Chicago youth protest against climate change in downtown rally
Dozens of people walked through downtown Chicago on Friday afternoon holding colorful signs and chanting: “There is no planet B, climate action is what we need.”
Youthful and older activists started at Pritzker Park around 4 p.m. and ended outside the Kluczynski Federal Building in the Loop. They walked in solidarity in a global climate strike against fossil fuels, hosted by dozens of international climate organizations.
Their goal: to convince Chase Bank and other megabanks to make a commitment to stop financing fossil fuel development.
They kicked off the strike with a climate parody of Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive.”
“I’m waking up/ To ash and dust/ And every breath is more noxious/ Breathing in/ Your chemicals,” they sang.
Danica Sun, 17, helped organize the event. Sun, a senior at Illinois Math and Science Academy, held a banner at the front of the group that read “Biden: Declare a climate emergency.”
“Youth should not be having to give up things like their education, their diet, their time, to strike like this. I really want to urge the adults in power to take action and live up to their responsibilities,” she said. “When the leaders act like kids, the kids become leaders.”
A member of both Fridays For Future Chicago and Chicago Climate Youth Coalition, this is the third strike she’s helped organize this year, she said.
Kina Collins, 32, who is running to represent a U.S. congressional district stretching through Chicago’s West Side that has been held by U.S. Rep. Danny Davis for over a quarter century, led the pack. She lives in Austin.
“I’m out here for all of our families that are working class people who cannot come out and take a break from work. Who cannot march,” she said.
Collins said the march is in line with her campaign pledge to not accept corporate PAC money from the fossil fuel industry. She hoped Friday night’s action would spur executives to pull their funding from projects that are harmful to Chicagoans’ drinking water and air.
“Our homes flooded this summer,” she said. “There are people in Austin on the West Side — and Black and brown and front-line communities — who get the hardest brunt of the climate injustice that is happening,” she said.
A man with a snare drum and two signs that said “Kiss My Frack” and “Global Warming, Local Burning” followed behind, tapping his sticks to the crowd’s chants.
Whooping and hollering, people marched down State Street, wheeling bikes. They stopped outside JPMorgan Chase’s building on South Dearborn Street.
“We are gathered right now at Chase, the biggest fossil fuel investor in the world,” Sun said, through a megaphone. The crowd booed. Signs bobbed up and down. “Don’t be a fossil fool,” read one. “Move your money,” read another.
Two students from Loyola University Chicago who grew up in La Grange said they came to the rally through their school’s environmental alliance. They said they’re hoping for a future where climate conversations are more unified.
Aidan McDougal, 20, is a public health major, and said his experience during the pandemic — watching the disproportionate way COVID affected different communities — was heartbreaking. It spurred him to take classes in environmental policy.
“The environment plays a role in everybody’s life — food, air, water,” he said. “If it’s not clean, it can affect you.”
Alejandra Rodriguez, 20, studies environmental policy, and said it’s one of the most pressing issues she and her peers confront daily.
“I do live by the quarry,” she said. “And there’s always a lot of flooding in the cracks in my house. You can just see the effects in everything. The air quality around the city.”
Anne White, 80, has been protesting since the Vietnam War, she said. Now, she’s a grandmother and she said she came out for the younger generations.
“I do it for my granddaughter. It’s her turn,” she said. “But as long as I’m around, it’s my turn too.”
