FridaysForFuture: Why schoolchildren skip lessons for the sake of ecology
Dmitry Kurkin
School strikes under the slogan of Fridays for Future gain strength around the world. This is not the first protest environmental movement whose goal is to draw the attention of world leaders to the problem of global warming and irreversible climate change. But it seems that for the first time, children and adolescents were the core of the struggle for the future of the planet.
"Friday for the Future"
Swede Greta Thunberg became the ideologist and symbol of Fridays for the Future: On August 20 last year, at the end of an abnormally warm summer, accompanied by forest fires (according to meteorologists, there was no such heat in Sweden for two and a half centuries) instead of 15 lessons on a single picket to the building of the country's parliament. She repeated her action every two weeks, on Fridays. Photos of a girl sitting sadly on the steps of the Riksdag or distributing leaflets with the words "I do this because you adults don't give a shit about my future" were flown around the news feeds. Greta had like-minded people in the neighboring countries of Europe, but business did not go beyond private initiatives in the first months.
The breakthrough came at the end of November, after Thunberg was invited to speak at the TEDx conference in Stockholm. Apparently, it was this speech that launched the chain reaction. A few days later, a national-scale school strike took place in Australia (where the Great Barrier Reef dies out at a catastrophic rate as a result of warming and water pollution). Then "Fridays for the Future" swept across Europe, and after the New Year holidays, the movement unfolded in full force, turning into weekly thousands of protests with the official hashtag - and the campaign official. By the end of January, Greta Thunberg had a chance to speak at the UN Summit on Climate Change and the Davos Economic Forum.
Now, regular actions on Fridays are conducted by schoolchildren (and their parents joined) in hundreds of cities around the world, primarily in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Australia and the USA. How long they will last, no one can predict.
Ecoactivism
It would be more correct to talk about Fridays for Future as a decentralized movement, under whose umbrella both those who inspired the performances of Thunberg and those who were already engaged in environmental activism in one form or another (for example, Dutch Lily Platt, who started to fight for cleanliness environment in 2015, when she was six or seven years old). Many of them self-organize at the school level, creating their own organizations for their peers.
Among them, for example, is the UK Student Climate Network, launched by seventeen-year-old Anna Taylor from London, along with four more high school students. Among the requirements of the organization: to make the fight against global climate change a state priority; give the right to vote in elections to citizens of the country at the age of sixteen (and not eighteen); inform people about the seriousness of the problem - including through environmental education in schools.
The past and personal status excites the participants of the action far less than the future. Neither the number of actions excites them (single pickets in support of the movement are held as regularly as many thousands of meetings), nor the ironic skepticism of those who consider them to be truants, who have chosen a convenient excuse to "retreat from couples." “Usually I don’t miss the lessons, so for me it wasn’t such a simple decision,” said thirteen-year-old Scottish Holly Gillibrand, who participated in the Extinction Rebellion movement launched three months ago in Britain.
Problem number one
As if the protesters needed a special document confirming that their environmental concerns were justified, three hundred and fifty Dutch scientists signed an open letter last week in which they supported the participants of Fridays for Future and joined their demands. "It’s time for the political leadership to [intervene]. We can no longer afford to sit back and not take the necessary measures."
However, the authorities still prefer to communicate with the striking students through the head teachers. Netherlands Education Minister Ari Slob said that it would have been better to postpone the protest for the weekend: "Education is education, and we are not going to allow absenteeism."
Fridays for Future once again confirms that the generation of those born after 2000 (and they are the basis of the current school protests) perceives the world to be much more unified, including through the Internet. And they are beginning to understand that the various manifestations of global warming that are observed in different parts of the Earth — whether it be fires in California, the death of corals off the coast of Australia or the invasion of polar bears wandering into the homes of the inhabitants of New Earth — are in fact nothing more than alarming same processes. So, the protest against them should be one.