what’s at stake. Tellingly, the population that
will live with the consequences took to the
streets last year to stage some of the largest
environmental protests in history.
Young people are well positioned, by the
strength of their numbers and the organizing
power of social media, to provoke action. World-
wide, there are more than 3 billion people under
25, two-fifths of the total population. In the
United States during the cultural unrest of the
late 1960s and early 1970s, Americans between
the ages of 18 and 29 numbered 41 million. Today
the same age group is 52 million strong. Youth
protests also have broadened into a movement
that includes a mash-up of so many social
causes, including racial justice and gun con-
trol, that it invites comparison with the social
activism of the late 1960s that roiled countries
around the world.
Millions of children have come of age watching
ice sheets melt and temperatures rise, and they
are fed up with waiting for government leaders
to act. “The Vietnam War served as a trigger to
radicalize a generation,” says Stephen Zunes, a
University of San Francisco political science pro-
fessor. “Climate is going to do the same thing.”
Delaney Reynolds, 20, who lives in Florida, one
of the places most vulnerable to climate change,
is increasingly frustrated with the lack of action.
“A lot of adults in power today are way too focused
on money and profits,” she says. “As soon as we
can replace them, we will replace them.”
Now a student at the University of Miami,
Reynolds grew up when Florida’s leadership
hadn’t faced up to the flooding that will inev-
itably remake the coastline of their sandspit of
a state; then Governor Rick Scott promoted an
unofficial policy to avoid even mentioning the
words “climate change.” Reynolds founded the
Sink or Swim Project and began educating Flo-
ridians about the risks of sea-level rise, giving
hundreds of talks to everyone who would listen.
“It is incredible that kindergartners can grasp
this as a problem and politicians can’t,” she says.
Felix Finkbeiner, a 22-year-old German
activist, is another old-timer in the youth cli-
mate change movement. He found his way
to advocacy as a nine-year-old who had a toy
polar bear and was moved by photos of starv-
ing polar bears struggling to hunt for food as the
Arctic ice disappears.
Finkbeiner wanted to help: He planted a tree
at his school. Now he’s pursuing a doctorate in
climate ecology while heading the nonprofit
he founded in 2007. Plant-for-the-Planet has
planted eight million trees in 73 countries and
is part of a global effort to plant one trillion.
“There’s no reason this movement had to wait
this long or be a youth thing,” he says. “What’s
happening is phenomenal. This could be the
tipping point we were hoping for.”
Last fall he met and shared tips with Lesein
Mutunkei, a 15-year-old soccer player in Nairobi
who planted a tree after every goal he scored
to do his bit to help Kenya recover its forests.
Mutunkei expanded his project to involve other
youths who celebrate their own achievements
by planting trees. “If you are good at music and
reached a certain point, you can plant a tree for
that. If you get an A in a subject, you can plant
a tree,” he says.
One of the most consequential efforts is play-
ing out in the courts of the world, including in
Norway and Pakistan, where young people are
pursuing litigation to win climate protections.
In a case that’s ongoing, 21 young Americans
have sued the federal government for its role in
creating a “dangerous climate system.”THE MOST RECENT WAVE of climate protests
began to build several years ago in Europe. Young
activists in Germany organized school strikes that
attracted few numbers and little attention but
helped build the foundation for the movement
sparked by Greta Thunberg’s solitary school
strike in August 2018, which swept the world.
Unknown when she sat outside the Swedish
parliament in Stockholm, the 17-year-old has
become the face of a global movement that has
seen school strikes in most countries and over
7,000 towns and cities. By the time she arrived
in New York, after sailing across the Atlantic on a
no-emissions yacht, she had achieved the kind of
one-name celebrity usually afforded to rock stars.
Thunberg is plainspoken and blunt, perhaps
in part because she has Asperger’s syndrome.
She doesn’t engage in the contorted language
so common in political discourse. When she tes-
tified before the U.S. Congress, she submitted
a UN climate panel report instead of prepared
remarks. “I don’t want you to listen to me, I want
you to listen to the scientists,” she said.
Elizabeth Wilson, a human rights lawyer
and visiting scholar at Rutgers Law School in
New Jersey, has watched young activists find
their footing. “I think it is extraordinary where78 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC