by Lucy Diavolo
8. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 19
The youth director of Earth Guardians and author of the book We Rise, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is an Indigenous climate activist who is using his voice as both a hip-hop artist and environmentalist to guide a global, youth-led movement dedicated to protecting the earth. Martinez began his activism at six years old, speaking at climate summits around the world. He’s even addressed the General Assembly at the U.N. and received the 2013 U.S. Community Service Award from President Barack Obama, all before age twenty.
Martinez is perhaps best known for his lawsuit against the U.S. government. In Juliana v. U.S., first filed in 2015, he argued that the federal government failed to limit the effects of climate change. Martinez has also worked locally to remove pesticides from public parks, contain coal ash, and place moratoriums on fracking in his home state, Colorado. In 2020, Martinez will be able to vote in his first presidential election. In an op-ed for Teen Vogue, he explained why he’ll be supporting Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
9. Jayden Foytlin, 15
A member of Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21 class of 2018, Jayden Foytlin has become a major player in the fight against global warming while still in high school. Foytlin, an Indigenous and Cajun teen, is one of twenty-one people (including Martinez) suing the federal government in Juliana v. U.S. Along with her mother, Foytlin is also protesting the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, which would carry oil from the Dakota Access Pipeline into Louisiana, Foytlin’s home state.
Greta Thunberg Wants You—Yes, You— to Join the Climate Strike
LUCY DIAVOLO
September 16, 2019
I’m on the subway headed to Manhattan to meet Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist who pioneered the climate strike movement, and I’m absolutely kicking myself for forgetting my travel mug. The iced coffee I’m sipping is in a single-use plastic cup—straw and all—and here I am on my way to meet arguably the most visible climate activist in the world.
Having completed a transatlantic journey by sailboat, Greta is scheduled to speak at the United Nations General Assembly’s Climate Action Summit, another chance she’ll have to make her no-nonsense appeal to world leaders about the urgent necessity of international action on the climate crisis. She’s famous for being ruthlessly frank with the global elite, so when I meet her in a midtown conference room on a Friday morning, I’m surprised to find a reserved young woman who speaks softly after carefully considering each question I ask.
What’s less surprising is the steadfast confidence and grave seriousness that emanates from this teenager who has given voice to an entire generation’s existential fear and energized a worldwide movement demanding everything necessary and possible to save our planet.
Asked about how she’s liked her visit to the States since her August 28 arrival, she praises the “really nice” people. Other highlights: keeping up her routine of unwinding with long walks by strolling through Central Park and visiting New York’s museums, including her (fitting) favorite, the American Museum of Natural History.
But she does have one note about the city that could apply to much of the United States: “You’re obsessed with air conditioning.”
A Global Sensation Tackling a Global Threat
Greta is shy and serious in person. She considers questions and gives thoughtful answers. I see this during our Friday interview and again on Monday, September 9, when she’s on stage with journalist and activist Naomi Klein at an event sponsored by Te Intercept. The event spotlighted Greta in conversation with Klein, but also featured Xiuhtezcatl, Vic Barrett, and Xiye Bastida—all accomplished climate activists age twenty or under who each offered a vision of their life in 2029 were the Green New Deal to be enacted.
The line stretches down a city block to get into the auditorium at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The pew-like seating and giant halo-shaped chandelier overhead lend a vague religious overtone to the evening. While some might think these youthful climate activists are preaching to the choir, at the moment, it feels more like they are speaking gospel.
In her introduction ahead of their talk, Klein calls Greta “one of the great truth-tellers of this or any time” and praises her bravery for calling out the world’s rich and powerful to their faces at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier in the year. Greta takes the stage to a standing ovation and talks with Klein about the climate strikes, her Asperger’s diagnosis, and her boat trip to the States, which she says was lengthy but worth it for the sights of wildlife and the view of the stars she got out on the open ocean.
One on one, Greta comes off as skeptical of the attention she receives. But in front of a full house that prizes activist sensibilities, that skepticism makes her a dynamo. The crowd loves her for laughing off online trolls and for researching absurd conspiracy theories about herself.
Fighting for the Future, Living in the Now
Greta is in a line of work that can be notoriously difficult: activists often struggle to support themselves in the long term, and the emotional toll of the work can be a serious burden to bear.
She’s been open in the past about how she entered activism as she was coming out of a very serious period of depression where she wasn’t eating or speaking. Just days before we sat down to chat, she had shared on Instagram how she’s been bullied for having Asperg-er’s syndrome, calling out “haters” and writing in a caption, “I have Asperger’s syndrome and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm. And—given the right circumstances—being different is a superpower.”
Klein asks Greta about this, too—and Greta explains that the way her brain operates can empower her as a climate activist.
“Without [my Asperger’s syndrome], I wouldn’t have noticed this crisis,” Greta says. She tells Klein that after recognizing the climate crisis for what it was, she felt she had no other choice but to take action. She sees that drive, and that of other climate activists she knows on the autism spectrum, as evidence that there’s something about the condition that makes for good activists.
“I think it has something to do with how we walk the walk and we don’t have the distance from what we know and what we say to what we do and how we act,” Greta says. “And without my diagnosis, I also wouldn’t have been such a nerd, and then I wouldn’t have had the time and energy to look through the boring facts and still be interested.”
Back in the midtown conference room on Friday, I ask Greta if she views her experience with depression as a potential source of a superpower, too, and she tells me how, even if being different can cause depression, she views it as a strength.
“Depression is something that often people who are different suffer from, either because they work too much or because they are being bullied because they are different or just because they don’t feel right in this society—that they feel everything is meaningless,” she says. “That is often the people who think a bit outside the box and who can see things from a different, new perspective.”
“We need these people, especially now, when we need to change things and we can’t see it just from where we are. We need to see it from a bigger perspective and from outside our current systems,” she explains. “That’s why people who are different are so necessary: because they contribute so much. Therefore, we need to really look after the people who are different and who may not be heard. We need to listen to those and to look after each other.”
Climate Change or System Change?
Greta’s weekly strikes started outside her home country’s parliament in August 2018. In those early days, it was just her. But she has become a focal point for a youth movement that is taking over the world. Just after our initial interview, Greta joined local climate strikers in New York for the second week in a row.
I ask Greta if she thinks people with economic security in richer countries have any special responsibility to the climate movement, and she tells me she does.
“We have to lead becau
se we have already built infrastructure that other countries need to build, and it takes carbon dioxide to build that infrastructure and to make sure that people in poorer countries can be able to heighten their standard of living,” she says. “We have to also give [poorer countries] the opportunity to adapt [to climate crisis]. Because, otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense.”
The issue of systemic change is on a lot of climate activists’ minds. In 2017, the Carbon Majors Database compiled a list of the largest institutional sources of global greenhouse-gas emissions, finding that just twenty-five companies have accounted for more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988. Environmental groups have seized on these numbers as evidence of the systemic nature of carbon emissions.
While she clearly thinks our current political and economic system has exacerbated the crisis by its refusal to act, she’s less willing to say whether she believes capitalist countries can make the changes required of them, telling me, “I don’t think it will be up to us teenagers and children to actually solve the problem.”
“We young people are building this up,” Greta says, making it clear that the strikes are a message to world leaders. “They always say they have listened to us, so this is a chance for them to prove it.”
Greta generally operates from a place of granting authority to science. Klein asks about her insistence that she’s not prescribing action for political leaders, but just asking them to listen to the science. Greta replies that she vets her speeches with scientists—asking them to check not just for factual accuracy but also for misunderstandings or clarifications. Even if she’s taking a year off school, she’s clearly still doing her homework.
Klein is an expert on the climate crisis in her own right. The author of books like This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and On Fire: The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal, she has been a powerful voice connecting our political and economic systems to the climate crisis. She tells me backstage before Monday’s event that she believes the climate crisis is one outcome of the capitalist system, prompting me to consider the two side by side.
But the most political Greta gets during her conversation with Klein is when she’s asked her about concerns within the Democratic Party that a climate response like the Green New Deal is too expensive.
“The money is there,” Greta tells her. “If we can save the banks, we can save the world.”
The Next Global Climate Strike
Ahead of her speech at the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, Greta is also trying to get the word out about the next global climate strike, set to begin on September 20, the latest major action in the climate movement’s world-saving gambit. She hopes that more people than ever will take the day to strike from work or school.
She tells Teen Vogue that whether it’s the Swedish government, major corporations, or the United Nations General Assembly, climate strikers are trying to generate political momentum to address the climate crisis—to push governments, corporations, and fellow citizens to do “what is required and what is possible.”
“Please think about it from a bigger perspective,” she says when I ask if she has advice for those unsure about joining the September 20 strike. “Not just from today, but imagine yourself in about twenty or thirty years. How do you want to look back at your life? Do you want to be able to say that you did fight against it and tried to push for a change early on? Or do you want to say that, ‘No, I just went on going like everyone else because it was too uncomfortable.’”
“If you can’t be in the strike, then, of course, you don’t have to,” she continues. “But I think if there is one day you should join, this is the day.”
The fact that “perspective” came up twice during our interview doesn’t surprise me, nor does it surprise me that Greta talks about the view of the stars from her sailboat or the way she views Asperger’s as her superpower. Youth climate activists have a way of giving those of us who might be older and more jaded the perspective to see the potential for a future without crisis, but meeting Greta affirms that this is about more than just hijacking youthful optimism. It is about welcoming the perspective of a generation that is fighting for its own future—for the right to live.
Behind the Scenes with the Climate Strike’s Teen Organizers
SARAH EMILY BAUM
September 20, 2019
Teen Vogue reporter Sarah Emily Baum spent weeks with the student organizers of the New York City Youth Climate Strike, attending planning meetings and getting up to speed on how they put together one of the largest mass mobilizations for climate justice in history.
August 21, 2019, About one month before the Youth Climate Strike
In a New York City basement, just down the street from Trump International Hotel, fifty kids sit in folding chairs trying to come up with a plan to save the world.
“We really want this organizing body not to focus on September 20 as a goal, rather as a catalyst,” says Xiye Bastida, a seventeen-year-old Indigenous climate activist and member of the NYC Youth Climate Strike’s core committee. Now a resident of Morningside Heights, in New York City, Xiye spent most of her life in San Pedro Tultepec, Mexico. Back then, she saw the flooding of her hometown as an anomaly, rather than a symptom of a much more sinister problem—the climate crisis.
On September 20, Xiye and activists around the world will mobilize for the Youth Climate Strike. At the helm of this action is Greta Thunberg, a sixteen-year-old Swedish environmentalist who went viral for going on a weekly school strike to protest lawmakers’ inaction in response to the climate emergency. Thunberg will be joining the march in New York City ahead of the United Nations Climate Summit, where major world powers will decide whether meaningful steps will be taken to fight the climate crisis, or if they will continue stalling until it’s too late.
Until then, students like Xiye are building the movement from the ground up. “[Smaller actions like this are] important because organizing is always the backbone of every big action,” she says. “You need to be coordinated if you want to have a united front.”
Although some global warming is organic, climate scientists say human activity (like the emission of fossil fuels) has caused temperatures to increase at an accelerated rate. When the temperature warms, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, and natural disasters increase in frequency and decimate the globe. According to the United Nations, a global warming of just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) would be catastrophic.
Young people—especially those who are Indigenous, lower-income, or people of color—are expected to be hit the hardest. That’s, in part, why they’re leading this movement. In addition to Greta and Xiye, youth-led organizations from around the country and around the world are driving the cause forward, each adding their own unique voice to the chorus of young people demanding change. Zero Hour, led by seventeen-year-old Seattle native Jamie Margolin, uplifts marginalized voices on the front lines of the climate fight; the Sunrise Movement, cofounded by twenty-six-year-old Varshini Prakash of Boston, prioritizes lobbying for policies like the Green New Deal; Extinction Rebellion Youth uses nonviolent direct action to bring a sense of urgency to the climate crisis. The list goes on.
“Everyone has the power to make our voices heard,” Xiye tells Teen Vogue. “Now, we have the responsibility to make our voices heard.”
At the end of the meeting, the students head outside. Some are in large, blow-up dinosaur costumes—“because we’ll be fossils too, if we don’t act”—and in the streets, against the backdrop of Central Park and traffic lights, they dance and sing their protest songs.
August 28, 2019, Three weeks before the Youth Climate Strike
After spending fifteen days on a zero-emissions yacht sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, Greta Thunberg sets foot in New York City for the first time. She is greeted by a swarm of press and a crowd that includes Xiye and a hoard of other young activists who are chanting her name and anticipating the upcoming Friday strike—Thunberg’s fir
st in the United States. They plan to convene outside the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan later that day.
By this point, eighth grader Alexandria Villaseñor, a fourteen-year-old New York City student, had been striking there every Friday for thirty-eight consecutive weeks. Alexandria, who has asthma, began her climate activism after a family visit to California left her ill and unable to breathe. The smoke from rampant forest fires had seeped into their house.
“I saw the connection between that and climate change,” says Alexandria. She founded Earth Uprising, an organization promoting climate literacy among young people, and is serving as a core organizer of the NYC Youth Climate Strike. She has continued her strikes through rain, cold, and a polar vortex, as well as a death threats from right-wing trolls and climate deniers.
Nonetheless, Alexandria says, “I wanted to defend my hometown.” That’s why she made a simple white sign and started her strike on a little metal bench outside the United Nations, where she often sat alone.
This was not one of those weeks.
Hundreds of students, activists, and journalists descended upon her quiet little bench. A circle of teenagers stood outside, and someone “shoved” Alexandria to the middle, right next to Greta. In the chaos, it took almost thirty minutes just to cross the street, Alexandria tells Teen Vogue.
“Halfway through at the park we got the message the president of the U.N. General Assembly wanted to meet with us, and they shuffled us back to the entrance of the building,” Alexandria says. The teen girls—Alexandria, Greta, and Xiye—told her that they were fighting for changes, like a more ambitious international greenhouse gas emissions agreement.
“We are out of time,” Alexandria tells Teen Vogue. “We’re in a crisis. But now we’re raising awareness and getting attention from people in power—and we’re just getting started.”