taxes?’’ she said. ‘‘I’m not that young.’’ But she’s
also able to hear the question from the middle
schooler and imagine that the world could still be
diff erent, to think: You know what? You’re abso-
lutely right. It should, and even could, be illegal.
‘‘I still have the outrage,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s not like
I’m 40.’’When I fi rst met Margolin, on a rare day of
winter sun in Seattle, it had been three weeks
since a resident of the county just north of the
city became among the fi rst Americans to test
positive for a new virus circulating in China.
That threat still felt far off , theoretical, and we
focused instead on the one that defi ned Margo-
lin’s adolescence. Wearing a purple winter coat
that brought out the dyed magenta streaks in her
hair, she ate Valentine’s-themed cookies at the
bakery near her high school and tried to explain
what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of world-
wide environmental destabilization. The defi ning
feeling of her generation, she said, is ‘‘not really
believing in the future.’’
Margolin arrived from school with an empty
lunch bag and a stuff ed backpack. Occasionally,
she paused to answer messages on her phone:
Zero Hour was hiring fellows to do voter-turnout
work in Philadelphia, and she needed to approve
the language of the ads before they went out. The
mundane interruptions made it feel awkward to
ask about grief and anxiety and fear, but Margo-
lin shrugged. It was pretending that everything
was fi ne when it clearly wasn’t that she found
exhausting, she said.
When adults ask her, as they often do, when
she fi rst became worried about climate change,
Margolin has a go-to answer: Climate change,
she explains, is like Beyoncé. When you’re a
member of her generation, both are facts of
life, things you just know, fundamental to the
way the world functions. ‘‘There was defi nite-
ly a time when I fi rst heard of climate change,’’
Margolin told me, just as she ‘‘wasn’t birthed
knowing about Beyoncé.’’ But in neither case can
she remember a moment of fi rst awareness. For
her and her peers, Beyoncé has simply always
existed. And so has the fear of growing up and
making a life in a world rendered unrecognizable
by climate change.
Then came Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and
Maria, which hit in 2017, the same summer
Seattle was choking on wildfi re smoke so thick
it turned the sun red, blotting out even nearby
buildings and sending people to the hospital.For Margolin, the world suddenly seemed more
dangerous, the future less stable, the people in
charge far less capable. She began to wonder
what she could do about it. By the next year,
when she was 16, she and other organizers she
met online were leading their fi rst international
climate protest.
Last month, Margolin published a guidebook,
‘‘Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It.’’
In the foreword, the Swedish activist Greta Thun-
berg writes that it took getting involved with
Margolin and the Zero Hour marches in 2018
to realize that she wasn’t alone in being deeply
worried about what was happening to the planet
on which she still had her entire life to live. As
she met more young people through her activ-
ism, Thunberg writes, she began to see that, the
world over, many in her generation shared her
anger and despair. They just didn’t know what to
do with those feelings.
Young people have been frustrated about the
world’s inaction on climate change long enough
for there to be former ‘‘youth climate activists’’
with gray hair and children of their own. In the
last couple of years, however, in part because of
the sudden celebrity of Thunberg, the role has
become something of an archetype, a phenome-
non underscored by the arrival of the 19-year-old
German climate-change denier Naomi Seibt, who
was pitched by the conservative Heartland Insti-
tute as an anti-Greta — a comic-book counter-
point, like Captain Pollution or Superman’s nem-
esis Bizarro. (Seibt reportedly left the institute in
April.) The contours of the backlash, too, have
become familiar: Critics argue that young people
are manipulated by adults; that they put on a nice
show but have accomplished very little; that their
fears are hysterical and their demands extreme.
Last winter, when Thunberg was selected as Time
magazine’s ‘‘person of the year,’’ President Trump
responded to her message of urgency with smug
dismissal. ‘‘Greta must work on her Anger Man-
agement problem,’’ he wrote on Twitter, ‘‘then
go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend!
Chill Greta, Chill!’’
Margolin’s answer to this sort of criticism is
that she would love, very much, to chill; there
are any number of things she would rather be
doing, if only adults would make that possible
by running the world more responsibly. And isn’t
it a bit rich to criticize a bunch of teenagers for
what they’ve accomplished, when they’re going
up against a well-funded fossil-fuel industry from
their bedrooms and homerooms, all before beingold enough to vote? And wouldn’t you be angry,
too, if the generations before you built and ben-
efi ted from an unjust and unsustainable system
and then left you to deal with the mess when it
started to break down? Wouldn’t you, like Thun-
berg, want to stand up before the people who
were supposed to be looking out for you and
the world you’d someday inherit and demand
to know, with fi re in your eyes, How dare you?
It’s diffi cult to measure the success of any
activist movement. For years, Black Lives Matter,
with its call to stop police violence against Black
people, had more detractors than supporters.
Through organizing and education, approval of
the movement grew slowly but steadily, before
skyrocketing after the killing of George Floyd.
Within two weeks, reforms that seemed next to
impossible began to feel inevitable.
Last fall’s explosion of youth climate marches,
school walkouts and media coverage of youth
activism followed a similar, if less spectacular,
course. Climate change, which went unmen-
tioned during the 2012 presidential debates and
received less than six minutes of airtime when
Trump and Hillary Clinton debated, became a
major issue during the 2020 primary season.
Candidates’ climate proposals became far more
ambitious than they were just a few years before
— though still short of what science tells us is
needed. ’’So what has changed between then and
now?’’ the historian Thai Jones asked ABC News.
‘‘The answer is activism.’’
Yet many youth climate activists feel that their
work is still misunderstood: A diverse movement
with dispersed leadership and a complex critique
of the racial and economic injustice of climate
change gets boiled down to just a few faces and
slogans. Margolin has watched Thunberg pur-
posefully avoid giving speeches, trying to pass
the microphone to other young activists from
parts of the world hard hit by the climate crisis,
only to see the media quote Thunberg’s quick
comments instead of her peers’ carefully written
statements. When The Associated Press cropped
the Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate out of a
photo taken at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, leaving only white activists in the frame,
it was both infuriating and unsurprising. So is
coverage that ignores the eff ort that goes into
organizing and treats youth protests as a mere
novelty. All this, too, Margolin fi nds exhausting.
‘‘The story shouldn’t be, Oh, isn’t it cute that these
kids are standing up for something,’’ she said. ‘‘It
should be, What are they standing up for?’’Estimated number of protesters who
turned out for youth-led climate
marches on Sept. 20, 2019:4 000 000
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