The Climate Crisis has spurred action across the world from young students and children. The protests on Friday, Sept. 20, were actually led predominantly by young adults and schoolchildren, desperate for the chance to grow up healthily on Earth. It makes sense, what was once a given to our parents and grandparents, clean water, air, polar ice caps, polar bears, bees, etc. is no longer a given to us, let alone our future children.
How do we properly convey to those around us, particularly older generations who have been given what was once a necessity and no somehow a privilege, the frustration, and honestly terror we feel about the Climate Crisis?
Emma Lin, an 18-year-old freshman from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, started a pledge called #NoFutureNoChildren in response to this shared frustration Gen Z has. She began the pledge after noting how little elected officials both at her University and on Earth, in general, were doing to mitigate the rising temperature of the world. She quotes the deadline, 2030, as the year drastic long-term climactic consequences will cement themselves in Earth’s history if the globe doesn’t decrease global net carbon emissions monumentally.
The #NoFutureNoChildren movement has 3246 pledges as of Sep. 23 but continues to grow constantly. At an age where college students want to enjoy their lives as their parents and grandparents did, they find themselves crushed under the weight of climate change and the seemingly impending end of our planet. Emma Lin explained, “In 2030, I will be 29 — about the average age to have children for women in Canada, but when I am 30, the world will be just at the edge of a series of irreversible chain reactions that we can’t come back from. Any child I would have is facing a future of economic instability, of unclean air and water, of extreme weather and political instability. I would rather give up my lifelong dream of being a mom than see my baby suffer.”
The #NoFutureNoChildren movement provides some important questions to the climate crisis dialogue. If you would like more information, check out #NoFutureNoChildren, a website created by Emma Lin, to take the pledge.
As always,
Louisa