‘Listen and help us’: Kids worldwide are on strike for the climate

In over 200 nations, children are calling for adults to take action and stop ruining the planet’s future.

NEW YORK CITY- Listen up, grown-ups around the world: You’ve failed us.

That is the message millions of young people from Sydney to Warsaw to London and beyond carried to the streets on Friday, as they skipped school to stage strikes demanding urgent action on climate change.

The global strike is the third this year and involved more than 3,000 protests, according to Fridays for Future, the group that organized them. The strike in New York, where 1.1 million students were excused from school, comes ahead of a pair of climate meetings at the United Nations–the first-ever Youth Summit on Saturday and a one-day Climate Action Summit of the General Assembly on Monday.

Striking for change

The New York protest was led by Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish high school student who has become the face of the fast-growing youth movement that has taken hold in more than 200 nations. Her message to world leaders is blunt and to the point: Listen to the science.

"We are united behind the science and will stop at nothing to keep this crisis from getting worse," Thunberg said from the stage in Battery Park at the south end of Manhattan as the crowd chanted, "Greta, Greta, Greta."

She not only condemned political leaders for their "empty promises, lies and inaction," she chastised supportive adults for taking selfies with her and her fellow activists and telling them "how much they admire what we do."

That is not why the crowds turned out in the streets, she added. "We are doing this to wake up the leaders," she said. "We deserve a safe future. Is that too much to ask?"

Thunberg delivered a similar message to the U.S. Congress when she testified earlier this week. Instead of prepared remarks, she submitted last October’s report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that warned the rise of global temperatures was hastening to an alarming degree. To prevent 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming—which would result in catastrophic food shortages, coral reef die-offs, worsening flooding, wildfires and extreme weather—the scientists advised that global greenhouse gases must be reduced by 45 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050.

Aside from her appearance before Congress, Thunberg met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama, and appeared at a protest in front of the Supreme Court with 21 youth plaintiffs suing the government to force court-ordered action on climate change. She also joined a strike outside the gates of the White House, which included a silent 11-minute “lie-down” in recognition that there just 11 years remaining before that first 2030 deadline.

Thunberg arrived in New York late last month after a two-week trip across the Atlantic by yacht. She refuses to fly because of airplanes’ carbon footprint.

The tiny but fearless teenager seems the least likely leader of a global movement. When she staged her first Friday school strike outside the Swedish Parliament in August last year, she sat alone. A handful of other students joined her, then more. She spoke to the UN meeting in Poland–traveling by train–last December, and by spring, a global movement had been launched.

“The weight of the climate crisis has been put on our shoulders by the inaction of our leaders,” says Alexandria Villasenor, who is 14 and the founder of Earth Uprising, one of the numerous activist groups that has been organized.

Villasenor lives an hour’s drive from Paradise, California, which burned to the ground last fall in one of the worst wildfires in the worst fire season ever recorded in California’s history. In recalling the fire and the toxic smoke that spread to her hometown, Villasenor said her greatest fear is that by the time she turns 18 and is eligible to vote, “it will be too late to solve the climate crisis.”

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/kids-march-climate-action/
Texto elegido para la entrega del parcial por Tamara Fourcade, Federico Reyes, y Tatiana Mussini.
Elegimos este texto porque nos resulta interesante la enseñanza sobre la prevención de la contaminación en la escuela, mostrar cuáles son los daños ocasionados debido al consumismo. Mostrar que niños pueden generar un cambio a escala mundial puede llegar a ser motivador para nuestros alumnos, para que se animen a realizar un cambio mínimo, que entre todos se vuelva grande.