“Climate change is worse than the EE.”
– Joshua Wright
Our house is on fire. Quite literally.
It has been burning for a while now and we have failed to realize it, we have failed to act upon it and only helped ignite the flames even further. The honorable Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish activist, has initiated the global youth movement Friday’s for Future which advocates for climate justice. Students across the world skip class to demand for climate action from their governments. The urgency of this issue has been brought to light by Greta Thunberg who is not afraid to stand up for her beliefs amongst the current world leaders and demand for changes immediately. She inspired us, students of the OSC community, to act and demand change within our school community as well.
OSC has always been open to ideas of environmentalism however, little is truly done to make our school community more sustainable: our lifestyles rank among the high consumers and we tend to waste a lot of energy by leaving ACs running for long periods of time in classrooms and so many small changes could be initiated to reduce our ecological footprint in the world.
It’s on this note that a group of eight students, Luca, Joshua W, Disara, Alex, Talia, Emily, Joshua J and I, decided to participate in the global movement by organizing our own demonstration in school and creating a pledge that would act as a moral obligation for students to follow while advocating for certain administration changes to make our school more sustainable.
The primary idea was developed a while back with two of my classmates, Luca and Disara, however, following the Easter Sunday attacks, nothing could be properly organized within the school community. The campaign committee, alongside many other members who were willing to lend a hand, worked relentlessly to make this event successful. The plan was to first advocate about the issue on social media and raise awareness about the Greta Thunberg’s campaign before sending out a notice on the week of the campaign. This was all done through the mobile community and through word of mouth. We tried to keep as little intervention from the teachers as possible to this event solely because this was a student-led rally. Following this, our committee, separated to two groups, with one handling the creation of posters for the morning rally on the upcoming Friday and the other writing out the pledge, worked afterschool throughout the week to organize everything needed for the event. I worked with the committee in charge of the pledge creation as it was decided that the seniors should handle it whereas everyone else handled the poster creation which we also took part in later on. We also had to work out many logistics as to what we wanted from our community as well as our administrations. This was quite difficult as the issue being tackled is one marked as a Wicked problem. Meaning that it doesn’t have one set solution. Eventually, we wrote out a well-thought-out pledge which consisted of obligations for students to follow as well as changes that needed to be made by the administration such as the introduction of a meat-free Thursday in the canteen to cut down our community’s meat consumption.
The idea of the pledge was, following the morning rally on Friday, we were to have a auditorium gathering at 12.00 (half an hour before lunch break) in the auditorium with all secondary school students who were willing to skip class to join our cause and here, we were to present the problem, Greta Thunberg’s ideologies and movement and then present the pledge which would be sent out that night for students and teachers to sign. Following the signing of the pledge, we would present the results to the board and ask for the changes specified to be applied within our school community for a more sustainable future
Assembly at 12.00 PC: Shivani
The rally was really successful, with many students joining us as we paraded through school with our posters and chants. We got a lot of people’s attention and many teachers commended us for our efforts. The assembly at 12.00 was also very successful as the entire auditorium was filled and we did a good job at presenting the issue. Josh and I were in charge of presenting the pledge and its points to the audience which we did and we received a positive response from them though there were some who showed reluctance to a few specific points of our pledge such as the implementation of a carbon tax on all our flights that we take for sports and music competitions. We tried explaining the issue to the best of our abilities and it paid off because we received about 100+ students signing the pledge the following week! We are getting prepared to present these figures in front of our school board but till then we are continuing our efforts to bring change from the bottom and ensuring that students are making changes to their daily lives to strive towards a more sustainable future.