So I’ve made slow but steady progress today in my free time. If you take a look around my site now, you’ll see the colors have been fine-tuned, holes have been filled, my little “about me” blurb on the home page is finished, I’ve added a “Follow Me” area with my social media icons and links, I’ve added a blogroll beneath my tag cloud–you name it, I’ve had my hand in it today.

And as always, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve spent hours today fiddling and experimenting with various CSS/HTML combinations, taking much from the template and heavily modifying it to fit what I want.

I like my color scheme. I like how much I’ve learned. But also per usual, I’m already having second thoughts.

It’s not that I don’t like the theme. In fact, I love the theme. I’m just concerned that it doesn’t convey what I really want to convey in a blog–namely, simplicity. I find that as I get more and more into my design, it gets more and more cluttered and clunky. And because of this… I’m seriously considering scrapping most of this and starting afresh.

You have no idea how much it kills me to say that. Especially since, even as we write this, I’m still futilely tinkering away at the existing theme. But I can’t help but feel in the pit of stomach that, at the end of the day, I’m not going to be happy with the way this looks right now.

But once again, I’ve learned a lot. And with a little luck, some perseverance, and all the knowledge I’ve gained in the past couple days, hopefully next time this process will go much quicker.

WordPress Dashboard

It’s still a work in progress, but I’m making some serious headway, slowly but surely. As you can see, my blog is undergoing some major, major, changes right now.

First of all, you may have noticed some downtime. This is due to me completely switching platforms for my blog. Previously, I was using Squarespace and, to be honest, they just royally pissed me off. Sure, it’s pretty, but the absence of such basic features as autosaving drafts, e-mail alerts for comments, etc. just became to too frustrating to ignore. In addition, the interface is deceivingly irritating. At first it seems nice and smooth, pretty to look at, easy to navigate–but then, once you’re trying to balance several programs and a blog entry, the interface makes you want to scream after it locks up your browser (and then loses your writing, since it sure as hell didn’t autosave it for you).

Now, as you can see, I’ve switched to WordPress and I’m incredibly happy with it so far. Not only am I saving money this way (I’m spending $3.50 per month for hosting, versus $12+ per month for Squarespace), but it’s simply a more powerful system. For a long time I held off moving up to WordPress because, to be honest, I was pretty intimidated. The idea of having to get a hosting server, and managing FTP and doing in-depth HTML and all those other confusing acronyms… it was almost too much for me. But I’ve summoned up the courage to give it a shot, and boy has it been worth it already.

It was much easier than I’d imagined it would be. In fact, it’s almost hard to believe it was as easy as it was. Despite some minor snafus switching my domain name (which ended up not really being snafus–really, I just needed to wait longer for everything to switch over on the back end), everything ran super-smoothly and I was up and running in less than an hour. Now I’ve already gone through several themes, installed well over 25 plugins, and I’m experimenting, playing, customizing and learning more as I go along.

I think I’ve pretty much settled on this theme, and I think it will actually have some drastic effects on the way I pull content into my blog, and my philosophy on how I’m going to be writing over the next months and years. But more on that later. For now, just enjoy the prettiness (or chaos, depending on what stage I am of customizing the theme and features) and play around with the new features as I add them. Once it’s finished (hopefully very, very soon) I’ll put together a quick post detailing all the features of the new Web site and how I plan to use this site from now on.

That’s me. When it comes to blog posting, at least.

I apologize for the total lack of updates lately–it’s a busy life! Sunday I traveled safely back to the U.S., and I’m now back home in Kentucky for a little while. Unfortunately, I’m also a little sick.

I’m doing my best to balance some relaxation with some work, but it’s hard when there is so much to do! Because of that, I’m not going to finish my “series” on “What I’ll Miss”, because I can just easily tell you quickly now and be done with it. No sense looking back, anyway. The final four things I’ll miss from Denmark are:

4. Traveling (not exactly in Copenhagen, but facilitated by my location)
3. Biking
2. Climate Activism (this may very well have changed my life, we’ll see)
1. The People!

Anyway, I’ve got a lot to do over the next couple weeks. Not only do I have Christmas, New Years and traveling to do, but I’ve got the annual career center NYC site visit trip (more on that when it gets closer) and several applications, etc. to complete.

ALSO, I will soon be moving my blog to a different service, probably WordPress. Please bear with me as I make the transition, tweaking and adjusting along the way. Blog posts might also be a little more scarce in the next few weeks, but I’ll do my best to pick it back up at the beginning of the semester.

So just FYI, more later.

Once again, I’m not about to give you a play-by-play recap of tonight’s events on here. For that, you can read my twitter. But I will tell a little bit about what I’ve been doing for the past 24 hours or so, and my thoughts on what’s next for the movement.

Today was a ridiculous day, and a day I will–without a doubt–remember for the rest of my life. Not only did we have the DIS closing ceremony, which made me re-realize how much I’m going to miss all the wonderful friends I’ve made here, but I spent the entire afternoon and evening (until about 2am) in the tcktcktck Fresh Air Center volunteering, manning the door and tweeting my brains out as fast as I can for all the breaking info that came out of tonight.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Derailing.

There’s no doubt that our ideal train to a sustainable future has totally derailed. (And, in a more personal sense, so has my blog posting–I’ll be finishing up my “Things I’ll Miss” list on Sunday as I travel, most likely.) But this isn’t over.

After the announcement of the Copenhagen “Accord” by President Obama this evening, the room was, to put it mildly, absolutely furious. But we aren’t done yet.

This train may have derailed a bit tonight, but we will not give up. We are mad, we are unsatisfied, and more than anything we are disappointed in our leadership. But we aren’t about to throw in the towel.

In the past 24 hours I’ve been working alongside the most incredible people in the entire environmental movement. Bloggers, journalists, columnists, organizers–even the famous faces of our movement like Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben. I’ve been working with people blogging, writing, tweeting and representing organizations like tcktcktck, Oxfam and Greenpeace. I’ve learned from them, I’ve seen them do their magic, and I’ve even tried to jump in and play a role by tweeting, blogging, passing on information and taking care of a lot of the behind-the-scenes work at the Fresh Air Center, so they can keep this movement alive.

I saw it in the room tonight–people are pissed off and sick of cold, dreary Denmark already, but they’re ready to keep fighting and keep moving. These past few months have brought the environmental movement closer together and made it stronger and more resilient than ever before.

Mr. Obama, world leaders, those in opposition to our cause, I say this–be ready. Step it up. We’re changing this game.

If you won’t save the world by yourselves, we’ll push you until you have to. Every time you turn around, we’ll be demonstrating. We’ll be rallying. We’ll be shouting and screaming at you, holding vigils, fasting for weeks on end. We’ll be standing in the cold at all hours of the night, making you listen to us. This problem isn’t going away, and neither are we. It’s taken me a while to get involved in this movement. But I’m here now, I’m inspired, I’m motivated and I’m here to stay.

Tonight I attended an event at the tcktcktck Fresh Air Center here in Copenhagen (where I’m also volunteering, now) with a panel that included author and columnist Naomi Klein, New York Times reporter Andy Revkin, journalist for the Guardian UK George Monbiot, Huffington Post Green editor Katherine Goldstein, and even a short speech by Greenpeace Executive Director Kumi Naidoo.

It was epic, to say the absolute least.

Katherine Goldstein, George Monbiot and Naomi Klein (left to right) Speaking at the tcktcktck Fresh Air Center in Downtown CopenhagenI’m not going to give you the play-by-play rundown of the event because that’s what twitter is for (and even if you’re reading this late, just go back a few pages worth of my tweets and you’ll figure out when I was tweeting about the event). But I will say this–I learned a lot in just those few short hours I heard these amazing professionals and activists speak.

The first thing that really stuck out to me was one thing George Monbiot said about the movement. In all the press releases, all the documents, all the official U.N. materials, it’s always called “climate change”. Rarely is it even called global warming any more because sometime back it was decided by “they” that “global warming” was too incendiary of a phrase and made the movement seem alarmist. But really, there are no words to describe this problem we face.

It’s that simple. Like George Monbiot said tonight, describing this problem as “climate change” is like “calling a foreign invasion ‘unexpected visitors’”. It’s like calling “a bombing a ‘package delivery’”. It doesn’t quite cut to the heart of the issue. It doesn’t show you what the problem is.

George Monbiot came up with the best term I’ve heard for it yet, the “Climate Crash”. And I think that’s about as close as you can get to really describing it effectively. That’s what this is, it’s a climate crash, make no doubt about it. Unless we turn this ship around soon, we’re all sinking–not just those countries stuck close to sea level. If we don’t make some major changes, we’re going to see everything change–for the worse. Crashing weather patterns, crashing economies, crashing foreign relations, crashing human lives. That’s what this problem is.

Which brings me to the second thing that really stuck out in my mind during tonight’s event. Naomi Klein presented a pretty pessimistic view of the COP15, unfortunately, a view that’s probably also the most realistic. And despite the negative outlook she put out tonight, she did have one thing to say for the conference–this has changed the message.

No longer is the movement just about rising temperatures or rising sea levels. It’s not about changing weather patterns or changing to “green” lifestyles. It’s not about making green trendy or making climate activism cool.

This movement is about saving lives.

Klein gave us the quote of the night: “This is the moment when environmentalism became a social justice movement.” That’s what this movement is about now. It’s about human rights. It’s about looking at the way this climate crash is affecting humanity. George Monbiot put it in incredibly blunt terms (appropriate, if you ask me)–this is a “battle over humanity” he said, it’s a battle between “human decency” and “human selfishness.” “Human decency must be paramount,” he said, “Only one side can win… and it must be us.”

It must be us.