Just a little over a year ago, a 15-year-old girl missed the first day of school to stand in front of the Swedish Parliament with a “School Strike for Climate Change” sign. Under her knitted beanie and with her long double braids coming down to her chest, Greta Thunberg stood still with her mouth firmly shut but her eyes beaming.
Thunberg stood outside the Parliament every day, including schooldays, for the next three weeks.
Whether her action struck onlookers as heroic or defiant, news about Thunberg went viral and inspired millions of teenagers from all over the world to join in her movement — Fridays For Future — a school walkout every Friday to protest climate inaction by adults.
Thunberg is in New York City now having sailed in a solar-powered boat from her home in Sweden — not fly, as that would go against her fight for climate justice — and gearing up for more action.
And countless teenagers from around the world are prepared to support her. They, too, are tired of climate inaction and stand ready to take the matter into their own hands.
“We are the younger generation. We are the ones who are going to be affected. And therefore, we demand justice,” Thunberg said in a video calling for every age group from every pocket of the globe to join in the Global Climate Strike on September 20 and 27 and fight against climate inaction by walking out of schools, workplaces and homes.
Thunberg will be speaking at the U.N. Youth Climate Summit on Saturday as well as the U.N. Climate Action Summit next week.
Teenagers are scared for the future
According to the 2018 report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, without any significant and systematic changes, the earth’s climate will become irreversible in just 11 years.
For most of today’s teenagers who will still be under 30 in 11 years, this is scary.
In a recent Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation (Post-KFF) poll, the first major survey of teenagers’ views since the explosion of the youth climate movement inspired by Thunberg last year, 57 percent of teenagers feel scared and 52 percent feel angry about climate change.
“It’s the greatest threat to life as we know it and humanity as we know it,” Madeline Graham, a 16-year-old from Maryland and organizer of a student protest for the upcoming climate strike, told The Washington Post.
“When you’re facing something like that, and you’re 16 years old, and your mom’s yelling at you, and you have classes, and, on top of that, everybody’s gonna die . . . it’s easy to let fear overtake you.”
On top of experts’ warnings about the near future, in the last few years, the world has seen some real impacts of climate change, such as historic death tolls and infrastructure damages from record-setting mega wildfires and hurricanes.
And many of our young activists first became involved in climate activism not because of what climate experts were saying on the news, but because of what happened so near to them.
According to the Post-KFF poll, 36 percent of teenagers’ views on climate change are based on their personal experiences and observations.
The Washington Post reported that Graham saw floods repeatedly deluging her grandmother’s home in Maryland and that Gabe Lopez, a 16-year-old activist from Everett, Washington, saw relatives, who fish for a living, suffer financially due to warming waters in the Pacific.
While empathy and demand for justice are some of the core ideas of the youth climate movement, teenagers are also simply and truthfully reacting to the obvious consequences of climate change already happening in their lives.
“People sometimes ask me if I’m an optimist or a pessimist. And then I say, ‘I’m a realist.’ If we do the changes required, then we will prevent this from happening and we will succeed,” said Thunberg in an interview with The Washington Post.
More than just the climate
According to a recent U.N. report, among 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations to create a more sustainable world, climate change mitigation is not only not on track to achieve by 2030 deadline, but even worse, moving backwards.
“Since climate change mitigation is one of four areas in which we are actually moving backwards in terms of SDGs’ targets, it is critical that we act now,” Eun Mee Kim, a co-author of the report from the Graduate School of International Studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, told The University Network (TUN).
“We note that in order to implement SDGs in an indivisible and integrated manner, we must think in terms of systems.”
Teenage activists realize this and are calling for more systematic changes within governments, businesses and schools.
During the upcoming climate strike, teenage and adult protesters participating in the Global Climate Strike will be demanding two systematic changes: to stop burning fossil fuels and to ensure a rapid energy revolution with equity, reparations and climate justice.
“I would say to all the big fossil fuel organizations, all the countries not acting to solve this crisis, can you please put aside your money and protect my future and protect future generations?” Jerome Foster II, an organizer of U.S. Youth Climate Strike from Washington, D.C, said in an interview with Time Magazine.
And teenagers are concerned about the harm to their future. While 39 percent of teenagers said it would hurt their future “a great deal,” 63 percent said it would hurt future generations, according to the Post-KFF poll.
Many young activists also believe that poorer people will be most seriously affected by climate change.
According to the Post-KFF poll, while 37 percent of teenagers said it would hurt the people in the United States “a great deal,” 47 percent said it would hurt poorer U.S. communities and 60 percent said it would hurt poorer developing countries.
But young climate activists are learning and starting to address those aspects as well, unlike the mainstream environmentalism that often overlooked equally important aspects of climate change, such as colonialism and racial inequality, according to Joe Curnow, an assistant professor of education at the University of Manitoba and a researcher at the RadLab, an activist research collaborative based at the university.
“Many youth activists learn about the ways that colonialism, capitalism, and racism shape the climate crisis, and they start working toward climate solutions that have the power to address the root causes of climate change, and address the ways black communities, indigenous communities, and communities of color are impacted by climate change first and worst,” Curnow told TUN.
“Climate justice approaches are much more common among young climate activists now than a decade ago— a real shift is underway.”
The time to act is now
While young activists are often fueled by fear and anger to fight for climate change, they are also motivated.
The Post-KFF poll showed that 54 percent of teenagers feel motivated about climate change and that roughly one in four have already participated in some form of political action, such as a walkout, a rally or writing to a public official, to express their views on climate change.
Just this past March, 1.6 million students in over 120 countries and more than 2,200 towns and cities participated in the International Youth Climate Strike to protest against climate inaction by adults.
“Students realize that we need the action now. They can’t wait until they’re in positions of power because by then, it’ll be too late for my generation.” Alexandria Villasenor, a 13-year-old co-founder of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike, said in an interview with Time Magazine.
Many of them do realize that individuals can also make a difference. The Post-KFF poll showed that 42 percent of teenagers said mitigating the effects of climate change will require major sacrifices from ordinary Americans.
The same report shows that despite their strong feelings about the issue, fewer than half said they’ve taken action to reduce their own carbon footprints.
However, at the same time, this can also be seen as one of the many consequences of the declining emphasis on climate change education in schools nationwide.
According to the Post-KFF poll, only 17 percent of teenagers said they have learned “a lot” about the causes of climate change, down from 22 percent in 2010. And only 14 percent of teenagers said they have learned “a lot” about ways to reduce the effects of climate change, down from 25 percent in 2010.
“It’s terrible. It’s hardly ever brought up at my school,” Sam Riley, a 17-year-old activist from Boston, told The Washington Post.
Generation of fighters
As a group that hasn’t reached voting age, teenagers all around the world are turning their sense of helplessness as a fuel to act and call on others to act against climate action. Just like any other generation, today’s young generation has its strong and weak points. But, one thing is clear. They are fighters and won’t be stopping any time soon.
“In the case of climate change, young people have so much at stake — our futures are on the line, and people in power have failed to address climate change for decades,” Curnow told TUN. “Young activists are reclaiming their power because they feel that they have to.”
And we need fighters on our corner to win the battle against climate change.
