Summary
2019 Los Angeles Youth Climate Strike—kids skipping school and taking to the streets to demand adults act to protect their future from the consequences of global warming. Strikers were widely concerned with the apparent lack of concern the adult world has exhibited for young people's ecological inheritance in the face of a changing climate and its accompanying fires, floods, and heat waves.

Project Text
In 2019 I followed the Los Angeles school climate strikers, documenting their work on the streets in protest, and behind the scenes organizing. Their demands were simple; that adults take the climate crisis, and young people’s futures in the face of global warming, seriously.

For me, as a journalist looking for the strikes' significant attributes, these actions were notable as much for the passion of the strikers as the preponderance of girls and young women making up and organizing them. Women at large were activated in 2019, at the end of the Trump administration, and before the pandemic began; that much was evident at the time. The fact that girls and young women were taking the lead in these school strikes did not surprise me—girls become emotionally and intellectually mature before boys of similar age for physiological and developmental reasons—and womanhood itself seemed under threat during the Trump administration. Demonstrations demanding significant action to address the climate crisis benefitted from both of these conditions.

To be young and understand the ramifications of a warming climate on one's future today is to be angry and feel betrayed by the adult world. I was told as much repeatedly by the school strikers I was in touch with and those I spoke with in the streets. Recalling my own childhood and adolescence during the Cold War I could not come up with an analogue for girls' anger as raw and present as I saw among the school strikers. It's been long accepted that adolescent boys will be in touch with their anger, early and often, and as such this acceptance became a gendered excuse for male anti-social behaviors.

Social cues, polite society, and the overarching sexism of our culture have long insisted girls and young women to check their anger. These strikes showed me a righteous female anger unbound and directed to organize, participate, and demand better for women, people generally, and the planet. I hope that this might find an outlet again, after the immediate crisis of the Covid pandemic and in the face of the changing contours of the climate crisis.

It has been four years since these protests. Mean global surface temperature anomaly compared to the stable average between 1951 and 1980 has jumped (from +0.85ºC in 2018) to +0.97ºC in 2019. In 2020 that increase was +1.02ºC over the previous year. Due to the pandemic, 2021 saw a falling increase of +0.85ºC over mean but we are marching back up the graph again. 2020 came within two hundredths of a degree of tying 2016's status as the hottest year on record since record-keeping began in 1880.

Since 2019 we have largely lost our opportunity to undertake meaningful global warming mitigation in order to see a "safe" increase in atmospheric warming. We now face the need to respond and adapt to the future we have provided ourselves. These young people and others like them, presumably with the same disproportionate participation of women, will be directing the choices we will be forced to make due to the failure of our societies to have made prudent choices for these kids' futures. I hope the kids remain angry—and turn that anger into productive action—creating a rebellion to recast the ways we live on earth from those of exploitation and extraction, towards stewardship and sustainability.