Previously published on BillMoyers.com
As world leaders converge for the UN's global summit on climate and thousands gather in New York for the People's Climate March, I talk to 18-year-old Oregonian Kelsey Juliana, who is walking across America to draw attention to global warming.
Kelsey Juliana comes by her activism naturally -- her parents met in the '90s while fighting the logging industry's destruction of old growth forests and she attended her first protest when she was two months old.
Now just out of high school, she's co-plaintiff in a major lawsuit being spearheaded by Our Children's Trust that could force the state of Oregon to take a more aggressive stance against the carbon emissions warming the earth and destroying the environment. She's walking across America as part of the Great March for Climate Action, due to arrive in Washington, DC, on November 1.
"You don't have to call yourself an activist to act," she says. "I think that's so important that people my age really get [that] into their heads. As a younger person, I have everything to gain from taking action and everything to lose from not... It's important that youth are the ones who are standing up because of the fact that we do have so much to lose."
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