Young climate activists slowed by pandemic, but not defeated

By MARTHA IRVINE and CHRISTINA LARSON April 19, 2020

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FILE - In this Monday, Oct. 29, 2018 file photo, Jamie Margolin, a high school student, speaks during a rally by youth activists and others in Seattle in support of a high-profile climate change lawsuit in federal court in Eugene, Ore. "It's really hard to grow up on a planet full of ifs," said Margolin, a 17-year-old cofounder of This is Zero Hour. "There's always been a sense that everything beautiful in this world is temporary for my generation." (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

Jamie Margolin had not expected to be sitting in her bedroom right now.

The high school senior had prom and graduation coming up, but so much more: A multi-state bus campaign with fellow climate activists. A tour for her new book. Attendance at one of the massive marches that had been planned this week for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

Then the pandemic arrived in Seattle, her hometown, and her plans went out the window.

“But still so much to do,” Margolin said, perched in front of her computer for a video interview from that bedroom.

Like many other young activists who’ve helped galvanize what’s become a global climate movement, Margolin is not letting a spreading virus stop her. They are organizing in place, from the United States to Ecuador, Uganda, India and beyond.

And while some fear they’ve lost some momentum in the pandemic, they are determined to keep pushing — and for now, to use technology to their advantage.

Unable to gather en masse as they’d planned this Earth Day, these activists are planning livestreams and webinars to keep the issue of climate front and center on the world stage and in the U.S. presidential race.

One event, Earth Day Live, is being organized by a coalition of youth-led climate groups, including Zero Hour, of which Margolin is a leader (her Twitter profile includes the tag #futurepotus). As is the case with many other young climate activists, she got involved in the movement taking aim at the fossil fuel industry well before Sweden’s Greta Thunberg became a global household name.

Online organizing is not as easy in some countries. In Uganda, activist Mulindwa Moses says only about a third of the population has Wi-Fi. Also under lockdown, the 23-year-old graduate student is waiting for his chance to return to planting trees and speaking to his nation’s youth in person.

Like the original founders of Earth Day, he is among those who were first inspired by local issues — which they came to connect with global climate change.

While traveling in eastern Uganda, Moses met with families who had lost their homes in mudslides caused by torrential rainfall.

“I remember a girl I had a conversation with — she lost her parents and had to take care of her siblings. She was suffering so much,” he said.

So, last year, he began a campaign to encourage citizens to plant “two trees a week” and regrow their forests to combat deforestation and mudslides exacerbated by changing weather patterns.

In Ecuador, 18-year-old Helena Gualinga also has had to pause her world travels.

Born in Ecuador’s indigenous Kichwa-speaking Sarayaku community — home to about 1,200 people in the Amazon — she says she learned from the example of her parents and her elders how to speak up for the rights of her people. Their fight has been against a government that they believe has given their land too freely to mining and oil companies.

“The energy I remember from my elders growing up” — at community meetings she attended with her parents when she was small — “was that my community was always very worried,” she said.

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Now, she added, “I know I have a voice.”

Moses plans to run for his country’s parliament next year. “I want to fight to change the system from the inside,” he said.

So does Max Prestigiacomo, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, who is set to take his seat on the city council of Madison, Wisconsin. While fighting the coronavirus has used up much of local government’s bandwidth, he still plans this fall to push the platform on which he ran – for his city to become fully sustainable by 2030. It is a lofty and some would say unattainable goal, but he is looking for “the impossible yes.”

“Obviously, I wanted the alarm sounded decades ago before I was even born,” the 18-year-old said. “But it’s too late for incremental change.”

Tia Nelson, daughter of the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, founder of Earth Day, said her father would appreciate the determination of this generation, as he did the young people who made the first Earth Day in 1970 a great success.

Though the senator went to Washington in 1963, and won support from President Kennedy, his daughter said it took several years to find backing for many of his environmental causes. He came up with the idea of Earth Day, first envisioned as a nationwide “teach-in,” after reading a magazine article about college students’ impact on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Later that same year, the Environmental Protection Agency was born.

“The climate youth movement today is having a significant and important impact in doing exactly what my father had hoped on the first Earth Day — that he would get a public demonstration sufficiently robust to shake the political establishment out of their lethargy,” Tia Nelson said. “The youth movement 50 years ago did that. The youth movement today around climate change is doing the same thing.”

Nelson, who is climate director at the Wisconsin-based Outrider Foundation, said she’s particularly excited at polls showing that many young Republicans care just as much about climate change as Democrats.

Peter Nicholson, who helps lead Foresight Prep, a summer environmental justice program at Chicago’s Loyola University, said the coronavirus crisis only highlights the message that “we are all connected.”

“Climate change is no less real,” he said. “The feedback loop is just much longer.”

So for now, Margolin and her peers will use their devices to help foster those connections — something their predecessors could not do remotely.

“Everyone is online anyway,” she said. “Maybe they start on Earth Day. But then with online resources, you click one link that leads you to another, leads to another that leads you to contact info.”

“And then you just start getting involved.”

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Other online Earth Day resources:

Smithsonian Earth Summit: https://earthoptimism.si.edu/2020-summit/

Earth Day 50: http://www.earthdayinitiative.org/

Earth Day for Earthrise: https://earthrise2020.org/

Citizens Climate Lobby virtual Earth Day: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/uniting-from-home-registration-101119077884

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Martha Irvine is an AP national writer and visual journalist. Christina Larson is an AP global science and environment writer.

Climate activist Jamie Margolin poses for a portrait in a tree in Seattle on April 5, 2020. Margolin, who is finishing her senior year of high school, first took on the issue of climate in 2014, when she was just 14 years old. Two years later, she helped found Zero Hour, a youth-led organization aimed at pushing climate as a political and social justice issue. The group is helping take the climate movement online in the age of coronavirus. “We’re doing webinars, we’re doing livestreams, we’re doing social media content, animations, everything like that to educate folks,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can.” (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

In this Friday, Feb 21, 2020, photo, environmental activist Licypriya Kangujam, 8, stands at Juhu beach in front of a pile of trash during a cleaning drive in Mumbai, India. Kangujam is among the younger climate activists in the world and, beginning two years ago at age 6, began taking on issues ranging from carbon emissions in her home country to ocean pollution. Insistent that children deserve to be heard on these topics, she’s given a TED Talk and attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “I’m strong. I’m brave. I’m intelligent,” she said. “(Addressing) climate change is not only for adults, or just for our leaders.” (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

In this Friday, Feb 21, 2020, photo, environmental activist Licypriya Kangujam, 8, holds a sign at Juhu beach during a cleaning drive in Mumbai, India. Kangujam is among the younger climate activists in the world and, beginning two years ago at age 6, began taking on issues ranging from carbon emissions in her home country to ocean pollution. Insistent that children deserve to be heard on these topics, she’s given a TED Talk and attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “I’m strong. I’m brave. I’m intelligent,” she said. “(Addressing) climate change is not only for adults, or just for our leaders.” (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2020 file photo, climate activist Luisa Neubauer speaks at a demonstration outside the Olympic Hall during the ongoing Siemens annual shareholders' meeting in Munich, Germany. Protesters outside the venue demonstrated against the company's decision to stand by a contract linked to a coal mine in Australia. Sign in the foreground reads "Australia burns" in German. The 23-year old, based in Berlin, and others started the “Fridays for Future” climate protests in Germany after “we as one of the richest economies worldwide were intending to miss our climate targets due to a lack of political will,” she said. “That to me seemed rather unacceptable.” She said decision-makers and all generations need to work together on common-sense solutions. (Peter Kneffel/dpa via AP)

In this Aug. 10, 2019 photo provided by Sebulime Enock, Mulindwa Moses, 23, poses for a portrait in Kampala, Uganda. Moses, a graduate student, has begun a campaign to encourage citizens to plant trees to help prevent deadly mudslides in his country. Before the coronavirus shut down Uganda, he regularly met with adults and schoolchildren to educate them about the impacts of climate change and deforestation. He said he has received death threats because of his work. “I’m not going to stop. If it’s losing my life, I think I’ll die a great man,” said Moses, who plans to run for parliament in 2021. (Sebulime Enock/Blu Monkey Studios via AP)

In this Jan. 13, 2020 photo provided by Sebulime Enock, Mulindwa Moses prepares tree saplings for planting in Naayla, Uganda. Moses, a graduate student, has begun a campaign to encourage citizens to plant trees to help prevent deadly mudslides in his country. Before the coronavirus shut down Uganda, he regularly met with adults and schoolchildren to educate them about the impacts of climate change and deforestation. He said he has received death threats because of his work. “I’m not going to stop. If it’s losing my life, I think I’ll die a great man,” said Moses, who plans to run for parliament in 2021. (Sebulime Enock/Blu Monkey Studios via AP)

In this March 8, 2020 photo provided by Lucas Bustamante, Helena Gualinga marches in the International Women's March in Quito, Ecuador. Gualinga, who is 18, is part of the country's indigenous Kichwa-speaking Sarayaku community – home to about 1,200 people in the Amazon. “My community had to defend its right to the land,” she says. Following the example other mother and her elders, she says she learned how to be a spokesperson for the rights of her people. She speaks often about the negative impact of climate change, oil drilling and mining on the Amazon rainforest. She does not consider herself an activist. “I just care about the environment." Gualinga has split her time between Ecuador and Scandanavia, where her father grew up. (Lucas Bustamante via AP)

This 1968 photo provided by the family shows Tia Nelson and her father, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, on the campaign trail in Wisconsin. Of her father, the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, Tia says her father would appreciate the determination of this generation, as he did the young people who made the first Earth Day in 1970 a great success five decades earlier. (Nelson Family via AP)

Tia Nelson, daughter of Earth Day founder, the late U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, looks at photos from her father's archive on Monday, March 2, 2020, in Madison, Wis.. Tia, who has dedicated her own career to environmental work, is a managing director at the Madison-based Outrider Foundation, a nonprofit that works on climate and other issues. Nelson, who was 13 when the first Earth Day happened, says she is heartened by a new generation of young climate activists who've taken up the cause. (AP Photo/Martha Irvine)