One year ago at age 15 Greta Thunberg started skipping school on Fridays to protest global climate change. All by herself she sat at Sweden’s Parliament building. She would talk to anyone who would listen, saying the climate is in crisis and doesn’t understand why so little is being done about it.
Thunberg isn’t alone anymore. She soon inspired students at other schools in other countries to leave school on Fridays to protest. This student-led movement became the Climate Strike. At least two coordinated multi-city protests included over one million students each. Yeah, she’s 16 and has her own Wikipedia page.
Today these students called for a Global Climate Strike. And people responded. There were over 6000 protest sites in over 170 countries in all seven continents (yes, a protest in Antarctica) with at least four million people. Thunberg isn’t alone any more.
I didn’t find an article about the strike on Daily Kos (hopefully one will appear later), so I turned to Twitter and found two wonderful feeds. The first is Thunberg’s own feed, the second is a feed for all the posts using the tag #ClimateStrike. Both of them show huge crowds in lots of places. Here are some of them:
Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska
Laramie, Wyoming
San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (perhaps 100,000), California
Seattle, Washington
Burlington, Vermont
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Lincoln, Nebraska
Denver, Colorado
Boston, Massachusetts
Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor, Michigan
Madison, Wisconsin
St. Louis, Missouri
Miami, Florida
Portland, Oregon
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Albany, New York
Chicago, Illinois
St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota
Moscow, Idaho
New York City (estimated attendance at a quarter million!)
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Calgary, Alberta
Duncan, British Columbia
Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo Brazil
Sayulita, Mexico
Guatemala City, Guatemala
Nariño, Neiva, and Villa de Leyva, Colombia
Santiago, Chile
Lima, Peru
somewhere in Equador
somewhere in Panama
La Paz, Bolivia
Kabul, Afghanistan (where 80% of conflicts are related to the consequences of global warming)
Katmandou, Nepal
New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Adaspur, and Kantapada. India
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Funafuti, Tuvalu
somewhere in Russia
Tel Aviv, Israel
Istanbul, Turkey
Paris, Bordeaux, and Orléans, France
Granada, Spain
Stockholm, Sweden
Reykjavik, Iceland
Nairobi, Kenya
somewhere in Tanzania
I mention these only because they were listed in the Twitter feeds I was browsing. But even that shows how diverse and widespread today’s protests were. I scrolled through a lot of the #ClimateStrike feed, then scrolled through Thunberg’s feed. When I got back to the #ClimateStrike feed it said “1,178 new results.” And after a quick break it had jumped by another 200. So, no, I’m not going to be able to keep up with it.
The protest in Detroit was called for 3:00. I and my handmade sign got to Grand Circus Park at about 2:45 and there were already lots of people there. At about 3:15 there were a few speeches, then we headed out to march with the youth in the lead. We had cop cars beside us to protect us (we didn’t fit on the sidewalk) and to stop traffic at intersections.
I thought, according to the original plan, we were going to loop around Campus Martius and head back to Grand Circus. But there was already an event in Campus Martius (I think a celebration of a Detroit youth choir that came in second place on *America’s Got Talent*).
While we curved around Campus Martius I could look back at our crowd to get a sense of how many there were. And I was not at the front of the march. There were definitely several hundred of us. I don’t know if there were a thousand.
So we went on by, all the way to Hart Plaza by the river. There several youth spoke to us. And that’s where the event ended.
I walked back to Grand Circus and on to my car.
Favorite signs:
I’ll die of old age. My grandchildren will die of climate change.
We are missing our lessons so we can teach you one.
If you did your job I’d be in school.
May the forest be with you.
Daily Kos did post a story this evening. Scrolling through their pictures I can add protests in:
Sydney (a big one) as well as, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Brisbane, Hobart, and Alice Springs, Australia
Jakarta, Indonesia
Hyderabad, India
Glasgow, Scotland
Dublin, Ireland
Hamburg and Berlin, Germany
Brussels, Belgium
Marseille, France
Johannesburg, South Africa
somewhere in Uganda
Greensboro, North Carolina
Charlottesville, Virgina
Cincinnati, Ohio
Houston, Texas
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