5 Youth-Led Climate Justice Groups Helping to Save the Environment

“We take on a radical stance."

BY MAIA WIKLER

MARCH 28, 2019

DUSTIN WERO

We’ve seen youth rising to the call and become climate activists over the last year, and that’s largely in part because the stakes have never been higher.

Young people around the world are demanding urgent action to address the ongoing climate change crisis, and are ramping up efforts. Greta Thunberg’s call to action at the United Nations climate change summit, which led to a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, Sunrise pushing forward the Green New Deal, and the ongoing school strikes around the world — including one held on March 15 — have continued to show this generation’s commitment to the cause.

These visionary leaders are creating radical change, fast. Hope not only exists in their bold and unapologetic approach but also in the sheer size of this generation. The Pew Research Center projected that millennials are set to surpass baby boomers in population size in 2019 and represent nearly 40% of the electorate by 2020, according to Center for American Progress.

To honor their efforts, Teen Vogue spoke with five youth-led climate justice groups for a glimpse into the many ways young people can get involved.

1. SustainUS

While politicians congratulate themselves for addressing the climate crisis with the Paris Climate Agreements, the fossil industry is still able to wield access and power in the negotiating spaces at the UN. Through symbolic and direct actions, SustainUS brings youth to international negotiations to dismantle the political elite’s narrative and demand stronger, urgent action.

Most recently, SustainUS sent youth delegates to the World Bank meetings in Bali, Indonesia to speak out on fossil fuel corruption. In 2017, the group organized an action that went viral when youth delegates disrupted the White House panel promoting fossil fuels at the UN climate change conference in Bonn, Germany.

Daniel Jubelirer, COP24 delegation leader for the annual United Nations climate conference, spoke to Teen Vogue about the key strategy and role of SustainUS. “We wield storytelling as a weapon against complacency. We are bringing young people who have a lot of lived experience with injustice from climate impacts and racial injustice,” he said.

Phillip Brown, a 20 year-old queer immigrant from Jamaica and SustainUS COP24 youth delegate tells Teen Vogue, “My presence there was a tangible form of reparation in the sense that black and brown people don’t have the resources to make it into these spaces, even though we are some of the most impacted by climate crises. By showing up in these international spaces, I am reclaiming what’s been taken from us for centuries, our right to take up space and voice our demands for solutions that center the needs of our most vulnerable communities.”

2. Those leading lawsuits in defense of the climate

Youth around the world are using litigation to hold governments accountable to stop climate change and address environmental injustice.

In the U.S., 21 young plaintiffs are suing the U.S. government for violating constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property by allowing and promoting the use of fossil fuels despite knowing they are directly causing the climate crisis.

In Canada, youth recently launched a class action lawsuit in Quebec arguing that the government is violating the rights of young people by failing to take urgent climate action.

“People under 35 will be most affected, we will be here to experience the worst impacts of climate change. It might take 10 years to get a final decision from the court but this lawsuit sends a clear signal to all governments that they need to take climate change seriously,” Catherine Gauthier, executive director of ENvironnement Jeunesse and the representative plaintiff in the case, tells Teen Vogue.

3. Uplift

Vast areas of the Southwest have been dubbed “energy sacrifice zones,” which means millions of acres of federal land are being used and polluted for energy extraction. The Southwest is already experiencing some of the most dire impacts of climate change with massive heat waves, megadroughts and rapidly diminishing water sources. Uplift, an award-winning collective of youth grassroots leaders, is tackling this ongoing crisis.

Brooke Larsen, executive coordinator of Uplift, tells Teen Vogue that the organization is unique because they center voices from the frontlines. “We take on a radical stance,” she says, focusing on colonialism and capitalism as the group builds alliances with different groups in the struggle against climate change.

Uplift strives to be a connective force for the region by organizing an annual 3-day outdoor climate convergence on the Colorado Plateau, training youth leaders in grassroots organizing skills, and using storytelling to amplify marginalized voices across the Southwest. Georgie, a young Hopi woman and Uplift organizer, tells Teen Vogue that her community’s core values are “from the Earth in reciprocity, respect.”

“I grew up with that way of living. Here in Hopi, we have Peabody Coal. There is mining, oil, and gas all in our backyards, on our sacred lands. Uplift creates a political space that brings people together from all over the Southwest, connected by the fact that we are all affected one way or another.”

4. University divestment campaign organizers

The student-led divestment movement is putting the pressure on academic institutions around the world to uphold their commitment for the interest of the public and greater good by cutting their financial ties with the fossil fuel industry, which they argue is reckless in the face of climate change.

According to Vice, as of May 2018, one hundred and thirty-three schools, including Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale, had divested from fossil fuels since the movement began in 2011. Today, educational institutions with previous investments in fossil fuels valuing over $1 trillion have committed to divestment from these industries because of these student-led divestment campaigns.

The success of this movement, however, is not only in the number of divested institutions or the amount of money moved. Just ask Emilia Belliveau, who has a masters in political ecology and is a former divestment organizer at Dalhousie University, and spent three years researching and interviewing the organizers of the movement for fossil fuel divestment on campuses. She tells Teen Vogue, “That perspective doesn’t acknowledge the social impacts of fossil fuel divestment as a movement. This movement has empowered thousands of young people around the world to be skilled community organizers with an understanding of climate change that challenges systemic power and inequity.”

“[Universities are] still engaging in colonialism in this era of reconciliation,” Sadie-Phoenix, two-spirit grassroots organizer and community advocate who led the divestment campaign at the University of Winnipeg, tells Teen Vogue. “Educational institutions have a responsibility to move forward with reconciliation after the history of residential schools. It can’t do that when it's actively colonizing by failing to address climate change and threatening land and water. Infrastructure that’s gold LED standard is greenwashing when it’s funded by oil companies. Divestment is a way to uphold reconciliation.”

To learn more about starting a divestment campaign at your school, click here.

5. Sunrise

Sunrise is redefining youth activism in the U.S. with the meteoric rise of their movement to make supporting the Green New Deal a mainstream position . Teaming up with the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, 29 year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sunrise and the Green New Deal want to transition the U.S. to a hundred percent renewable energy by 2030.

Varshini Prakash, co-founder of Sunrise tells Teen Vogue that the group is led by young people. “Everyone who launched Sunrise was under 26 at that time. For the first year before we launched, it was just a few of us — about 12 people and we had no idea that it would become this large of a movement.”

Now, nearly two years later, Sunrise boasts thousands of members and trained youth activists across the U.S. “We are combining protest organizing and electoral organizing together into one strategy which is pretty unique, as opposed to many other groups who talk about it from the perspective of what we can get from our existing political reality,” Varshini says.

“The millennial generation is not starting from a place of what is politically feasible in this moment, youth are pushing to stretch the imagination of what is possible.”

Related: People of Color Deserve Credit for Their World to Save the Environment

Stuff Happens to the Environment, Like Climate Change 

By Thomas L. Friedman Oct. 7, 2015

An article about the environment in plain talk on a complex issue. - Quick conclusions:

"This is what will greet the next president — a resilient planet that could once absorb our excesses at seemingly no cost to us, suddenly tipping into a saturated planet, sending us “daily invoices” that will get bigger each year. When nature goes against you, watch out.

“For the first time, we need to be clever,” says Rockstrom, “and rise to a crisis before it happens,” before we cross nature’s tipping points. Later will be too late. We elect a president who ignores this science at our peril."

With both China and India having just announced major plans to curb their carbon emissions, the sound you hear is a tipping point tipping. Heading into the United Nations climate summit meeting in Paris in December, all the world’s largest industrial economies are now taking climate change more seriously. This includes the United States — except for some of the knuckleheads running to be our next president, which is not a small problem.

When, at CNN’s G.O.P. presidential debate, the moderator Jake Tapper read statements from Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz (who drives an electric car powered by solar panels on his home’s roof) about how Reagan urged industry to proactively address ozone depletion, and why Shultz believes we should be just as proactive today in dealing with climate change, he got the usual know-nothing responses.

Senator Marco Rubio said, “We’re not going to destroy our economy the way the left-wing government that we are under now wants to do,” while Gov. Chris Christie opined of Shultz, “Listen, everybody makes a mistake every once in a while.”

They sure do, and it’s not Shultz, who has been wisely and courageously telling Republicans that the conservative thing to do now is to take out some insurance against climate change, because if it really gets rocking the results could be “catastrophic.” Hurricane Sandy — likely amplified by warmer ocean waters — caused over $36 billion in damage to Christie’s own state, New Jersey, in 2012.

But hey, stuff just happens.

There was a time when we could tolerate this kind of dumb-as-we-wanna-be thinking. But it’s over. The next eight years will be critical for the world’s climate and ecosystems, and if you vote for a climate skeptic for president, you’d better talk to your kids first, because you will have to answer to them later.

If you have time to read one book on this subject, I highly recommend the new “Big World, Small Planet,” by Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center, and Mattias Klum, whose stunning photographs of ecosystem disruptions reinforce the urgency of the moment.

Rockstrom begins his argument with a reminder that for most of the earth’s 4.5-billion-year history its climate was not very hospitable to human beings, as it oscillated between “punishing ice ages and lush warm periods” that locked humanity into seminomadic lifestyles.

It’s only been in the last 10,000 years that we have enjoyed the stable climate conditions allowing civilizations to develop based on agriculture that could support towns and cities. This period, known as the Holocene, was an “almost miraculously stable and warm interglacial equilibrium, which is the only state of the planet we know for sure can support the modern world as we know it.” It finally gave us “a stable equilibrium of forests, savannahs, coral reefs, grasslands, fish, mammals, bacteria, air quality, ice cover, temperature, fresh water availability and productive soils.”

It “is our Eden,” Rockstrom added, and now “we are threatening to push earth out of this sweet spot,” starting in the mid-1950s, when the Industrial Revolution reached most of the rest of the globe and populations and middle classes exploded. That triggered “the great acceleration” of industrial and farming growth, which has put all of earth’s ecosystems under stress. The impacts now are obvious: “climate change, chemical pollution, air pollution, land and water degradation … and the massive loss of species and habitats.”

The good news is that in this period many more of the world’s have-nots have escaped from poverty. They’ve joined the party. The bad news, says Rockstrom, is that “the old party” cannot go on as it did. The earth is very good at finding ways to adapt to stress: oceans and forest absorb the extra CO₂; ecosystems like the Amazon adapt to deforestation and still provide rain and fresh water; the Arctic ice shrinks but does not disappear. But eventually we can exhaust the planet’s adaptive capacities.

We’re sitting on these planetary boundaries right now, argues Rockstrom, and if these systems flip from one stable state to another — if the Amazon tips into a savannah, if the Arctic loses its ice cover and instead of reflecting the sun’s rays starts absorbing them in water, if the glaciers all melt and cannot feed the rivers — nature will be fine, but we will not be.

“The planet has demonstrated an impressive capacity to maintain its balance, using every trick in its bag to stay in the current state,” explains Rockstrom. But there are more and more signs that we may have reached a saturation point. Forests show the first signs of absorbing less carbon. The oceans are rapidly acidifying as they absorb more CO₂, harming fish and coral. Global average temperatures keep rising.

This is what will greet the next president — a resilient planet that could once absorb our excesses at seemingly no cost to us, suddenly tipping into a saturated planet, sending us “daily invoices” that will get bigger each year. When nature goes against you, watch out.

“For the first time, we need to be clever,” says Rockstrom, “and rise to a crisis before it happens,” before we cross nature’s tipping points. Later will be too late. We elect a president who ignores this science at our peril.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 7, 2015, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: Stuff Happens.