Reporter’s Notebook: Covering COY11

By Bethany Ao, GSS correspondent

PARIS — Last week, I had the privilege of covering the COY11 conference north of Paris as a contributor for Global Student Square.

The 11th Conference of Youth was a precursor to COP21, the climate change conference now underway in Paris. More than 5,000 students from every part of the world you can think of gathered at COY to discuss climate change, sustainable ways of living and how we can innovate for the future. I roomed with girls from Colombia and Sierra Leone, which was super-cool!

But I’m not going to lie — as a journalism assignment, covering COY was challenging.

Between having to juggle practical things (such as how to get to where I wanted to eat dinner without being able to speak French) and turning stories over in a matter of hours (and snapping photos and tweeting in between and trying to be in five different places at once), there wasn’t much time for me to think about anything else. Many of my hours were spent hunched over my laptop in a corner of the press room with multiple plates of vegan potato salad stacked up next to me, trying to transcribe my interviews as quickly as possible.

That was probably a good thing, because I did miss my family a lot on Thanksgiving. They did FaceTime me for a bit though, and I’m very grateful for that.

Despite — or maybe due to — all I had to do as a journalist, COY was so rewarding. I’ve never covered a live event on such a large scale before, so I learned a lot about just constantly being on my feet and aware of what’s going on around me, and how to make decisions about where to be at what time.

I struck up conversations with random strangers and heard such interesting stories in the process. I spoke with a dynamic artist whose passion for her work totally blew me away. I listened to a Peruvian activist from the forest talk about getting land rights for her tribe after her father was brutally murdered by illegal loggers.

While photographing a speech, I met one of my classmates from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. We had a great “What are you doing here?!” moment. I even had a bug literally plucked off my face by one of the headliners for this conference during our interview (definitely one of my shining moments).

The passion these young people have for the Earth is so encouraging. They’re excited about what they can do to save it, and it’s so easy to see that boundaries don’t register as a real thing for them. There is such a spirit of hope and innovation here, present in every conversation I have and every presentation I watch.

We all live here. It doesn’t matter whether you’re 15 or 55, or from Kenya or Canada. The problem is that we’ve done a lot of terrible things to our planet that we haven’t been great at fixing, and no matter where you’re from, there’s something, no matter how small it may seem, you can do to help.

Maybe it’s picking a piece of trash off the road. Maybe it’s starting your own NGO to provide people with sustainable energy. I can’t imagine that it’s easy for these young people to do what they do — for every step forward, it seems like we take five back. It must be frustrating to watch things like oil spills happen in real time. But they keep pushing forward, because they love living here and they love the organisms on this planet. I respect that more than I can put into words.

I came away from this weekend feeling confident in our future. As a fellow young person, it makes me so grateful to see tangible evidence that there are others out there who care about improving the quality of life for their communities. I hope to continue writing about how they’re trying to do their part to save our world — and helping them do it.

—Photo by Roger H. Goun at http://www.rogergoun.org/ and via Flickr.

Bethany Ao is GSS News Editor for Europe and a junior at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Email Bethany at bethanyao2017@u.northwestern.edu.