This week on the show we welcome Rosie Zhou, a lead organizer with Sunrise Spokane — a student and young-adult-led organization focused on ensuring we get to 100% carbon independence within the less-than-seven-year window set out in the 2018 special report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
What makes young organizers like Rosie and her friends really special and worth paying attention to isn’t just the fervor and clarity of their demands for decisive action, but the inclusivity, holism and intersectionality of the tactics they’re bringing to the climate fight.
Their environmentalism is absolutely still about starving polar bears and rising sea levels. It’s also about a clean industrial revolution that can lift us out of our economic torpor — viewed through a lens that recognizes the disproportionate impacts that inaction will have on the poor, people of color, and basically everyone in the global south.
It’s a really powerful, compelling message, and these young people are just getting started. Enjoy.
Let the Sunrise In