On Fridays, Teenagers On Strike Across The Planet

The #FridaysForFuture wave arrives in Barcelona. They’re excited. They have called a strike for today, Friday February 22, “inspired” by the #FridaysForFuture movement of Greta Thunberg, a Swedish activist who started the movement a few months ago, at the age of 15. They follow in the wake of Girona, the first city in Spain where some students agreed to fight for the climate and for a planet Earth that they are going to inherit and that has 12 years to change course.

“We were waiting for a reason to start acting and as soon as Greta appeared, we created our association GEA (Group of Students in Action) to follow her movement. You don’t have to be an ecologist to claim a future, ”explains Maria Serra, one of its representatives.

Created between three friends, the group from Girona wants the movement to be serious and they have asked their teachers to help them ally themselves with environmental and naturalist associations in order to “demand that governments comply with the agreements they sign”, Lucas explains. Barrero, who will also strike for the weather this Friday.

Young people from Barcelona make their first strike to prevent climate change

The Barcelona group has organized its launch in two shifts through the Unim Forces platform. On Friday morning, high school students will hold a three-hour strike and in the afternoon, university students will hold a demonstration.

“That we are minors causes an impact and helps the movement, because this is a very serious emergency and we have to insist until they listen to us,” explains María. Her friend Aitana believes that, although they do not expect adults to join the movement now, they will do so later “because the future belongs to everyone and climate change will affect us equally. We are plummeting and young people are more aware than many adults and politicians ”.

Skipping class, therapy to cope with climate change anxiety

To protect themselves from retaliation by schools, the #FridaysForFuture headquarters proposes to students that they argue that climate change makes them anxious and the way to heal is to do something therapeutic like the climate strike.

Friday March 15 will be the great strike

The commitment is very serious. That is why the student groups meet by Skype to prepare internationally for the great strike of March 15, to which they want to drag teachers, parents, Ampas and even minors who are not yet in the 3rd year of ESO (and who are not yet have the legal right to strike if they are not accompanied by a guardian).

Students stand behind the scientific community that is ignored by governments

Architecture student Gemma Manz explains that #FrydaysForFuture is supporting the entire scientific community that politicians and businesses have turned their backs on over the past decades. “I did not understand why so many people looked the other way if we only have 12 years to reduce global emissions. That is why I began to read a thesis that analyzes the communication of climate change in Spain from social psychology ”, explains this ecologist, moved by the enormous reaction of young people who are not.

Artillery of protests in more cities and, underway, the national group

Also Alicante, Valencia, Almería, Vigo, Seville and Tarragona are preparing their protest artillery. At the national level, all will be integrated into the Youth for Climate platform to follow a common strategy.

The young people of Madrid will debut on Friday, March 1 with a sit-in in front of the Congress of Deputies that they will repeat every week. Lucía Curtu, one of its representatives, tells that within two hours of creating an account on Facebook and Twitter, they already had people willing to join the group “because young people, when something affects us, we do move,” she says.

They believe that the comfortable present we live in plays against them and “skeptical and institutional denialism” that continues to allow pollution and does not communicate the true urgency that climate change represents.