Bright lights of hope are shining all over the world. Each of these mapped points is a school climate strike planned for the week Friday 20 to Friday 27 of September. AmericaAmerica has named today, Friday 20 September, the target day, because the United Nations Youth Climate Summit is being held in New York tomorrow Saturday 21 and the Secretary-General's Climate Action Summit is Monday 23. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the world faces a climate emergency and he has challenged leaders to come to the summit with concrete, realistic plans on how to better tackle the emergency. “We absolutely need to keep the rise of temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius to the end of the century and to be carbon neutral in 2050 and to have a 45 per cent reduction of emissions by 2030,” he told reporters in France a few weeks ago. New ZealandThe main New Zealand school strike day has been set for next Friday, the 27th. By the time I post to this blog that day, the strike will have finished and I'll be back home after standing in solidarity with thousands of young people outside our New Zealand parliament. I'm answering the call to older people, such as grandparents, to stand in behind the schoolchildren and say "Because this is a crisis yes, it's okay to school strike to press hard for robust climate action." I hope my presence and the presence of other adults will help to protect the climate strikers from the barbs and bites they will get: 'Should be in school'; 'They don't know anything.'; 'They're exaggerating'; 'That Swedish girl is sick'. 'That Swedish girl'Greta Thunberg is the inspiration for the worldwide school climate strikes. On 20 August 2018, after the heat waves and wildfires of Sweden's hottest summer in 262 years, 15 year old Greta, fed up with the lack of action taken by her national politicians, sat down outside the Riksdag, (Parliament)alongside a placard, Skolstrejk för klimatet. She sat there during school hours every day until the national elections three weeks later. Then she sat there every Friday. Media of every sort were attracted and she quickly became a world figure, inspiring many thousands of other teenagers to study the climate science and strike as she did. Then began speaking engagements which have gone on and on. What's she like?If you are willing to interrupt this read for 9 minutes, click on the arrow below and listen to the 'sick Swedish girl', now in the States after a trans-Atlantic yacht trip, being interviewed on America's The Daily Show. Important things are said. And it's funny. Boys and girlsAs the headline map shows, strikes this September are planned in many countries. l looked at scores and scores of photographs, from previous school strikes in many places and noticed that there was a pretty even mix of girls and boys. Skolstrejk för klimatet: India; Japan; America; South Africa; Spain –To enlarge any picture please just click it. That interested me. Most of Greta Thunberg's and the strikes' critics are adult men. But in these activist groups of younger people, males are solidly present. Then as I looked further I came across this extract from The Daily Beast, an American news and opinion website focused on politics and pop culture. Barbie Latza Nadeau writes: 'There is an argument to be made that climate deniers tend to be men and climate activists, with the exception of Al Gore, tend to be women, sparking debate whether there is a misogynistic element to the debate. A 2016 study in the Journal of Consumer Research, “Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption,” backs up the theory. “Men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity,” the authors write. “It’s not that men don’t care about the environment. But they also tend to want to feel macho, and they worry that eco-friendly behaviors might brand them as feminine.”' Rubbish or resonanceIs that rubbish or does it have some resonance? Maybe it's somewhat true of older men. Amongst the male youth now though, perhaps striking itself is macho. When I first followed the school climate strikes, then mainly in western Europe, I did think girls were more prominent than boys. The Greta influence? Now though, boys are strongly to the fore. Will the power brokers listenI'm a male and I'm certainly eco-friendly. I'm encouraged that today's news makes clear that some authorities are backing the student strikes. Washington State for instance has released all school students from school for the day provided they have their parents' permission. And here in Wellington, New Zealand, where I live, I'm pleased to hear that Victoria University has freed its students from class attendence on Friday the 27th. I'm waiting to see what the secondarey schools do. I hope the school strikes for climate today and next week will be huge and will push those who control governments and corporations to think twice and thrice. Individuals may do individual do things such as ceasing to fly, but governments and big business have to act to achieve anything approaching what the Secretary-General of the UN is espousing - the IPCC recommendations. We wait to see. ########## John McInnes Friday 20 September 2019 References: School strike 4 Climate School strike for climate - Wikipedia updated article Women affinity with environmental concerns - Barbie Latza Nadeau in Daily Beast -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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