The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of action — sick-outs, strikes, viral face-to-face encounters with senators, and widespread national media attention on the youth movement to address climate change. Last Friday, March 15, these efforts culminated in the hugely successful international Youth Climate Strike, which I and other members of Youth Vs. Apocalypse, an organization that was founded to stop the proposed Oakland coal export terminal, helped to organize.

Three weeks earlier, I went to Senator Feinstein’s office in San Francisco to speak at a Sunrise Movement rally. I, along with other young people and adult allies, wound up in the senator’s office, where we directly asked her to vote yes on the Green New Deal, legislation that would create millions of union jobs in the clean-energy sector, while bringing the U.S. to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This is when the now-viral confrontation — a video of which has since been viewed over 10 million times on Twitter, written about by The New York Times, CNN, and Huffington Post, and used in an unaired skit on *Saturday Night Live* — happened. In this meeting, Senator Feinstein seemed to imply that because I am 16 years old and cannot vote, my voice does not matter.

I beg to differ. The purpose of electing officials is to ensure they voice the needs of the people. Regardless of age, I am a constituent. Addressing my concerns is what Senator Feinstein signed up for. In addition, her nearly 30 years as a senator was the time that much-needed climate action was not taken. I came to her office to express that she, and all other politicians and adults, have failed young people. Their mistake is why we have come to the climate crisis that we are in. They had the opportunity and time to take action, and they didn’t. Now it is their turn to listen to us.

We are not too young to understand the science. We know that we have less than 12 years to reverse this adult-made climate crisis. We care about our futures, which adults are actively destroying by not acting on this crisis, instead debating about politics and money. Just because we can’t vote doesn’t mean we don’t deserve a seat at the table, especially when the topic of discussion is our futures.

During the Bay Area Youth Climate Strike on Friday, I stood on a stage in San Francisco’s Union Square facing a crowd of thousands. I looked out and saw the faces of my peers, whose eyes glistened and skin glowed from the first sunshine in months. I felt the drive and determination of young people, felt the vibrations of their screams for justice. I felt the admiration of our adult allies. I stood atop that stage in unity with two other passionate young women of color. We are the leaders of this powerful movement, a movement to save the earth. After all of the silencing, poisoning, and disregard of our lives and our futures, we were leading the movement to reverse all of that.

Standing on that stage, looking at the sea of people, I reminded myself that only two years earlier, Youth Vs. Apocalypse started as a group of fewer than 10 young people fighting a developer trying to build a coal terminal that would impact working-class people, especially those of color. And now here we stood with thousands, leading a movement to reverse climate change.

Young people can no longer stand by while adults ruin a world that they will be handing down to us. There is only one future, and it belongs to all of us. There is only one planet, and it is the job of all of us to sustain it. We will save the earth.

Let this movement be a lesson to politicians and power holders: You can no longer dismiss young people or climate change.

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