A teenage boy, one of many who will be part of the future of the climate crisis and its aftermath, gazes up at this striking DC mural
The young people behind the Washington DC section of the strike, Preparing to Face the Corporations Fueling the Climate Crisis.
By Gigi Beeson
On the 25th of March the first global climate strike of the year will be taking place. With the pandemic starting to die down, thousands to millions of people, mostly children and young adults, will be taking to the streets across the globe for the mass protests demanding action from the government and corporations that are prioritizing profit, and not people.
The global strike is part of the youth-led Fridays For Future (FFF) movement or school strike for climate movement, started by Greta Thunberg who went on school strike every Friday outside the Swedish parliament when it was not doing enough to protect the climate. Many kids started to follow suit and skip school on Friday, claiming that there was no point in getting an education if they had no future with looming climate catastrophe.
Right before the pandemic, the movement was at its peak. On the 20th of September, 2019, an estimated four million people went on strike, unified in the fight for the planet. Strikes were held in 150 nations with 1.4 million participants in Germany, an estimated 300,000 in Australia, and approximately 250,000 in New York where Thunberg delivered a speech to the crowds.
This year’s strike promises to be even bigger, driven by the message: people, not profit. “Everyone should show up. It’s an amazing time and just something that you really get to experience in DC that you can’t get anywhere else in the world,” says Elson Bankoff, a DC Friday’s for Future Leader.
Those part of Friday’s for Future believe that the climate situation we are in is due to the cruel acts of colonialism, extractivism(the process of taking large quantities natural resources), and capitalism – all part of our flawed socio-economic system colonial powers have put in place. According to the FFF movement, rich nations are responsible for 92% of global emissions, and despite being 1% of the population they are responsible for double the pollution produced by the poorest 50%.
TD Bank, with assets of $514.4 billion, represents one of many banks in America investing in the fossil fuel industry.
With all of the resources available to youth, who can access them, such as social media and the internet, they have what they need to fire back at those in power. “I mean that’s why we start young -so we know what to do. Don’t worry if you don’t feel like you don’t know everything at any point because it’s not really our job to [as kids], but everyone will continue to grow and continue to learn and then be ready,” says Elson.
The issue of climate change is worsening due to these corporations. The companies Chevron, Unilever, and Nestle, to name a few, are affecting many people in the world, either due to pollution or the warming of the planet.
Fridays For Future has laid out a plan for the government and big corporations to take action with climate reparations for the people most affected by the crisis. Part of the ask is for these powerful bodies to stop putting their businesses first and instead put the people who have had their lives put in danger from the damage these businesses have brought on as their priority. “We don’t have much time for people to stay ignorant about climate change. Climate action will benefit us all.” says Agnese Lesmene, another young climate activist.
Here in Washington DC, young campaigners are preparing for the strike, just weeks away.
Kids from schools across the district, many of whom run their own environmental club at school are getting ready to take action. Agnese Lasmane just joined FFF when hearing about the strike and recently started becoming more eco-conscious after realizing the severity of the situation: eating less meat, reusing items, and spreading awareness of climate change. “I’m so excited to use my voice to demand climate action!”, she said enthusiastically. Some kids are even willing to interact with police. Rosie Clemans-Cope, who was a seventh grader at the time, got arrested with the climate group, Sunrise in Rockville last Summer.
On an instagram group chat for the Washington section of the strike, the kids are sharing announcements concerning the protest. Many introductions are rolling in such as, “I’m a freshman”, and “I’m in FFF, Zero Hour, & also sunrise !! So excited for this”, and, “Hey, I’m a sophomore..and although I don’t lead anything at school yet, I’m helping organize a climate event with this friend and another senior!” The online chat has a warm environment where the young people can meet other eco-conscious teens. “I’m in an environment where people have drive and also want to have fun and be around people”, says Elson. Agnese finds it, “super inspiring and motivating to see that there are so many people who are passionate about climate change.”
Elson Bankoff is the girl responsible for getting everyone together on the group chat and is a big part of Fridays For Future DC. She is one of many people in the world, and young people from Gen Z, who have grown up caring about the environment and were called to action by seeing the FFF movement started by Thunberg.
The Youth Behind the Strike
Bankoff started taking on leadership roles for Fridays for Future in October of 2021. The huge global strike in 2019, that happened when she was a freshman in highschool, was what pushed her into environmental advocacy. She doesn’t strike every Friday but goes when she can. She is the leader of her school’s environmental action club and started an online magazine (no paper of course) called Ecosystemic within SEASN, an environmental network, that she helped found. It’s a place for people who are interested in environmental advocacy to come together and work on a variety of things- newspaper articles, artwork, short films, you name it. “It’s very fun and I think it’s good for people to share their ideas and inspire each other.” The network now has at least 60 schools all around the country working on environmental focused projects.
With exams and school deadlines it is amazing how these teens and young people find the time to do organizing for FFF and take environmental action. For Elson, “it’s definitely difficult to find time to work on things. On Saturday, I spend the entire day and all of Fridays working on Ecosystemic and Fridays For Future strike organizing. We have weekly calls, probably like two calls a week to make sure that we have some sort of organization because everyone is incredibly busy.”
She went on to say how she thinks people under-appreciate and slightly undermine teenagers and their capabilities to manage their work and take action. But in today’s world, with climate change taking down nations and communities one by one and industries continuing to fuel the crisis, many young people are prioritizing the deadline to take action before it’s too late to avoid mass environmental destruction.
“It’s definitely hard to find time, but I do because I want to. If it[the environmental work] momentarily distracts from something academic or something practical, that’s ok with me cause you gotta find time.”
Her passion about the environment came at a young age. “I think initially it was a sort of fear and as I grew up we started learning about it[climate change] more in school, which I am very thankful for. It was a children’s book set in a environmentally destructed post-climate change world that influenced that fear. “I think that’s how a lot of people at a young age get involved because when people are young they have a lot of empathy and sort of like naivete about the world and you hear a lot about these things happening and it’s very scary.” Her motivation now has moved towards, “integrating things like climate education into curriculums because that’s honestly what really got me inspired.”
On the subject of climate education, Agnese Lasmene, another student from the DC area involved with the strike said that, “it’s important to often bring up the topics of climate change so that we can realize that it’s a current problem. I think that learning to talk to people about these topics such as climate change is hard, but I feel that finding how climate change affects something meaningful to that person can change how they look at it”, says Agnese.
A mock Cop 24 conference in middle school opened Elson’s eyes to the world of climate policy. “I was like,”oh my god this is so cool”, and I got super interested in the technology behind it but most importantly the policy because I became terrified about the fact that everyone knew that this was happening and has known since the 80s and late 70s but still has not done anything. There has been so much active political lobbying to sort of prevent change, which I think is not what humanity is really prone to do.”
“We innovate and we change and we progress and this issue is so unique in the sense that there’s been active attempts to remain passive and to like get people to not act which I think is very strange and terrifying to me but also what motivated me to prevent that.”
Generation Z and the climate crisis
Many believe that Generation Z (people born from 1997-2012) are the generation driving the fight to protect the planet. According to Agnese, “everyone, not just Gen Z, has the duty and significance to take care of our planet. Everyone has their “why?” as to why they want a better world. I think a lot of pressure is put on Gen Z to save the planet when it should really be a population effort.”
Elson belives that, “our generation has been very prominent [in climate activism]. We’ve been dominating voices and I think that’s true for a couple of reasons: mainly, that the climate crisis is very unique in the sense that no one in a generation prior had to worry about it because it wasn’t a threat.”
For young people in today’s day and age, they worry about how the climate crisis will affect them if it hasn’t already. Elson went onto say, “even if it’s not directly affecting us, it will be affecting other parts of our lives. If it’s already something that’s so heavy on our minds, like imagine what that’s going to be like in like twenty years, or thirty years, or a hundred years. Even if were not alive we worry about our children’s future and there’s so much anxiety that I think we [gen z] all have to experience.”
For the young generation, social media has played a huge role in how they are able to organize and take action. “Like literally I reached out via my friends texts then I reached out to you and I got your information through instagram. We have all of these group chats”, Elson says.
Moving back on the topic of generation Z, Elson thinks that, “we as young people are prominent in the movement but it’s also important to acknowledge the people who have been fighting for it for a while. I mean I’m writing my research paper on the role that labor unions played and the development of it in the 70s and I mean you look at it now and it’s not the same but there have been a lot of generations who have played a huge role.”
“I think that we have to be aware of that, and this goes for every other movement too, like LGBTQ issues, you have to acknowledge how things are a lot better now because people died for their rights back then and same with Black Lives Matter things. It’s something [today] where we can take to the streets and we can have this right to speak on it.”
“People have broken through the barrier to allow us to flood through the gates and I think, “yes we’re flooding through the gates!” – more then anyone else, but you also have to acknowledge what other people have done [to get us to that point].”
Climate change is everyone’s fight
People are suffering due to these corporations that are polluting and heating up the planet and contributing to the crisis by emitting massive amounts of CO2 emissions. Melinda Tillies, for example, had her home in Louisiana uprooted by Energy Transfer Partners for the Bayou Bridge Pipeline Project. Everyday she has been facing extremely loud drilling and her home is surrounded by the oil-filled pipes. Chevron, one of America’s top oil companies, to name another example, has contaminated the water’s of Ecuador’s local communities and has been responsible for many birth defects. California wildfires have massacred whole towns and robbed people of their lively hoods -the same with the recent floods that destroyed many parts of Western Germany in 2021. All had ties to climate change. These are just a few examples of the effects brought on by energy companies and climate change.
“If someone said that climate change wasn’t affecting to them, I would tell them that climate change hasn’t affected them yet.”
A poster conveying the message of the strike in Adams Morgan, Washington.
The crisis demands us to pay attention to the way that others are suffering from it, but also to the way those of us live who have not been directly affected by the crisis and our relationship with the world that sustains us. Many of us are in fact contributing to the problem.
These large polluting corporations may be the most responsible for the ecological damage, but without us, the consumers, they would not continue to damage the planet.
“I purchase less things, use less paper”, says Agnese on the ways we as consumers are driving part of the issue. As we make more and more purchases, we are generating more income, not necessarily for the people who make those items, but for the people at the top of big corporations who get more of the fair share. Factory workers in India get paid no more than $1 an hour according to Indeed, whereas here, in the US, $14.37 is the average hourly wage. What workers are getting the bulk of is pollution from factories or other places of work, damaging their health and the environment of their communities.
The strike put together by Friday’s for Future, is calling on us to think about the corporations that surround us and the damage we are indirectly contributing to. “We’re all affected by climate change and we do have the power to reverse the effects. We all play a part, negatively and positively, which is crucial for the whole world to know”, Agnese says. “If someone said that climate change wasn’t affecting them, I would tell them that climate change hasn’t affected them yet.”
The urgency is not apparent
If you turn on the news there is almost no talk of climate change, only in the strange weather report. Here in DC, the forecast for February was at a high of 75 degrees Farenheit one day and 37 degrees the next. The famous cherry blossom trees have already started to bloom. “We should be treating this problem like it’s urgent”, Agnese explains, “maybe then people will be more inclined to begin taking climate action.”
An elephant, supporting other creatures, creeps up the side of a building in bustling Adams Morgan, D.C.
The Future of Climate Action
However, there is hope with the way the youth are pushing forward. “I think there’s so much energy right now”, Elson explains, “and you can parallel, I mean look at the 1970s where there are all these counter culture movements, there are all these things to end the war, anti-Vietnam war things and there’s so much of the new left. There’s all of these progressive politics. Then you look at these people now and it’s like, well where is that generational energy?”, she said, about the people prominent in these past movements.
“I would hope that we would keep this energy up and that we [young people] will not just be left out on the streets, but inside the buildings, running for congress, and if people are drawn to it, starting ethical businesses, lobbying for change, working in court systems to make the legal system more equitable, and solving these issues and breaking apart and building the system in a bunch of different ways.”
Facing the future from behind an alleyway on Connecticut Avenue, D.C.
Elson emphasizes how she has, “a lot of hope because of all the energy that I see right now [with climate activism] but I just really, above all, hope that that doesn’t go away and that we continue to stay passionate and to not give up because it is difficult and it is stressful but it is making a difference and there is so much potential energy.”
“ We are flooding the gates but then we gotta go rushing into the building.” She proceeds to say how that sounds a bit like insurrection and laughter fills the room. “We’re all lined up, everyone’s at the gate and there’s so much energy and everyone just wants to get off the boat and then the gates open and everyone’s like, “we’re free, we’re going…we’re gonna save ourselves and everything. So I think it’s very similar to that and it’s just about getting through the gates and not being like, “well what do we do now?”
“We are flooding the gates but then we gotta go rushing into the building.”
On the 25th of March, Elson, Agnese, and many other young people will be ready to flood the gates and bring that energy with them in the face of the world’s leaders and corporations. Elson’s final message is: “Everyone, if you’re reading this, you should come to the strike and tell everyone you know to come to the strike. It will be very fun, you can miss school for a couple of hours for a great cause. You network, you meet amazing people, it’s incredibly inspiring.”
“Action and saving the planet runs on passion and determination to make a better world for everyone”, says Agnese, “which is strongest when acting together.”
Sources:
https://fridaysforfuture.org/action-map/map/
https://in.indeed.com/career/factory-worker/salaries
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/washington-dc/historic