Youth Climate Strike: These Thame students won’t be seen and not heard!

DOZENS of pupils from Thame’s Lord Williams’s School, some parents and climate acitivists from Thame and Chinnor, joined the thousands who gathered in Oxford to take part in the global Climate Strike yesterday, Friday September 20.

In bright, warm sunshine, they gathered, primary school children, teachers, teenagers, parents, union representatives and climate activist groups including Extinction Rebellion Oxford, carrying placards and wearing badges and T-shirts, united in their message; our future is threatened and we need the politicians to listen to us, and to the warnings of climate scientists and to take action now, before it is too late.

After rousing and often moving speeches by Rosie Rawle from Oxford Young Greens, Emma Woods and Rowan Ryrie, Founder of Parents For Future Oxford , several times the crowds strode along Broad Street, turned left into Cornmarket and back into Broad Street.  Gazed at and photographed along the way by wide-eyed tourists, they chanted and sang their protests at, what they see as the lack of action by those in power to protect them, the ecosystem and a fair and habitable future for everyone.

Emma Woods speaking to the Oxford Youth Climate strike crowds

The supporting adults could only look on and listen in awe at the passion, the eloquence, the understanding, the anxiety and above all, the enthusiasm and the hope that perhaps, just may be, they will be listened to by those who can make the biggest difference between manageable climate change and ecological breakdown, and an inevitable mass extinction. 

Students from Lord Williams’s School, Thame, join the Oxford Youth Climate Strike

If strength of numbers, loudness of voices, intelligent argument and the power of young people to plead for the grown ups to listen to them works this time, there naieve trust in authority may just begin to turn the hearts and heads of those with the power to save their futures.