“Big crowds make me anxious, but climate change even more so. ” As her sign suggests, Jane Gosden used violence to take to the streets of New York on Friday, September 20, during the day of global mobilization against climate change. In his eyes, it is now, no more and no less, “Save his future, that of [sa] generation and following “, even if she fears “That it is already too late”. So the 35-year-old took her courage and her sign in both hands and, for the first time in her life, mingled with the demonstrators.
They were 250,000, according to the organizers, and 60,000, according to the town hall, to march in the south of Manhattan to snatch from the leaders drastic measures against the soaring temperatures. Mostly young people, encouraged by the city authorities, who had given their blessing to students wishing to skip school. Their slogans, like those brandished in a thousand other American cities, rivaled good words: “The dinosaurs also thought they had time”, “The oceans are rising and so are we”, “Don’t let Gen Z be the last” or « Don’t be a fossil fool » – pun on fossil fuels (fossil fuels) and silly (fool).
If New York is transformed, in the space of a few days, into the world capital of the fight against climate change, it is because it is due to host, Monday, September 23, an exceptional climate summit at the UN in the presence of ‘about sixty heads of state and government. “We will force the leaders to listen to us. Change happens whether they like it or not ”, exclaimed the iconic Greta Thunberg at the end of the demonstration, to rounds of applause in a crowded Battery Park.
“Our house is on fire”
The young Swede, who launched the movement of Friday school strikes (“Fridays for Future”) in the summer of 2018, arrived in the United States at the end of August, after having crossed the Atlantic aboard a neutral sailboat in carbon. In front of the thousands of young people she has inspired, she reiterated her call to action: “It’s an emergency. Our house is on fire, and it is not only that of the young people, but our home to all. We cannot stand idly by. “
This climate change, they say they are always more likely to feel it. Like Beckett, Cody and Fritz, aged 12 and 13, who notice that the summers in New York are getting hotter and hotter – “It is 28 ° C today” – and that the snow becomes scarce in winter. “We are now affected every year by cyclones, which wreak havoc on both human lives and agriculture”, completes Maria Zuniga, 16, from North Carolina, a state whose coast was shaken by Hurricane Dorian in early September.
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