I Want A Future

Look at passionate young people from any era and you’ll find impressive catalyst for change. The transformative events of the turbulent nineteen-sixties may offer lesson for the climate challenges of the 21st century.

 Millions of young people from around the world have taken action regarding our climate crisis. Students skipped school and made signs to protest the inaction of world leaders to address this dire situation.

 In history you can look no further than to the mass student protest against the Vietnam War and escalation of the war. In the 1960s and early 1970s, anti-war activists decided to use every tool at their disposal to pressure Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to bring an end to the Vietnam War, which was costing thousands of American and Vietnamese lives every week.

Feeling frustrated and ignored, student activists were inspired by a speech delivered by the activist Mario Savio, who told fellow students at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”

From Parkland students to the climate change movement, teenagers and young adults have a history of pushing social change forward.

The climate strike movement was started by 16 year old Greta Thunberg. In August of 2018, she began protesting alone every Friday outside of the Swedish Parliament Building in Stockholm.

 Recently, she delivered an emotional speech at the United Nations in New York:

 “This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! 

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying.”

 Her words are spreading all over the world, and inspiring young people to protest alongside her and express their own fears of a future on this planet.

 The world needs leadership on climate change and young people are stepping up to the challenge.