SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the calling-for-compulsary-education-by-skipping-education dept.
Across the world Friday, students skipped class to protest their governments failure to take sufficient measures to curb climate change.
It all started with 16 year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden:
who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students' lifetime.
Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel peace prize for her efforts.
The protestors are calling for a list of anti-climate change actions and solutions including:
Our Demands
- Green New Deal
- A halt in any and all fossil fuel infrastructure projects
- All decisions made by the government be based on the best-available and most-current scientific research.
- Declaring a National Emergency on Climate Change
- Compulsory comprehensive education on climate change and its impacts throughout grades K-8
- Preserving our public lands and wildlife
- Keeping our water supply clean
Our Solutions
- The extraction of Greenhouse Gases from the atmosphere
- Emission standards and benchmarks
- Changing the agriculture industry
- Using renewable energy and building renewable energy infrastructure
- Stopping the unsustainable and dangerous process of fracking
- Stop mountaintop removal/mining
In a speech Friday outside the United Nations HQ in New York, Alexandria Villasenor, one of the founders of Youth Climate Strike U.S. said:
world leaders weren't listening. "Our world leaders are the ones acting like children," she said. "They are the ones having tantrums, arguing with each other and refusing to take responsibility for their actions while the planet burns."
At one of these planned protests a year or two back, permission forms were sent home in advance so kids could get parental permission to participate in skipping school and protesting. Kids who didn't participate were taunted and harassed by the other kids.
How does your school treat such events?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday March 16 2019, @11:36AM
I agree with most of what you said, but:
Whilst you're very probably right here, I know that as a teenager I would have found this sort of attitude deeply insulting. It might be true as a trend, but it's basically a form of ageism. You're robbing them of their own personal agency in a way because no matter what they do or say, their age is one thing they cannot change (without some help from good old Father Time). The other comment about them appearing very naive in an interview is fairer because it still gives them the chance to buck the trend, get informed and deny the preconceptions about their age group.
All that said, what's happened in the past is every generation has had a handful of serious environmentalists that will stick to their beliefs throughout their life and then a whole load of other fickler, more impressionable people that just jumped on the bandwagon at the time and abandoned those principles when their lives changed. That doesn't mean that these kids aren't different this time, so I hope you're wrong.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?