Rowan’s Environmental Action League (REAL) hosted Green Party congressional candidate Robin Brownfield as part of their regular meeting.
Brownfield, a Collingswood native, previously worked as an organizer for the United Farm Workers, and now works as an adjunct professor of sociology and labor studies at multiple universities. Now, she’s running for Congress in New Jersey’s first district, the congressional district that includes Glassboro, as the candidate for the Green party.
In her speech, Brownfield argued that disregard for the environment in American politics, industry, and foreign policy has all-around negative effects on the people, with disproportionately negative effects on poor Americans and other marginalized groups in American society.
“We call ourselves Eco-Socialists, we have the ecology as a primary issue,” said Brownfield. “We also have to keep in mind that it’s connected to people’s ability to survive, their well-being; the issues are, and can be, connected.”
The Green Party, while not nearly as well-known as the Democratic and Republican parties, has been actively promoting its own brand of environmental-focused politics for decades, all while providing a potential alternative to the two-party binary many Americans deride nowadays. Advocating for broadly left-leaning tenets such as labor rights, social justice, and of course, environmentally friendly practices in the public and private sectors, the Green Party seeks to gain increased popularity as climate change grows as an issue in the public consciousness.
Brownfield was hosted by REAL, a student group dedicated to promoting environmental awareness and activism on campus.
“The purpose of REAL is to make environmental issues accessible to people,” said Secretary Raven Vijayakumar. “There are a lot of environmental majors, but we actively encourage people from other majors to join and participate.”
“It’s the Environmental Action League, so we do some action, but education’s also a big part. We do things like clean-ups, we have a community garden, we do a lot of activities,” said Vice President Kyle Mains. “It’s a kind of blending of the education, but also the action from the student perspective.”
League members echoed Mains’ description of the league’s activities, stating how the various activities organized by REAL helped them get involved with environmentalism. Among these activities, the maintenance and use of a community garden, located on campus behind Magnolia Hall, stood out as a highlight.
“We basically just grow plants there every year,” said community garden chair Amity Wren-Briggs. “Right now, we’re working on some maintenance – there’s two beds that have deteriorated a fair bit, and now we’re just fixing it.”
While the league did host Brownfield, the club expressed that they themselves were not affiliated with any one political party, and were open to any students interested in environmentalism, regardless of their political affiliation.
“As a club, we’re not political. We as a club focus on a small-scale individual impact,” said Mains. “We want it to be accessible, we don’t want to make it exclusive to any group, it should be open to everyone.”
REAL encourages any and all students interested in, or concerned about the environment to come out to their meetings, and to get involved in their activities.
“I get anxious about the climate a lot, but I think the best remedy is to actually act,” said Vijayakumar. “The small things can have the biggest immediate impacts in your life.”
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in the The Whit, a student-operated campus news outlet for Rowan University and a content partner with South Jersey Climate News.
