By Jason Plautz, The Washington Post Magazine, February 3, 2020
The teenagers pour off buses near Denver’s Union Station under a baking September sun. Giggling with excitement at skipping out on Friday classes, they join a host of others assembled near the terminal. Native American drummers and dancers rouse the crowd, and there’s a festive feeling in the air. But this is no festival. The message these young people have come to send to their city, to their state, to the nation — to the world of adults — is serious. Deadly serious. “We won’t die from old age,” reads one of the signs they hoist above their heads. “We’ll die from climate change.”
High school sophomore Sophie Kaplan is marching in a bright yellow flowered sundress, but the sentiment on her poster is hardly so sunny: “Why Should I Study For a Future I Won’t Have?” She thinks about climate change every day, she tells me. She reads “about how we’re on the brink” and hears her teachers and parents tell her that it’s up to her generation to fix things. “I don’t understand why I should be in school if the world is burning,” she says. “What’s the point of working on my education if we don’t deal with this first?”
As the estimated 7,500 marchers converge on the state capitol, I come upon Chris Bray and his children, sixth-grader Arianna and second-grader Colin. Dressed in plaid shorts and blue sunglasses, Colin hovers shyly behind a homemade sign (a picture of coal with the word “Why?” and a shining sun with the words “Why not?”). The boy is “scared about the planet,” he tells me, but it feels good to be surrounded by so many other people who care, since he can sometimes feel as if nobody else is worried.
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