Why You Should be Skipping School to Yell Sometimes

By: Modhupa Tsali

In 2019, Greta Thunberg’s angry speeches and facial expressions started spreading around the internet. Since then, youth rallies for the sake of our planet have been a pretty big thing. Even our school has been a part of this movement. A lot of you went to our climate rally at the school parking lot in March. Even if you didn’t go to it, you probably heard its yelling from the back of the school. But what does all this angry yelling really get us?

When we picture climate activism, we might think of angry children demanding some undefined entity of “authority” to fix their problems. When we were out in the parking lot in March, what authority were we asking to solve our problems? In short, it was our NY state representatives and the US President, and we were actually successful in getting them to do most of the specific things that we demanded.

What that goes to show is, large-scale peaceful protests are a very effective way to cause change. Climate advocates work just like the women’s suffragists in the US History regents worked, and as you may know, women today have the ability to vote, so it’s not impossible for our means of energy production in the not-so-far future to be completely sustainable.

Often, over-emphasizing the climate crisis has the opposite of its intended effect on people. Trying to shame people for views or actions that are harmful to the environment doesn’t lead to change. It leads to resentment, along with the impression that it’s pointless to ask for change because we are already doomed. But we aren’t doomed. We just need to take whatever steps that we can to change, and this change needs to be structural so that it becomes easier for every person to make the right decisions in protecting our environment.

This upcoming September, Fridays For Future and many other climate-related organizations internationally are trying to take one more step towards structural change. Recently, United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) Antonio Guterres announced a climate summit in September in New York where entry will be offered only to country leaders who have committed to fossil fuel phase-out. While the Biden administration continues to say yes to mega-polluting fossil fuel projects, the UNSG summit is trying to pressure Biden to show better leadership by stopping. In September 2023, U.S. organizations will try their best to use this opportunity to increase public and political pressure on President Biden. They seek to mobilize 50,000 people to rally in New York to put on a big demonstration for what we want our president to do.

And just for reference, that’s a crazy number of people. The Fridays For Future rally on March 3rd at Brooklyn Bridge was only over a thousand people.

Going to one rally won’t fix all our problems, but it definitely will make them a little bit smaller. Here’s a little thought experiment: if the climate crisis is, in fact, inevitable, and at a point in time we are all going to die, if we delay it just by one day, that’s one more day that all of the nine billion people on our planet get to enjoy. In the end, if just one of our cities ends up surviving the inevitable doom of the climate crisis, it might just carry on humanity. So, every small action that we take might just be exactly what we need.

Climate activists aren’t going to save the world. But democracy can. Thousands of people asking their elected leader to do what they believe is the right thing can save the world. So, in the end, it all comes down to you (and everyone else, but I’m going to try to make you feel a little bit special so that you feel moved). It comes down to what you believe in, what you want your nation’s leader to do, and whether you are going to yell about it at a rally.