The Cleanest Line – Why They Strike Response

The article “Why They Strike” by Madalina Preda is about children protesting to raise awareness on climate change. It explains how children are skipping school to protest because adults are not doing enough about climate change issues, so kids have to. These students were sacrificing their education to protest every Friday. Alexandria Villaseñor, an organizer of school strikes in New York City, reasons this by saying “School won’t matter in the future if we’re too busy running from extreme weather events”. Greta Thunberg, a popular 16-year-old climate change activist, is one of the many leaders of these protests. The article mentions a “die-in”, something I had never heard of, which is when the children at protests all lay on the ground at the same time, implying that if action is not taken, climate change will shorten their lives. Since these children are not old enough to vote to make a political difference, they turn to protesting. A lot of times, adults do not take children’s opinions or beliefs seriously, especially on important issues, such as climate change. The president of the United States, for example, has mocked Greta Thunberg on twitter. The article also goes into detail about the effects of carbon emissions being released into the atmosphere. This causes deadly heat waves, hurricanes, and longer fire seasons. The main point of the article is to show that we can learn from these kids who are actually bringing awareness to the seriousness of climate change and the effects it has already had, and will have, on the world.