Girl Warriors: How 25 Young Activists Are Saving the Earth
Jamie Margolin 67 Imogen Sumbar 72 Bella Lack 76 Malaika Vaz 80 Mabel Athanasiou 85 Elizabeth Wathuti 89 Sarah Goody 94 Vanessa Nakate 98 Haile Thomas 102 Isabella Fallahi 106 Acknowledgments 110 Resources to Explore 113
Introduction As I write this it is 9 00 on a summer morning in northern California It should be bright and sunny but the sky is filled with smoke from wildfires that are raging across the entire West Coast I’m watching the culmination of centuries of human disregard for our environment The ash is so thick it blocks out the sun letting in only a dark orange-reddish hue It might as well be evening We’ve been sheltered at home for months as COVID-19 spreads and now the wildfires are burning again My younger daughter has moved into my bed because she’s so worried In the dark I get up to work on this book when my older daughter walks in looks at the sky and says How can everyone go on like this is normal We can’t The girls and young women in these pages know this They have grown up in crisis watching as the adults around them destroy the Earth From a young age they’ve spoken up about the violence racism and greed they’ve witnessed That’s why I wrote this book to amplify the voices of young climate activists from around the world Climate change is without a doubt the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced By 2018 when Greta Thunberg began her School Strike for Climate at age 15 in Sweden the media had begun to wake up A little But Greta hasn’t been alone in this fight Thousands of activists around the world some inspired by Greta others who’ve been fighting for the climate since before ix
INTRODuCTION Greta’s time have been speaking out rising up and demanding their leaders leaders take action Their stories inspired me and in an increasingly scary world gave me hope So in 2019 I wrote an article for the Washington Post about teen climate activists in the United States hustling to save the planet Until this point my reporting had not focused on the climate but that article sparked the idea for this book My goal was to spend six months interviewing 25 climate activists under age 25 from around the globe I thought the hard part of writing this book would be finding activists but every time I interviewed someone I heard Oh you should speak to so-and-so They led me to one another They also introduced me to their moms dads siblings and close friends I spoke to girls and young women from the United States Pakistan Iran Colombia the Dominican Republic Brazil Jamaica the Marshall Islands Indonesia Kenya Uganda England Ireland the Netherlands India and Australia These activists are fighting for the world they have inherited Their age does not deter them During my interviews they reminded me there can be no climate justice without racial justice I’m a White middle-class woman and part of writing this book has been unlearning my own internalized privilege My older daughter is Black but still the lens through which I write is a White privileged one One of the rules that my first editors all White men taught me in the newsroom was never share your story with a source before publication Yes you can verify quotes by reading them out loud but if you share your story with a source you’ll no longer be in control of it But how are these rules upholding a system that has kept White people in a position of power throughout history With the support of Kara Rota my editor at Chicago Review Press I sent the stories to every activist before publication I’m grateful for their corrections corrections and for the times they pointed out places where I needed to say more As I finished writing this book I cast my vote for the 2020 US presidential presidential election Then along with the rest of the world I waited as our heroic x
INTRODuCTION poll workers counted the votes And then I waited some more When my older daughter yelled out Joe Biden won I felt so much relief and joy We did it I’m so ecstatic that Kamala Harris is our first-ever Black woman vice president We have much more work to do Every activist knows this Interviewing and writing about these 25 Girl Warriors has changed me We can’t go on like this is normal We need to fight for this planet for the future and for the futures of all children We need to rise up in our resilience I hope that reading their stories will stir something deep inside you too and inspire you to create a new future xi
