Ten-year-old climate activist Nikos Spiridakis created this ad for 1Sky.  Supporters of the campaign put it on the air in 14 battleground states during the last presidential debate.  If they raise another $10,000 they can put it on again on the final debate on Wednesday.

I’m struck by how strongly many teenagers and children feel about the climate crisis.*

When I was growing up, we heard about global warming, but it wasn’t a cultural and political touchstone and, moreover, it wasn’t real.  Winters in St. Paul, MN, were still damn cold.  My parents never had to tell me we wouldn’t be driving to Chicago to visit our family because of gas prices.  I never saw an American city underwater.  Polar bears were merely cute, not symbols of environmental destruction.**

I’ve been trying to get in their heads, these people just 10 or 15 years younger than me, and understand it as they do.  One of the things I liken it to is the AIDS epidemic.  In the late ’80s and early ’90s, when I was around 8 to 10 years old, it was on TV, in health class, in plays that we saw on field trips.  I remember being anxious about this awful disease, but it didn’t seem like there was anything I could do about it except, someday, “practice safe sex” (gross!).

Later, in high school, I got fired up about sweatshops in developing countries.  The injustice struck a chord: girls and boys, unable to go to school, working under unfair conditions to make the clothes that ended up in my local mall.  I taught about them in schools around the Twin Cities and traveled to Nicaragua to shoot interviews with girls who worked in maquiladoras.

I feared AIDS in a very abstract way.  It was long before I was in any danger of contracting it, and by the time I was, it wasn’t a “crisis” anymore.  I cared passionately about putting an end to sweatshops.  But neither of these issues signalled a possible apocalypse….

* Examples: A 2005 study in the UK found that climate change is the biggest concern among schoolchildren.  Eight-year-old schoolkids in Washington, DC, are, according to their parents, obsessed with dying polar bears.  There are kid-led organizations such as Cool Kids for a Cool Climate and It’s Getting Hot in Here.

For personal perspectives, check out “Climate Change Through Children’s Eyes” these Climate Matters videos, “The Walk Home” and “Ask the Children.”

** Although I wasn’t particularly worried, there were some young people in the 1990s who were.  In particular, Severn Suzuki, who at age 9 co-founded the Environmental Children’s Organization.  Three years later, she addressed the 1992’s UN Earth Summit.  It’s an extraordinary clip.