The Millennials: Green without the Garden?

Abstract

College freshmen at Emory University made a music video to launch their group “MillennialBeacon” in January of 2009 and posted it on YouTube. In their video, Coldplay’s haunting hit “Lost” accompanies images evoking genocide in Sudan, a picture of the earth’s curve as the sun comes over the edge, smoke coming out of a hole in one of the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11, the mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb, the London bus bombing, a street sign named “Recession,” a Palestinian child holding a sign “T error is our common enemy,” windmills, solar panels, and people demonstrating in the streets.¹ The song “Lost” by Coldplay, the breakout British music group of the new millennium, is a perfect choice for these young people to have used in their challenging video; they are members of the Millennial Generation, those who have come into adulthood in the new millennium. They are wired, they think in images, and they are not naïve about the problems faced by their generation.