Abiba Biao photo
Climate movement chalk art outside City Hall.
Climate change, human rights, holiday treats, and sidewalk art intersected outside City Hall as environmental activists sought to heat up the public conversation around a warming planet and what to do about it.
That was the scene on Church Street Friday afternoon at the New Haven Climate Movement-hosted “Chalk ‘n Choc.”
Participants chalked environmental messages on the sidewalk outside of City Hall, snacked on cookies and hot beverages, and — fitting for the event’s falling right before Human Rights Day – talked about the social, political, and moral obligations of taking action to mitigate climate change.
Friday’s speakers and presentations focused on NHCM’s “50% Fossil Free by 2023” campaign. This campaign calls for individuals, corporations, and city governments to commit to reducing their carbon emissions by 50 percent through an online pledge.
“We want to have something that was a more tangible goal for people to commit to in recent years,” said Sophia Rivkin, a NHCM Youth Action Team member and junior at Co-op High School. “And since this is December, we’re in the final month of 2022. We want to have a big push towards this campaign.”
The actions of NHCM have gained recent traction over the past few years as the Elicker Administration and the Board of Alders has created a climate change task force and allocated $5 million in federal pandemic-relief aid towards “climate emergency” initiatives. The city’s Board of Education also recently adopted a climate emergency resolution, and, on Friday, Steve Winter announced that he has resigned as Newhallville/Prospect Hill alder in order to become the city’s first-ever executive director of climate and sustainability.
NHCM Climate Education Committee members Leah Mock and Tenzin Youdo.
ESUMS juniors, Leah Mock, 15 and Tenzin Youdon, 16, showed up to Friday’s event as members of NHCM’s climate education subcommittee. They described their work as focusing on ways that interdisciplinary climate education can be integrated into the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) district and enhance the K‑12 climate curriculum. The curriculum focuses on climate literacy and eco-friendly actions, and highlights environmental racism and the disproportionate effects climate change has on minority populations.
Mock described that work as focusing on “parts of the curriculum that are already existing, but having those activities be more focused specifically on energy efficiency.”
The challenge is to make sure these changes are implemented seamlessly and don’t disrupt the day to day operations of schooling, she said, so as not to incur any pushback from public school staff and educators.
“So we’re going through like the NGSS standards for Connecticut, New Haven and then from there we kind of just like breaking down part by part like where we can fit in small climate education activities,” Youdon said.
They hope to make climate education standardized in schools and make the topic accessible to everyone.
Lila Kleppner.
Lila Kleppner, a 17-year-old senior at Wilbur Cross High School, read on Friday an excerpt from a speech that UN Secretary General António Guterres delivered at the 2022 UN diversity conference.
“With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction,” she read.
Kleppner added: “We are treating nature like a toilet and ultimately we are committing suicide by proxy, because the loss of nature and biodiversity comes with a steep human cost, a cost we measure and lost jobs, hunger, disease and death.”
Sebastian Duque.
Co-president of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition and Yale junior Sebestian Duque also spoke on Friday. Born in Colombia and raised in Miami, he recounted his experience working with Dejusticia, an environmental human rights group based in Colombia.
One of Dejusticia’s initiatives is to stop the Colombian government from perpetuating the deforestation of the Amazon. In litigation filed by that group, Dejustica and 25 young people who have signed on to the lawsuit have cited the right to a healthy environment as a legal right.
“This is kind of like a lesson that we can take away that this is an avenue that we can pursue in the future, and we have to force and we have to fight so that the United States government recognizes these rights, which have been already recognized by international bodies such as the Inter-American Human Rights Commission,” Duque said.
Duque criticized Yale and the U.S. government for violating his and his peers’ human rights through continued investment in fossil fuels.
“And so I just want to take a moment to kind of recognize all of that, and call on us to continue our fight for rights,” he said, leaving the audience on an upbeat and inspirational note.
NHCM Youth Action Team.
I love the interest of the youth in a better world and the initiative to enact change!
As a former youth who once shared such zeal, I found that the "grey" area of life to be much larger than expected. I consider terms like "green energy" and "fossil fuels" as rhetoric. Real change comes from wholistic plans with practical and meaningful application. Unfortunately we still live in a world where people buy an electric car to make themselves feel superior without understanding where electricity comes from or how a car battery is made or disposed of! Recycling has morphed from an effective action into a warm lie to make you feel better about the salad you bought in a plastic box. Every one of us has a phone in our pocket with the stain of exploitation and environmental violations.
Keep up the advocacy, dive into the how and find small solutions! Big problems can't be solved with addressing the small steps.