by Naomi Klein
More and more politicians are beginning to realize that they need to start paying attention to young people. You may not yet be a voter, but you are a future voter. You may also have the power to influence how your older family members vote.
Speaking of voting, if you are old enough to vote in any election, do it. Research the candidates’ positions. Support those that best represent your views and your hopes for the future. Volunteer to help with their campaigns.
The ultimate political activism is getting into politics yourself. If you thrive on the energy and excitement of politics, think about running for office. If there is a position you can compete for in your school or university, can you include an issue of social justice or climate change in your campaign? Your voice can inform or inspire others, to get more people involved in these issues.
Beyond school, voters in many parts of the world are electing young people to public office. Chlöe Swarbrick of New Zealand ran for office representing the Green Party, which takes strong positions in favor of protecting the environment and fighting climate change. She was elected to her country’s parliament at the age of just twenty-three.
In Australia, voters elected Jordon Steele-John to the national parliament when he was twenty-two. The first elected member of parliament with a disability, Steele-John represents the Australian Greens, a party that supports ecological sustainability, social justice, and community-level democracy.
Steele-John has said that Australia should lower its voting age to sixteen, as some nations in Europe and South America have done. Hundreds of thousands of young people have already shown that they are focused on the future. Young people may also feel less pressure than adults to protect “business as usual” when it clearly isn’t working. If sixteen-year-olds could vote in every country, would we be closer to a fair and livable climate future?
USE THE LAW
You’ve seen examples in this book about how young people are using the law to challenge governments, polluters, and pipeline developers. From climate-related complaints brought to the United Nations, to lawsuits against individual states and companies, legal actions will probably become more common as the climate crisis grows more urgent. Another one is unfolding now in the Pacific island nations.
Solomon Yeo and seven other law students from those nations founded an activist group called Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change in 2019. The PISFCC is part of the Climate Action Network, an international collection of activist groups. The mission of the PISFCC is to fight climate change through legal means. It has asked the leaders of the Pacific island countries to pursue action on climate change at the United Nations and also at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
“Firstly, climate change is threatening our fundamental human rights under international law, and secondly, we as Pacific Islanders must do everything we can to fight global carbon emissions,” the group has said. Yeo hopes that bringing cases about climate change before the ICJ will “help states understand their duties to protect future generations.”
Yeo and other young climate activists know that legal actions are generally time-consuming and can be costly. But, like politics and protest, the law is a tool that activists can use when the circumstances call for it.
You may find a way to add your support to an existing climate or justice lawsuit, like the young people who signed Zero Hour’s petition in support of the kids who filed the Juliana lawsuit you read about in chapter 6. At some point you might even join with other like-minded young people to explore what it would take to start a climate lawsuit of your own. The law isn’t always an easy tool to use, but it can be one of the most powerful.
GREEN ART
Creative people made historic works of art during the original New Deal. The government helped them as it helped other kinds of workers. Through the Works Progress Administration and the US Treasury, federal projects provided meaningful work for tens of thousands of painters, authors, musicians, playwrights, sculptors, filmmakers, actors, and craftspeople. Black and Indigenous artists received more support than they ever had before.
The result was an explosion of creativity. The Federal Art Project alone produced nearly 475,000 works of visual art, including 2,000 posters, 2,500 murals, and 100,000 paintings for public spaces. The Federal Music Project was responsible for 225,000 performances that reached a total of 150 million Americans.
Much of this art was simply about bringing joy and beauty to the lives of people during the misery of the Great Depression. Some artists, though, set out to capture that misery. They wanted to show why the New Deal was so desperately needed.
Today, as we face the fight to save our planet and each other, art can do the same things. It can both bring us joy and remind us what we’re fighting for.
Warnings about climate change sometimes seem like a steady stream of terrible facts and images about how bad things are, or how much worse they could get. These facts and images have their place, but we also need pictures and songs and stories that give us hope. We need art that celebrates a positive future and how we can get there.
That is the spirit of the seven-minute animated film “A Message from the Future.” You may have seen it in school. It has been shared in classrooms from the lower grades through universities. It is also available to watch online for free. I helped create the film, along with artist Molly Crabapple, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, filmmaker and climate justice organizer Avi Lewis (who also happens to be my husband), and more.
It’s a story set in the future. It is about how, in the nick of time, enough people in the United States—the biggest economy on the planet—came to believe that we were worth saving. It shows the future built by a Green New Deal. Over lush paintings of a thriving world, Ocasio-Cortez speaks from the future, telling us what happened:
We changed how we did things. We became a society that was not only modern and wealthy but dignified and humane, too. By committing to universal rights like health care and meaningful work for all, we stopped being so scared of the future. We stopped being scared of each other. And we found our shared purpose.
As you’ll see if you watch the film, one of the ways a “message from the future” can inspire activism in the present is by encouraging us to believe that change is possible, by helping us picture the world after we win.
Other artists are finding new ways to express their ideas about climate and justice. Environmental artist Xavier Cortada, who lives near Miami, painted numbers on thousands of signs, with wavy lines to mark the surface of the sea. He gave the signs to people who own homes in Pinecrest, outside Miami. Each homeowner’s sign showed how much the water would have to rise to cover that property. A sign reading “3,” for example, meant that a sea level rise of three feet would put that home underwater. Kids caught on and started painting similar signs and putting them along roads and near schools. This art project had an effect. A homeowners organization formed in Pinecrest to focus on climate change, with an ocean scientist as its leader.
Kids are creating climate art too. As you saw in chapter 3, a twelve-year-old girl wrote the song that school climate strikers sang in Christchurch, New Zealand. In Portland, Oregon, each year a project called Honoring Our Rivers invites students from kindergarten through college to create artwork, stories, and poems about the waterways of the region. Some of them are published in book form and presented to audiences at a bookstore. Libraries and other public buildings, as well as schools, often display posters and other artworks created by young people on environmental themes.
Maybe you are an artist, songwriter, or storyteller. Perhaps you are experimenting with creating films, video games, or comics. You can use any of these creative tools to share your thoughts, fears, hopes, and visions.
Creative people are always finding new ways to communicate. Knitters, for example, are now making “climate scarves.” They look up the daily or yearly temperature records for their hometowns, their countries, or the world. They link the temperature
s to colors, from dark blue for the coldest temperatures to dark purple for the hottest ones, with ranges of green, yellow, orange, and red in between. Then they knit long scarves. Each row stands for a day or year, with the color representing its temperature.
You can share your climate art in another way. If you have skills with a paintbrush or a sewing machine, offer to help your friends or classmates make signs, banners, or costumes to wear to marches and demonstrations. Art and protest often walk hand in hand. No matter what you choose, tap into your unique creativity. Art and entertainment can make people listen and help them understand a message, especially one that is difficult to hear.
FIND A MOVEMENT—OR START ONE
An activist working alone can still make a huge impact on the world.
Rachel Carson wasn’t part of a movement when she wrote Silent Spring. But as you saw in chapter 5, her solitary, passionate work was a big inspiration for the environmental movement of the 1970s. And that movement, in turn, gave rise to a golden age of laws designed to protect the natural world.
More and more often, groups tackling a wide range of issues in social justice, environmentalism, and climate activism are merging their strengths in teaching events, projects, marches, and demonstrations. Both individual and group approaches are good. The road ahead has room for many causes and many kinds of activism.
If the idea of working with others for a common cause excites you, if you want to support and be supported by people who share your goals, then find a movement and jump in. Or create your own and see if others will jump in to join you.
Movements make a difference. You can be the friction, the resistance that is needed to slow down the machine that is setting the world on fire.
CONCLUSION You Are the Third Fire
You are living through a turning point.
As you have seen throughout this book, humans face the potential for massive disaster brought about by climate change, but this dangerous moment in time also brings an extraordinary opportunity. We still have the power to save countless human lives, the landscapes we know, and many species of animals and plants.
The young organizers of the Sunrise Movement say that this moment is filled with both “promise and peril.” The peril is climate breakdown, which is already under way. Certain people and parts of the world will suffer more than others, or sooner, but all of us are in peril—unless we limit our planet’s warming. The promise is that we can limit that warming, if we are bold enough to seize the moment and make big changes. And in making those changes, we have the opportunity to address many other crises that our society faces, from homelessness to racism. The Green New Deal says: let’s do it all at the same time!
Now is the time to rethink how we live, eat, travel, do business, and earn our livelihoods. Together we can do more than fight rising temperatures. The changes we make to protect the Earth can also protect and strengthen our most vulnerable and neglected communities, creating a safer and more just world for all.
Climate change makes all of our social ills worse. It speeds up or strengthens the bad effects of wars, racism, inequality, domestic violence, and lack of health care. What if, instead, it sped up or strengthened the forces that are working for peace, economic fairness, and social justice?
The climate crisis is a threat to the future of our species. The threat has a firm, science-based deadline. And this hard deadline might just be what we need to finally knit together movements that believe in the value of all people and the web of life.
Coming together in movements, hungry for environmental and social justice, young people like these marchers in Belgium—like you—can change the world.
Depending on what we do now, we can come out of this crisis with some things better than they were before. We can have renewable energy from sun and wind, as well as greener transportation and a world with more trees, wetlands, and grasslands. By protecting habitats and limiting our hunting of wildlife and the destruction of natural habitats, we can give the Earth’s other species a better chance to live into the future with us. We’ll have less waste because we will have lowered our use of plastic, especially disposable plastic, and we’ll have cleaner air and water.
We can also have wider participation in government and planning, with more diverse voices. We can recognize the land rights of Indigenous Peoples and create opportunities to learn from their knowledge. We can have a world where wealth and resources are more fairly shared. We can refuse to treat any person or place as a “sacrifice zone.”
Our house is on fire. It is too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save each other and a great many other species, too. Let’s put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less fancy, but with room for all those who need shelter and care.
I see three fires now. One fire is climate change, burning up the world we knew. Another fire is the rising anger, fear, and anti-immigrant sentiment that erupted in the New Zealand shooting you read about in chapter 3. These emotions are driving some political decisions around the world. They harden people’s hearts and countries’ borders against others, and they turn people toward authoritarian leaders.
But the third fire is the fire in the belly of the new generation of young activists like you. Your voices give us energy. Your visions point toward our best future. Now we have to feed that third fire and help it grow.
The more sparks the fire has, the brighter it will burn. I invite you to add your spark.
Are you ready to change everything?
AFTERWORD Learning from the Coronavirus Pandemic
Just as I finished this book in the spring of 2020, a new, contagious virus appeared, infecting people with a disease known as COVID-19. It spread rapidly, and soon the world was in the grip of a coronavirus pandemic.
Millions of people were infected. Many lives were tragically lost, and families were shattered. The pandemic also cost people their jobs and businesses, drained resources such as food and medical supplies, and nearly shut down the economies of entire nations. Like the hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes that devastated communities you’ve read about throughout this book, the coronavirus was a disaster—one that unfolded on a global scale.
A coronavirus pandemic shut down the world (including a theater called the World) in early 2020. Like all disasters, it brought an opportunity for change.
Now, as with those disasters, I invite you to think about the future, and about what the pandemic has shown us.
The coronavirus pandemic disrupted many of our existing systems, patterns, and ways of doing things. It is natural for people suffering through a disaster to yearn for a return to normality, but in reality, after such a big disaster, the world will not be the same. It will change—but will the change be for the worse, or for the better?
Writing from India in the early months of the coronavirus crisis, author Arundhati Roy shared her vision of the pandemic as a portal—or doorway—to the future. She wrote: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
After this tragic crisis, in other words, we can scramble to get back to where we were, knowing that many people will be left behind. Or we can seize this chance to rebuild our future along different lines, with our concern widened to include everyone. As we think about how that future might be shaped, we should remember what we have learned during the pandemic, just as we must apply what we have learned about the climate crisis.
The pandemic revealed that many societies’ leaders and agencies, the very things that were supposed to guide and help in a crisis, were poorly prepared, untrained, and unable to develop and communi
cate a clear plan for dealing with the virus. For years the public sphere had been starved of funds in the name of “small government.” People with useful knowledge and experience had left or been removed from official positions. The result: when millions of people needed “big government” to help, they were left on their own, or were forced to rely on struggling local governments.
As always happens during disasters, ordinary people found ways to help each other and their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the United States, with its high number of infections, the coronavirus highlighted what it means to have a medical system that is run for profit, rather than treating health care as every citizen’s right. People without health insurance were afraid to seek treatment, while many who did seek treatment found the medical system unprepared to care properly for them. Hospital executives and leaders of the medical industry had long tried to spend as little money as possible and make as much as possible for themselves and their investors. They kept insisting on the fewest unfilled beds and the smallest staffs they could possibly get by on. They had never stockpiled the basic goods that would be needed in a public health emergency.
The virus isn’t just an issue of public health, though. It also highlights many of the environmental truths explored in this book. In April 2020 a group of wildlife and ecosystem scientists with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services wrote about the link between disease pandemics and our thoughtless use of nature. “Recent pandemics,” they said, “are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost.”