Earth’s warriors keep battling and hoping
They fight for Earth. Young and old, famous and not so well known, there are many people from around the globe who make it their mission to try to save the planet, especially from the ravages of climate change. They find themselves often pitted against powerful forces.
One group is the generations that will live for decades with what Earth will become and are trying to keep it from getting overheated. Another is from a generation partly responsible for what’s happened and trying to clean up what they are leaving behind for those younger generations that they helped teach.
Here are some of those planetary warriors as people commemorate Earth Day. Even though 40, 50, 60 and even 70 years separate them, they have something in common: Hope. It keeps them battling.
ERIC NJUGUNA
“I became a climate justice activist out of necessity,” the 20- year- old from Kenya says. “Having seen first- hand the impacts of the climate crisis, I joined the youth climate movement.”
“As I get older, the impacts of the climate crisis will be even worse,” Njuguna says. “I am doing this work because it must be done.”
Njuguna admits to getting dejected frequently, pointing to failed efforts to get countries to agree to halting new oil and gas exploration and investment.
When looking at the oldest generation, Njuguna says it’s not really about age or blame for those who were in charge before — even though heat- trapping emissions are at their highest. Instead the activist says it is often about richer North countries that caused the pollution and poorer South countries that get hit.
“As the climate crisis gets worse and its impacts become even more devastating, it’s hard not to lose hope,” Njuguna says. “But I get hope from being in the movement to see young people, Indigenous people who are on the frontlines of the climate crisis lead the fight for justice.”
BILL NYE
“I’m so old. I was at the first Earth Day. I grew up in the city of Washington, D.C.,” says engineer- turned science communicator- turned climate activist Bill Nye, 67. “I rode my Schwinn bicycle to the Washington to the National Mall.”
Despite government and industry scientists knowing, predicting and warning about the dangers of human-caused climate change, “we haven’t done anything about this problem in 60 years, 50 years.
So let’s get to work. Yes it’s frustrating,” Nye says.
“There’s certainly plenty of things to be doomy about,” Nye says. “I mean just look around at just how lame global efforts have been to address climate change the last few decades.”
Nye says he’s borrowing a page from the playbook of “conservative media” and “so we made six one- hour things to scare people so that people might do something about things” in a streaming TV series called The End is Nye.
Yet Nye says, “you have to be optimistic. If you are not optimistic, you’re not going to get anything done. … When young people are running the show, they’re not going to put up with this stuff. They’re going to make changes.”
DISHA RAVI
“Hope is a sewer rat,” says Disha Ravi, a 24-year-old Indian climate activist with Fridays for Future and a vocal proponent of linking various environmental and people’s rights issues in India with climate-related activism.
Quoting Ohio- based poet, Caitlin Seida, Ravi says she feels the same. “I don’t think hope is some flowery thing. Like the poem, I believe it is a sewer rat that fights against all odds even if it gets ugly.” Ravi said, “We are all like sewer rats, fighting for a better world.”
Ravi was in the spotlight in 2021 when she was arrested on sedition charges by Indian police but released on bail soon after. She was purportedly arrested for supporting secessionists, but Ravi asserted that she was helping spread the word about the large scale protests by farmers in India.
For Ravi, it started with an Instagram post about climate change saying, “Hey, I want to do something. I don’t know what to do. Does anyone else want to do something with me?”
Ravi feels Earth Day has become a greenwashing exercise in recent years. “But the positive aspect is that people remember there is something called the Earth and they connect with nature to some degree,” she says.
DAVID SUZUKI
For more than half a century, David Suzuki has advocated for Earth, but looking back he fears “the environmental movement has fundamentally failed.” And what’s worse, he says, “my message at the end of my career is that we’ve run out of time.”
Suzuki, 87, was studying the smallest of things as a professor in 1962: the genetics of fruit flies. Then he read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and he asked himself, “but what about the bigger picture?”
And that bigger picture is where he said society has gone astray, thinking Earth is there to serve humans instead of people being part of an intricate web of life, where plants, animals, humans, air, water and soil are connected.
Suzuki said he and other environmentalists have been too focused on “incremental change that doesn’t threaten the system. … We’re all trapped within the system now.”
Over the decades, “I’ve said to my wife ‘that’s it; forget it; it’s too hard; we can’t do it’,” Suzuki recalls, but he never quit. “You have no choice. If you have children or grandchildren, you can’t ever talk about giving up.”
He tells the younger generation that “however despairing the situation, you have no choice but to fight and try. We don’t have time to despair. That’s a luxury.”