'Save the future': lessons in practical utopianism from the School Strikes for Climate Crisis.
| Author | McKnight, Heather |
| Position | CLIMATE FUTURES |
Thursday 20 August marked the second anniversary of the School Strikes for Climate Crisis. (1) The school strike movement has made dramatic progress since fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg first sat outside the Swedish parliament in 2018. By February 2019, the UK strike alone saw thousands of schoolchildren and young people walk out of classes, angry at the failure of politicians to make progress in slowing the escalating ecological crisis. On 15 March 2019, there were 1693 protests registered across 106 countries, with an estimated 1.5 million students striking on one day. (2) The movement grew rapidly; by September 2019 an estimated 70,000 schoolchildren each week were holding protests in 270 towns and cities worldwide. (3)
The School Strike movement has gone beyond the simple presentation of a vision of an inevitable crisis in the near future, or a request for adults to listen to science in the present. Instead, the strikers present us with a possible non-apocalyptic future in which they are active participants. This future is one in which they challenge the failures of politicians and the adult public and demand to play a role in policy-making.
On 1 March 2019, 150 students from the global coordination group of the youth-led climate strike, including Thunberg, issued an open letter in The Guardian:
We, the young, are deeply concerned about our future...we will not accept the world's decision-makers' inaction that threatens our entire civilisation... United we will rise until we see climate justice...You have failed us in the past. If you continue failing us in the future, we, the young people, will make change happen by ourselves. (4) The young people depicted themselves as being voiceless in the present, absent from the decision-making process, while also being the hope for the future. Their militant language was both apocalyptic and hopeful, encouraging others not to look away from reality, but at the same time to peer beyond inevitable demise. The movement spoke of climate justice as progress that is possible.
The School Strike movement demonstrates a complex sense of temporality, in which resistance anticipates a solution even as it expresses despair; anxiety garners a militant optimism. Here, political organising becomes an open-ended utopian process; this has enabled it to be ambitious and creative even during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The house is on fire
The school strike movement has grown from anxiety, which continues to be an essential part of the utopian temporality, one which ethically grounds the movement. Thunberg's story began when she was thrown into depression and rendered speechless by the future. Accusing world leaders of being too relaxed in tackling the climate crisis, she said that she wants them to panic: 'when your house is on fire, then that does require some level of panic'. (5)
Anxiety is also apparent in the banners and chants of the school students, and many student strikers speak of being motivated by fear for survival. As Zola, aged eleven, from New York, notes:
I feel both empowered and scared. It is awesome that we have come this far and that kids have taken notice of our world's faults, but it's frightening that we have to. If adults had taken action before it escalated to this point, we would have had a lot more time to help piece Earth back together. (6) Alongside the narrative that it is not too late to act, it is worth recognising that there is also the danger of erasing those for whom it is already too late. Thunberg foregrounded the death and destruction already caused by the climate crisis in her speech to the EU in April 2019. Today's students will experience the material realities of climate change in a way that politicians currently in charge, and adults presently enfranchised, will not. Much of their discourse aims to recognise the global inequalities and the suffering already underway as an apocalyptic warning.
Yet, even as it counters assumptions of a guaranteed future for humanity, the movement is forward-facing and hopeful. It rejects complacent optimism and is clear-sighted in its utopian intent.
Rejecting a capitalist future
The School Strike movement in the UK (and other capitalist countries), is also utopian in rejecting the current capitalist model in the hope of something better. It overtly condemns capitalist processes as having led to the climate crisis. The protests are a move against the kind of future young people are being offered. Narratives of cultural capital define school as a way to access employment, college qualifications and university degrees, with a focus on salary scales and improving GDP. By striking, they are resisting the systems that lead to them becoming commodified products.
The school strikes are an open declaration that pupils are willing to risk, and to some extent reject, their futures as defined by capitalism. Resisting the expected norms of school attendance and taking to the streets in protest demonstrates that students are at odds with the system that created, and continues to perpetuate, the climate crisis. They are indirectly criticising the capitalist system by disengaging from it while underscoring the pointlessness of striving for education in a dying world.
Through participation in direct action, there is an...
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