Rise Up! The Power of Young People
21 Apr
I keep thinking what it must be like to be a young climate activist in the UK today. Greta Thunberg, inspirationally, in one ear. Blustering Boris, with all his phoney rhetoric, in the other. Memories of an uplifting ‘coming together’ in Strikes for Climate and other protests in 2019 – more or less cancelled out by the crushing impact of the pandemic in 2020.
I care passionately about this, not least because I know just how much we all now depend on that collective voice of young people to ‘speak truth to power’ in today’s troubled world.
So it’s been a joy to be able to bring together Forum for the Future with the brilliant educational charity, Reboot the Future, to help create something that both honours that role of young people and seeks to project forward into a much more hopeful position than we find ourselves in today.
Hence ‘Rise Up to Reboot the Future!’
This is an online Novella ‘authored’ by three young climate activists looking back from 2026 to present a ‘plausible scenario’ of how the world is transformed through the courage, creativity and persistence of young people – by simply refusing to let today’s decision-makers go on screwing up their future:
A very different kind of writing challenge for me – which I hope you’ll enjoy!
With the added benefit of capturing some of the ‘genius’ of those young people in film through the wonderful work of Sophie Austin, Beth Flintoff and Becky Burchell – who worked with me in 2019 on turning an earlier book of mine, ‘The World We Made’, into a play.
And finally, Reboot the Future has also created a whole set of resources for use in the classroom, based on the Novella and the films. Here’s where you can access all the films and the linked resources: www.globaldimension.org.uk/rebootthefuture
Originally published on www.jonathonporritt.com/rise-up-the-power-of-young-people/
