‘Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation’
—TIME cover, May 2013
‘We don’t want these people in charge of us anymore.’
—Emma González, to CNN after the Parkland school shooting, February 2018
‘The winter is over, change is here. The sun shines on a new day, and the day is ours. First-time voters show up 18 per cent of the time at mid-term elections. Not anymore. Now, who here is going to vote in the 2018 election? If you listen real close you can hear the people in power shaking.’
—David Hogg, March for Our Lives speech
Lock the Gate joined 350.org, the Wilderness Society and others to stage a rally in Sydney on 24 March 2018, and 7000 marchers took to the streets, including a cavalcade of farmers on horseback. It was a beautiful event with a strong message—that it’s ‘Time 2 Choose’ a green-energy future—but one thing struck me: how old everyone was. White hair was everywhere. Where were all the young people?
Walking home, I passed a man in a wheelchair and his daughter, both wearing ‘No Coal Seam Gas’ T-shirts, and we got chatting. ‘He’s turning eighty-five next week,’ she told me. ‘We’ve come down from the Northern Rivers.’ They were looking forward to a family reunion the following day. ‘I couldn’t get the kids to come here. They’re excited to see him,’ she nodded at the old man, ‘but they weren’t interested in the rally. I get the feeling they think we’re slightly mad.’
Bev Smiles, Uncle Kevin and Auntie Pat, Bob Brown and Drew Hutton are seniors; who are they passing the baton to? I’ve seen how older people often dominate by numbers at rallies. Stop Adani in Bondi was also heavy on the greys, punctuated by bright young things from the AYCC, but in nowhere near equal numbers. Millennials were out in force in Bondi, but thronging the cafés rather than lending their support on the beach. Afterwards, I asked a group of women in their late twenties how come they hadn’t joined us, and they had no idea what I was talking about; in their case at least, the message wasn’t getting through.
Obvious reasons for older people doing the grunt work of organising include ageing populations (certainly the case in the Hunter communities I visited) and the fact that retirees have time on their hands. Some students have hours to spare too. Parents with young families, however, are usually time-poor, as are ambitious professionals in the building stages of their careers. That explains why it’s so often grannies and kids who volunteer. In the United States, those aged between thirty-five and fifty-five are most likely to volunteer, but older people tend to put in more hours. Everywhere, women volunteer more than men. In Australia, of the nearly six million people who volunteered in 2014, the highest rates were among young people aged fifteen to seventeen (42 per cent of them volunteered).
Millennials are by no means apathetic, but many are disengaged from the existing systems, which fail to speak their language. A million fewer American youngsters voted in the 2016 presidential election than in 2012 (when Obama was voted back in), seeing neither side as representing their values. If they regard politicians as unrelatable and self-serving, is it any wonder? Traditional politics is too often a closed shop, still so pale and male, and the next generation is seeking alternative ways to engage. It’s not just voting they are light on; group and union membership, contacting public officials, attending public meetings, and working with neighbours are all on the decrease, which helps explain why the Stop Adani and Time 2 Choose protests were skewed towards older protesters. Maybe street protests are learned behaviour: the boomers got their practice in the ’60s.
‘Kids today! They’re surgically attached to their phones. Obsessed with social media. And porn, probably. They have no manners! What’s with selfies? Selfish, more like. In my day … ’
Every generation of old codgers thinks its society’s youth are feckless layabouts who will send the world to hell in a handbasket. Socrates complained that ancient Greek children loved luxury, and had terrible manners and contempt for authority. Plato moaned that ‘they riot in the streets with wild notions’ and ‘have decaying morals’. In the 1920s, parents feared their offspring would turn into immodest flappers and risky partygoers. In the 1960s, when large numbers of students and young people drove the new civil rights, feminist, peace and environment movements, they sent the older generation into a panic. Youth had ‘gone wild’. British rock stars were ‘invading’ America. Teenagers were ‘sex-obsessed’, while protestors were nothing better than rioting criminals. It’s inevitable, then, that millennials cop criticism, but it’s not justified.
A much-discussed 2013 TIME cover bears the memorable line ‘Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.’1 The inside story, penned by a Gen Xer, told of ‘a crisis of unmet expectations’ for kids born between 1981 and 2000, thanks to their being raised on a diet of constant praise and affirmation: ‘Though they’re cocky about their place in the world, millennials are also stunted, having prolonged a life stage between teenager and adult.’ Please. It is not bruised egos that disappoint this generation; it’s the fact that the last lot failed to clean up after themselves and the planet’s conking out.
‘No one agrees about what makes each generation unique. For instance, are young people today narcissistic and coddled, or are we creative and energetic?’ writes sixteen-year-old Logan Casey, with impressive maturity, in The New York Times. (He was part of the paper’s Student Council program for the 2015/16 school year.) ‘Generalizations snowball and millions of people are made to share one identity. These stereotypes can reinforce prejudices and make groups into easy scapegoats.’2
I work with students all the time, and I’ve never met a single one who didn’t care about global warming or social justice or trying to build a better future. While millennials are indeed a large and diverse demographic, studies show how they value authenticity and transparency, and are more likely to be recyclers and conscious consumers. Coming of age in the Anthropocene, they exist online in a way that their parents did not. Add these ingredients to the pot and stir, and you get a very different dish from the one served up by TIME magazine.
The Millennial Impact Project runs an annual survey that since 2009 has quizzed over 100,000 American millennials on their attitudes to civic engagement, showing how this generation is combining social media with traditional forms of participation, while ‘redefining terms long accepted in the cause and philanthropy space: Activist. Cause. Social issue. Ideology.’3 The 2017 report concludes that their interest in the greater good is driving their cause engagement today, and their activism (or whatever you want to call it) is increasing.
Gens Y and Z are the most globally connected ever—they are building community online. They may well be induced to march (as we are about to see); they might even sue the government for its failure to protect their right to a healthy environment. But it starts, builds and evolves with social media. Older people trying to figure out what makes Gen Z tick (and how to sell to them) have noticed that they regard equality as a non-negotiable, and are getting involved in social activism at a much earlier stage in life. Forbes hints that it’s the Malala effect.4 As one young journalism student puts it, ‘Millennials have developed our own activist platform. Homophobia, racism, cultural appropriation, transphobia, negative body image, police brutality, gun control, and women’s reproductive rights are some of the social and political issues that affect our lives, and we are willing to fight for them to great lengths until national action is taken.’5
Jeremy Heimans is a New York–based Australian who co-founded GetUp! in his twenties and has co-authored a book called New Power with Henry Timms. ‘Old power works like a currency,’ they explain:
It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.
New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.6
‘Different generations have left different marks on the planet that are unforgettable,’ says Xiuhtezcatl (pronounced shoe-tez-caht) Martinez,7 a ‘conscious hip-hop artist’ who encourages kids to change the world through his music, book, social-media platforms and Earth Guardians organisation. He began his activism aged six, after seeing the Leonardo DiCaprio documentary The 11th Hour and telling his mother, ‘I need to talk to people.’
Martinez, with his chiselled jaw and glossy curtain of long, dark hair, was an unnervingly confident thirteen-year-old in 2014 when he delivered his TEDxYouth talk about his deep connection with the natural world, grounded in his Aztec heritage. ‘I have the power and I have the responsibility to do something about it, not just for myself, not just for my generation, but for every generation to come,’ he said. To wit, he performed an eco rap with his little brother Itzcuauhtli (eat-squat-lee) called Return to Nature, then evoked Gandhi: be the change that you wish to see in the world. ‘So what that means for me, is that we cannot wait for other people to do it,’ he said. ‘A lot of people think that … the power to make a difference … comes from political leaders, from governments, from presidents but they are wrong because the power to change the world is in each one of you.’8
Earth Guardians was started by his mother in the 1970s, and she’s obviously been a big influence, but Martinez decided ‘to keep the momentum going’ on his own terms by bringing in fifteen kids from his neighbourhood of Boulder, Colorado. Since then, they’ve campaigned against fracking, to get pesticides banned in local parks and to introduce a fee on plastic bags, but the big one was suing the government.
On International Youth Day in August 2015, twenty-one young people from across the United States, including Martinez, 18-year-old activist Kelsey Juliana and ‘Future Generations through their guardian Dr James Hansen’, filed a lawsuit against the US government for causing climate change and therefore violating the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty and property. Their charge was very similar to the one brought by San Francisco against big oil: that for over fifty years ‘the United States of America has known that carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels was causing global warming and dangerous climate change, and that continuing to burn fossil fuels would destabilize the climate system on which present and future generations of our nation depend for their wellbeing and survival.’ And they did nothing about it. The case, known as Juliana v United States, is set for trial in October 2018.
Little Itzcuauhtli has also been busy. In 2014, aged eleven, he was listening to adults discuss extreme weather, ocean acidification and mass extinctions at an eco-conference when he decided, ‘I have to do something drastic to change the outcome of the future. What can I do as one person to help change the direction we are headed?’9 He decided on a ‘talking strike’ promoted through a new website called Climate Silence Now. Itzcuauhtli—an outspoken kid who loves to chat—held his tongue for forty-five days. Can you imagine how much strength of character it took to stay quiet? He wrote on Facebook that the experience was ‘a bumpy road’, but ‘though I have lost friends at school, I have made many new friends from all over the world who have signed up to join me.’
One of them was the actor Mark Ruffalo, who’d met the Martinez boys at the People’s Climate March earlier that year and was moved to encourage others to share Itzcuauhtli’s vow of silence for an hour on 10 December. Ruffalo’s ‘first reaction was concern. No eleven-year-old should be sacrificing his voice in hopes of ensuring a habitable planet for his future. As a father, I worry about the other children around the globe who feel that same weight.’10 Martinez shared part of a note from Ruffalo: ‘I also am made heartsick by your despair, little one. Your silence is a symbol of the silence that will come from doing nothing. You are silent for species that will go extinct and for the countless lives lost in super hurricanes, droughts, floods and ecosystem failure due to the folly and inaction of our leaders.’ But, Ruffalo told the world, ‘Here’s the thing: Itzcuauhtli could have gone into despair when he thought about his future, but he didn’t—he took action. And by doing so he believes we will take action too. When he writes of world leaders, he isn’t just talking about heads of state, he’s talking about you and me.’
By the time she reaches the fourth name, she has to wipe her tears with her fists. ‘Scott Beigel would never joke around with Cameron at camp.’ But they keep coming, the names of her dead friends. ‘Helena Ramsay would never hang out after school with Max. Gina Montalto would never wave to her friend Liam at lunch. Joaquin Oliver would never play basketball with Sam or Dylan. Alaina Petty would never. Cara Loughran would never.’ Emma González reads out the names until she is done. Seventeen. ‘Meadow Pollack would never.’ Then she waits, and the wait is excruciating. Many in the 500,00011-strong crowd are weeping. The tears roll down González’s face, but this time she does not wipe them away, only blinks and looks into the crowd as a chant rises: ‘Never again, never again, never again.’ Finally, a beeper goes off to signal that her silence is up. ‘Since the time I came out here, it has been six minutes and twenty seconds,’ she says.
Six minutes and 20 seconds is the time it took a disturbed nineteen-year-old with a legally purchased AR-15 rifle to kill fourteen students, two sports coaches and a geography teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018. So here we are at another rally on 24 March 2018, this one dominated by young people.
March for Our Lives saw students and their families descend on Washington, where, as with the Women’s March, Trump was conspicuous in his absence. Again, sister events ran in other cities, with New York’s mayor saying 150,000 turned out there. Their message? ‘Not one more. We cannot allow one more child to be shot at school.’ #NeverAgain.
González, eighteen, went from regular high-school senior to massacre survivor to key leader of the youth-driven gun-control movement in under a week. Her image—big eyes, defiant expression, close-cropped hair; she’d recently shaved if off, dismissing it as ‘an extra sweater I’m forced to wear’—was seared onto the public consciousness when she delivered her first emotional speech at a rally in Fort Lauderdale three days after the shooting, saying she’d happily ask Trump ‘how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.’
America is a dangerous place to be a student. Thirty per cent of American schools have a police officer on staff.12 Parkland sparked a debate about whether to arm teachers, as shooting incidents continued to happen in schools and universities. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, there were seventeen separate incidents in the nine weeks following the Parkland massacre. From the outside looking in, the situation seems unfathomable. Hundreds of students have been killed and injured by guns in American educational establishments since the University of Texas massacre in 1966. They include the four unarmed college students murdered by the national guard at Kent State University in 1970, during a protest against the Nixon administration’s bombing of Cambodia. They include the twelve students (one teacher was also killed) who were murdered at Columbine High School, Colorado, in 1999 by two teenagers. They also died. And now the fourteen Stoneman Douglas kids. That’s not even the worst student death toll; it is only the worst since the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, when a twenty-year-old gunman slaughtered twenty first-graders and six adults. He then shot his mother before killing himself.
In the last six years, there have been at least 239 separate school shooting incidents in the United States.13 (Not all of them ended in fatalities, and not everyone agrees on how to count them. It’s in the interests of the pro-gun lobby to exclude suicides, shootings where kids were only maimed and incidents that happen on school property but don’t involve students.)
The Sandy Hook murderer suffered from untreated mental illness, a fact exploited by those intent on delivering that infuriating response, ‘Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.’ Let us be clear: Guns kill. That is their purpose. Selling guns in supermarkets will result in people being shot with them. This is not a matter of opinion. It’s a cold, hard fact.
And yet the March for Our Lives kids aren’t even requesting guns be outlawed; they’re mostly not questioning the Second Amendment. They ask only that gun control be tightened to prevent more kids being killed with weapons designed for military use.
According to The New York Times, ‘The AR-15 re-entered the gun market after the end of the federal assault weapons ban [introduced by the Clinton administration in 1994 amid concerns over mass shootings—the ban expired in 2004], at a time of heightened interest in the military. It was popularized by the rise of a video game culture in which shooting became an accessible form of mass entertainment.’14 The Iraq War was all over the news. These idiots were buying this gun because it made them feel like heroes. One of these guns was used at Sandy Hook. One was used at Australia’s Port Arthur massacre in 1996, resulting in a swift change of the law here.
Since 1968, more than 1.5 million people have died in gun-related incidents on American soil. Read that number again. It takes a while for it to sink in. That’s more than the total number of American service members killed in all wars in US history. America is at war with itself. Yet large sections of US society are insistent that their right to bear arms is sacred and unassailable. For any reasonable person who is not American, this makes zero sense, but if you’re an American who believes you ought to be allowed a handgun in your handbag, can we at least agree that selling gas-operated, semi-automatic weapons to unstable young men does not make the world a safer place?
The March for Our Lives campaign is asking for stronger gun laws, a ban on the deadliest weapons, and universal background checks. Since Sandy Hook, various states have introduced and/or extended background-check requirements for gun-buyers, but Republicans and the NRA continue to fight them. A month after Parkland, for example, it looked as if Minnesota might pass new gun-control legislation, but by April it was defeated.
Not that background checks prevented the Parkland shooter, former Stoneman Douglas student Nikolas Cruz, from tooling up. The suburban gun store in question, situated on a nondescript strip mall next to a spa, was required only to check that he did not have a criminal record and had not been found mentally defective by a court. And so Cruz, despite being troubled and known to police, was able to buy a weapon with barely more difficulty than if it were massage oil.
Cameron Kasky, seventeen, survived the shooting. In the car on the way home with his dad and brother, he began sharing on Facebook. In one post, he wrote that ‘doing nothing would lead to nothing.’15 The next night he invited some friends over, including seventeen-year-old Jaclyn Corin, and they came up with #NeverAgain. According to Corin, ‘Our first meeting was small—there were a handful of people lying around Cameron’s living room, trying to figure out next steps (if there were any). But with each meeting, we’d invite a few more students to join us, until we had about twenty people at our meetings.’16 Reaching out to peers who were on social media, they found sharing their responses was easy, as was connecting with millions of kids across the nation who cared. By the day of the March for Our Lives rally, González had 1.4 million Twitter followers.
As the funerals of their friends were being held, Corin put out a call for 100 students to travel to Tallahassee to lobby the state legislature, posting on Instagram, ‘Please contact your local and state representatives, as we must have stricter gun laws immediately.’ #NeverAgain organised via a huge group-text thread.17 The group agreed on their aims from the outset—to build an inclusive, student-led movement to campaign for action to stop ‘the epidemic of mass shootings’—and naturally began to message and hear from other kids who’d experienced gun violence.18 Within days, they had their plan for March for Our Lives. Social-media graphics, posters and voter tool kits were made available online. A supporter donated an office space, which became both war room and hangout. They crowd-funded US$2.7 million in a week, but there were no parents or seasoned campaigners running the show.
David Hogg, seventeen, had ambitions to be a filmmaker or journalist before the shooting, and brought out his phone and started interviewing his friends as they were hiding from the gunman in a closet. He told CNN he’d had one thing on his mind: ‘Tell the story.’19
Two members of the core team are twenty-year-old ex–Stoneman Douglas students, now in college and apparent media whizzes, but really, what would take your mum six months to build on Squarespace any one of these kids could whip up in an afternoon. Corin calls social media ‘our weapon’.20 They’ve all been raised on the 24-hour news cycle and knew it was now or never, plus content creation comes naturally to them.
Vanity Fair also points out that Columbine survivor Laura Farber took nineteen years to make a documentary based on the experience, while Hogg, ‘filmed his ordeal as he lived it, huddled in lockdown, laying down the commentary track in real time and conducting his first on-camera interviews. He fled the school, made it home, then rode his bike back that same afternoon to grab B-roll.’21
González is obviously no fan of Trump’s, but the group agreed early on that the movement must be non-partisan, and both Hogg and Kasky proved themselves shrewd political communicators, hammering this home repeatedly in their media appearances: ‘This isn’t about Red and Blue; this is about protecting the kids.’ It is also about inclusivity. Whether by intuition—as the brainchild of the most diverse and inclusive generation yet22—or design, having taken the learnings from the Women’s Marches on board, the rally was anchored by speakers from different communities and backgrounds. Naomi Wadler, at just eleven, opened her speech with ‘I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper. These stories don’t lead on the evening news.’
One month after the Parkland students ran from their school under siege, thousands of others across America walked voluntarily out of theirs (many risking suspension) as part of a solidarity initiative called Walkout Wednesday. This was organised by the Youth Empower offshoot of the Women’s Marches—yet more evidence of the new cross-movements coming together. Asked how he felt about it, Kasky said, ‘It was inspiring, the fact that students all over the nation were taking leadership positions that we were thrust into.’23
The Parkland students are accidental activists. Corin told The New Yorker that she had not been ‘even a little bit’ politically active before, although she was well versed in the gun-control debate having written a school paper on it. As junior class president, she had perhaps been a little bit famous, but now her face is everywhere. ‘Before February 14, 2018, I spent my days at dance class, watching Netflix in bed with my dog, and studying.’ Imagine the pressure. She, González and Kasky went on the Ellen show, where Kasky admitted he felt guilty that it took experiencing gun violence in his own community to turn him into a campaigner, but as he said in his Fort Lauderdale speech, ‘We’re just kids.’
These kids—who have been through serious trauma, mind you—present as wiser, and more collected, reasoned and determined than many seasoned campaigners and politicians. This is what Kasky told the crowd at March for Our Lives: ‘To the leaders, sceptics and cynics who told us to sit down and stay silent, wait your turn. Welcome to the revolution! It is a powerful and peaceful one because it is of, by and for the young people of this country.’
Everywhere students are speaking out, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, in classrooms, in the streets and to the media. ‘We’re not only fighting for ourselves, we’re fighting for the future kids,’ Parkland student Giuliana Matamoros told New York magazine.24
‘This isn’t just about our school,’ said her friend Lyliah Skinner. ‘It’s about every single place that you can go to and not feel safe because: gun violence. Our school gets more attention because of our demographic. We are a predominantly white school, rich, Republican, and that’s not fair because places like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, this is every day for them.’25 Skinner had been hiding in a classroom for more than an hour when police burst in, ordered the students to drop to the floor, then led them out with their hands up. Hands up don’t shoot. Kids in the crowd at March for Our Lives had the slogan written on their palms. ‘Today,’ said Kasky, ‘is a bad day for tyranny and destruction.’26
‘Many fellow survivors and I have not kept quiet,’ writes González in a piece for Teen Vogue, which put her, Corin and other young activists from different communities on its digital cover. Fourteen-year-old Jazmine Wildcat is a Native American gun-control activist from Wyoming. Nza-Ari Khepra, twenty-one, began campaigning after her best friend was killed in Chicago when she was just fifteen. ‘We have taken the media by storm through appearances and interviews, met with state and federal lawmakers to beg them to enact much stricter gun control laws, and been joined in protest by students around the nation and the world who’ve held school walkouts and demonstrations that exhibit the energy and power of young people in full force,’ writes González.
After watching David Hogg give his brilliant, courageous speech—‘Ninety-six people die every day from guns in our country,’ he said, and ‘yet most representatives have no public stance on guns and to that we say, no more’—I checked Instagram to see who else was moved to tears. I typed in his name with a hashtag. What came up? Nazi memes showing Hogg dressed as Hitler or Hogg with Hitler, calling him ‘CNN’s Minister of Propaganda’; posts from gun-toting freaks spouting venom and threatening worse, and I thought, here it is again, the pus from the boil that’s being lanced. It gets ugly before it heals. The people holding the power who are set to lose it, and the bullies and the bigots who’ve benefitted, they can get very nasty indeed.
A politician who was the only declared candidate for Congress in his Maine constituency called Hogg a ‘bald-faced liar’ and González a ‘skin-head lesbian’. She said simply, ‘I’m not going to even address the fact that he said it in the first place.’ Hogg, however, responded on Twitter: ‘Hey friends in Maine! Who wants to run against this hate loving politician He is running unopposed, run against him I don’t care what party just do it.’ Within days, the politician was out of the race.
‘We are going to make this the voting issue; we are going to take this to every election, to every state and every city,’ said Hogg on stage at March for Our Lives. ‘And to those politicians supported by the NRA that allow the continued slaughter of our children and our future, I say: get your resumes ready.’
‘I think fourteen is the best age to get involved in activism,’ says Anna Rose, who was twenty-two when she co-founded the AYCC with another Australian university student Amanda McKenzie. ‘In your teens, you have a lot of empathy. You haven’t been beaten down by the world. You’re also idealistic enough to believe you can make a difference, and you’ve got time.’27 At thirty-five with a child of her own, does she still believe she can make a difference? ‘I do,’ she says. ‘I am.’ It’s shortly after Christmas and we are whispering in the kitchen of Rose’s holiday rental while her baby sleeps. ‘Also, you can’t get arrested until you’re sixteen,’ she laughs.
Rose was environmentally aware from an early age. Her grandparents and uncle were farmers, hit hard by drought. ‘I lived with my mum and dad in Newcastle, but I spent a lot of time on my grandparents’ farm. They ended up selling, and the drought was a factor. My uncle kept his farm, but the cattle had to go away on agistment; there wasn’t enough water.’
Like Elizabeth Morley, Rose remembers frightening stories on the news about farmer suicides. Also, she says it was impossible not to think about pollution and the environment growing up near the largest coal-export port in the world. Rose was fourteen when a campaigner from the Wilderness Society visited her school, and told her there was something she could do about it. ‘I’d been distressed about the drought and environmental destruction and just sitting with that and feeling powerless, and along comes this guy with this speech that offered a solution. I went up afterwards and asked him, “What can I do?” He said, “Well, you’re at school, so start where you are.”’
Rose set up a green group with her classmates and convinced the school to back a ‘sports’ option called Environmental Activities. They planted trees and recycled. Rose also volunteered at the Wilderness Society. ‘They had a shopfront—I was selling tea towels—but the campaign office was out the back.’ When she heard about BHP Billiton’s plans to mine the Stockton Bight sand dunes, less than an hour away from her school, she got Environmental Activities involved. The kids’ campaign tactics included dressing up as koalas (which landed them in the local newspaper) ‘and a lot of letter-writing’. By 2001, before Rose graduated, a coalition of the Wilderness Society, local residents, passionate kids and the traditional Worimi owners had defeated BHP. The government declared Stockton Bight a conservation area.
At university Rose gravitated towards the eco kids, but not exclusively. ‘I’m a joiner,’ she says. ‘I joined everything.’ Links with the Circus Society turned out to be more helpful than they sound. When Rose steered a campaign to persuade the university to switch to clean energy, ‘we got all the clubs and societies involved, cheerleaders, footballers, deans of faculties. It was inclusive, and that’s why it succeeded. Everyone has a particular talent or network or idea.’
In 2005 Rose was elected environment officer for the National Union of Students. Everywhere she went, she met passionate students, but there was a missing link. Of course, some people simply didn’t care, but she figured there must be students who would have liked to join a green group but either didn’t dare or were put off for some reason. Did the existing groups seem too serious or too splintered? Like they would take up too much time? Or did they appear to be dominated by the super-dedicated activist types already involved? Were people like Rose inadvertently sending the message that it was all or nothing? And what about all the kids beyond the university, all the working young people, and those still at school? If Rose wanted to change the world, she needed to reach out wider.
She knew the two obvious routes to participation: one, someone invites you; two, you seek it out. (The seeking, she explains, usually happens after reading a book or watching a movie that enlightens you.) ‘But mostly it’s the invitation. More people asking means more joining.’
No one invited Amanda McKenzie. Reading The Weather Makers did it for her. She was on holiday in Tasmania’s Styx River State Forest at the time. ‘You have to lean back to see the tops of the trees they’re so tall, and I remember sitting in that forest thinking, This has been here since before Europeans even knew this place existed, and we could destroy the planet in a generation.’28 Uh-oh. McKenzie, now CEO of Australia’s Climate Council, was then a 21-year-old arts/law student. ‘I spent the next six months worrying, sometimes waking up at 4 a.m., then I decided, Enough! I just need to do something.’ McKenzie and her sister started writing educational presentations and delivering them in schools. After each talk, McKenzie would say, ‘I’m going to start an organisation for young people who care about climate change. I’m not sure what it’s going to be exactly, but if you’re interested, come and see me afterwards.’
Rose was at COP11 in Montréal as part of the youth delegation when the seed for the AYCC took root in her mind. She reckoned the climate-change issue could use a national coalition of youth groups, and when she got back to Sydney in December 2005, she persuaded a small group of friends to help her organise a founding summit. They secured a $10,000 grant from an insurance company.
‘That was a lot of money to give student newbies,’ I say.
‘By that time, I’d been involved in activism for close to decade,’ says Rose.
McKenzie was one of thirty-five people who attended the founding summit in November 2006. She joined the steering committee. Rose became national director. Their first big activation was a youth conference called Power Shift (based on an American model), designed to connect and inspire young climate activists from across the country. It culminated in a flash mob on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, choreographed by the team from So You Think You Can Dance?
Today the AYCC is Australia’s largest youth-run organisation, with over 150,000 members aged between twelve and twenty-seven. It runs training programs; it works in high schools to help kids get their heads around the climate-change issue; it supports the SEED Indigenous Youth Climate Network (Rose is Amelia Telford’s mentor) and, of course, it campaigns. The AYCC was crucial to the five-year-long campaign to persuade the South Australian government to build a solar thermal power plant, the biggest in the world, at Port Augusta. They made submissions, they door-knocked, they crowdfunded TV ads, and organised a 328-kilometre march from Port Augusta to Adelaide. It took them fifteen days. Probably, someone even dressed up as a koala. ‘The press needs something to take pictures of other than men in boring suits,’ says McKenzie.
Rose left the AYCC when she reached its age limit. She went on to write a book about her efforts to change the mind of a climate-sceptic politician, ran Earth Hour in Australia for a couple of years, and now works with Farmers for Climate Action. I ask Rose what drives her, and she looks genuinely puzzled; like, how is that a question? ‘Why wouldn’t you do this?’ she says. ‘If I were to analyse it, I’d say it’s what I’ve always done. I was really lucky to get involved early. But bottom line? Once you realise you can change things, why would you not?’