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"You have to try to figure it out yourself."
Green New Generation
The other historic 2020 political contest began in a hallway outside Speaker Pelosi’s office just two years ago. Not along party lines, oddly enough. The language was incendiary, but Donald Trump wasn’t there and didn’t much care. “We are angry,” said the 24 -year-old Varshini Prakash for the newborn Sunrise Movement, “angry at the cowardice of our leaders at a time when courage is needed most.” For the Democrats in Congress not to have a plan to save the underpinnings of human life, she declared, was “a death sentence for my generation.” And an era opened: a spontaneous alliance of mostly teenagers and 20-somethings mobilizing their own experience, observation, and deadly fear.
Senator Ed Markey. Saikat Chakrabarti.
Olivia Freiwald. Angel Nwadibia.
Saya Ameli Hajebi. Nick Rabb.
Drake Hunt. David Wallace-Wells.
Step out of a mad whirling news cycle, for an hour, back to climate reality, meaning the storms, the fires, the climate threat to human and other kinds of life that the presidential candidates won’t get around to, because they never do. We’ve been living in a two-tier conversation, even a two-tier world, divided between a power class that never could deal with the ruin of climate, and a rising generation, speaking for itself now, that can’t talk about anything without a climate connection, like race, justice, equality, or politics.
U.S. Senator from Massachusetts
Former Chief of Staff for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez
Activist and student at Tufts University.
Activist and director of the Academic Parity Movement.
Activist and Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University.
Activist and student at Yale University.
Activist and student at New York University.
Author of The Uninhabitable Earth.