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| Students participate in a #FridaysForFuture climate protest march in Berlin, Germany, on March 29, 2019. |
A global student uprising is underway, with youth worldwide demanding that adults face the climate crisis head on. They need a strong foundation in themselves and adult partnership for the challenges ahead.
Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg became one of the most well-recognized faces of this movement following her speech before world leaders at a UN climate conference in Poland in December 2018, when she said, “Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.”
Youth leaders like Thunberg are rising up across the globe. I had the privilege of working with a group of them from the United World College of the Atlantic in early March this year when I co-led a retreat in the U.K. with 17- and 18-year-olds. There were six adults in the retreat as well as students from 11 countries. All of the students had been on the front lines of the most recent strike; all of them carry deep questions about their futures. A young woman from the Netherlands named Maura Van der Ark — whom I had met in the Amazon Rainforest two summers ago, as Truthout reporter Dahr Jamail and I conducted research for his book, The End of Ice — had organized the retreat to help fellow students find a solid footing in these times.
These young people were exhausted from overwork, highly pressured to succeed by society’s standards, confused about their pathways into the future, and angry at their planetary inheritance. They were harboring a severe need to slow down, be themselves, reflect, and connect deeply with the Earth, with one another and with supportive, understanding adults. My experiences with them left a deep impression on me.
Need for a Deep Pause
At our retreat, the talented, motivated, bright, devoted young people collapsed into the spacious, undemanding atmosphere that we offered to them. Expectations from parents, school and the immediacy of the climate crisis were suspended. One of the students, Laurie Chan, wrote this of her experience:
To be able to pause and to truly think is so rare and difficult to get in this fast-paced life…. The idea that we are more productive if we are constantly on the move isn’t true at all. If anything, it makes us tired and forget who we are, what our values are, who we want to be, and where we want to go…. The most important takeaway I had from the retreat is that meaningful seemingly life changing answers are always inside of us, but it takes this kind of self-introspection in order to put the pieces together and draw it out of ourselves.
Of this same vein, Sanela Ramic from Bosnia wrote, “Calm is indeed a superpower.”
Walking Together, With Intergenerational Respect and Solidarity
One of the students, Beth Irving, spoke about having a 60-year spread in ages within the retreat, and what she thought of the older generations. “There is a lot of blame and anger directed towards the older generations,” she wrote to me after the retreat ended. “I want you to take me seriously when I say I am terrified. And I need you to take action, now, like I am doing.”
“We make not be able to reverse the climate situation, but reassurance comes from knowing others care like I do,” Irving continued. “Anything we muster may not be enough, but the salvation is that we will do this TOGETHER. I tend to hide out in my hopelessness; so it really helps to consider this openly together.”
Please continue this article here: https://truthout.org/articles/standing-in-the-fire-with-young-climate-activists/
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