About 200 people — including dozens of teens — gathered in Daley Plaza on Monday and blocked a nearby intersection during the evening rush to call on governments to act quickly to avoid the dire and impending consequences of global warming.
Protesters chanted “leave the oil in the soil” and “oceans are rising, so are we” and “city of Chicago can’t you see, this is a climate emergency” as they blocked the intersection of Randolph and Clark Streets.
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“We’re demanding that our governments take immediate action on climate change,” said Joe Phillips, an organizer with a local chapter of Extinction Rebellion, a loosely knit global organization that held demonstrations in cities around the world Monday.
Phillips, 44, an urban farming teacher from the Ukrainian Village, called on Mayor Lori Lightfoot to declare a “climate emergency.”
“We want governments all over the world, including Chicago, to start telling the truth about the climate crisis, which is that basically our economy is destroying the earth through fossil fuel emissions,” he said during a rally at Daley Plaza.
Several dozen teenagers marched to the demonstration from a separate rally outside Trump Tower. Their upturned palms bared messages about climate change.
Serena Worley, a sophomore at Deerfield High School and director of outreach for the Illinois branch of U.S. Youth Climate Strikes, expressed frustration over not being taken seriously.
“Every time I talk to an adult about this I hear the same phrase over and over again: ‘Your generation is going to fix all this, you guys are the future,’” she said.
Worley then shared her response to such adults: “Excuse me? You’re still here. You’re still in power. You can act. This movement wouldn’t exist if the adults in power did their jobs and protected the people they were elected to represent.”
Her schoolmate, Avery Martin, said she was once a motivated student but school has become pointless to her in the face of a climate crisis that spells doom for future generations.
“Ever since I became involved in the fight against climate change, school has become fruitless, it has become almost trivial and worthless,” she said.
“We do not want to be fighting against adults, politicians and the government. We want to be working with them,” she said.
Climate activist Tonyisha Harris, a recent graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, said time is running out to make necessary changes that would mitigate global warming, and she called on Gov. J.B. Pritzker to pass legislation that would reduce carbon emissions.
“Remove that count down clock above our heads and give my generation a future,” Harris, 22, of South Shore, said.
