The Faces of Young Protesters at New York City’s Climate Strike

By Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker
September 20, 2019

This article features students from The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria who participated in the Climate Strike.

In Stockholm, last year, a ninth-grade environmental activist started a school strike to call attention to the global climate crisis. On the steps of the Swedish parliament, initially alone, she protested the government’s complacency about the need to reduce carbon emissions. Each Friday afterward, she returned, and, quite quickly, other students joined her around the world, in a movement that became known as Fridays for Future. In the year since, that teen-ager, Greta Thunberg, now sixteen, has become the lodestar of a youth-led climate movement, likely the largest youth movement in global history. In the U.S., young activists are fighting for the Green New Deal and emphasizing an environmental-justice politics that prioritizes those who are already being displaced by climate change. The threat is existential, from their vantage, and the rhetoric is no-nonsense. (“I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the scientists,” Thunberg told Congress, in a special address on Wednesday.) If governments, run by adults, don’t act in the interest of the earth, then the future of the young is in peril.

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