School Strike for Climate Change

It’s the year 2040, only 20 years from now. You have gone to work in a self-drive shared electric car using New Zealand’s 100% renewable energy, tonight there is meat for dinner from a farmer using regenerative agriculture and this year you going on a holiday in New Zealand in a high speed train  also using renewable sources of electricity. You are saving your allocation of “flight kilometres’ this year to go on a holiday to Australia next year in a biofuel plane. This is a carbon zero future. We can achieve this carbon zero future if we work together. Collective action does work. 

There have been many social movements in our past that have changed our world for the better: the suffragettes and abolitionists, the civil rights movement and more recently the anti-vietnam war protests and the LGBT movement. Youth have been involved in many of these movements and now they are protesting to build a new way of life for humanity: one that does not take our planet for granted and works to protect it for future generations and for other species.

Due to the passivity of most of my generation, climate breakdown and ecological collapse has seemed inevitable. Now, thanks to the school strikers, the leaders in the environmental movement and the climate scientists we can turn this around.

On Friday the 27th of September we are being asked by school students to join their strike for climate action. This emerging crisis affects us all. Climate activism may be the most important movement in the history of humanity. Let’s march with them on the 27th, starting 11.00am Civic Square Wellington. 

Either we make history or we’re history.

Jude Brown