the creation of millions of good, high-paying jobs and in building racial equity to ensure that we didn’t just deepen the existing societal inequalities that exist today,” Prakash explained.
The UMass chapter of the Sunrise Movement is working to pursue a GND at UMass and ensure the campus continues its push towards being carbon zero.
In 2018, former Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy and his Chancellor’s Sustainability Advisory Committee (CSAC) created the Carbon Mitigation Task Force, aimed at assessing the possibility of a carbon-neutral future. In April of 2022, UMass committed to being carbon zero by 2032.
“Our focus this year is to make sure that UMass makes meaningful climate action,” said Angel Silverio, environmental and natural resource economics major and organizing member in the UMass Sunrise chapter. “Ensuring that they recommit to their carbon zero by 2032 and building a better university for workers, students and the communities around us prioritizing its folks other than the fossil fuel and monetary interest,” Silverio said.
“I believe this train has left the station; like we are not ever going to go fully back to where we were at the beginning,” Prakash said.
She pointed out several accomplishments the Sunrise Movement and the mobilization of young climate activists have made over the last couple of years, as well as discussing her time on the Bernie/Biden Unity Task Force, pushing climate issues.
She mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), although being initially cut down by billions of dollars, the act is “a $400 billion massive investment in renewable energy, in a lot of significant environmental justice programs and labor provisions that would never have been won if the movement did not call for any fight for right. So that was huge.”
“I don’t think that we could have succeeded as far as we did in the United States without that global youth movement,” she said.
IRA funding is now being questioned and frozen by the Trump Administration, aiming to revert government initiatives towards the fossil fuel industry.
“We’re seeing with this, you know, current administration is attempting to ramp up fossil fuels at the exact time when we should be ramping down and but also an economy where renewable energy is cheap and abundant and is rapidly, rapidly growing,” Prakash said.
She also assured the work accomplished over the past decade was not in vain, and “we need a lifelong commitment from each of us to do this work” to bring about even more positive change, saying, “We need spirit.”
After Prakash wrapped up her talk, there was an open Q&A. Becca Smith, a master’s sustainability science student at UMass, asked Prakash how she remains hopeful in uncertain times.
“I really believe that hope is chosen. It is chosen, and it is forged in action and in community,” Prakash said. “And I think in this moment, we actually can’t really afford blind optimism or abject pessimism, but that through community you can find hope and a path to a better future.”
Peyton Ewan, a senior environmental science major joined Sunrise during her freshman year. She relates to Prakash and was greatly inspired by her talk. She has attended a couple of climate justice-focused events at UMass but says this one has her “so pumped to do more” activism at UMass and beyond.
Julia Rodrigues, a freshman environmental science major attended the event to learn more about climate activism: “I think the hope and power that [Prakash] found through [her own activism], it was very inspiring.”
Camila Ortega, a freshman legal studies and public policy major also found Prakash’s story inspiring and learned that it’s important in activism to have “a lot of resilience although it can be hard to have.”
Ortega and Rodrigues both expressed interest in the Sunrise Movement and found Prakash’s talk as a call to action to get involved and use their studies at UMass to promote future change.
“Young people matter, and their participation is incredibly vital to the success of any social movement,” Prakash said.
Virginia Sanzo can be reached at [email protected]. Alexandra Hill can be reached at [email protected].
