Student activists’ school strikes against climate change are going global, and adults are listening
- Alexandria Villasenor, who misses school each Friday to petition the UN’s HQ in New York, has helped create a worldwide community of like-minded youngsters
- The 13-year-old says, ‘we are not going to let them hand us a broken planet’
On the ninth Friday of her strike, 13-year-old Alexandria Villasenor wakes at home in New York to a dozen emails, scores of Twitter notifications, and good news from the other side of the planet: students in China want to join her movement.
Every week since December, the seventh-grader has made a pilgrimage to the United Nations Headquarters demanding action on climate change. She is one of a cadre of young, fierce and mostly female activists behind the “school strikes for climate” movement. On March 15, with the support of some of the world’s biggest environmental groups, tens of thousands of youngsters in at least two dozen countries and nearly 30 American states plan to miss school to protest.
Their demands are uncompromising: nations must commit to cutting fossil-fuel emissions in half in the next 10 years to avoid catastrophic global warming. And their message is firm: children are done with waiting for adults to save their world.
“Mom, this is so cool,” Alexandria says, as she reads the latest list of countries where children have pledged to participate in a global strike: Australia, Thailand, Ghana, France. “Where is Gir …, Girona?”
“That’s in Spain,” replies her mother, Kristin Hogue.
They sit on the couch, still in their pyjamas, and Alexandria pulls out the planner she bought to keep track of all her commitments. Each task is colour-coded by geographic scale: pink for global organising; orange for national; yellow for New York.
