SINCE LAST DECEMBER, when Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg began her one-woman campaign, school strikes have happened around the planet. At their height in the spring, 1.4 million kids left class for a day, demanding that our leaders actually lead on the greatest crisis the planet has ever faced. In May, the students asked adults to join them, and so on Sept. 20 the first all-ages climate strike will take place across the planet.
Here’s why you should join in making it the largest day of climate protest in human history:
1) Because the climate crisis just keeps deepening.
When I wrote the first book about all this, 30 years ago this fall, scientists were issuing warnings about what would happen if we didn’t act. We didn’t act, and now instead of warnings we’re issuing body counts. Wildfire, flood, the spread of insects carrying disease: The iron law of climate change is that it affects first those who have done the least to cause it. But by now it’s reaching every part of the planet: Last autumn in California, we watched a city literally called Paradise almost literally turn into hell inside half an hour. This spring, we watched the relentless flooding across the richest grain belt of the planet.
2) Without rapid, transformative action, it’s going to get much worse.
So far, we’ve raised the temperature of the planet 1 degree Celsius—about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. But we’re on course, unless something changes fast, to see it rise 3.5 degrees Celsius—6 degrees Fahrenheit—by century’s end. Scientists say that would preclude civilization as we’ve known it.
3) We could change if we got our act together.
Engineers have worked small miracles—the price of solar power has dropped almost 90 percent in the last decade. So, if our governments and financial institutions put their mind to it, rapid change is truly possible (and it would save us vast amounts of money that would otherwise be spent trying to defend against cataclysm).
4) There’s a big movement demanding change—but it needs to get much bigger.
Right now, leadership is coming from frontline communities most affected by change. It’s coming from Indigenous communities around the planet. It’s coming from scientists and from people of faith. But it needs to come from everyone! This is the defining issue of our lifetimes—you need to not just worry about it, but to get out in the street.
5) A strike—if only for a day—is the perfect way to do it.
We have to show that we’re willing to disrupt business as usual. Right now, despite the unfolding crisis, we mostly just get up in the morning and do what we did the day before—business as usual is literally what’s killing us.
6) It’s not okay to make ninth-graders save the planet by themselves.
So, go to globalclimatestrike.net and make yourself an organizer for a day. It’s not hard, and you’ll sleep better.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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