 This is Austria, recording with ACMI from City Hall Plaza, where Boston is one of many cities around the globe participating in the climate strike to urge public leaders to do something about the crisis. Following in the steps of 16-year-old activists from Sweden, Greta Thunberg, this begins a week of climate change actions planned throughout Massachusetts. Today's local strike is organized by Massachusetts Climate Strike, a diverse group of young activists, all of whom are under the age of 20. Many leading the strike are affiliated with the Sunrise Movement, the national grassroots organization pushing for progressive climate action and the Green New Deal. We talk to a speaker at the event to get their thoughts on possible solutions. We have solutions that we can have clean air, we can have clean water, we can have clean energy, we can have clean food, we can have clean housing, we can have all of these things for everybody if we work together. Instead of divide and conquer, compete to see who can get the most before they die because that's going to kill us all. Build on the status quo and look for ways that the status quo can continue simply with a new paint job. And what we need is a fundamental change in how we function as a society, not a new branding of the same movement. The demands include for Governor Charlie Baker to declare a climate emergency for the legislature to pass policies that prioritize workers and communities on the front lines of poverty and pollution, and for the state to stop using fossil fuel and building fossil fuel infrastructure and for all politicians to commit to a no fossil fuel money pledge. We spoke with students who left school to come protest and asked why they feel this issue is more important than being in class. People under climate change, poverty and pollution are being so affected by this and it's something that's going to affect our entire country and it's really imperative that we act right now over and out of time. Students who wanted to attend the strike had to get a note signed by their guardians. It counts the same as any other excused absence. We spoke with Principal Matthew Janger from Arlington High School to get his perspective on the vise of student activism on this issue. So our role as a school is to educate students in science, in how politics work and to encourage engagement in their community. So to that extent we want students to take action on these consequential and important things. The climate debate is clearly one of the most important political policy and civic areas right now in our world and so we want students engaged in that. They should be invested in their future, right? They should be invested in the things that are going to make our community stronger, more successful, more inclusive, better able to achieve our common goals of what is the country of life and liberty for all. So in terms of where they can have the most positive impact, I think it really depends on the student and the moment. We had some students who were asking their teachers for how they would be able to make their work up or asking their teachers to not have certain assignments on particular days. We had some students coming to administrators and saying, you know, how am I going to sign out for that? And so we just explained this is an absence like any other absence. Your parents can excuse it. If your parents excuse it, there's no consequence. It's not a cut. It's just a parent excused absence. It's not our role to have an opinion about students' political speech. In fact, we are not allowed to make different decisions on how we treat students based on the content of their political speech. At the same time, it's absolutely our role to encourage students to be engaged in their community. And it's absolutely our role to educate students in being effective and to educate them in science and what the issues are of the day. It's just that we aren't supposed to tell them what to think. We're supposed to tell them how to think and to bring them to what the science says because that is our core mission. Totals as high as four million worldwide participated in the strike, making it possibly the largest climate rally in history. Organizers in New York have pegged numbers close to 250,000 people. San Francisco saw about 40,000 people turn out while Denver and Boston got close to 10,000. Griffin Gould is co-president of Arlington High School's Young Progressives and worked with Massachusetts Climate Strike. We sat down with him to get his view on the strike and why he feels compelled to get involved and make a change. I think the start of my activism, I would say, would be when at the end of my freshman year I got elected to be the co-president of the Young Democrats Club which we now have renamed the Young Progressives Club. And that put me in touch with a network of Massachusetts High School Democrats which is an organization that's been going for, I think, 10 or 12 years now. And that put me in touch with other people who are doing really exciting activism in the gun violence prevention spaces and in the environmental spaces. And that answers my second question of how did the AHS Young Progressives start? I know you started Young Democrats and then it changed after you started it before. So it was the Young Democrats, my freshman and sophomore year. The club itself was actually founded by Sean Garvely, the current state rep of Arlington, which is a cool piece of trivia. But we changed to the Young Progressives after we became an official chapter of March For Our Lives which is a nonpartisan organization and it can't have any party affiliation. And we also thought that a lot of the members of our group and a lot of the common ideas that we share didn't necessarily align with the Democratic Party all the time and more with progressive ideology. I want to ask you about climate change specifically. Why do you feel that that's a big issue and feel compelled to do activism towards that? Yeah. So climate change is, you know, a scientific fact and it's true whether you believe in it or not. And it's an existential issue that threatens the future of all of humanity and sort of, there are no other issues if we don't address the climate. And I'm, you know, sort of terrified that humans will go extinct because 200 million years of evolution have led to this incredible civilization that we have whether you like it or not. And that has sort of a value intrinsically, I think. And to squander that on the wealth and greed of, you know, a few thousand people in the entire world is incredibly unjust. So we have to act. And can you just give me a rundown of the kind of things you did to organize for the climate strike? Yeah, sure. So I was one of the organizers on the Boston Climate Strike Team for the September 20th strike. And I was on the logistics team. And my personal role was to take the lead of marshaling and medics. And so at an action, marshals are the people and vests that you see around making sure that all of the demonstrators are following the action plan and staying safe as well as communicating with law enforcement to make sure that everyone is staying safe. And since it was a youth action, we really wanted to make sure that no one got arrested and no one got hurt. And even though we weren't expecting any sort of opposition at all, we wanted to have a strong show of adult support, especially in light of the recent straight pride sort of fiasco. And so I sort of recruited, I think we had a team of about 40 or 50 adult support marshals. And I ran a training the night before. And I sort of helped coordinate with the action planning team the best ways to keep everyone safe. And what was the hardest part of organizing into your position? Yeah, the hardest part, probably the day of, I was in touch with the group Boston Street Medics. And they said that they were going to have four to ten people show up and check in. And they didn't check in. And we did have one demonstrator pass out from heat. And it would have been very nice to have some medics on hand that we knew we could trust. But I think other than that, it went really, really smoothly. I think just we should have gotten a few more marshals because the crowd was really big, which is sort of a good thing too. And what are some specific solutions you hope to accomplish with the strike? Yeah, so our demands, I don't have them sort of memorized, but we're fighting for a Green New Deal and a dress transition so that the people who have their jobs and livelihood displaced by shifting away from disposable and fossil fuel industries are the first people who have priority in the new renewable industries. And there's one other demand that I'm forgetting, but it's also online. And do you see the protests as a success overall? Yeah, I think so. Definitely. I think Boston, we showed up pretty strongly. I think this past week was the climate week sort of. And I saw a post on Greta's Instagram that said seven million people worldwide participated in the climate week, which is really incredible. And even if Governor Baker didn't come out and shake our hands, I think we still got the point across. We got a lot of really great press and media attention. And just getting 10,000 young people in the streets is really cool. What was one part of the process that you think was either needed more attention or went perfectly or what aspect of it? Yeah, let's see. Something that we talked about a lot in the debrief sessions was the speaker program. Marty Walsh was not part of the speaker program. And he showed up backstage and said that one of his staffers was told that he was promised to be able to speak, which no one on the lead organizing team did. And we don't even know if anyone told them that. But he sort of just pushed his way up on stage and spoke. And that really upset a lot of the marginalized communities in Boston that were represented at the strike. And he hasn't signed the Green New Deal pledge. He hasn't signed any sort of climate emergency. And it felt a little bit hypocritic, the things he was saying, and a bit counteractive to the inclusivity that we were trying to protect. And we're hoping to start sort of an escalation arc towards him so that he will comply with our demands. But that was one thing that definitely wasn't part of the plan. Something that went really well, I think just the outreach. Our goal from months and months ago was 10,000. And when we set that goal, we thought it was sort of a pipe dream. But I think the official estimates are 10 to 15,000 that came to the strike. And it's really kind of mind blowing that we actually met that goal. Really cool. And is there anything else upcoming that you want to talk about? Any other issues or anything else with climate strike that's coming up and you protest? Yeah, yeah. The Boston Climate Strike team is going to be organizing an escalation arc leading up to our next strike. Which is going to be November 29th. So every Friday we're going to have small actions that you can either do from home or do by yourself or with a group of friends. Like just calling Governor Baker and demanding that he sign a Green New Deal pledge. Or asking Marty Walsh to declare a climate emergency for the city of Boston. But the next big event is definitely the strike on November 29th. So keep an eye out for that. Yeah, no problem. Thank you. While it remains to be seen if the climate strike will lead to effective change, or if national leaders will listen to the organizers, Massachusetts Climate Strike is already organizing their next event for late November. With ACMI's driving forces, this is Ross Fadir.