Anderson+Describing+Places


 * Power Shift 2011 **

It was way too early in the morning when we had to leave the house we were staying at. Power Shift is in a huge room in the convention center. It reminds me of the convention center the Indy gymnastics meet was in. And this isn’t even everyone! There were several groups in each of the different large rooms. The keynote address by Bill McKibben the night before had been in an even bigger room, with even more people. It was amazing and awe-inspiring to be in a place so huge. It showed us how many students were in the environmental movement.



The floor is concrete. There are no windows. We get a bit tired; there were lots of yawns. The Power Shift organizers tried to keep us awake by having us pretend to be an animal and find someone else that was the same animal. JH and I decided we were sea urchins, so we didn’t have to move. The chairs were a bit hard. It was also almost impossible to find food, or at any rate healthful food, anywhere near the convention center. It was, in a way, in a food desert.



There were breakout groups as well as the large sessions. We sat around on the hard concrete floor, discussing our ideas for The Green Initiative Fund, the big sustainability project we of the RPI delegation were pushing for. AC and I took pictures of the group; I also took video. One of the Power Shift organizers came to help us with our project; it was quite awkward, seeing as we had decided to discuss TGIF rather than the hypothetical project each college group was supposed to be discussing.



Outdoors in DC was beautiful. It was April, after all. We decided to skip the Sunday afternoon sessions and walked around DC—we got to see the Constitution! A place like this, historic and meaningful, was a good setting for “shifting the power”. We ate lunch and joked about how "even the bag has a story". Stories formed an important part of Power Shift; each speaker talked about his or her personal story. One brief session had asked us to come up with and share a story.