{"id":1872,"date":"2018-07-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www-prod.greenpeace.org\/usa\/campaign-updates\/1872\/faces-of-the-future\/"},"modified":"2024-11-19T03:16:55","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T03:16:55","slug":"faces-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/usa\/faces-of-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Faces of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meet four female activists who helped create the youth-led climate movement ready to march on Washington.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Esm\u00e9 Rice, Iris Fen Gillingham, Emelly Villa, and Talia Glick from the Zero Hour Team. \u00a9Katie Nelson\/Greenpeace
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The doorbell rings and hugs are gleefully exchanged between two teenage girls at the <\/span>This is Zero Hour<\/span><\/i> home base in Petworth, Washington D.C. What started as 16-year-old Seattle native Jamie Margolin\u2019s idea for a youth-led climate march, the Zero Hour movement now includes a diverse team of youth activists from across the country fighting for climate justice. <\/span><\/p>\n

Founded on the belief that every individual should have access to clean air, water, and land, <\/span>This is Zero Hour<\/span><\/i> strives to put the needs of communities before corporations and to hold elected officials accountable. Many of its 20-something members have never met in person before now, getting to know one another through hours they\u2019ve spent organizing over the phone this past year. But on Saturday, their work comes to fruition as they march on Washington and launch at least 14 sister marches worldwide. <\/span><\/p>\n

With the Youth Climate March just days away, I sat down with four members of the Zero Hour team \u2014 Esm<\/span>\u00e9<\/span> Rice, Iris Fen Gillingham, Emelly Villa and Talia Glick \u2014 to discuss why they were drawn to the climate movement and how they feel about their big moment approaching. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ThisIsZeroHour\/videos\/2012963332285853\/<\/p>\n

*****<\/span><\/p>\n

Greenpeace: So, how did everyone get involved? How did you hear about the march?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Esm<\/b>\u00e9<\/b>:<\/b> My name is Esm<\/span>\u00e9 Rice. I\u2019m 16 years old and from Atlanta, GA.<\/span> I met Jamie last summer at the Climate Reality Leadership Corps in Seattle. It was a three-day conference-summit where you learn a ton of things about climate change and how you can spread the word. So we were talking about things we wanted to do when we got back home, and I was like, \u201cOh, yeah. I want to do a march in Atlanta [where I\u2019m from] to raise awareness and do something about it.\u201d And she was like, \u201cYeah, but what if we did a march on Washington?\u201d Then I was just added to a group chat and it just started there. Ever since then, we\u2019ve just been figuring it out along the way. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a really cool process because at the beginning of it you never know what the potential is. We just knew that we wanted to let people what was happening and that we aren\u2019t going to stand for it anymore. That was our mission, and with that mission in mind, it just kind of developed into this. It\u2019s pretty great. <\/span><\/p>\n

Iris: <\/b>I\u2019m Iris Fen Gillingham. I\u2019m 18 years old and I\u2019m from the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. How I got involved with this really started with being directly impacted by climate change. When I was little, my parents had a community supported agriculture business, so we made a living growing vegetables and selling shares. People would buy a share and they would get a fresh box of vegetables every week. We had a farm up on the hill, and we leased ten acres along the flats where there was really great soil. And in the span of five years, we had two 100-year floods and one 500-year flood \u2014 the 500-year flood washed away all of our topsoil. It washed away all of what we were growing and destroyed all of our equipment. It changed my family\u2019s life because we were forced to stop farming for a living. I\u2019ve been very lucky because I still have a home and we still live up on the hill and we still grow and raise all of our own food and have solar electricity, but that was the first time I experienced the erratic weather patterns that can be attributed to the climate crisis. <\/span><\/p>\n

A couple of years later, a landman started coming into my community talking about fracking. So I got involved when I started going to meetings around the issue of fracking because my family is [made up of] farmers, and we realized we didn\u2019t want to have our soil, water, and air contaminated. I would go to these meetings and I would look around the room, and all of these leaders would say that they were doing it for their kids and grandkids, but I was the only young person [in the room], and I really felt that we needed to be represented and our voices needed to be in the movement. So I started stepping up and becoming a youth spokesperson in my community and got involved with an organization called Earth Guardian. <\/span><\/p>\n

Talia:<\/b> I\u2019m Talia Glick. I\u2019m from Seattle, and I am 15. Jamie and I met at a convention with JSA, Junior State of America, which is a political debate group focused on American politics and youth involvement. This was about October or November [2017], so Zero Hour had been in existence for about five months. They had started the movement, but were still very grassroots and looking for more volunteers. We weren\u2019t even called Zero Hour at that point. So I got involved from there and started working on social media and communications. Then one day, somebody was like, \u201cWe need somebody to head this team and be in charge of social media overall,\u201d and I was like, \u201cI can do that.\u201d I got more and more involved from there since being the team leader is a lot of work and I just got busier and busier. And here I am. <\/span><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t been nearly as personally impacted by climate change as Iris \u23e4 I\u2019m in a very different situation. Growing up in a city in an upper-middle-class family I\u2019ve been really lucky to escape the effects of climate change. I think that I\u2019m more involved because of my beliefs than I am because of my personal experiences in regards to social activism. But it\u2019s important to me that frontline communities are [no longer] affected because I have the safety of living in the city and I am not worried about my home flooding or a hurricane happening. I want everyone to be that safe; I want everybody to have that opportunity and position. <\/span><\/p>\n

Emelly: <\/b>I\u2019m Emelly Villa. I\u2019m 17 years old and from Los Angeles, CA.<\/span> I joined Zero Hour because I started off as president for my school\u2019s environmental organization, and through that I joined Citizens Climate Lobby. It\u2019s a great organization, but it\u2019s primarily made up of older people. It was hard to connect with people my age and there was no one showing up to the meetings that were my age and had the same ideas as me. So one day one of the members from Citizens Climate Lobby emailed me, and he had read Jamie\u2019s article in <\/span>Rolling Stone<\/span><\/i>, and he said thought this was a really good opportunity and that I should join. Prior to that, he and I were working on a fundraising opportunity for Citizens Climate Lobby, so then I started working on the fundraising team for Zero Hour.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a9Katie Nelson\/Greenpeace<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Greenpeace: So what\u2019s the most stressful or least stressful part of this week for you? We have how many days left <\/i><\/b>\u23e4<\/span> four? <\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

All: <\/b>Yeah. <\/span><\/p>\n

Esm<\/b>\u00e9<\/b>: <\/b>A little bit. <\/span><\/p>\n

Talia: <\/b>We have like 10 interviews this morning. Not just us, but everyone has a lot of media stuff. So yeah, it\u2019s stressful having it come together. <\/span><\/p>\n

Esm<\/b>\u00e9<\/b>: <\/b>We have our to-do list right there…Tuesday is so long. But we don\u2019t forget to take a breather. We\u2019re still young. We need our sleep, we need our rest. We can\u2019t stress ourselves out too much, so we set aside time to just be together or be alone if you need to and just have that time for yourself to rest. <\/span><\/p>\n

Talia:<\/b> Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathons. <\/span><\/p>\n

*All laugh*<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Esm<\/b>\u00e9<\/b>: <\/b>Having this much to do makes time go by really fast. It\u2019s like I know there\u2019s a march happening on Saturday, and that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been planning for a year, but it feels like we\u2019re taking each day at a time so it\u2019s going by so fast. And then the march is going to happen and then we\u2019re going to feel so great about it, I just know. It\u2019s going to be great.<\/span><\/p>\n

Iris: <\/b>I think for us it\u2019s not about, per say, the numbers that come out to the march. The biggest piece for me is we\u2019ve built this connection, a network of youth to support each other across the country. As a young person, sometimes I can feel alone or feel like I\u2019m the only youth in my community speaking up about an issue, but now we have this giant support group and network. We have a platform; we\u2019re getting our voices in the media; we\u2019re starting this conversation about climate change which is the defining issue of our time. Van Jones did a shoutout for us the other night on TV and did a little segment on climate change. So that\u2019s getting people’s brains turning a little bit \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Esm<\/b>\u00e9<\/b>:<\/b> In the national conversation. That was our mission \u2014 to just get people talking about climate change nationally. <\/span><\/p>\n

Iris: <\/b>\u23e4 and from the youth perspective of \u201cthese are our lives.\u201d We\u2019re looking at a future where we don\u2019t know what it\u2019s going to be like, and we\u2019re going to be voting for the elected officials that are going to be looking after our lives. <\/span><\/p>\n

Talia:<\/b> I think especially being a youth movement \u2014 I mean, [Iris], you\u2019re 18 and can vote in the next election \u2014 but I\u2019m 15. I\u2019m the second youngest person here and the youngest person in this room right now. It\u2019s hard because I can\u2019t drive. I\u2019m <\/span>young<\/span><\/i>: I just finished my freshman year of high school. I\u2019m not in a position where I can actually do a lot of stuff that is effective. <\/span><\/p>\n

When Trump was elected and schools walked out across the country, that was all high schools. I was in middle school at the time. I was young, but I was still civically engaged. Most 12-year-olds don\u2019t read the news \u2014 I read the news. So I organized a walk-out at my school and 40 kids walked out, which for a middle school where there are 11-year-olds is pretty impressive. <\/span><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a really hard position to be in because we are the youth and we do always get the short stick and people don\u2019t necessarily listen to us, but there are people that are younger than us. There are kids that aren\u2019t even our generation: there are babies being born right now. We can see the world right now as it is before some parts of it have been affected by climate change. Climate change is a massive issue, but I can go and walk in the park and see grass and trees and a blue sky. 50 years from now, that likely won\u2019t be the case if nothing stops. So it\u2019s not even us, it\u2019s the younger generations. I know we talk about it a lot because we are the younger generation and we are kids right now, but it\u2019s also the next generations \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

All: <\/b>And the next, and the next, and the next. <\/span><\/p>\n

Talia:<\/b> None of us have kids and none of us have grandkids, so we can\u2019t be the older activists that say they\u2019re doing it for their families. Cause we\u2019re doing it for us, but we\u2019re also doing it for other kids because we are kids. <\/span><\/p>\n

Esm<\/b>\u00e9<\/b>: <\/b>Like she said, we can\u2019t vote, and it\u2019s hard to put your voice out into a democracy when you can\u2019t actually sign a ballot and vote for what you want and what you see in your future. So we have limited options in terms of what to do with our voices. The biggest way possible is to create a movement and show people and rally people together \u2014 people that <\/span>can<\/span><\/i> vote and tell them. We have our lobby day in two days, on Thursday, and we\u2019re going to the Capitol and we\u2019re talking to our senators. We want them to see us as the youth that are going to be voting, either now or in a few years. We\u2019re their future, so they have to listen to us if they want to stay in the business and meet our demands. And we have a whole list of demands on our website. <\/span><\/p>\n

Iris:<\/b> We have an incredibly radical platform.<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ThisIsZeroHour\/photos\/a.2006740799574773.1073741832.1904207306494790\/2083325281916324\/?type=3&theater<\/p>\n

Greenpeace: So are you all each going to your respective senator\u2019s office when you do this? <\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Talia:<\/b> We\u2019re going to meet with quite a few senators, so there will be some folks that don\u2019t have anybody from their state here right now. <\/span><\/p>\n

Esm<\/b>\u00e9<\/b>: <\/b>My Georgia senators, for example, are not available. <\/span><\/p>\n

Iris: <\/b>But for us, it\u2019s been amazing \u23e4 the momentum and the group of people that has been brought together. For me looking at climate change, because it is a social justice issue and because lives are every day being impacted, and I\u2019ve had the opportunity to visit a lot of the frontline communities where they don\u2019t have clean drinking water and families are scared to let their kids play in their backyard because there\u2019s a radioactive waste fracking dump next door. It\u2019s like these issues that are so normal, that people are just living with climate change and the contributors to of climate change \u2014 fossil fuel extraction, our food systems, consumerism \u2014 being right here in this room with these youth people and seeing how we can use our skills to build solutions and use creativity\u2026 We can think outside the box, and we\u2019re doing something that\u2019s never been done before: we\u2019re doing something and we\u2019re organizing this. <\/span><\/p>\n

This was young people. This is not adults with us at the forefront: this was the youth on calls, in between study halls, late into the night \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Esm<\/b>\u00e9<\/b>: <\/b>With a test the next day or after sports practice. I think that\u2019s pretty impressive.<\/span><\/p>\n

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So inspired by these young leaders taking to the streets this Saturday for #ThisIsZeroHour<\/a>. Make your voices heard in our fight to solve the climate crisis! https:\/\/t.co\/XU27q6AZvS<\/a><\/p>\n

— Al Gore (@algore) July 18, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n