i sat down with gregor sharp, an 18-year-old climate activist, to discuss.

podcast transcript:

kaitlyn copland 0:05

during recent years, it seems that an increasing number of social movements have improved their ability to organize and mobilize people around a cause. why? the globe is more connected than ever through social media. 

movements have harnessed the media’s power to revolutionize the spread of information about social change all across the world. one relevant example is the cop26 coalition, which is a uk based civil society coalition of groups, grassroots movements, trade unions and racial justice networks. 

activists from the cop26 coalition converged upon glasgow to protest the cop26 climate summit that ran for two weeks in the fall of 2021. while world leaders revisited the paris climate accords to create the glasgow climate pact, protesters from different countries and movements united under the cop26 coalition to march in solidarity through the soggy streets demanding more immediate climate solutions. 

i had the opportunity to sit down with one of the activists present at cop26. gregor sharp is an 18 year old climate change activist who is a content creator for friday’s for future. we discussed how social media mobilizes organizations and increases connectivity as demonstrated through the cop26 coalition.

the following dialogue is our conversation which has been edited for clarity and length.

gregor sharp 1:31

hi, my name is gregor sharp. i’m an 18 year old climate activist from lake bluff, illinois. i’m a social media contributor for fridays for future and earth uprising. i got involved in climate change around 2018 when i first discovered it when i was learning about it in middle school. and then from that i reached out and branched off to different organizations and kind of got myself involved more and more and here i am today. 

kaitlyn copland 1:56

perfect! i want to discuss with you fridays for future in regards to their history. what are their purposes? what’s their goals and why is this all important? 

gregor sharp 2:05

fridays for future was founded in august 2018 by then not really popular climate activist greta thunburg who had been striking outside of the swedish parliament every friday. she decided that she would continue to be striking every friday and she created the fridays for future movement, which then eventually branched off to different countries around the world where students and young people would strike in front of the parliaments, the white houses, the presidential houses and the legislature houses around the world and in different cities and states and everywhere, basically. it started off with one person and it’s eventually grown to its largest at 4.3 million. 

kaitlyn copland 2:56

how has social media played a role in the visibility and reach of your demands and additionally, how is it increased connectivity for fridays for future branches across the world? 

gregor sharp 3:06

okay. so social media is a really big factor in sharing information. it’s been scientifically proven time and time again that it’s [social media] been one of the greatest ways of scientific movements and scientific information sharing throughout these past couple years, even though it does have a massive amount of misinformation problems. 

but overall within the climate movement, as a whole, we’re able to reach audiences and other people who may have not really heard about climate change. 

kaitlyn copland 03:38

could you also talk a little more on the shortcomings of social media in regards to this movement? 

gregor sharp 03:46

some shortcomings with our environmental movement are with conservative groups and other republican, right wing political groups. they do denounce fridays for future and say that we are prompting misinformation towards environmental sciences and other sciences as a whole. that shuts off our outreach programs to the majority of the far right groups around the world as they do not want to listen to us and they don’t believe that climate change is real.

political leaders who want to profit off of fossil fuel companies and other companies that are basically prospering from climate injustice and environmental deregulations are generally some of the reasons why we haven’t been able to do as much as we possibly can. we keep on getting blocked by different organizations and companies, because they want to focus on their own capitalistic profit.

kaitlyn copland 04:41

would you say that you use social media to try to target these organizations? 

gregor sharp 04:57

yeah, we definitely do target these groups time and time again. we specifically called chase bank out before cop26 happened because of their massive involvement within cop26. they do massively fund fossil fuel companies. and that kind of greenwashing, as we would say, definitely does not, in fact, help the environmental groups and youth movements around the world as a whole because it seems like they’re just profiting off of a name that they are sustainable and doing stuff. they’re also supporting the organizations, companies and the fossil fuel organizations which have been basically polluting and damaging our world. 

kaitlyn copland 05:40

i want to move on to discussing the cop26 coalition. i know fridays for future is a part of it. i’m really interested to know how the coalition was formed, especially if it involves social media. 

gregor sharp 05:54

the cop26 coalition was majorly formed right around the beginnings of when cop26 was birthed. especially with mock cop, where a few delegates met online and established their doctrine that they really wanted to get passed within cop. that engagement with other youth environmental organizations and environmental organizations as a whole eventually led to the formation of the cop26 coalition. that’s just a coalition of environmental and climate organizations that wanted to work together to ensure that we get climate action done and climate action in the cop26 agreement that eventually came out. i think it’s called the glasgow accord. it does include a little bit of climate change action.

kaitlyn copland 06:42

just to recap, when the cop 26 coalition was forming, all of these groups that formed it, connected with each other through social media, and it was like, yes, let’s do it? 

gregor sharp 06:57

we mostly connected through social media, but other people knew each other in person from former experiences with other cops, and just meeting in general in real life. that kind of connection via social media and also real life, interjected and created the cop 26 coalition.

kaitlyn copland 07:15

awesome. during the summit when you were protesting, did social media increase connectivity between the organizations? was fridays for future able to gain new partnerships and allies?

gregor sharp 07:29

yes, absolutely. we definitely gained more partnerships and allies as the fridays for future international group as a whole. generally, because of the fact that most of the events that we were attending were live streamed, they were broadcasted on every single major news network around the world. basically, as you can see on the first friday, the major major strike that happened in glasgow that we saw that definitely happening, where our coalition definitely got the word out and definitely was able to form a big coalition to get the news groups around the world to broadcast this kind of event. it’s major to see around 1.2 million people protesting within the streets of a 500,000 populated city.

kaitlyn copland 08:16

i was going to ask you about, like the visibility and reach of the protests at the summit. were you and the entire coalition, were they effectively able to create high visibility and reach of the protests?

gregor sharp 08:36

i would say definitely, like i said, we got 1.2 million people to protest in a city which only has a population of 500,000, which is absolutely incredible. that’s about double the population. so i definitely agree with social media and other forms of connections outside of social media, working amazingly to get the word out to other individuals who lived around the uk and european area, and also who flew in as climate delegates and other delegates, to cop26 to spread the word of taking climate action now and doing something. 

kaitlyn copland 09:13

that’s impressive. could you speak a little about your personal experience, on the ground at glasgow? 

gregor sharp 09:20

it was really amazing. i got to meet a ton of incredible climate activists and engage in social media myself. after the first major strike, we were able to witness around 28 speakers, youth activist speakers, mostly, even from mapa related countries and bipoc communities speak up about their experiences with climate change as a whole. we were able to rally a lot of people towards climate action during that day. and it was generally something that i really enjoyed. i was down on the streets protesting myself. i got to meet a ton of incredible climate activists and people who generally supported the idea for climate action around the world.

and it was just generally one of those experiences where i will never forget it because it was such a positive experience as a whole because everyone was there for positive reasons because they wanted to support this movement as a whole.

kaitlyn copland 10:23

that’s really exciting. do you have any final thoughts on how social media influences social political movements overall? 

gregor sharp 10:30

yeah, social media does definitely in today’s world affect political movements as a whole because everyone’s really connected now. as we can say with online social media platforms such as instagram, twitter, facebook, tiktok, snapchat, all those different apps and getting the word out for those different apps and different social media platforms, really generally does benefit the climate movement and other movements as a whole. it’s basically become like a revolution because social media has become such an influential factor in people’s lives today, that we generally didn’t realize that until about like eight years ago, because there was no social media back then. the general expansion of social media, and generally increasing our social media as a whole has definitely basically affected the world for the worst and for better.

kaitlyn copland 11:26

awesome! thank you so much for your time. 

gregor sharp 11:28

thank you so much!

founded by greta thunberg, one youth movement that has gained traction is the fridays for future movement, in which students from around the globe strike for climate in their local cities every friday. students skipping school weekly to protest has become a bizarre enough phenomenon that the news has taken notice, but very rarely is the story portrayed from the youth’s point of view. last fall, i had the pleasure of following around the youth activists of fridays for future in dc, who spend every friday not just striking, but also visiting congress members and writing letters demanding action.

here are the stories of four of the nation’s most influential fridays for future activists: ari rubenstein (17), khadija khokhar (18), sophia geiger (17), and kallan benson (15). when the fridays for future movement was awarded the champions of the earth award by the united nations in 2019, benson was one of the activists who publicly declined the award on stage. benson then delivered an eye-opening speech explaining how the movement refuses the award because “awards are for celebrating achievement, but the achievement we seek has not occurred”. 

in my video, these inspiring fridays for future leaders explain why they strike for climate every friday and why the climate movement urgently needs not just the passion from youth, but from everyone.

it was an unseasonably warm and sunny friday, feb. 15 – good weather for youth climate strikes across the united kingdom. before the main gathering strengthened in bonn square, the main site of oxford’s strike, a banner for the youth climate strike was unfurled off of the bridge of sighs, one of oxford’s most iconic landmarks.

by the time i arrived in the late morning, the plaza was filled with protestors of all ages, mostly school children who were skipping school to participate in the demonstration but also university of oxford students, parents, and more elderly community members.

most protestors held pickets and posters with handwritten slogans following the theme of the protest movement that the older generations have left the younger generation with a climate crisis they must fix. the subject matter of the signs overall covered an impressively broad range of climate change topics, including, “our planet is not like your actions, it’s not rubbish”; “stop climate changing before it changes the world”; “if the earth were a bank, it’d be bailed out”; and “there is no planet b.” there was also “no pollution is the only solution”; “i’d rather miss a day of school than see my planet die”; and even “harry potter and the deadly climate change” (it was oxford, after all).

the protesters’ emphasis on clever and often humorous signs contributed to the overall upbeat (or positive) atmosphere of the event.

the size of the constantly growing crowd was so great that people repeated different chants at opposite ends of the plaza. one of the more popular ones was the call and response chant of “what do we want? climate action! when do we want it? now!”

after striking in bonn square for a while, the majority of the protestors left and made a procession through oxford city centre and back around to bonn square, a trip they repeated several times over the course of the day. in addition to the convening and march, the event organizer brought in a number of speakers, including an environmental journalist and a student who did spoken word poetry. the strike as a whole was executed as a very peaceful and minimally disruptive protest without any outside intervention.

i was curious about the environmental interests of the participants, so i posed a few questions of martin parker, a student from leeds, u.k., studying math in st. catherine’s college at the university of oxford. when i asked him why he attended the strike, martin said, “i find it inspiring watching the youth strikes….and seeing it on the news. i think it’s a very exciting movement. i’m inspired by the global aspect as well. i think it’s really motivating that people are getting together across the country and across the world.”

although the interview was challenging because the crowds’ chanting was deafening, i asked martin how long he has been interested in environmentalism.

“all my life i’ve been aware and conscious of the issues facing the planet. i’ve never been involved in activism until recently,” he said. “i think it’s the same case for a lot of people, that they’ve seen movements like this coming up a lot recently and are just getting involved now.”

as a planet 世界杯欧洲预选赛免费直播 and student of environmental journalism, i was interested in what the participants of the strike thought about the importance of sharing climate stories through public communication. surveying the scene, i spotted a woman wearing a name badge, which upon closer inspection was a card which read “ask me anything, i’m a climate researcher.” she was dr. michelle cain, a science and policy research associate at the university of oxford environmental change institute. i asked her about what impact she thinks environmental storytelling has on people’s understanding and interest in the current climate situation.

“i think storytelling is very powerful and everyone can…engage with a good story,” she responded. “there are only so many articles you can read, but the ones that really grab you are the ones that are telling a good story.” covering climate events and people’s personal perspectives and experiences can encourage increased focus on and participation in global efforts to facilitate change.

today’s young people will need to contend with the implications of climate change exponentially more so than older generations, and i am proud to have witnessed youth standing in such unity for justice against what will be the greatest challenge during their lifetimes.