Youth climate strikers can win their fight. Here’s a manifesto | George Monbiot

Courage and conviction may not be enough – that’s something I learned from other movements’ failures

This one has to succeed. It is not just that the youth climate strike, now building worldwide with tremendous speed, is our best (and possibly our last) hope of avoiding catastrophe. It is also that the impacts on the young people themselves, if their mobilisation and hopes collapse so early in their lives, could be devastating.

To help this movement win, we should ask why others lost. We should ask, for instance, why Occupy, despite the energy and sacrifices of so many, came to an end, while the institutions it confronted remain intact. We should wonder why the global justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, despite the numbers involved, their courage and determination, has not changed the world. We should consider why Podemos, the Spanish party that rose so high on the optimism of the indignados movement, now seems to be spiralling into recriminatory collapse.

Much of what I propose here is controversial, and I can't promise I've got it right

Related: I can’t wait for the striking schoolchildren to grab the reins of power | Suzanne Moore

Related: 'It is our future': children call time on climate inaction in UK

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2E1cm5c