For the young environmental activists inspired by Greta Thunberg and her peers, the battle is going to have to be as much about changing the political climate as is it about climate change.
In just over a year, the 16-year-old Swedish student has gone from protesting by herself to inspiring school strikes across the planet and deliveringlast Monday. The momentum comes on the heels of another major youth-led movement, March for Our Lives, that spun out of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018.
Fiery idealism, though, can only last so long after it collides with cold realism. Veterans of the civil rights movement, peace movement and other similar activism over the years caution that if Thunberg and company are going to channel their youthful passion into real societal change, a sustainable energy of a different kind is needed.
Rudd, 72, also saw up close how important evolution over time could be to furthering a movement. He watched as fellow veterans of '60s and '70s activism went into"helping professions" like teaching and social justice law. But what they didn't go into in great enough numbers was politics. "Take the occupy movement. It seems like it burned out quickly because there were all these very dramatic street occupations that were not there before and then there weren't," Flacks said of the mass takeovers of public spaces across the world in late 2011 in protest of social and economic inequality. He says that passion is still around."It went into the Bernie Sanders campaign.
"I remember looking at one of my friends who was going from one sit-in to another. I could see he had gone past normal. He had a smile on his face like he was hypnotized," he said."We saw with the civil rights movement, those folks were just ordinary people — and they changed the course of the country," Danns said."These young folks today have that potential to do that, too.
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