Ill. Youth Climate Movement takes Earth Day protest online
Group divides from national branch to stay inclusive, nonpartisan
Ella Barry speaks at an Illinois Youth Climate Strike march in December at Federal Plaza in Chicago. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
The Illinois Youth Climate Movement was preparing to return to the streets Wednesday for an Earth Day protest.
The coronavirus pandemic and the statewide stay-at-home order, however, have thrown a wrench into those plans.
“We were already planning our big march before we decided we had to cancel,” said Ella Barry, a junior at Benet Academy in Lisle and a member of the group’s core team. “So it was definitely disappointing. But I’m hoping we’ll still have a good turnout on our livestream and still be able to spread the word.”
Where the group would usually march through Chicago to Federal Plaza for a series of speeches, as it did a handful of times last year, instead they’ll just give those speeches online through a livestream at 6 p.m. on the Illinois Youth Climate Movement Instgram page. They’ll be joined by speakers from the Illinois Environmental Council and the GoodKids MadCity grassroots group, among others.
“We always say our marches are about spreading the word and putting pressure on politicians to know that people care and people want them to take action,” Barry said. That approach shouldn’t change in the online demonstration.
But it does suggest why the group felt it had to divide from the national U.S. Youth Climate Strike organization last month. The Illinois group posted an announcement changing its name from Illinois Youth Climate Strike to the Illinois Youth Climate Movement on its Instagram page, stating: “Our decision to leave is deeply impacted by the shift in environment at USYCS over the past months. We believe the climate movement should be open to everyone, and in order to fill this need the best path is for us to leave our parent organization. ILYCS believes this decision will be the best for our community, our organizers, and the climate-justice movement as a whole.”
“Our national branch was kind of headed in a direction where they weren’t focusing solely on climate issues, and they were going to try to focus more on being an anti-capitalist organization,” Barry said. “Which we’re not fully against. We just thought it would be better for our group if we could stay focused just on climate change and stay more inclusive so people who aren’t necessarily completely anti-capitalist still feel welcome at our events. So that’s why we chose to separate from them.”
In fact, that sort of activism is what has set the Illinois Youth Climate Movement apart all along, from its origins just over a year ago. They weren’t just against fossil fuels and capitalism run amok. They took an active stance on legislation within the political system like the Clean Energy Jobs Act.
“We are definitely really focused on getting legislation passed,” Barry said. “But we also try to stay as nonpartisan as possible. So I think that was also part of the reasons we wanted to deviate from the national branch, because they were turning to a partisan direction, which again isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just not what our group has come to stand for in Illinois.
“A lot of our members went to a lobby day in the beginning of March” in Springfield for CEJA, she added. “We’re pretty confident about it. Definitely things are kind of up in the air now, given the current situation. But after that lobby day we were feeling pretty good about the passage of the bill. It still needed more changes, but we were definitely feeling good about it.”
Barry sees the crashing price of oil on International markets as as open door to the sort of change CEJA is intended to produce. “We’ve just seen news in the last couple of days about the oil industry struggling right now,” she said. “I think that’s a really good opportunity for us to get a lot of clean energy started now that we have the oil industry kind of not doing their best.”
In any case, they’re taking the mission online, just as their schooling has moved online with the statewide stay-at-home order to stem the spread of COVID-19. “It’s been definitely different and difficult,” Barry said. “But we’ve been trying to keep in touch with each other over Zoom and staying in touch with one another and doing our best to get all our work done and also do our work for our climate-strike group in this new and different way.”
The entire global movement, of course, is in part organized around school, in emulation of the school climate strikes first launched by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg two years ago. In addition to the core team of 20, the Illinois Youth Climate Movement has about 150 ambassadors at schools across the state, and it’s always recruiting more on social media. As a junior, Barry can hope for better days next year, but she feels for the seniors deprived of their graduation ceremonies and proms.
“It definitely sucks for them,” she said. “But I think they’re handling it well.”
It might actually help to keep them together after graduation. Barry said many of the senior organizers a year ago moved on to attend college out of state, “but we have a lot of people this year who are going to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I think a lot of them will probably stay on the team, plus get a new club started down there.”