In his speech exhorting the environmentalist movement to embrace a platform of social justice, Ewuare Osayande, a poet, political activist, and author of 10 books, said “the number one thing you can do for the environment is beat Bush.” The remark drew the loudest applause of the night.

But his criticism extended beyond the White House.

Osayande criticized some environmental activists for turning a blind-eye to environmental racism.

He also drew a link between the industrialized nation’s disproportionate contribution to global warming and Western imperialism and colonialism.

“It is the children of the developing world who are most vulnerable to the global warming,” he said. “They don’t have the infrastructure to cope with it.”

He also called upon the environmentalist movement to radicalize and challenged them to reject tainted funding from corporations that might contribute to environmental destruction.

Another keynote speaker, David Orr, who chairs the Environmental Studies program at Oberlin, drew laughter and applause when he snuck into his slide-show a political cartoon of Vice President Cheney strumming a banjo against the backdrop of oil rigs, singing “this land is oiled land, this land is mined land.”

Orr accused the Bush administration of muddled thinking and pandering to polluting corporations, despite growing public support for sound environmental policy.

“The machinery that connects public values and public policy is broken,” he said. “We know what we are doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.”

Orr said as he mockingly followed a graph that demonstrated the correlation between energy consumption and global warming with a quote from President Bush that read “we need an energy bill that increases consumption.”

The rest of the talk was devoted to strategies for environmental activism. He called upon the collegiate community to fill in the “leadership vacuum” in the environmentalist movements as he related stories of how individual students had greatly furthered the cause.

He cited the example of an Oberlin graduate that established an environmentalist group in Ohio and a group of Oberlin students who bought out a city block to forestall the establishment of a Walmart.

Though he was clearly speaking to a predominantly anti-Bush audience, Orr reached out to conservatives in the audience.

“You can be a conservative,” he said. “But there has to be something to conserve.”