REVOLUTION NOW! Our Youth On The Move!

Everyone asks where the youth are in this revolution. They're here...they're on the move...and they're making a big difference. Tonight we present to you, Ms. Geneva Boyer, and you'll see what we're talking about.

I'm Geneva. I'm a student at BrandeisUniversityand an MA native. I've been in the climate movement since I was nine, and been involved with many different organizations. Up until mid-highschool, I was a major theatre kid, reveling in everything from wearing stilts as a cross-dressing cross-dressing goddess to singing operatic love songs as a scientist in love with her atom. I've also always enjoyed writing, and recently began writing poetry again--prompted by a parasite I got in the woods. It needed an ode. I love being able combine these three passions by writing and performing environmental and social justice themed poetry.

I am particularly excited about this pursuit because as Bill McKibben put it, "We need to fight with art and with music, too. Not just the side with our brain that likes bar graphs and pie graphs, but with all our heart and all our soul," because if facts and figures changed people's opinions, we would have won years ago. Instead, people are governed by emotion, which is better influenced through art than science.

Or as John Stewart said to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson when he interviewed her "Now is this scientific evidence because I find those types of facts are very unpersuasive." Jacksonresponded, "What would persuade you?"
"A feeling."

I use poetry to combine facts and emotion, thereby charging an issue many already feel passionately about and prompting action, or alternately reaching people who tune out dry facts.