ACTION HERO
Teenage climate-change activist Daisy Jeffrey has been praised as the voice of a generation and is the latest Australian to have contributed to the On … series of small books, designed to pair leading thinkers with complex themes. Her new release, On Hope, explores the hectic juggle of balancing activism with high school and the ongoing mission to be heard.
Last September, 17-year-old Daisy Jeffrey found her face beamed across the country. As part of the group of students who organised the Australian school climate strikes, she galvanised more than 300,000 people to demand climate action and became the local face of the movement in the process. In her new book On Hope, the year 12 student writes about juggling her activism with assignments, being invited to attend the UN Climate Conference last December and why it’s important to raise your voice, especially on the topic of climate change.
It’s 8.30am in August 2019 and I’m struggling to process the maths being written out on the smartboard. Just four and a half hours earlier I was discussing strategy on a call with strikers from around the globe. The reality of having been awake and engaged at four in the morning three times in one week has caught up with my brain, which is now screaming for sleep.
How do I balance activism and school? It’s all a bit of a shemozzle, really. My mind is always in a million different places at once – trig over here, Adani over there and a desperate need for coffee at the front. I should not have to be doing this. This is the government’s responsibility, not mine.
That month before the strike left no room for despair, however. I was in a constant state of caffeine-fuelled panic, running from a meeting with union officials to a meeting with tech corporation Atlassian’s co-founder and resident billionaire climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes. From there, I’d rush back home to work on assignments and jump onto a meeting with the NGOs helping us with logistics on strike day. At 7.30pm I’d grab my meal and head up
to my room for a national coordination call with strikers across Australia. We were all exhausted.
The night before the second Global Climate Strike on September 20, 2019, the Sydney team came to stay at my house. We set up a corkboard in the corner of my living room with a timetable for the next morning tightly pinned to it. All of us had interviews at around six or seven, so we’d have to pack up and move out fast. We laughed until sometime past one in the morning, whereupon we realised we’d be royally screwed if we didn’t get some sleep.
And that brings us back to the beginning, but I’ll give you a quick run-through, just in case you’ve forgotten. There was a lot of panic, then the realisation that we’d hit 80,000 people in Sydney, then a lot of joy, then the realisation we’d hit 330,000 people nationwide, then six million worldwide. We’d just done the impossible. What would we do next? That night I arrived home and then headed off to my school social, which was infinitely less exciting than trying to save the world.
After the Global Climate Strike, I was invited to attend the UN Climate Conference in Madrid in December 2019. As I boarded the flight, I had two things on my mind. 1. Would this conference achieve anything? 2. Bugger, I’d better start on that English assignment. So, I did. I filled the first nine hours with maths and English. For the first time in forever, I delved into schoolwork and left activism at the door. It was a relief, because it felt like a massive weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Then I landed in Hong Kong, connected to the WiFi and my messages came flooding through – back to reality. I was staying in a hostel in Madrid with six others, strikers from Uganda, Russia and Chile, who I’d get to know and love over the coming week.
On Monday, we heaved ourselves out of bed at 6.30am, chowed down some brekky, and headed out. The metro was full of people with the same destination as us – 30,000 human beings all hoping to make the world a better place (with a few exceptions). As we arrived, I was in awe. I was about to enter the place where countries from all over the world come together to make change. Imagine 10 Bunnings Warehouses strung together, only without the snags and a hell of a lot fancier. I was among world leaders, scientists and activists from across the globe.
The school strike movement is striving to achieve climate justice. You might be wondering what the difference is between climate justice and climate action. Well, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but fighting for climate justice recognises the injustice of climate change: those who have done the least to contribute to the problem are the first to be affected. Climate justice frames climate change as an ethical and political issue, rather than simply a scientific conundrum. We know, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that gender, ethnicity, race, income and age all affect how exposed communities are to the impacts of climate change. In order to achieve climate justice, disadvantaged communities must be included in international negotiations, but what the United Nations climate conferences have shown over the last two and a half decades is that rich countries are reluctant to give poorer countries a seat at the table, let alone indigenous peoples and the youth.
The schedule of a youth climate activist is a hectic one. We hop on two-hour calls and then jump onto another one and, if you’re extra lucky, another one. At the same time, we’ll work on assignments or send out emails or plan actions. Fifteen or more strikers would sit down in the morning for a meeting, discussing whose voices needed to be elevated and which countries needed to be targeted. We’d then head off to our various other meetings, rallies and press huddles, and meet up at lunch in working groups to more extensively plan our actions and long-term strategy. The next item on the agenda would be dinner and then workshopping ideas until 11pm or possibly even later, and then we’d hang out until we fell asleep at around 3am. We’d be back at it at 6.30am. One of the greatest challenges we faced was not falling into the same patterns of international conflict as our elected representatives. We needed to avoid a white-centric approach and instead help elevate the voices of those less likely to be heard at these negotiations
That week, the most impressive people I met were the kids who, just like me, had put school on hold to fight for a safer future. Our determination and commitment to forging a better world, however, was not shared by those actually running the negotiations. We left that conference bitterly disappointed by the world’s inability to work together to tackle a crisis that already affects all of us. I returned to Australia in despair. How was I supposed to write a book about hope if I didn’t have any? As the fires increased in intensity and smoke and ash smothered Sydney, I sank further. It felt like we’d failed. But then, as the fires continued to rage up and down the coast, a nationwide sense of anger grew.
We are a country prone to fire, flood and drought, but not like this. Climate change is exacerbating the conditions that cause these disasters to become catastrophic and a source of constant torment for humans and wildlife around the world. When you ask me about hope, I will tell you it comes from you. If there ever was a time to use your voice, now is the time. If you think your voice doesn’t matter, remember that there are millions of people who feel exactly as you do, and if you do not raise your voice, then who will?
This is an edited extract from On Hope by Daisy Jeffrey (Hachette, $16.99), out on March 31.
If you think your voice doesn’t matter, remember that there are millions of people who feel exactly as you do, and if you do not raise your voice, then who will?