An Earth Day like no other

Happy late Earth Day! Last Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and focused on the current theme of climate action.

What are the climate activists of today up to? Well, here’s how Earth Day 2020 took shape in my community...

Imagine this: You’re standing on the football field at school on a warm spring day. Two-hundred fifty students from so many different grade levels are standing with you, holding signs and wearing old field day t-shirts with new messages spray-painted onto them. “Green New Deal,” “Good Jobs,” “Liveable future” are the words of the day.

All this started when we all stood up and walked out of our 5th-period classrooms.

In February, that’s what we thought Earth Day would look like at my school, when we began our Sunrise Movement strike circle. As you can see in the video above, we even started to make our signs and t-shirts before Spring Break! Plans changed because of social distancing and online school, but I’m still so proud of what we achieved.

A planning meeting back in March

Instead of a protest and march to disrupt business as usual, we shifted our focus to an online day of action, so we can still build public support for the Green New Deal. Each Zoom call had a turnout of about 30 people, with the highest attendance rate being the teacher panel, where 65 people tuned in!

At 9:30 a.m. we kicked off the day with a Green New Deal Q&A. We covered a lot of points similar to my post about Green New Deal myth-busting, and I got to present along with two other Sunrisers, both sophomores. It was encouraging to hear intelligent, thought-provoking questions and be able to respond in a live conversation.

Our first slide of the presentation, followed by Q&A

At 10, we switched over to a new Zoom call about contacting our elected officials. Since handwritten letters and phone calls don’t always get through to offices in a timely manner during the pandemic, we practiced using a customizable email tool from UNICEF to add our own personal thoughts on S. 1743. You can join us and write your own email: https://act.unicefusa.org/climate

The student speeches call, in between presentations

My favorite events were the student speeches (10 students, 4th to 12th grade) and the teacher panel (8 teachers from 4 different departments). We had so many presentations, from reducing waste to the history of the environmental movement, from long-term climate action to cool bugs! And the audience was so supportive, celebrating each speaker in the chat after their remarks.

A founding member of the strike circle delivers her speech

We finished up the day with an art build, where 20 of us doodled/painted on our own while hanging out on Zoom and watching climate change-related videos together.

One of the Earth Day action team leads with her art build sign

We expected Earth Day 2020 to be a day of massive strikes. The actual result wasn’t what any of us had envisioned, but I am very excited to continue working on this in my school community. Honestly, I had fun!
From start to finish, the strike circle has been a crazy adventure in learning and organizing. I grew more during the past few months, with all the triumphs and freak-outs, than ever before, and I hope others feel the same way (or at least, found something vaguely interesting to do for a day instead of online school). Once all the follow-up is over from this moment in Sunrise history, I’m looking forward to facilitating phone banks for GND-champion candidates for Congress and lobbying with UNICEF Club. Our work is not over yet!


To all the co-leaders, team members, speakers, and moderators that may be reading this: Thank you so much, none of this would have been possible without you. Can’t wait to see what you’ll do next. :)