by Naomi Klein
Twenty-one other states have adopted a different framework for teaching science from kindergarten through high school that also requires that schools teach climate change. You should be able to see your state’s science standards on the state’s official website or the website of the state education department.
If climate studies aren’t taught at your school, or if you think more education on the subject is needed, find out who decides about your school’s curriculum. In some cases, it is up to individual science teachers to decide how much climate science to teach, and how to teach it. In other cases, the school board of your school district, or your educational board, might make those decisions.
Once you know where the decisions are made, you could write a letter asking for more instruction on the climate, or start a petition for your fellow students to sign. You can also see if you can go to a Parent-Teacher Association or school board meeting to share your thoughts in person.
You’ll find it helpful, whichever route you choose, to have a clear and specific statement of your goal. Be ready to explain what you are asking for, and why. You may find that other students—and their parents—want the same thing you want.
Also ask yourself, does your class or school ever have guest speakers? Ask your teacher or principal to look for speakers who can come to give presentations on environmental issues and climate change. What about field trips? If your school has such outings, do a little research on places you could suggest. Maybe there is a model solar-powered home in your area that gives demonstrations, or a wind-energy farm, or a science museum with an exhibit on climate change.
You can also focus your own schoolwork on climate change. If you are going to write a book report or create a science project, consider looking for a way to make it about climate change. It could be about the dangers, but it could also be about interesting solutions.
For shared projects, see if any of your classmates are willing to explore a topic that touches on climate change. Working on homework could spark conversations about climate change with your parents or friends. They may even help you find more research or ways to get involved.
MANY WAYS TO PROTEST
You’ve seen a lot of examples of climate protests in this book. For some people, protesting means joining a large, planned public march or gathering, such as a nationwide March for Science or Climate Strike. These events often bring together members of many organizations and movements. They also welcome individuals who don’t identify with a particular group but want to stand up with those demanding action against pollution.
In big cities, these events can be huge. On the day of the Global Climate Strike in September 2019, a hundred thousand people marched in New York. Half a million marched in Montreal. But marches and demonstrations also took place in small towns and in the countryside. That same day, a group of nine researchers at a base in Antarctica stood in the snow, holding protest signs, to cheer and show support for the climate strikers worldwide.
In small communities, two dozen people marching down Main Street for the climate can be a big turnout. Their passion and concern are real, and it might take more bravery to march in a small group than in a large mass. After all, this problem is for all of us to solve, not just for the crowds that make news.
If a climate strike is scheduled for a school day and you want to take part, talk to your parents and teachers. Some schools now give all their students permission to be absent on those days. Some kids even go to marches or protest gatherings with their classmates and teachers. See if a teacher will make the protest march a school assignment—you could offer to write a paper about why climate activism matters to you, or a report after the march for your class or your school newspaper.
But marching in the streets is not the only kind of protest. Other methods have also brought about change. One is making a statement by refusing to spend money on something.
People have boycotted products made by companies that are especially notorious polluters, or the banks that provide loans to them. People have also boycotted television shows that run ads from fossil-fuel companies. Boycotts become powerful when they spread through social media or letter-writing campaigns, so that thousands of people are telling a company or a network, “If you want our business, change your ways.”
Pocketbook power works. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, boycotts by consumers have a bigger effect on corporations than most people realize. About a quarter of the boycotts that receive national attention succeed in changing corporations’ practices. For example, because of pressure from the public for more humane treatment of orcas, SeaWorld agreed to stop breeding these sea mammals in captivity. Boycotts and social media campaigns also led the company that owns Zara clothing stores to stop selling fur in a thousand locations.
Similar pressure can be put on the banks, insurance companies, and private investors that loan money to new fossil-fuel projects such as pipelines and fracking. With rallying cries such as #StopTheMoneyPipeline, activists are calling for these lenders to divest—withdraw their investments—from projects that harm the environment or make climate change worse, as we saw with Standing Rock. Banks and other lenders do not like to lose customers, so when activists say they will no longer do business with lenders who invest in fossil-fuel projects, the consequences are felt.
Divestment campaigns have made stock in fossil-fuel companies less attractive to many lenders and investors. Every big institution—like a university, a church, a foundation, or a city government—holds its money in some kind of fund or endowment. That money is then invested in stocks and bonds. It used to be that every major fund held investments in fossil-fuel companies. But thanks to the youth-led fossil-fuel-divestment movement, loosely coordinated by 350.org, funds totaling roughly $11 trillion have committed to eliminating their investments in fossil-fuel companies. And many of these funds have committed to investing in climate solutions instead.
You may not be a big investor with stock to divest from, but as a consumer you can still make a statement. You could stop buying food and beverages from stores that won’t replace plastic straws and bags with recyclable paper ones. You could choose to eat a plant-based diet, because animal agriculture is a major contributor to climate change. You can buy books from local bookstores you can walk, bike, or bus to, or get books from your library, instead of ordering them from a faraway company that will burn energy shipping them to you.
And when you decide to join a protest march or demonstration, bring water in a reusable bottle. Individual acts of protest against waste and consumerism matter too. They matter even more if you can convince your whole school, or even your school board, to change what it buys and how it handles waste. If you’ve been reading about some of the young climate activists profiled in this book, you know that some of them successfully carried out campaigns to make their schools more green. See if you can convince your school to install solar panels on the roof, or start composting food waste. You may not be able to march in the nation’s capital or even a state capital, but you’re in school—so turn it into your arena for battling climate change.
Striking in the Global South
Before she graduated from high school, Vanessa Nakate became the first Fridays for Future climate striker in the African nation of Uganda. Her activism against climate change was spurred by concern for Uganda’s people.
“I wanted to do something that would cause change to the lives of the people in my community and my country,” Nakate says. “My country heavily depends on agriculture, therefore most of the people depend on agriculture. If our farms are destroyed by floods, if the farms are destroyed by droughts and crop production is less, that means that the price of food is going to go high. So it will only be the most privileged who will be able to buy food.”
Vanessa Nakate organized the first Fridays for Future climate strike in Uganda.
As she researched ways to bring public attention to the problem, Nakate learned about the Fridays for Fu
ture climate strikes. Nakate decided to start by organizing four strikes. People did not know what to make of them. But Nakate learned a lesson that many activists have learned: that you can keep standing up for what you know is right, even if others mock or criticize you.
“Well, people found it very weird that I was on the streets,” Nakate says. “And some of them threw some negative comments, like I was wasting my time, and the government will not listen to anything that I have to say. But I just kept going.”
She kept going all the way to Madrid, Spain, where she joined climate protesters from around the world at a United Nations climate summit in 2019.
Nakate has been disappointed with the way the media covers climate change. She says, “They keep talking about climate change being a matter of the future, but they forget that [for] people of the Global South, it is a matter of now. And they have to help us report these things, because if they don’t report these things, our leaders won’t understand the importance of these strikes that we are holding.”
Media, including social media, is essential to any movement today. For activists, this means two things. First, let your activism be based on good information from reliable sources. If you share incomplete or wrong information, it can end up hurting the cause you are trying to help. Second, if you agree with Nakate that important aspects of climate change are not being covered in the media you follow, you can write to newspapers, news networks, and other information sources to ask for broader coverage. Better yet, send a letter or petition signed by as many people as possible.
EXPLORE YOUR ENVIRONMENT
For some people, the path to activism is a hiking trail. Or a walk in a park, or a swim in a lake. Getting close to nature can lead to environmental activism.
Just spending time in nature is a form of activism. It says that the natural world matters, and that you care about it.
A small seed of environmental activism may grow into something big. Felix Finkbeiner was a fourth grader in Germany when he had to write a school paper on climate change. At first, he planned to write about saving his favorite animal. Then, as he says, “I realized it’s not really about the polar bear, it’s about saving humans.”
While researching his paper, Finkbeiner read about African tree-planting activist Wangari Maathai. (See chapter 3 for more about Maathai.) He wrote the paper about what tree-planting can do to help the environment and fight climate change. When he presented it to his class, he ended it with a dramatic challenge: Germans should plant one million new trees in their country. A couple of months later, he planted his first tree. It was a small crab apple tree that his mother had bought for him to plant near the school. He later joked that if he had known how much attention it would get, he would have asked her for a more impressive tree.
News media and social media spread the word about the schoolkid who had made a stirring call for more trees. Finkbeiner’s crusade received so much attention that, four years later, the United Nations invited him to New York to give a talk about tree-planting. By that time, Germany had planted its millionth tree.
Felix Finkbeiner of Germany leads a mission to plant a trillion trees.
Finkbeiner went on to start a nonprofit group called Plant-for-the-Planet. Its goal is a trillion new trees on Earth. The youth-focused group leads one-day workshops for children around the world. Kids learn how to plant trees and how to start their own tree-planting campaigns. As he has said, planting trees is something that kids can do to fight climate change now, without waiting for adults to solve the problem.
You don’t have to make a speech at the United Nations or start an organization to share the benefits of planting trees. Remember, Finkbeiner’s project started with just one tree. Look for parks in your area that are having tree-planting days and see if you can volunteer. Find out if an environmental organization, such as the Audubon Society or the Sierra Club, has a chapter close to you that is running a tree-planting project. Suggest a young people’s tree-planting project for your school, camp, club, or religious organization.
Any tree-planting project, whether it’s one new tree in your yard or a forest being restored, needs two things to succeed. First, the trees that are planted have to be the right ones for the location. They should be species that are native to the area, so that they can thrive in the local soil and weather. This is also good because native trees are ideal sources of food and habitat for the birds and animals that live in the area.
Second, trees have to be planted properly. This might mean digging the holes to a certain depth, or spacing them a certain distance apart. It might even mean that the young trees need fencing around them for the first few years, to protect them from nibbling animals. Nurseries that sell young trees for planting can give you this information. So can groups that organize planting projects.
There are many other ways to get close to nature. You might decide to take up camping or bird-watching. Try organic gardening as a way to learn about soil and the life cycles of plants. In a school garden, a yard, or a few pots on a windowsill or balcony, you can grow flowers or fresh herbs, greens, and vegetables.
Volunteering to be part of a cleanup crew is another form of outdoor activism. Many cities and local environmental groups sponsor “cleanup days,” when groups of people gather trash from parks, trails, beaches, or stream banks.
Finally, a number of environmental organizations work around the world to protect the planet and its wildlife. Some of them welcome young members, and some of them sponsor hikes or volunteer projects in communities.
Do a little research and see if you can find a group that appeals to you. Teaming up with others may be your way to get green. It is also a reminder that the solution to climate change isn’t just about the planet—it’s also about the people we share it with.
“We Can’t Eat Money, or Drink Oil”
Teenager Autumn Peltier is a water warrior. Peltier is a member of the Wiikwemikoong First Nation in Canada. Water has always been an important part of her life. Her home, an island in Ontario, is surrounded by the waters of Lake Huron.
When Peltier was eight years old, she visited another First Nations community and was shocked to see a sign warning people not to drink the water without boiling it. This set her on the path of activism. She had a role model in her great-aunt Josephine Mandamin, who had devoted her life to protecting the waters of the Great Lakes—the five big bodies of water between Canada and the United States. Mandamin had once walked around all five lakes to call attention to water pollution.
Peltier began speaking up about the need for water protection. She was so vocal that at the age of fourteen, Peltier was named Chief Water Commissioner by the Anishinabek Nation—a post that her great-aunt had held before her death. This made Peltier the main spokesperson for water protection for forty First Nations in the province of Ontario. Peltier calls her great-aunt her hero. “I’m going to carry on her work until we don’t have to anymore,” she says.
Peltier has certainly carried on her great-aunt’s work. She has spoken to Canada’s prime minister and to gatherings at the United Nations about the right of all people to clean, safe water, and the importance of unpolluted water to the environment. She has called for a halt to industrial and commercial projects that harm or threaten people’s water supplies. When she was fifteen, in 2019, she told a UN meeting, “I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, we can’t eat money, or drink oil.” Her words are a reminder that even in wealthy nations, there are communities that do not have access to safe, healthy water. Usually those communities are where Black and Indigenous People live. One example in the United States is Flint, Michigan, where residents have battled for years against a failed water-management system and undrinkable water. Peltier’s activism grows out of the principle that clean water should not be a privilege for some but a right for all.
GET POLITICAL
“We will mobilize to vote you out,” said Komal Karishma Kumar. The young woman from the Pacific island nation of Fiji was sp
eaking to United Nations officials in September 2019. She and other young climate activists were telling the leaders of member nations that kids are watching them. When they are old enough to vote, they will remember who took action to fight climate change, and who did not.
You may be a few years away from voting age, but you are not too young to get involved in politics. You will live the rest of your life in the world that today’s political leaders are making with their actions on climate change—or their failures to act. It’s not too early to start letting them know that you are paying attention.
In a warning to “business as usual” political leaders, young climate activists show they want politics to change—and every day, more of them become voters.
If political action sounds to you like the best way to achieve social justice or fight climate change, start by finding out who your leaders are, from the local to the national level. What have they said about global warming and climate change? What have they said about the rights of the poor and of Indigenous People? Do their actions match their statements?
Consider going to town halls—meetings where your leaders answer questions and discuss issues with the community. If your leaders do not hold town halls, consider writing to them. If they have voted or taken action in ways that support fairness and fight climate change, thank them. If they haven’t, explain what issue matters most to you, and why.