Kids claim a sustainable climate from adults

Pritam Singh

Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, UK

Not being eligible to vote and choose political representatives who can frame the policies that they would like to support, the children have taken to the path of street action to build public opinion and put pressure on the policy makers. 

On Friday (March 15), school students in many cities of the world participated in the climate campaign they have named as Fridays for Future. Over a million students around the world skipped school on Friday to protest against inaction by governments all over the world on climate change. They organised thousands of rallies in 125 countries, including one in India in Delhi, making it the largest global youth climate action in history. In the UK alone, more than 100 towns and cities saw protests by children. Sydney had one of the largest, with about 30,000 young children holding a climate march. 

They have named their campaign ‘Fridays for Future’ because instead of attending their school lessons, they plan to hold rallies on selected Fridays to draw the attention of the world leaders to their threatened future of environmental catastrophe.

This generation of children is, for the first time, coming to terms with the mode of functioning of the present economic system and its impact on nature. 

The capitalist economic system, in comparison with all pre-capitalist economic formations, is environmentally the most destructive. Capital, which overshadows all economic activities in the capitalist mode of production, looks upon nature — land, water, mineral resources, forests, fisheries and air — not from the viewpoint of long-term sustainability of nature but from the angle of the fastest and most intensive use of natural resources for profit maximisation. This profit maximisation logic of capital conflicts fundamentally with the needs of sustainability. 

The core meaning of sustainability is based on the ethics of inter-generational equity, ie the future generations must have equitable access to the quantity and quality of natural resources that the present generations possess. If the current generation overuses the existing resources, especially the non-renewable ones, the future generations will be left not only with depleted resources but also the waste created by that use and the resulting pollution of land, water and air.

Unmistakable empirical evidence is emerging that the present generation is overusing the resources and is causing excessive waste and pollution. According to the latest air quality date available from World Health Organisation (WHO) and The National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the USA (NASA), 91 per cent of the world's population lives in areas with air pollution above the limits prescribed as safe by WHO. India's air quality record is the worst, with nine of the world's 10 most polluted cities located in India.

Greenhouse gas emissions caused by the excessive use of fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas) are leading to overheating of the planet and the consequences that follow: melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, acidification of oceans, unprecedented storms, increasing droughts and spreading deserts.

Greta’s school strike for climate

This almost sudden emergence of the children's climate movement owes its origin to the action taken by one 15-year-old girl in Sweden who has now become a global celebrity and, very deservingly, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Greta Thunberg walked out of school on August 20 last year and sat in front of the Swedish parliament building with a hand-printed banner ‘skolstrejk for klimatet’ (school strike for climate) which now has been translated into dozens of languages. Since then, she has been boycotting school almost every Friday and sitting in front of the parliament to demand that the Swedish government should initiate policies in accordance with the Paris climate agreement. 

In the beginning, she was ignored, and no one joined her. She first managed to persuade her parents that she was on the correct path. Her mother, a celebrated opera singer, gave up flying even though it meant an impact on her career and her father, an actor and author, became a vegetarian. Her determination bore fruit and classmates started joining her. What seems to have impressed her peers is that she has demonstrated the ability to understand the need for macro political actions and combine that with individual life choices. She is vegan and travels abroad only by train. 

When she was invited, the first child to be ever invited, to speak at the Davos World Economic Forum to the world's rich and powerful, she spoke her mind about the urgency needed to prevent environmental catastrophe: "I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act."

To rephrase a Chinese saying which Mao Tse-tung is known to have used: Greta Thunberg's individual initiative leading to a global movement is truly a case of a single spark becoming a prairie fire.