by Nick Engelfried.
Early in the morning on September 20, 2019, a couple dozen young people arrived in New York City’s Foley Square to prepare for one of the largest outpourings of public support for action on climate change in history. At noon, hundreds of thousands of people would converge in the park for an opening rally and march to the United Nations Headquarters a little over three miles away. Millions were joining similar demonstrations in cities and towns around the globe. Foley Square would soon fill with tightly packed bodies, the hum of voices, and the carefully controlled chaos that accompanies such massive gatherings. But for now, for a little while, only the organizers were on the scene.
Before almost any large activist event comes a moment when the leaders wonder if their efforts were worth it, whether the hoped-for crowds will show up. But this time there was no need to fear. High school students throughout the city were planning class walkouts to join the rally and march. Activists young and old came from all over New York and beyond. When the first group of a hundred students showed up, march organizers got an intimation of how successful their recruitment efforts had been.
“From that point on, I knew it was going to get hectic,” high school sophomore Rachel Lee told me in an interview months later. “Soon there were enough of us to shut down the street.” When Lee introduced one of the rally speakers, the crowd extended farther into the distance than she could see.
Lee belonged to the New York City chapter of the youth-led climate group Zero Hour, a participant in the multi-organization consortium that planned the massive climate march. In early 2019, she and other local activists learned New York would host a special U.N. summit meant to spur more ambitious government commitments to cutting carbon emissions. The September 20 mobilizations in the city and elsewhere were timed to fall just a few days before that official event—but to many observers, the summit itself felt like a response to an unprecedented flood of student-led climate activism sweeping the globe.
It was in August the previous year that a Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg began skipping school to protest for climate action, sparking an international movement. That November, young people from the U.S. organization Sunrise Movement generated headlines by calling for a Green New Deal at a sit-in in the Congressional office of House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi. A football match between Yale and Harvard would soon be disrupted by students protesting the Ivy League schools’ investments in fossil fuels. And now, on September 20, 2019, activists around the world were kicking off eight days of strikes and other mobilizations that represented a culmination of momentum from more than a year of youth-led climate organizing.
“Strikes are happening almost everywhere you can think of,” Jamie Margolin, a prominent young activist from Seattle, told me in a phone conversation a few weeks before the 20th. “People are participating in literally every place in the world.”
I was interviewing Margolin for a story about the movement of school strikes for the climate for the online publication Waging Nonviolence. I had been writing about climate activism for years and spent more than a decade as a youth climate activist myself, so I was naturally interested in the recent upsurge of activity. However, my conversation with Margolin left me even more intrigued as to how this flood of youth-led action on behalf of the climate came to be. I learned that while the school strikes started in Sweden, their origins were intimately tied to developments in the United States—especially in Seattle, just a couple hours south of where I lived.
I was curious to see firsthand what Seattle’s local youth climate movement looked like now. So, on an unseasonably warm Friday later that fall, I took a bus to the city to find out.
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Seattle City Hall is an odd-shaped structure, built on a hillside in such a way that a patio which appears from the back to be on ground level actually looks down from above on the wide stone stairs leading to the front entrance. From this vantage point, I watched as a few dozen people began gathering on the steps below. There were children, young adults, and people of all ages up through retirees, but the group skewed young. School-age participants were missing class to be here. Some held hand-lettered signs with messages like “Business as usual is a death sentence” and “Fridays for Future.” I was looking at Seattle’s weekly climate strike.
Although this gathering wasn’t large, I knew just a couple months earlier some ten thousand people had rallied in nearby Cal Anderson Park for the September 20 day of climate mobilizations. The group who gathered in front of City Hall every Friday—a popular day for the school strikes sparked by Thunberg’s activism—therefore represented the tip of a much larger movement. I meandered down to the building’s front steps, hoping to learn what inspired some of the protesters to keep coming back week after week.
One of the first strikers I talked to was fourteen-year-old Zoe Schurman, a middle schooler with a shy expression and faint purple highlights in her hair. “The youth of today’s future is on the line,” she explained. “And adults aren’t just doing nothing—they’re actively continuing to burn fossil fuels and create further injustices. If older generations aren’t going to be responsible, then in times of crisis youth have to step up and be the adults.” It was inspiring to hear someone so young sum up the crisis their generation faces so clearly.
I also spoke with twelve-year-old Ian Price, the founder of Seattle’s school strike. “I’m here because decision-makers like those in this building need to act,” he told me, looking up at City Hall. Price first skipped school for the climate on Friday, December 14, 2018, making Seattle’s one of the longest-running climate strikes in the U.S. He was moved to act after watching a YouTube clip of Greta Thunberg speaking at a U.N. climate conference. Price told his mother, Heather, that he wanted to protest on Fridays, and on the 14th he stood in front of City Hall with a sign that read, “It’s Getting Hot: Climate Action Now.” Heather Price waited nearby, keeping an eye on Ian’s safety but otherwise not interfering.
Unbeknownst to him at the time, Price was one of a scattering of U.S. students who had watched Greta Thunberg’s speeches on social media and decided to take action, more or less simultaneously. On the same day as his first strike in Seattle, thirteen-year-old Alexandria Villaseñor sat outside the United Nations in New York with a sign that read “School Strike 4 Climate.” A week earlier, ten-year-old Zayne Cowie of Brooklyn began striking outside New York City Hall and fourteen-year-old Kallan Benson organized a climate-themed hopscotch game outside the U.S. Energy Department. Zane Kalmus-Kunde, age ten, and his older brother Braird started striking in Los Angeles around the same time.
“We kind of embraced the fact that we were youth trying to make a difference,” Zane Kalmus-Kunde told me in an interview for this book. “Greta is inspiring to me because even as a kid, she understands what climate change means for us and is acting more mature than a lot of politicians.” The strike movement grew, with some students skipping school every Friday and much larger numbers participating in occasional national or international days of action.
By early 2020, I was immersed in researching where the strike movement and other recent currents of youth-led climate activism had come from. At first my goal was to share what I learned in a series of articles for Waging Nonviolence. I spoke with high school climate strikers, college students campaigning for fossil fuel divestment, and young activists pushing a Green New Deal. The youth involved seemed to come from every race and culture, and spoke confidently about the intersections between climate disruption, racism, and other pressing social issues.
Slowly, I began to see how the movement that seemingly burst from nowhere in late 2018 had in fact built on over two decades of work by young people concerned about the climate. I was deeply familiar with some of those earlier efforts, having become a climate activist in my late teens in the ‘00s. Like many of the Generation Z members I was now interviewing, my own motivation as an activist stemmed from a deep sense of connection to a natural world increasingly under threat. I organized support for campus sustainability policies in college, then spent several years working to oppose large coal, oil, and gas projects in the Northwest. More recently I had turned away from fulltime activism to focus on my work as an environmental educator and writing about the efforts of others. Even so, I retained many connections in the climate organizing world.
I gradually came to see that to provide a full picture of how the modern youth climate movement came into existence, I needed far more space than was available in the short articles I was writing. This daunting task would require a whole book.
In May 2020, I spoke with Ian Price again. This was well into the first wave of COVID-19, so I connected with him and his mother over Zoom. As with most youth activists I talk to, little about Price’s appearance marked him as a likely movement leader. On the contrary, he seemed an ordinary adolescent with an unassuming demeanor and a tendency to fidget as he spoke. His hobbies are ordinary, too, for a young person in Washington State. He told me he enjoys skiing, and worries about the future of snow sports in a warming world. “The thought that when I’m older people won’t be able to experience skiing like I have is heartbreaking,” he said.
During the tumultuous year that was 2020, climate change sometimes seemed eclipsed in the public consciousness by a string of other crises. First came the pandemic, then a long-overdue national uprising against racial injustice, then a high-stakes presidential election. But while COVID made in-person rallies hard to organize for a while, the youth climate movement adapted as best it could. Some students, like Price, posted photos of themselves holding signs on social media every Friday. Others came up with creative ways to protest in small groups. In both the primaries and the general election, youth activists played a crucial role getting out the vote for progressive House and Senate candidates. All this occurred against a backdrop of unprecedented extreme weather events, which added urgency to climate activists’ demands.
In 2021 and 2022, with a new Congress and president in office, it was time to see if the youth movement could translate grassroots momentum into policy wins. Young activists took on this challenge—sometimes more successfully than in other cases, but always in the context of a national discourse about climate that had been irrevocably altered by the last few years. I was by then thoroughly absorbed in writing this book, and I found myself trying to answer three broad questions: Where did the major strands of climate activism that burst onto the scene in late 2018 come from, and how did they spread so quickly? What was the relationship between modern youth climate organizing, and the efforts of an earlier generation of activists? And what, from the vantage point of the early 2020s, has been the effect of all this organizing on both government policy and the larger public consciousness?
The book now in your hands is divided into three parts, each loosely organized around one of the guiding questions above. While I sometimes touch on developments in places like Canada or Sweden when they have direct bearing on events in the United States, I have confined my focus mainly to events in this country. A comprehensive look at the vibrant international youth climate movement is beyond the scope of this project.
My research has involved interviewing well over a hundred current and former young climate organizers, culling through countless old news articles and blog posts, and drawing on notes and memories from my own years as a climate activist. I hope the resultant book serves as a repository of valuable lessons from more than two decades of youth climate organizing, a source of inspiration for those doing this work today, and a glimpse into the world of climate activism that will be illuminating for readers new to it as well as those with extensive personal experience.
The people whose stories appear in these pages include Jamie Margolin, the Seattle high schooler who started Zero Hour and helped inspire Greta Thunberg; University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher, who shut down an oil and gas auction with a creative act of civil disobedience; Chiara D’Angelo, who spent sixty-three hours chained to an oil drilling support vessel; young Indigenous organizers who galvanized massive protests against the Dakota Access pipeline; and many, many others. Their accomplishments may sometimes seem larger than life—but while indeed impressive, in the end they are simply ordinary young people who chose to take extraordinary action on the defining crisis of their generation.
In doing so they have, arguably, acted more like adults than many so-called grownups.
(an excerpted Introduction from the book MOVEMENT MAKERS, by Nick Engelfried.)