In 2006, a pint-sized 6-year-old with hair down to his waist stood in front of a crowd of around 300 people at a climate rally. He clutched the microphone stand as if it was about to run away from him and held a sheet of notes that he barely glanced at. Then, in his little voice, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez said something remarkable.
“Most kids don’t even know that the world is sacred,” he said. “That’s because they spend most of their time in front of their TV or in front of their videogame. It’s time for their parents to get them out of their house and show them that Mother Earth is a sacred thing.” In a video of the event, you can see the audience cheering and clapping. Martinez pauses, a smile taking shape on his face.
I would never have expected a 6-year-old to understand that the planet matters more than playing videogames. A 6-year-old shouldn’t have to care about climate change. Martinez, who identifies as Mexica, a descendant of the Aztecs, is now a 23-year-old artist and activist, and one of 21 plaintiffs in 2015’s Juliana v. United States, which was among the first lawsuits in the U.S. to use “Atmospheric Trust Litigation” to hold the government responsible for its actions — and inactions — related to climate change. The foundations for Atmospheric Trust Litigation were laid at the University of Oregon’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program, but the nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust was the first to employ it as a legal approach. That lawsuit was followed by a series of similar ones. Most of them come from the Western U.S. — Oregon, Montana, California, Alaska, Utah, Hawai’i — and involve young people of Black or Indigenous backgrounds who represent the communities most affected. Juliana v. United States argued that the U.S. government “willfully ignored” the dangers of burning fossil fuels, violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to life, liberty and property and failing to protect public trust resources.
Youth-led movements aren’t a novel phenomenon. According to Australian sociologist Judith Bessant’s Making-Up People: Youth, Truth and Politics, young people have been at the forefront of political movements since at least the 18th century. Many of the abolitionists who were active on the Underground Railroad were barely 20. In the 1960s, youth played a major role in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Julia Butterfly Hill was 23 when she prevented the logging of a 1,000-year-old redwood in California, and Greta Thunberg was just 15 when she launched her global strike for the climate, inspiring millions to do the same.
“It’s time for their parents to get them out of their house and show them that Mother Earth is a sacred thing.”
Some aging liberals have a knack for caricaturing young people as immature, impulsive and lacking good judgment; critics often slight their intelligence and their supposed disengagement from politics. Yet the imaginative and bold approach they’re taking today reminds the rest of us how much there is at stake. They’re exposing why their seniors’ tacit or overt excuse for disengagement — “we won’t be alive to see the ravages of the climate crisis anyway” — is beyond unacceptable.
Juliana v. United States has faced many delays and hurdles in the past almost-
decade; at the end of February, the Department of Justice tried to stay and dismiss the case. On the other hand, last August’s Held v. Montana win expanded the possibilities for using Atmospheric Trust Litigation against the government by ruling that young people have a right to a healthy environment. Cases like this are moving slowly through the legal system, with some expected to end up in the Supreme Court.
Andrea Rodgers, a senior litigation attorney at Our Children’s Trust and co-counsel in Juliana v. United States, has said that the impacts of climate change represent a violation of human rights and children’s rights. The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which Rodgers uses in her arguments, establishes that “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Life itself — that most seminal right — is what’s at stake here.
It is painfully obvious if you read the headlines: 2023 was the hottest year on record. The associated charts are scary: The red line showing the temperature increase starts at zero and holds steady throughout the 1850s, a decade when slavery was still legal and Westward expansion was already fomenting Indigenous genocide and displacement. But within just seven decades, that red line climbs in an ever-sharper curve to today, when it hovers around 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. This is significant, because climate experts have long agreed that, if we want to prevent potentially irreversible impacts, we need to make sure that the world’s average temperature does not exceed that of preindustrial times by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
We can’t keep expecting young people to carry the torch for us. While powerful grownups and politicians endanger all of us by failing to make difficult but urgent policy decisions, young people across the West continue to make the case for radical change.
Life itself — that most seminal right — is what’s at stake here.
We should be long past proposing “greener” policies or waiting for local and state courts to take on these cases. So what would it look like if adults joined the fray? If we think beyond litigation and use our money and our deeds in the service of science-based climate political action, we can galvanize more people around us. We can shame our representatives — the way the young plaintiffs are doing — by representing them, and us, in the courtroom.
Back in 2006, 6-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez said: “There are simple things you can do in your own homes, like not let the water run, or turn off the lights when you’re not using them. You could teach these things to your children. Every choice we make is for or against our future.”
That’s a profound realization for a 6-year old. It’s also crushingly sad, because he was talking to adults, urging them to teach their own children the things he already understood. But not enough adults have taken up this task, and now, obviously, we are long past needing to watch our resource consumption at home. And yet his words remain inherently hopeful: They remind us just how easy it would be to own up to ourselves and commit to doing more, not just inside our homes, but in our neighborhoods and in our towns, with our wallets, and with our everyday actions.
Ruxandra Guidi is a correspondent for High Country News. She writes from Tucson, Arizona. Follow her on LinkedIn. “Encounters” is a serial column exploring life and landscape during the climate crisis.
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This article appeared in the April 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Youth are leading the way on climate action.”
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