Michael Noble, Minnesotans for an Energy-Efficient Economy

Michael Noble is the executive director of Minnesotans for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a Minnesota coalition that works to improve the environment and the economy through increased efficiency in energy and land use, and increased reliance on home-grown renewable energy. The coalition partners conduct a coordinated program of research, public education campaigns, and citizen involvement in public decisions.

Today we made some final strides toward the launch of a little organizing project that we dreamed up for Earth Day. We want to reach out to young people in rural communities in Minnesota. Environmental groups often make the same mistake over and over again, and defeat their efforts to build a diverse base. They rely on urban elites to make up their membership, and then they wonder why young people, farmers, and regular folks feel ignored.

ME3 decided that for Earth Day 2000 we were going to make a concerted effort to find new voices, including young people and rural people to lend their strength to our effort. We have built a strong coalition with rural economic development officials and local governments and farmers, but we could still broaden our base of support.

We decided to use an Earth Day 2000 PostCard as a clever way to get more people involved. The stunningly beautiful wind farm at right is a real-life snapshot of our vision for a clean energy future, so why not share that vision with others? Over the next month, we hope to get 10,000 citizens to sign up to send free Earth Day 2000 PostCards with a similar image. We'll send the cards out on Earth Day with a photo taken that morning at sunrise by a professional photographer at the Buffalo Ridge wind farms (no buffalo, just wind turbines and family farms). People can combine a personalized message on the postcard with a request that if the recipient does just one thing this Earth Day, they should sign up to get news and action alerts from us. We have a contract with a web firm in St. Paul that's handling the design, database, and web marketing for this project.

Using a team of 40 volunteers from 40 campuses, we put up Earth Day Network posters with a tag line inviting people to a special ME3 Earth Day website. On the site, we invite them to send a PostCard to friends or relatives, especially those in small Minnesota towns and suburbs -- but we'll send the cards to anyone, of course. We will also market this PostCard campaign in news stories, radio interviews, chat rooms, and banners on rural Internet service providers.

We have realized over the years that it is not an information gap that slows down clean energy; it is a willingness gap. We hope that thousands of people across Minnesota will get the message about Clean Energy Now! and sign up at our website for regular action alerts to protect our air, our water, and our climate against pollution from fossil fuels. We want to make politicians feel the heat so they will see the light. Groups like Desktop Publishing in Montana have shown us that building a bigger and better database that can quickly get out information is one way to get broader, deeper, and more responsive citizen support.

We know it will take a lot more than 10,000 or even 100,000 Earth Day 2000 PostCards from ME3 friends to change the world. But it's not a bad start.

Giving credit where its due, Greenpeace gave me this idea (thank you) when they sent me a notice on December 23 for a postcard with a photo of the first light of the new millennium.