“What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!” 

This was the cry of the hundreds of young protesters led by the local chapter of Fridays for Future who marched from City Hall Park to Battery Park.

Protesters push bikes at climate change protest  in Lower Manhattan.  September 24, 2021. Photo by Nikol Mudrová

They held signs  that read, “Protect our home,” or “If you breathe air, you should care!!” 

The New York City Friday for Future movement summed all the various banners  and chants into  four specific demands. They want clean energy, no funding for projects polluting the environment, t environmental justice education in public schools and environmental protection for 30 percent of the country’s  land and sea. 

“We need to completely cut our carbon emissions and fracked gas,” Brooklyn Darling, a SUNY New Palz University student said. 

Brooklyn Darling, 19, a SUNY New Palz College student, voicing her disagreement with climate inaction in front of the City Hall, where the strike started. September 24, 2021. Photo by Nikol Mudrová

She also believes it is crucial to follow the  United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Agreement, and sign the Green New Deal.

“Those in power should listen to youth. We are the ones who are inheriting this earth after they leave,” Yasmin Bhan, one of the strike’s organizers said.  

That is why organizers led the crowd with the slogan: “Uproot the system.” The same message also led more than 1,400 Friday’s climate strikes around the world. 

“Especially in Congress, there are a lot of people getting paid by the fossil industry,” protestor, Gerome Foster II said. At 18 he is the youngest member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory and the executive director of youth voting advocacy group OneMilionOfUS. “We need to vote out the people who are continuing to perpetuate the system and are putting us at risk.” 

Climate change protestor Gerome Foster II, 18, has been very active in the fight to save the environment.  September 24, 2021. Photo by Nikol Mudrová

Foster was inspired by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate activist who launched the Fridays for Future movement and a close friend. 

This global strike happened just a few weeks before November’s UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow and during New York Climate Week. 

As a response to Climate Week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced several new climate policies including a 15-Year $191 million plan for reaching the goal of 100 percent clean energy by 2040 and carbon neutrality by 2050. 

But this is not ambitious enough for the protestors  since youth climate activists rallied for clean energy by 2030 and not 2040.

Youth activists sitting in Battery Park and listening to speakers at New York City’s Global Climate Strike. September 24, 2021. Photo by Nikol Mudrová

And a lack of ambition and will is what Foster noticed on Biden’s Environmental Advisory Council.

“The hardest is reaching the scale of the plans,” he said.“Often, we’re fighting over how we scale up and what we can do, for instance, 10  percent increase over the next 10  years and we say: ‘No, based on the science, we need to make an 80 or 90 percent decrease.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, we can’t do that,’” he said.

According to Foster, the political climate is simply not changing fast enough. 

“They don’t understand the urgency or the scale of it,” he said. 

And that is why the organizers voiced from the stage of Battery Park the need for tackling climate change globally.

“No matter your race, gender, identity, sexual orientation, religion or social economic status, this is a fight for all,”he said.

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“My grandparents did not experience the fires that my parents and I had experienced,” said Robin. 

According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, the number of wildfires in the west has nearly doubled since 1985.

As a third-generation owner of the property, Robin was born and raised on the land and clearly remembers the 1993 Altadena fire that raged and burned down five houses on her street. It was after that fire that her father implemented an extensive fire safety plan.

“We spend a lot of money on fire safety. We have a full fire suppression system, a pump that goes into the pool with full-on fire hoses, probably 400 feet of fire hoses,” Robin said. “If you’re going to live here you’ve got to be prepared. It comes with the territory.”

Luckily, the Santa Ana winds did not come into play and the four miles of land between Robin’s property and the fire went untouched. 

“We would have been next. We missed a bullet,” Robin said. 

As temperatures slowly climb to hotter degrees, it has escalated the amount of dry shrubbery and organic matter that fuels fires. Over the past century, temperatures have risen by three degrees increasing heatwaves and lowering the amount of rainfall. These conditions not only ignite these raging fires but also contribute to the fast spread of them and the challenge of putting them out. 

“We saw some of the worst heat we had ever seen,” said Sean Provencio, a resident of Pasadena. 

Temperatures in Pasadena averaged around 111 degrees Fahrenheit in early September when temperatures don’t typically pass 103 F. 

Smoke from the Bobcat fire from Southern California. Photo courtesy of Stacy Rubinowitz

InciWeb says the Bobcat Fire that has ravaged the San Gabriel Mountains remains 15% contained and has burned up to 105,345 acres.

“It almost felt like you were at a campfire site,” Provencio said of the smoke and ash plumes brought on by the fire.

The Bobcat Fire is only one among 26 other fires that firefighters continue to battle throughout the state of California, Cal Fire reported. 

Up in Northern California, the North Complex Fire was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle as the fifth largest fire in California history. It has burned 298,191 acres and is almost entirely contained.

It began in mid-August due to lightning storms and the winds brought the smokey air to San Francisco. 

The smoke penetrated the marine layer and blocked the sun bringing a dark and apocalyptic feel to the city , said Julie Peck, a resident of San Francisco. “And when it’s really smokey you wake up and your whole house smells like smoke,” said Peck. 

Breathing in the smoke is known to cause respiratory problems, strokes, and heart attacks leading to higher numbers of hospitalization. And amid a global pandemic, these fires just add to the chaos and incredulous hardships.

Peck said 2020 has been a beast of a year.

“It just seems like it’s one thing after another,”she said.

And now with the fires becoming an annual occurrence, residents have begun to ask themselves if it’s worth it to stay in California. 

“I’ve been through it so many times you’d think it would get easier and you’d be more prepared as time goes on,” Robin said. “Is it really worth it that every year we have to go through that much fear to live here?”

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Today the streets of Manhattan were flooded with thousands of young people marching together in the fight against climate change. 

They shouted “Hey, hey, ho, ho climate change has got to go,” and “Save the Planet.” Teenagers climbed up street posts to display signs calling for environmental policy reform.  Bystanders watched from storefronts as demonstrators in seemingly organized chaos migrated from Foley Square to Battery Park. 

The march was a result of a movement orchestrated by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, a prominent figure in the fight against climate change, to give her peers a chance to have their voices heard. It comes just days before the U.N. 2019 Climate Summit taking place in New York. 

 “I just think we need more awareness for people who don’t believe it or are unwilling to make a change,” said Anna Beckmann, a 16-year-old student at Columbia Secondary School in Harlem. “A lot of people say it is not going to make any change, but I think it is an important act of solidarity for our generation.”

Protestors gleamed with pride, holding up handmade signs, cheering and chanting as they made their way South on Broadway. Police lined the streets, forced to intervene only when a brave few climbed scaffolding for a better vantage point to view the sea of climate activists. 

 With the majority of the crowd in their teens, the calls to action that echoed through the streets were more so pleas to an older generation in hopes of creating a better future.

 “We want more eco-friendly and less consumption,” said 18-year-old Liz Sullivan.

 As marchers met at the end of Broadway which turned in the mouth of Battery Park, “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley played over the P.A. system. 

Activists of all ages flooded Battery Park in Manhattan to hear Greta Thunberg speak. Here, a young girl stands with her family just outside the entrance to the where protesters assembled. Photo by Thomas Hengge

“The climate summit is in two days, so we want to create enough of a spark to where we’re seen,” said Chole Giulini, 16, who traveled from Sandford, Connecticut to attend the march. “Our planet is dying. It is as simple as that. The results of the climate summit will determine what we do after this.”

 On the lawn of Battery Park, the marchers came to a halt, and people gathered in front of a stage where Thunberg was set to speak. It was there the volume of people that showed up could be grasped. Hundreds, if not thousands, already filled the park as more poured in. People danced to the music blaring from the stage speakers, took pictures and found real estate to display the signs they made.

Climate change activists gathered by the thousands today at Foley Square and marched to Battery Park to raise awareness on climate change. The March comes just days before the U.N. Climate Change Summit. Photo by Thomas Hengge

 Some seized the opportunity to get a little more creative in an environmentally conscious way with how they chose to raise awareness.

 “I am having people write what was on their signs or something that they want to share because I didn’t want to bring a paper sign, I didn’t want to waste,” said Erin McElhone, who was covered in black marker. “So, I am letting people write on my own body.”

 Whatever form of activism was chosen today, the collective voice of climate activists was heard not only in New York but around the world as well. Thunberg’s speech was broadcast across the nation as well as in other countries. It is a moment younger generations hope perpetuates the change they believe is needed for a sustainable future.

“Even if the politicians don’t make a change for us right now, someday we will all care about this,” said Beckmann.

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Environmental activists are still pressuring lawmakers to embrace the Green New Deal, despite that it has already been voted down in the Senate.

While Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said that he believes in climate change, he’s been dismissive of the Green New Deal. In place of the deal, he’s tried to push his Republican colleagues in the Senate to acknowledge the urgency of climate change and have open discussions about its effects, but activist Iliana Walsingham said this is not enough.

“Opening up conversation is good, but we should have done that 10 years ago,” said Walsingham, 21. “Now is the time to have actual action. We need to change.”

Walsingham is one of many asking for more action regarding climate change. On April 30, around 50 protestors from the Sunrise Movement, a group dedicated to making climate change a more visible and pressing issue, assembled on the sidewalk outside Schumer’s Midtown Manhattan office. For more than two hours, they gave emotional testimony, sang passionately, and repeatedly called for the senator to support the deal.

The group refused to leave the site, and eventually, law enforcement stepped in. Walsingham was one of seven activists arrested for blocking pedestrian traffic and refusing a lawful order to disperse. But for her and the others, the cause is what’s important.

“I think we need to hammer home that climate change and this climate catastrophe is going to affect everyone worldwide,” said Walsingham, before the start of the protest.

Sarah Lawrence College senior, Iliana Walsingham calls for Democratic leadership to address climate change in a serious way. Photo by Emma Bolton.

The Sunrise Movement, founded in April 2017, latched onto the Green New Deal resolution, brought forward by New York’s District 14 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey. In addition to protests and rallies outside of lawmakers’ offices, they’ve also hosted town halls across the country explaining the Green New Deal to the public.

The Green New Deal proposes modernizing the country’s energy infrastructure by transferring it away from fossil fuels, while creating jobs and dealing with economic inequality in the process. The resolution calls for government public work investments on the scale of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 New Deal to decarbonize the country’s energy and transportation sectors.

Carolyn Kissane, New York University’s Director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Concentration, said that the Green New Deal has caught the public eye because it’s a bold policy resolution centered on mitigating the effects of climate change.

“It’s extraordinarily ambitious,” she said. “We haven’t had a climate-specific political agenda in quite a long time.”

Support for the Green New Deal exploded after it was officially proposed by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey in February 2019. For young people like Jessie Bluedorn, 24, there are two main reasons to support it.

“We need more than just nice words. We need a plan that holds us to a to actual timetables,” Bluedorn said. “The Green New Deal lays out a specific deadline by which we would need to be off fossil fuels. So any plan that has strict accountability is something I would very much be for versus just generic, ‘we’ll eventually get off of fossil fuels.’”

While it’s not the only way to help reduce the effects of climate change, lessening dependence on oil, coal and natural gas is important in curbing carbon emissions. The plan will also decarbonize transportation and make buildings in the United States more efficient. For Walsingham, the plan’s focus on significantly reducing dependency on fossil fuels is a huge draw.

“We need to get off of fossil fuels,” Walsingham said. “We need to stop producing single use plastics, we need to basically lessen consumption. But basically switching to an electric infrastructure grid is the most amazing part of it.”

Policy experts like Kissane note that the timeline is largely unrealistic — the plan calls for sweeping changes to be implemented within ten years —  but the resolution makes a statement about a way to approach creating a greener society.

“I think the idea of thinking about policy and ways to go about reducing carbon emissions– I’ll be honest with you, we’re not going to be carbon-free by 2050, we’re not going to be fossil-free by 2050, nowhere near it,” Kissane said. “But the idea of what are the things that we can do now? What can we do more on energy efficiency? What can we do about thinking about our energy systems in the United States?”

While the large scale transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy is the top priority for the activists, the other factor is the social justice and economic equality aspects of the plan. It’s the other reason Bluedorn attended the protest.

“As we have seen globally with the Yellow Vest Movement in France, to effectively transition off fossil fuels, we really have to build in a just transition framework and acknowledge that some people are more impacted than others,” said Bluedorn. “So, there has to be a jobs guarantee and a serious plan for how we are going to transition our economy that is not going to leave certain people more impacted than others unfairly.”

As of now, the plan will remain a statement of ideals. In March, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) brought the plan to the floor, forcing Democrats to vote on it. Senator Schumer called it a sham vote, while moderate Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) said that the plan was too broad, non-specific, and unrealistic. The resolution failed in a 57-0 vote, with four Democrats crossing the aisle and the rest of Democrats voting “present.”

Chair of the Technology and Society Department at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, and historian, Jonathan Soffer, sees why aggressive climate change plans are harder for politicians to back.

“This is our generation having to make changes mostly for the benefit of future generations,” Soffer said. “And that’s a virtuous thing, but a lot of people aren’t willing to make those sacrifices if they don’t see immediate benefits. That’s always a harder sell politically.”

As the head of a large caucus in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been reluctant to get behind the resolution. She was the focus of Sunrise Movement protests in Washington D.C. last November, ahead of Ocasio-Cortez’s official swearing in. At one point, she referred to the plan as “the green dream, or whatever they call it.” Like Schumer, she has talked about climate change in the general sense, although last week she initiated a vote to block the Trump Administration from pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord.

Natalie Osborne receives instructions and a song sheet from the protests organizers. Photo by Emma Bolton.

Natalie Osborne, 21, sees the Green New Deal as one of the only ideas that politicians have put forward that addresses climate change. She attended the protest outside of Schumer’s office, and hopes to see the deal become reality.

“I think the Green New Deal is the big one for right now,” Osborne said. “And it addresses a lot of different issues. It addresses racial inequality and income inequality and how they tie in with climate change and climate disasters.”

Stu Waldman and Gloria Weiss attended the rally to support the young people pushing for a greener future for their grandchildren. Photo by Emma Bolton.

The Sunrise Movement is largely comprised of Millennials and Gen-Zers, but there were some notable exceptions, including Stu Waldman, 77, who clutched a picture of his young granddaughter as he stood among the younger activists.

“Matilda is five months old,” Waldman said. “When she’s my age, it will be near the year 2100, and if we don’t do something very quickly in the next ten years, the world — her world — will be unrecognizable.”

A study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shocked the world in October 2018, showing that the timeline to slow the warming of the atmosphere is much shorter than previously thought. According to the study, the world has less than 12 years to drastically curb carbon emissions — otherwise, the worst consequences of climate change will start showing.

Communities across the world are already feeling the effects of rising temperatures, including here in the United States, with more frequent severe weather events. Just this week, the United Nations released a preview of a new report showing that humans and climate change have pushed close to one million species of plants and animals to the edge of extinction.

In the face of dire predictions and a lack in federal leadership, cities like New York  are making their own climate change policies. New York City has created their own Green New Deal, which would use congestion pricing to lower carbon emissions, and retrofit existing buildings to be more energy-efficient. Entire states, including California, Vermont, and Massachusetts have created their own plans to stay in the Paris Climate Accords, even though the Trump Administration has pulled out.

Experts like Kissane believe these city and state-based policies are an indication of what the Democratic party may do in the next election year.

“I think the Democrats are aware that [climate change] is going to be a pivotal issue going into 2020,” she said.

Sunrise activists are looking to Democratic leadership to take on the issue of climate change and that extends to the presidential race. Last week, as his first major policy proposal, presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke announced a plan to put $5 trillion dollars towards addressing climate change within his first 100 days as president.

I think some of the candidates are doing a great job addressing it,” Bluedorn said. “It’s still very early in the primaries, so I am not fully backing a candidate, but certainly I am using climate as a litmus test for any candidate.”

Senator Schumer and Representative Ocasio-Cortez were unavailable for comment.

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“Even though climate change will affect everyone, its impacts will not be evenly distributed,” said Eddie Bautista, executive director for NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, a network that links grassroots organizations from low-income neighborhoods and communities of color to create environmental justice.

“Our communities live at the nexus of so many inequities, all climate change does is add even more intense disproportionality in terms of our burdens,” said Bautista.

The report outlines the shortcomings of Mayor de Blasio’s OneNYC Plan just before a scheduled update, which will be released by the Mayor’s office on Earth Day.

The NYC-EJA created recommendations on how the OneNYC Plan can assure the safety of residents that live in Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas, or SMIAS for short. These are communities that have become the concentrated hosts of the city’s infrastructure, such as waste transfer stations, power plants and industrial facilities, and climate-based damage to that infrastructure could mean disastrous consequences to those who live in these areas.

“We have the heaviest clusters of the city’s toxic chemical uses and heavy infrastructure all cited in waterfront neighborhoods in the path of storm surges,” said Bautista. “Not only do you have storm surges to worry about and flooding but dislodging of chemicals and the potential for communities to be exposed to toxic stews in the event of severe weather.”

The report also highlights the range of climate change impacts that are to be expected. Beyond incremental storms and rising sea levels, the increasing temperatures are also a concern for the NYC-EJA.

“Heat kills more people than storm surges or hurricanes every year,” said Bautista. “We’re expecting the average summer day to increase anywhere from 4 to 6 degrees, the number of heat waves are expected to either triple or quadruple. There’s no strategy to deal with that in the OneNYC Plan.”

Bautista says the rising temperatures are markedly problematic in low-income neighborhoods like Brownsville, where communities lack enough trees to keep the asphalt cool or have residents that cannot afford air-conditioners.

The report also sites that there are vast vulnerabilities in industrial neighborhoods that have regional implications. One example, Bautista says, is that most of New York City’s food goes through the Hunt’s Point Distribution Center, which is an SMIA. Over 60% of New York City’s produce, fish, and meat comes through the center.

“The mayor’s office has confirmed, that had Sandy landed when it was high tide for Long Island Sound – either 12 hours before or after when it actually landed – that means a storm surge would have wiped out the food supply for the entire city and no one knows how long.”

Community outreach programs, like El Puente in South Williamsburg, are taking the NYC-EJAs recommendations of creating community-based planning and preparedness.

“These major weather events made us realize how unprepared we were and still are,” said Ana Traverso-Krejcarek, Green Jobs-Green New York Program Associate at El Puente. “We have to start from scratch. There has not been enough awareness or information on the community level.”

A big part of that is educating mothers in the predominately Latino community on environmental justice and how they can protect their families by providing classes and services in Spanish. Through these programs, El Puente addresses not only concerns for climate-based infrastructure, but for the potentially hazardous risks that come with living in one of Brooklyn’s most toxic neighborhoods, the home to companies like RADIAC, which stores radioactive materials just one block away from the East River.

“For years we’ve been fighting to get RADIAC to close, but it’s privately owned,” said Traverso-Krejcarek. “If the water level rose, say from a hurricane, we don’t know the impact of radioactive material being spread through the community. It’s right here. The latino population that lives in the neighborhood still knows about it, but the huge new influx of residents don’t.”

Angela Terrero, 36, is one such resident that remembers the early days of fighting for RADIAC to close. Now a mother of two who brings her children to El Puente for after-school activities, she fears that the decade long battle will not come to a close quickly enough.

“If the wind had been blowing the other way,” said Terrero. “It would have been us and not the Lower East Side who received most of the impact.”

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by Raz Robinson

A swath of midtown was completely shut down as participants in yesterday’s Peoples Climate March came together for a block party of sorts in Midtown, hours after the march.

The march itself, which was over 400,000 strong, came to a close between 33rd street and 11th avenue, but for the next five blocks marchers and activists who were unable to make it to the march in the morning, joined in an act of solidarity. They told the stories of the communities struggling with the effects of climate change.

Ray West, 63, from Shoreline Wash, and Carmen Gilmore, 46, of Bellingham, Wash. both traveled together as representatives of their 350.org chapters the environmental organization whose aim is to build a global movement for climate solutions and organized the march.

The pair felt that Washington had been hit extremely hard by the consequences of climate change.

“One of the big issues in Washington State is the ocean acidification,” said Gilmore of man made chemical changes that are adding more carbon dioxide into the ocean.“It affects a lot of the wildlife out there, it effects a lot of the things that all of the salmon and orcas feed on.”

West said there is no doubt that the planet is warming.

“The science is out there,” said West. “There’s no doubt about the science that shows us mankind is making a warmer planet, this generation has to stop it.”

Coming from the opposite end of the country Kyle Gibson, 28, Maine of the Beehive Collective, which looks to attack climate change not just with their words, but also with their art.

“It started out as an all women’s stone cut mosaic collective originally,” said Gibson. “Originally they were doing pictures of endangered species, but then started making work about complicated political issues to try and synthesize it into a visual that people could understand.”

The collective had a series of tarps set up on the sidewalk that visualized the history of our planets climate. Visual graphics were used by the group to explain political issues and connect them to economic and ecological problems.

In recent years Machias, Maine, the town the group is based out of, has been devastated by the effects of climate change. They lost their once thriving timber and fishing industry. The collective looks to tell the story of their town to as many people as possible.

“The economy there is deep in the bust end of the boom bust cycle,” said Gibson. “It was a thriving place at one time with a much bigger population because of the timber industry and the fishing industry, but all that’s gone now.”

What left in the town is an aging population with less ability to revitalize the community, as most of the younger people have went elsewhere to find work.

As the gathering came to a close, some of the marchers shared their stories with each other.

Mak Ska Higa, 70, from Black River Falls, Wis., came as a member of an anti-fracking group based out of Madison, Wis. As a Native American, his opposition to fracking comes as a result of a more spiritual connection to the land.

Mak Ska Higa, an Indigenous American, Vietnam Vet, and environmentalist. Photo Credit: Raz Robinson

“Most non-natives think of trees as board,” said Higa. “We think of trees as being part of our relation to our fathers and their fathers, our great grandfathers.”

A member of the Ho-Chunk-Wakajexi clan, better known as the Winnebago Tribe has a history of fighting said Higa. His family was one of the families to survive the colonization of the United States.

“Like my family did, we have to keep fighting for a place to live on this planet,” said Higa. “I owe my existence to my ancestors, because they fought. Maybe one day people will owe their existence to us.”

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