Students in Chico hold ‘Fridays for the Future’
Local high school and university students rallied at Chico City Council Chambers on Friday calling for more movement on climate action.
Joining the annual “Fridays for the Future” event, students from Chico State, Chico High and Inspire School of Arts and Sciences made their own signs and banners to place around the city government building. The annual event is also known as Youth for Climate, Climate Strike or Youth Strike for Climate, began by Swedish student environmental activist Greta Thunberg in 2018.
Students rallied along Main Street in downtown Chico, waving signs and cheering as some vehicles driving by honked. Chelsea Barron, Emily Strom and Faith Churchill also made signs and a large banner at home, that was placed around different locations around the corner of Fourth and Main Streets.
Chico State professor Mark Stemen helped students studying environmental science and activism with the event, as they placed signs around the chambers to call attention to the rally as part of an online social media campaign.
Stemen said part of his class is teaching students how to organize and spread the word about environmental causes online, engaging with their peers.
“I hope that today is one that can help refocus us on the realities of the climate crisis — things like the fires last summer are just a clear example of the realities of what takes place in a climate catastrophe,” Sunrise Chico of Sunrise Movement organizer Steven Marquardt said.
Marquardt said due to the pandemic and a variety of other pressing local issues, the conversation on climate action in Chico has been impacted — and he hoped the event would reinvigorate discussions around the state goal for carbon neutrality by 2045.
“With those goals in mind in 2045, it’s really important that we start to amp up that conversation and get momentum around that and hold ourselves and the Chico City Council accountable … to really remind the city and citizens that these are goals that are being demanded of us and it’s time that we really take it seriously.”
Marquardt said that’s why students his age and younger are the leaders of the climate action movement because “their futures are most at risk.”
“Clearly what we’ve been doing the last 50, 60 years around environmental progress has not been working,” he said. “Listening to the young people is going to be a really important way to do many things.
“It’s also where the energy is.”
In total around 20 students came out Friday to rally at a distance outside.
“I’m a very big environmental activist,” Chico State junior Daisy Chavez said. “I’m really just hoping to get the voice heard, in the hope that the people in power actually listen to it and hear our concerns for the environment … We need to change our system and figure out a more sustainable way of living and that’s why we want to get the Chico Climate Action Plan approved..”
Inspire School of Arts and Sciences senior Sage Brazil Few said she has organized other school walkout rallies before, inspired by the Camp Fire and the “devastation” of other climate change disasters.
“From what I’ve seen, we’re not moving quick enough,” she said. “We need more radical action, quick.”
“I’d like to see more action among our local government, but this is a good start.”