It was up to the discretion of those walking past City Hall on Monday morning to accept or refuse flyers from Extinction Rebellion — a group committed to educating people about climate change and institutionalizing such education.
It was hard to ignore the message “Decarbonize, Democratize, Decolonize” scrawled letter-by-letter on notebooks held up by the 14 participants, who had black duct-tape covering their mouths.
The protest at City Hall was intended to spread awareness and advocate for reforming education on climate change at private and public institutions — a cause that is central to XR.
“The larger effort is to fight the climate emergency we are in that the government and corporations are denying,” Scott Schwedock, a member of the group’s outreach program told WSN. “Essentially we are leading towards ecological and social breakdown, because of climate change.”
The group — formed in late 2018 — has a specific branch for organizing universities, and students were the driving force behind Monday’s protest.
The global organization has started to put weight on universities, Abby Schroering, a coordinator for Extinction Rebellion and graduate student at Columbia University, said.
“We spend all of our lives in school because we are promised a future, and if we are going to work this hard for a future, then we need a future to look forward to,” Schroering explained to WSN. “And we are asking the educational institutions to take responsibility for building that.”
Schroering’s voice was on the verge of cracking as she said this, but many passing the small group of students and their big letters hardly glanced in their direction and certainly didn’t remove their earbuds to talk to Schwedock.
Valentin Abend is an architect and a recent graduate who grew up in a small Spanish town, and the issues surrounding climate change were in the back of his mind until he went to an Extinction Rebellion public talk. That talk demonstrated the importance of individual impact and it is why the architect actively participates.
“XR often looks like a group of hippies, or like people just shouting in the streets,” Abend said with a chuckle. “It is extremely organized and very strategic.”
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