As the climate crisis grows, youth environmental movements are radicalizing

With a gun, a young indigenous man searches the Amazon rainforest for illegal loggers, followed by a crew from the 2023 documentary We are guards. Eight thousand kilometers away, young people from Just Stop Oil will throw soup on Vincent van Gogh’s painting ‘Sunflowers’ in the National Gallery in London in 2022. As reporters film them, they shout, ‘What’s more important? Art or life?” Three hundred kilometers away, in 2024, activist Greta Thunberg writhes in the arms of police as she and others are arrested for blocking a road to The Hague in protest against the Dutch government’s tax breaks to oil companies.

The climate crisis is radicalizing youth. Tech-savvy and globally connected, Gen Z and Millennial activists are becoming increasingly militant as runaway fossil fuel development destroys their future. They won early victories. They have brought ecocide, the utter destruction of nature, to the forefront of politics. They attracted worldwide attention with protests. They sued governments and won. The victories go against the face of an older generation of corrupt politicians, paid by the oil industry.

Yet the danger of ecological collapse threatens to overwhelm their initial victories. Climate refugees are flowing across borders. A global network of fascism seeks to dismantle democracy and eradicate civil society.

Young climate activists are at a turning point. Faced with an unlivable future and trapped in a bleak present, pushing and pushing and pushing. They have no choice. They are fighting for their lives.

The shadow of the future

The children are not doing well. They are very scared. A global survey from Bath University shows that teenagers and young adults are looking to the years ahead with trepidation. Researchers collected more than 10,000 responses across 10 countries and found that young people felt fearful and “betrayed by their governments.” Helplessness and anger permeated Generation Z and Millennials from Nigeria to Portugal, from the Philippines to the United States. Fear is greatest where the risk is greatest: in the Global South.

Imagine what it feels like to be 16 years old and growing up with the climate crisis hanging over your head. You look around and see cars and planes emitting carbon. You see plastic bottles spilling from garbage bins and garbage floating in the river. Every season you hear about or directly experience catastrophic weather conditions. A deep hopelessness fills your heart. Everywhere you look and everyone you see is rushing to enjoy the good life, even if it is your death sentence. No one seems to care enough to stop.

Many young people are traumatized by the destruction of their homes and forced migration. Driving through a forest fire is terrifying. It is emotionally devastating to see your home flooded and your memories destroyed. According to the Brookings Institution, the World Bank estimates that Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia will produce 143 million climate migrants by 2050. Every family that leaves their home carries more than their backpacks and children; they carry the pain of being torn from their lives. The nervous system of a traumatized person is like a tree ripped from the earth, with its roots exposed and raw.

How do young people replant themselves in a future that is turning to dust? Fight. Fight. Fight.

Get into the ring

Screaming at the top of their lungs, youth activists blocked the road to Vice President Kamala Harris’ home in Los Angeles. They held bright signs that read: “Financial climate action! No genocide!” referring to Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza. Forty protesters from the Sunrise Movement sang fiercely as police arrested six who sat on the road and refused to move. One said against LA times reporters: “My generation spends our teenage years organizing climate action because people like Kamala Harris have failed us!”

By turning fear into action, young people around the world have grown into environmental groups, from mainstream to militant. The umbrella organization Youth Climate Movement, which initially focused on school strikes and marches, has now scaled up to demand deep systemic change. The group needs financing. They struggle with tactics. Some youth leaders speak at global conferences such as the United Nations COP28. Others are gritting their teeth, impatient with yet another summit, and wanting more immediate action.

Scrappier and more in-your-face groups such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion are leading the charge. Sunrise is a 501(c)(4) political action organization that first made headlines in 2018 by staging a sit-in at the office of then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. It has grown into a powerhouse with $13 million in funding, 400 hubs across the country and a vision to create a Green New Deal. Their activists are pursuing Democrats, which has angered centrist Democrats who are turning irascible, with one person anonymously saying, “The extremism … is the reason even many moderate, thoughtful people are annoyed by environmentalists.” But what drives young climate activists is despair about a future that goes up in flames. Sunrise CEO Varshini Prakash sighed desperately over the failure of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better project: “It’s like we voted, we marched, we struck, you know? There were 16 year olds doing phone banking. What else do we have to do to win?”

Extinction Rebellion is a British-based group that is getting loud on the streets. Using nonviolent direct action, the group organized high-profile protests: occupying Greenpeace offices in 2018, blocking bridges over the River Thames and, most recently, staging a Broadway play, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People’. An activist stood up in the theater and shouted: “I am against the silence of scientists” and walked out wearing an Extinction Rebellion shirt. Two others later disrupted the game.

More recently, Greta Thunberg joined Extinction Rebellion for a protest in The Hague. One of the group’s co-founders, Roger Hallam, was arrested and given a suspended sentence for planning to stop planes at Heathrow Airport using a drone. The organization also recently protested at the Science Museum in London, with more actions planned for the summer.

Add to this the legal victories that youth climate activists are achieving. In 2023, a Montana judge ruled that the state is violating the rights of its young citizens by allowing fossil fuel companies to destroy the environment. Called in another case Genesis B. v. EPA18 California teens have sued the Environmental Protection Agency for “failing to protect them from climate change.” Lawsuits are piling up all over the world. Climate activists had filed more than 2,180 cases by the end of 2022. The goal is to create a legal infrastructure that, in addition to protest, allows civil society actors to stop governments and fossil fuel companies from conspiring to erode the environment for profit while people die.

The risk, of course, is that legal tactics may fail. In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the EPA’s ability to reduce carbon emissions and continues to roll back the agency’s power. Against the legal and political wall, climate activists are becoming desperate. Young people go on hunger strike. Young people are arrested during nonviolent protests. Young people are making connections between climate change and movements for racial justice. Young people ring doorbells and knock on doors and teach classes and spread memes and march and go vegan and stop taking planes and get arrested again.

All this – and yet progress is too slow: 2023 may have been the last year below the ‘key climate threshold’ of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and other historic calamities continue to unfold in the global environment.

Hints of a different direction are bubbling up in the popular media. A movie from 2023, How to blow up a pipeline based on the book of the same name by Andreas Malm, it showed a small group of youth climate activists blowing up an oil pipeline and publicly taking credit. The Internet is full of hand-wringing articles about the possibility of desperate activists turning to property destruction, like the Earth Liberation Front of the 1990s. Critics fear such a turn will alienate middle-class sympathizers and slow the movement.

Young climate activists find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They see their future on fire. They know that people are currently suffering and dying from climate change. They see millions of people fleeing drought and monsoon and begging for safety at the borders of the Global North.

They fight to save themselves. They fight to save life on Earth, the only planet in the vast universe we know it hosts. They fight according to the rules of a rigged game. How long before they throw out the rules?