These Young Climate Justice Advocates Say It's Time for a Revolution

Jamie Margolin can’t remember a time in her life when climate change wasn’t a crisis. The signs were everywhere, from the disappearing sea life in the 16-year-old’s hometown of Seattle to the climate-related disasters in Colombia where her mother’s family lives.

Jamie Margolin of Seattle, Washington, left, is an
environmental activist who co-founded Zero
Hour with Nadia Nazar of Baltimore, Maryland,
right. With a team of volunteers, they are preparing
 for the first Youth Climate March in Washington, D.C.

“When you’re growing up with all this beautiful wildlife around you, it gives you a better idea of what you want to protect,” said Margolin, who will start 11th grade this fall. “And also it’s more painful when, for example, things go wrong, when you see that that habitat is being destroyed.”

Margolin said she wanted to take action when she was younger, but avoided it because the problem was so terrifying. But Donald Trump’s election spurred her to action.

“As young people, we find ourselves in this really awkward place in history where we are going to be alive for the worst effects of climate change, but we’re not old enough to make the decisions right at that tipping point where they need to be made,” she said.  

Read the HuffPost story by Yvette Cabrera -  “These Young Climate Justice Advocates Say It's Time for a Revolution.”

Rescuers and Relatives Race to Find Survivors of Colombia Mudslide

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Gildardo Ramírez reached Mocoa on Sunday, only to find a scene of rubble where his Aunt Claudia’s neighborhood had been. He looked desperately through the ruins for his missing aunt, who he said had not been seen since a flood of mud and debris plowed through Mocoa the night before.

A survivor on Sunday amid the damage
 caused by a mudslide after heavy
rains in Mocoa, Colombia.

“I arrived to the house, and it was destroyed,” he said by telephone from Mocoa, a small city in the southern mountains of Colombia near the border with Ecuador. “The only thing I found was a backpack.”

Anxious relatives like Mr. Ramírez and more than 1,500 rescue workers raced on Sunday to find anyone who might still be alive and trapped in the wreckage in Mocoa, where parts of the city have been wiped off the map by a deluge of mud and floodwaters.

Read The New York Times story - “Rescuers and Relatives Race to Find Survivors of Colombia Mudslide.”

(Taking the advice of those who know, what has happened here cannot be attributed directly to climate change, but the preponderance of such events around the world brings a startlingly and undeniable certainty to the fact that we have changed the world’s weather system in a measurable way, bringing upon ourselves events that have no antecedents - Robert McLean)