I was born into a world in which my future and my past are uncertain. Born into a world where my inheritance is slipping into the sea. Born into a world where my people are going extinct.

I am 20, and I am suing the executive branch of the federal government for causing the climate crisis. I am one of the 21 youth plaintiffs in the Juliana v United States climate lawsuit taking action against our government for denying us our constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.

I am also a first-generation Garifuna-American. My people are an Afro-indigenous community originally from the island of St Vincent in the Caribbean. In the 18th and 19th centuries, we were pushed from our homeland on St Vincent by British colonial power, settling on the eastern coast of Central America in Honduras and Belize. Despite overwhelming adversity, we organized our community and emancipated ourselves to protect our future as a people.

However, the struggle continues for me and my people. As sea levels rise and the coral reefs upon which we depend disappear, the Garifuna’s future is uncertain. Again, we are being pushed from the lands upon which we settled. The land that my family has inhabited for generations, the land that I am supposed to inherit, will be underwater in a few decades unless the federal government stops actively promoting fossil fuels as our primary energy source.

Until the unprecedented Superstorm Sandy, my mom hadn’t had to prepare for a natural disaster since she left Honduras. She raised me in White Plains, New York, a place that for her, promised safety and relief from disasters like Sandy. During the hurricane, I spent days hunkered down in her bedroom without power as the storm raged around us. I was a terrified middle-schooler waiting for one of the many trees surrounding my house to come crashing down on us, just like I’d seen happen on the TV. The anxiety from that event and its immediate aftermath seven years ago is still with me.

This anxiety is increased by the knowledge that the identities that I inhabit: first-generation, trans, indigenous, Latinx, black, youth; all make me uniquely vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis.

That is why I have dedicated the past four years of my life to holding the federal government accountable for the harm it has caused and continues to cause me, by knowingly perpetuating the climate crisis. Like the youth in other famous civil rights lawsuits, such as Brown v Board of Education, we are demanding that the government address the injustices its policies have wrought to ours and future generations. In our lawsuit, we are not asking for money, but instead, seek a government-prepared climate recovery plan sufficient to protect our constitutional rights and ensure a climate system capable of sustaining human life. Like the Garifuna have done for centuries, we are fighting for justice, and for our survival.

People of color, indigenous communities, low-income communities and young people face a significantly higher risk of experiencing the impacts of climate change

I first learned of the institutional racism and injustice underlying our political system during the height of Black Lives Matter (BLM), a movement that brought increased attention to the police murder of unarmed black people across the country. Coming just a few years after Superstorm Sandy, a disaster that disproportionately impacted people of color in my community, it wasn’t hard to draw the connection between the systemic injustice highlighted in BLM and the climate crisis. Just as police, our supposed protectors, perpetuate violence on black bodies because of the color of their skin, our federal government is perpetrating violence on these same bodies through its policies that create and maintain our nation’s fossil fuel-based energy system and cause catastrophic climate change.

As I dug deeper into this issue, I found that climate change has long been impacting marginalized demographics around the country and the world. People of color, indigenous communities, low-income communities and young people face a significantly higher risk of experiencing the impacts of climate change than the general populace and young people from marginalized demographics are especially vulnerable. One thing that is clear to me now is that the climate crisis is a social justice issue – and is having a profound impact on my life and my identity.

What’s worse is that the executive branch of the United States government – a government, that, in theory, was created to protect us – has known that burning fossil fuels will cause climate chaos for more than 50 years. Instead of working to curb emissions, it has colluded with corporate interests – actively enshrining the fossil fuel energy system into our nation’s policies. Because of the actions taken by the United States government and the fossil fuel industry, my generation has never known a world free from the impacts of climate change.

We must find new ways to fight by listening to the stories of our ancestors

There is a lesson to be learned from my ancestors. No matter the adversity that we face, we must organize our communities against the systemic injustices driving climate change, or disappear altogether. We must find new ways to fight by listening to the stories of our ancestors. By looking back at the story of my people, of people all over this planet, tribes and communities who knew they had to do anything in their power to avoid losing everything.

This decade is our last chance to stop the destruction of our people and our planet. This is our time to hold our government accountable for the actions it has taken, and continues to take, to perpetuate the climate crisis and to stand in solidarity with communities around the country and the world in our fight for a just future. This is why I will join millions in the street on 20 September for the Global Climate Strike. We have no choice but to act when the alternative is to sit and watch our world burn.

We have no choice but to act when the alternative is extinction.