Climate Girls Saving Our World (eBook)

54 Activists SpeakOut

Gayle Kimball Ph.D. (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
462 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-9840-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Over 50 girls and young women from 30 countries share how to save our planet from environmental destruction. In the first book about the global young women's climate movement, you'll learn about their activist tactics and personal stories as they shape the future. You'll discover regional issues and understand Generation Z. The activists represent every inhabited continent and give first-person accounts. Gayle Kimball interviewed them because they're leading the climate movement and are courageously dedicated to stop climate change and destruction of our environment-the most important issue of our time.

Textauszug

Introduction

The power young people hold within us is invincible. It is we who together are going to solve this. Greta Thunberg

Over 50 girls and young women from 30 countries share how to save our planet from environmental destruction. You’ll learn about their activist tactics and personal stories as they shape the future. You’ll discover regional issues and understand Generation Z. The activists represent every inhabited continent and give first-person accounts. I interviewed them because they’re leading the climate movement and are courageously dedicated to stopping climate change and the destruction of our environment.

Our most urgent problem is the complex of the climate crisis, global warming, pollution, and environmental destruction. Everyone is impacted and must take action in the decade ahead or tipping points become irreversible, such as the thawing of Arctic permafrost and the Antarctic ice sheet, extinction of many species, and the loss of rainforests and coral reefs. Once reached, there will be no hope of remediation.4 We must reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) by 2050, which means cutting them in half by 2030. Humans, in our Anthropocene Epoch, have caused rapid warming in contrast to the previous Holocene Epoch where temperature didn’t vary more than a degree for over 12,000 years.

The previous generation of activist leaders who tried to sound the alarm about the crisis, called the Sixth Mass Extinction, included these adults:

Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring (1962).

Bill McKibben wrote the first climate change book for a general audience--The End of Nature (1989) and founded 350.org in 2007.

Al Gore, the author of the film and book An Inconvenient Truth (2007), etc. In 2020 he pointed out two reasons to be hopeful: Renewable energy is less expensive than fossil fuel and the world population is not growing as fast as feared.

Vandana Shiva, author of Earth Democracy (2015), etc.

Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2015) and On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, 2019, etc.

In my video excerpt of her 2019 lecture, Klein names three major “fires:” climate disruption; political fires of hatred, division, and pessimism; and the youth-led climate movement.5 The spirit of fire must be used to clean the debris. She says the main problem is that economic powers want us to give up so we don’t rise up. For example, many films about the future are dystopian, where the 1% live in walled compounds and the masses suffer from disaster, as portrayed in The Hunger Games series. In fact, the UN Office on Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) warns that the climate crisis is turning much of the planet into an “uninhabitable hell for millions of people.”6 Hopeful actions mentioned by Klein are that university and financial endowments are divesting from fossil fuels and the blooming of climate organizations like the Sunrise Movement.

While attending a climate march in San Francisco, I asked McKibben to comment about the youth movement for a short video. He replied, “Youth, in general, are behind a lot of what’s going on in the climate movement, the most important part. Because this is such a timed crisis, it’s very apparent they’re the ones who will pay most of the price.”7 He observed that social movements are shifting away from leader-led to broad spread-out movements. He said that climate activists succeeded in divesting $11 trillion from fossil fuel companies globally8 and stopped pipelines, but he believes we need 100% renewable energy. McKibben is not sure if we’ll act in time to save the environment, especially since he had recently returned from Greenland where he saw the ice melting.

In contrast, the current climate movement leaders are much younger, Generation Z, and the most prominent are girls like Greta Thunberg.9 They emphasize climate justice, referring to the harm the climate crisis does to disadvantaged people—including women. They use the word “intersectional” to point out that issues are interlaced, a reaction to the focus on the single issue of technology in the earlier environmental movement and sexism in the Second Wave of the women’s movement. They advocate system change, starting with government Green New Deals. However, Thunberg points out discussion of these green plans is dangerous if it implies necessary change can occur in the existing system.

The activists advocate replacing the consumption-driven growth economy model with a circular renewable economy that doesn’t waste. They angrily fault adults for not acting on the crisis and are afraid for their future. In every leadership group of youth climate organizations I’ve researched, the large majority are girls. I wrote about Gen Y activists in a series of books and wrote a book titled Resist about how to be a changemaker, so it seemed a no-brainer to research Climate Girls Saving Our World. No other social issue is relevant if we destroy our environment and climate, and girls are leading the battle to save us.

Because girls created most of the recent climate organizations like FFF (Fridays for Future), Youth for Future Africa, and Polluters Out, I interviewed 54 young women climate activists in 2019 and 2020, using snowball sampling as they recommended other girls around the world. I also contacted youth climate organizations for their nominations. I refer in this book to the interviewees as “our activists.” My initial letter and interview questions are on the global youth webpage.10 My intent was to learn about their tactics, how they organize, their goals, and what biographical factors led them to be courageous and dedicated changemakers. I wanted to know why they’re willing to give up their hobbies, sleep, and playtime for hours in meetings and demonstrations.

The activists and I both edited the transcript of the Skype video interviews, which are available to view on my YouTube channel.11 It includes their social media links, mainly Twitter and Instagram, to stay current with their work. I learned to respect Gen Z highly although they’re accused of being apathetic, which gives hope, plus became more conscious of my contributions to climate change.

Since the climate crisis is a global disaster, I included girls from 31 countries, nine US states, an indigenous nation, and Canadian provinces of Ontario and British Columbia. The youngest is Lilly, age 11, in the Netherlands, with a few Generation Y activists included—mostly from Africa. The book begins with a list of climate problems and overview characteristics of the activists, followed by the interviews that are organized by continent in alphabetical order. The geographical sections begin with an overview of regional themes. The book ends with climate solutions to apply in your life, including lobbying government officials to declare a climate emergency and create climate plans. Older generations can work with activist youth in intergenerational justice to push for effective climate plans that deal with the crisis—we don’t have time to fiddle while the planet is on fire. As Thunberg said, “If a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to…. Change is coming, whether you like it or not.” Ending the climate emergency may seem hopeless, but as Nelson Mandela reminded us, “Change always seems impossible until it happens.”

A setback, our Fridays for Future activist in India, Disha Ravi was arrested on Valentine’s Day in 2021 for helping to write a non-violent paper in support of striking farmers. “This is their way of trying to scare away youngsters from raising their voice about anything," environmentalist Leo Saldanha said of the Indian government. "This sends a message to all young people out there that, shut up and stay at home or this is what is going to happen to you."12 Her arrest was met with international protest as well as in India, which spotlighted lack of free speech.

Activists pushed for a green recovery to the economic slowdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, including allocating a percentage of the $11 trillion allocated for global stimulus programs by July of 2020.13 A TIME Magazine cover story titled “One Last Chance” concluded that 2020 was the year the world decided to “keep driving off the climate cliff—or to take the last exit.”14 The European Commission pledged more than $800 billion to “turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently.” South Korea, Costa Rica, and Rwanda are examples of other countries promising Green Deals. China plans to build a “new infrastructure” with electric vehicles and high-speed rail, although they’re also building new coal plants. Chairman Xi Jinping promised to reach carbon neutrality, as did the US and many other countries listed in the Solutions section.

You’ll be inspired to learn about the passion, dedication, and hard work of the girls leading the climate movement, learn about issues in 31 countries, and gain insight into the new generation of leaders. Thunberg’s mother, Malena Ernman asked, “Is the struggle for the environment the world’s greatest feminist movement? It...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.9.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-9840-8 / 1098398408
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-9840-8 / 9781098398408