It’s not entirely up to school students to save the world

In the past several months, people around the world have watched in awe as school students, led by the Swedish teen-ager Greta Thunberg, have taken their concerns about the climate crisis to a new level, with a series of one-day strikes. The latest took place on Friday, and drew what is estimated as more than a million participants in a hundred and twenty-five countries. The strikes have been the biggest boost yet for the global climate movement, galvanizing public attention by reminding people just who will have to deal with the mess that older generations have created. Thunberg has spoken to the Pope and to the British and European parliaments—and this week she and her fellow student leaders are speaking to everyone else who’s older than them. On Thursday, they issued an appeal to adults to take up the same tactic, and on Friday a number of them responded, with a letter pledging to organize the first of a series of all-ages, one-day climate strikes, on Friday, September 20th. (I was among them and helped draft the letter.) The initial list of signees is composed of a wide array of, well, adults, from around the world. Some have spent their lives trying to make change from within the system, such as Christiana Figueres, the United Nations diplomat who served as the lead negotiator of the Paris climate accords. Others are writers (Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver), scientists (Tim Flannery, of the University of Melbourne; Katharine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech), trade-union leaders (Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation), and indigenous leaders from Australia (Anne Poelina) to America (Tom B. K. Goldtooth) and the Arctic (Jenni Laiti).

Young people have used strikes to call attention to the
climate disaster. Now they’ve challenged adults to do the same.

What all of these people have in common is a strong sense that business as usual has become the problem, and that it needs to be interrupted, if only for a day. The climate crisis is a perplexing one because, mostly, we just get up each day and do what we did the day before, as if an enormous emergency weren’t unfolding around us. That hasn’t been true of past crises: during the Second World War, oceans may have separated American civilians from the fighting, but every day they were aware of the need to change their ways of life: to conserve resources, buy bonds, black out their windows at night if they lived on the coast.

Read the story from The New Yorker by Bill McKibben - “It’s not entirely up to school students to save the world.”

Tony Abbott and Josh Frydenberg's re-election targeted by school climate protesters

School students who want action on climate change will target Tony Abbott’s office in Warringah and Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong on Friday, as the two senior Liberals face tough re-election fights.

 Students during the climate protest in March. the
school strike movement is turning its attention to key
 seats in the upcoming 18 May election.

After staging two national days of protest in the past six months, the school strike movement is turning its attention to key seats in the upcoming 18 May election.

On Friday, students will also protest outside the offices of Labor’s Anthony Albanese and Jason Clare, prime minister Scott Morrison in his southern Sydney seat of Cook, and Liberal MP Trevor Evans in the seat of Brisbane, among others.

Warringah and Kooyong, two formerly safe Liberal seats, may be at risk of falling to climate-focused challengers.

Read the story from The Guardian by Naaman Zhou and Paul Carp - “Tony Abbott and Josh Frydenberg's re-election targeted by school climate protesters.”

School climate strikes: what next for the latest generation of activists?

School students across the UK (and the world) went on strike on February 15, leaving their lessons to protest the lack of effective action on climate change. Coordinated school strikes may be a novel tactic, but mass environmental activism isn’t. So will things be any more successful this time around?

The first big global wave of ecological concern began in the late 1960s and involved fears of overpopulation, air and water pollution and the extinction of species. It peaked with the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, which kicked off international environmental politics.

The next mass movement began in the late 1980s with concerns over the ozone hole, Amazonian deforestation and newly-voiced fears of climate change – then known as the “greenhouse effect”. That wave peaked with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which sought to tackle both global warming and biodiversity, and marked the beginning of coordinated climate action through the UN. 

Read the piece from The Conversation by a PhD Candidate from the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester, Marc Hudson - “School climate strikes: what next for the latest generation of activists?”