They covered close to 1,000 miles in just 9 weeks, often wearing the same sunscreen-stained matching T-shirts. They rode 60 miles in 1 day in the hot summer sun, carrying all their belongings on their backs. They impacted towns across New England from southern Connecticut to northern Maine and many in between. They did it all on their bikes as part of an effort to make an environmental difference as Climate Summer participants.

Climate Summer, a selective summer program in its third year, is part of the Better Future Project, an organization which aims to build a future free from the burning of fossil fuels, according to the Climate Summer website.

With close to 80 applicants this year, Climate Summer chose 31 students for summer 2011 to bike New England in order to make an environmental change. Hoping to "help lay the groundwork for a social movement for climate change," according to Carrie Watkins '12, who is minoring in Environmental Studies and a member of Students for Environmental Action. Their mission was to raise environmental awareness in as many towns as possible without getting in any fossil-fuel powered vehicles over the 9 weeks.

Beginning together at a weeklong training camp in New Hampshire and then biking almost 90 miles to their second training site, the Climate Summer members spent their first 2 weeks learning about community organizing and climate change issues, as well as how to successfully promote their cause in the different communities they visited to make an impact over the summer. The bikers split into groups of four to six members, and each group took on a different region of New England to conquer, ranging from Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

With sleeping bags, a few outfits, laptops, and various other belongings on their bikes, each group rode from town to town in their assigned area and spent about a week in each place trying to promote their idea of a future without fossil fuels.

"The problem with climate change is huge, and the only solution that anyone can conceive of [is] to get our country onto clean energy," Watkins said.

"The way the program sees it is that the only way to create that kind of change, is if the people demand it and stand up and say we need this," she explained.

 "We were trying to get the communities that we were in to get themselves involved, to get people in communities to realize that they could be part of something bigger," Watkins said, who served as a team leader for her group.

First riding to New Bedford, Mass., Watkins and her team covered 100 miles in 2 days, a record distance for many who had never biked anything nearly that far. "I was not a biker at all before [this summer]. I had never gone more than 10 miles, and all of a sudden I was going 90 in 2 days. Most people never had," she said. In 1 day alone, the group rode 60 miles across Massachusetts from town to town.  

Leaving at 5 a.m. to avoid the heat, Lisa Purdy '14, a member of Students for Environmental Action, and her group of five women biked two trips over 100 miles during the summer, one from Holyoke to Chelsea and then from Chelsea to Falmouth. Over the 9 weeks, they outlined the state of Massachusetts, biking east to west and then down to the Cape and back up to Boston. In each town, the group stopped for nearly a week to talk to the community about climate change issues.

While the groups arrived in some towns welcomed by a full agenda for the week, they showed up in others not knowing anyone and needing to set everything up themselves. "The general theme was community organizing and building relationships in whatever way we could possibly help. So sometimes that meant just meeting with the mayor, … sometimes it was visiting a community garden or farm and talking to people about different [environmental issues]," Purdy said of their day-to-day activities in each town.

"Some of the towns were really amazing, and we got 40 people to show up to a meeting that usually had 10 people. … We saw people exchanging business cards, which was exactly what we were trying to do: connect people," Watkins said.

In Watkins' team alone, the group covered seven different towns across Massachusetts. They went from New Bedford, an economically depressed city, to Medford and Arlington, more "suburban Boston," as Watkins called them. They stopped in Westport Point on the water and also in Lawrence, where they encountered a language barrier with the largely Hispanic community while trying to promote their cause.

Despite the drastically different communities, the Climate Summer mission was always the same. "We were trying to tell them that this problem is bigger than one person. … It needs to be a community thing and then a national thing, and that's the only way to create any significant change," Watkins said.

While some of the people they met with were already environmentally active, the range of people varied from town to town. "We come in there with our bicycles looking like we should know what we're talking about and what we're doing, but it was humbling to just be learning all the time," Purdy said of the people she met that knew more than her.

"One problem that we faced is that a lot of people [say], ‘Well, I'm not an environmentalist.' We're trying to say, ‘You're people. You don't have to be an environmentalist, you just have to do something,'" Watkins said.

The Climate Summer members spent their nights in sleeping  bags on the floors of churches and ate on a small food stipend of $5 per person per day. Encountering generosity wherever they went, the group was welcomed into community homes everywhere for a chance to shower and do laundry. Hearing how far they biked and their tiny food budget, community members brought them meals, and one town even donated $100 worth of groceries to a team. In Westport Point, the community donated the money they collected in church to the Climate Summer group that was visiting.

"I've experienced that sort of open generosity from near strangers, … but I've never had that [with] someone who isn't really part of your community and doesn't really have any connection to you," Watkins said.

While it was sometimes hard to see immediate results with their work this summer, Watkins and Purdy are nevertheless confident that their work was the start of something bigger. "You make a connection, see business cards exchanged, you see 40 people at a meeting. You can quantify things like that, but a lot of it is just the feedback you get," Watkins said.  

The group exchanged contact information in communities throughout New England with the hope that the Climate Summer participants will continue the dialogue with the people they met throughout their summer.  Though this summer has just ended, there are already talks to plan a more extensive bike trip this year from the Gulf to the Exxon-Mobil headquarters in Texas "to make a statement and talk about transitioning from oil to investing in green energy," according to Purdy.

Until then, the two members of Students for Environmental Action plan to throw the momentum they've gained on Climate Summer into environmental activism on campus this semester.