The Optimistic Activists for a Green New Deal: Inside the Youth-Led Singing Sunrise Movement

December 23, 2018

Sunrise, founded a year and a half ago by a dozen or so twentysomethings, has established itself as the dominant influence on the environmental policy of the Democrat’s young, progressive wing.Photograph by Michael Brochstein / SOPA / Getty
On a Sunday in mid-December, some eight hundred young people filled the pews and the aisles of Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. They had trickled in from all over the country, in vans and buses, carrying backpacks and sleeping bags, some of them college students and others still in high school. They belonged to an environmental movement called Sunrise, and they had come to the capital to pressure their congressional representatives on the issue of climate change. The next day would be one of visits and protests, where the young people planned to lobby the incoming Democratic majority to begin work on a Green New Deal. The plan they hope to see adopted—to make the United States economy carbon neutral—would be nothing less than a total overhaul of our national infrastructure.

Sunrise, founded a year and a half ago by a dozen or so twentysomethings, began its campaign for the Green New Deal last month, when two hundred activists occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office a week after the midterm elections. The movement has allied with the incoming congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who joined them outside Pelosi’s office (and whose run for Congress was inspired, in part, by her participation in the anti-pipeline protests at Standing Rock), and Justice Democrats, the progressive campaign incubator started by former staffers of Bernie Sanders. As the Republican-led government has forced more established environmental organizations into defensive positions, Sunrise has established itself as the dominant influence on the environmental policy of the Democratic Party’s young, progressive wing.

Just as the March for Our Lives has changed gun-control activism from a movement of grieving parents to one led by students, Sunrise is part of a generational shift in the environmental movement. For years, rhetoric about climate change has invoked the future generations who will have to live with the flooding, storms, droughts, diseases, and food shortages of a warmer world. The young people of Sunrise are telling lawmakers that the future is here: they are the children in question, and the consequences of climate change are affecting them now. And, like other activist movements of their generation, they see their cause as inseparable from the broader issues of economic and social inequality. In a proposal that Ocasio-Cortez has circulated in Congress, she describes the Green New Deal as “a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States.”

Inside Luther Place Memorial Church, cheers erupted as activists unfurled a yellow and black “green new deal now” banner from the balcony. The crowd hushed as the first speaker, Varshini Prakash, came to the microphone. Prakash, who is five feet tall and has long curly hair, is one of Sunrise’s co-founders. She later told me that a highlight of her activism career was when she participated in a musical disruption of a Trump Administration panel at the United Nations climate conference in Bonn, in 2017, and a story about it trended on Reddit.

“We’re going to kick things off the way we always do,” Prakash said, “raising our voices in unison in song.” Part of what makes the Sunrise Movement’s activists seem so optimistic is that they conduct most of their protests while singing. Their ranks did not conform to the dour stereotype of an environmental movement composed of white-upper-middle-class Appalachian Mountain Club members. I spoke to Sunrise members whose families had roots in India, Iran, Croatia, Mexico, and working-class neighborhoods in American cities. There were some students in Carhartts and beanies, who looked like they might go camping, but one young person standing near me wore a Sisters sweatshirt, the brand started by the YouTube makeup artist James Charles, who is the first male spokesperson for CoverGirl. Sunrise’s principles include: “We are Americans from all walks of life,” “We are nonviolent in word and deed,” and “We shine bright.” The dominant culture is cheerfulness.

After leading the group in a song called “We’re Going to Rise Up,” Prakash introduced herself. She is from a town outside of Boston, but her grandparents are from southern India, and she told the story of a flood that hit their city, Chennai, in late 2015, when the region experienced its highest rainfall in a hundred years. This was typical of Sunrise members, who tend not to talk about starving polar bears, melting ice caps, or ocean acidification. Instead, they talk of family members who have lost their homes to floods or fires, young relatives who have asthma, or beloved landscapes that have been degraded or destroyed in the spans of their short lifetimes. (Another movement principle: “We tell our stories and we honor each other’s stories.”)

“I think no one should have to live in fear of losing the people that they love or the places that they call home due to crises that are preventable,” Prakash told the crowd. “My nightmares are full of starving children and land that is too sick to bear food, of water that poisons that which it should heal, and of seas that are ever more creeping on our shores,” she continued. “But my dreams are also full of a rising tide of people who see the world for what it is, people who see the greed and selfishness of wealthy men, of fossil-fuel billionaires who plunder our earth for profit.” The young people cheered.

Many of Sunrise’s founders met through the fossil-fuel divestment movement, but they tend to cite inspirations from outside environmentalism. Prakash named Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, and youth-led immigration-justice organizations such as United We Dream and Cosecha. Like the March for Our Lives, Sunrise has told a story of a corrupt political process, where oil and gas billionaires like the Koch brothers have helped direct governmental policies. Also like March for Our Lives, Sunrise has focussed on the development of clear, nonpartisan policy goals. Its members are working within existing political structures, pressuring politicians to take more active stances on the issue of climate change and to reject donations from fossil-fuel entities, and getting out the youth vote.

“Our strategy for 2019 is going to be continuing this momentum to build the people power and the political power to make a Green New Deal a political inevitability in America,” Prakash told me. “In 2020, we, along with our partners, are going to be attempting to build the largest youth political force this country has ever seen.” The movement has received support from established environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club and 350.org, but a spokesperson for Sunrise, Stephen O’Hanlon, said the assistance has been primarily non-financial. He added that the organization has raised less than a million dollars since it was started, from a mix of grants from foundations and grassroots donors.

Staffers from the Ocasio-Cortez campaign first met with Sunrise at a dinner last summer. Immediately after the November demonstration, Ocasio-Cortez put forward her resolution, drafted in partnership with Sunrise and Justice Democrats, to form a select committee on a Green New Deal in the House of Representatives.

The resolution calls for a transition to a hundred per cent renewable energy by 2030, the upgrade of residential and industrial buildings to greater energy efficiency, the decarbonization of manufacturing and agriculture, and investment in technology that would reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If put forward, it would be the most ambitious climate policy the Democratic Party has ever endorsed. For Sunrise, it is the only policy initiative that matches the scope of the crisis.

“We know, from looking at history, that transformation of the scale demanded by science has only happened under two conditions in our history,” one activist told me, at the gathering in the church. “First, when the public has united to address a clear and present threat, and, second, when political leaders have put forward solutions that clearly address that threat and that are clear answers to the crisis.” In its statements, Sunrise makes patriotic appeals to ambitious mobilizations in America’s past, from the Public Works Administration to the moon landing—contrasting a vision of technological innovation and ambition with one of a kleptocratic petro state.

Since Sunrise’s first sit-in, more than forty Democratic representatives have endorsed Ocasio-Cortez’s resolution, including the heads of the progressive caucus, rising stars in the Party like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Joe Kennedy, and veteran activists like John Lewis. But, as Waleed Shahid, the communications director with Justice Democrats, told me, it really only needs the endorsement of one person: the incoming Speaker of the House. So they had come to visit Pelosi once again.

The next morning, at eight, the activists assembled in the Spirit of Justice Park, outside of Congress. Before occupying the offices of the Democratic leadership, they were going to lobby some fifty Democratic representatives. They took off toward the congressional office buildings singing a song condemning the fossil-fuel economy, whose refrain went, “Which side are you on now? Which side are you on?”

I joined a delegation of about sixty young people who had bussed up from Kentucky as they visited John Yarmuth, the state’s sole Democratic congressperson. Most of them were high schoolers from Louisville and Lexington. They were met at the door by one of Yarmuth’s staffers, who stood and listened while the visitors began their prepared presentation.

“We’re here because we’ve witnessed the failure of political leadership on climate change for as long as we’ve been alive,” a college freshman named Quincy Robinson said, referring to notes on his phone. “The latest United Nations report on climate change gives us just twelve years to rapidly transform society and economies to stop the climate crisis.”

Another student, Trevor Harry, told a story about canoeing in Beargrass Creek in downtown Louisville, which has been polluted with waste from pig farms. He described some of the legislative goals that the select committee would research, including massive investment in renewable energy, upgrading public transit, and a jobs guarantee with living wages. “It would be the first committee to approach the crisis as the integrated social, scientific, and economic challenge that it is,” Harry said.

The main action of the day took place midmorning, when the protesters split into three groups, to visit the offices of Pelosi, Representative Steny Hoyer, the Democratic Whip from Maryland, and Jim McGovern, the Massachusetts representative who is poised to become the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee. A student from Grand Rapids said she was “fighting for our sacred places.” A student from Wilmington, Delaware, said she was there for “my community, which is already suffering from flooding from sea-level rise. ” A twelve-year-old activist from Denver named Haven Coleman spoke of the poor air quality on the northeast side of her city, where much of the population is Hispanic. “I fear the fires in the summers and the sun that stirs up the local fracking pollution and big car exhaust,” she said. “It leaks into my home, my lungs, sneaking in with the heat, there is no escaping its choke.” More than a hundred of the thousand protesters were arrested for obstructing the hallways while singing songs.

Of the three House leaders, only McGovern appeared in person, stepping out of his office into the hallway. (Pelosi doesn’t use her offices in the Cannon House Office Building, but she works from the Capitol.)

“I’ve met some of you before,” he said, scanning the group. “I’m here to talk about whatever you want.”

“We’re hoping that you will support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s select committee for a Green New Deal!” someone in the crowd said.

“So the answer is I want to get to yes on that,” McGovern said. “But this is what we’re doing right now—we’re trying to figure out what the committee looks like, and this is a work in progress.”

He went on to talk about the House Committee on Rules, and jurisdictional issues—that some representatives on the Energy and Commerce Committee are worried their powers are being taken away. (Members of the Natural Resources Committee have also voiced such concerns.)

“I’m working with Leader Pelosi right now to get something in place that’s real, that has money behind it, that’s funded, so there can be a staff, and that’s where we want to get to.” McGovern said. “We’re working on it and I hope that we can get it.”

It was not the most straightforward endorsement, but the activists took it as a victory nonetheless. In the weeks since the campaign began, Democratic leaders have agreed to revive a select committee on climate change, but have said that it will not be focussed on a Green New Deal, and may not have subpoena power. Speaking this week to the Hill, Hoyer described it as a “recommendatory committee to the Energy and Commerce Committee and the environmental committees.”

In response to Hoyer’s comment, Prakash said, in a statement, “If true, this decision is an insult to the thousands of young people across the country who have been calling on the Democratic Party leadership to have the courage to stand up to fossil-fuel billionaires and make sure our generation has a livable future.”

Corbin Trent, a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez, told me, “What I can say is that I think that if we didn’t already have an interstate highway system in this country I think it would be hard for the Democratic leadership in this country to see a way forward to create one,” he said. “At this moment in time, it seems like shooting for the moon is hard for our leaders to do.”

On Tuesday morning, the day after the protest in Washington, I met with four of the Sunrise Movement’s co-founders at a bakery near Washington’s Union Station. They had ended the previous day with a small party at the office of 350.org. The office of Ayanna Pressley, the newly elected Justice Democrats–endorsed representative from Massachusetts, had sent pizzas.

Over oatmeal and coffee, they told me about their personal awakenings about climate change. Sara Blazevic, who is twenty-five and from New York City, went on a volunteer trip to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when she was sixteen. Victoria Fernandez, who is also twenty-five and from California, talked about how unseasonable rains had affected business at the tennis shop her father owns, in the Bay Area. Evan Weber, who is twenty-seven and grew up in Hawaii, told me that the beaches he had played on as a child in Oahu have since been washed away. Stephen O’Hanlon, twenty-three, who is from outside of Philadelphia, had witnessed the effects of mountaintop removal on a trip to Appalachia organized by a college group.

In late 2015 and early 2016, Prakash and Blazevic, who knew each other from the fossil-fuel divestment campaigns they had led in college, began connecting with other youth climate activists to discuss how they might form a more effective movement. They saw how Bernie Sanders had helped spark a new political energy among their peers, who were suddenly inspired to see their student debt and poor job prospects in more political terms. For Blazevic, the moment of clarity came in December, 2015, when she read remarks from Sanders in which he used the phrase “fossil-fuel billionaires.”

“I remember being, like, ‘That is it, why are we not talking about the fossil-fuel billionaires in the climate movement?” she recalled. “I just remember feeling like this is the story that we should be telling in the climate movement. We should be talking about the people who are most responsible for this crisis, and naming names of the Rex Tillersons of the world instead of doing what the climate movement had been doing for a while, which was, at least, in my corner of it, getting lost in conflicts with college administrators over small pools of money.”

Their first meeting, in July, 2016, was in the Neighborhood Preservation Center in New York City. They agreed that they wanted to propose solutions to the climate crisis that match its magnitude. Since climate change disproportionately affects poor communities of color, they agreed that racial and economic justice had to be considered in any solution to climate change they proposed.

They arranged to meet once a month for the next nine months, renting houses or staying with volunteers in a different location each time. They went to an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, to Delaware, to Virginia. Their numbers grew to a dozen people.

They studied the wins and the losses of the climate movement in its forty-year history. They read books about how other mass movements had grown viral and gone to scale—Fernandez fished out a waterlogged copy of the book “Rules for Revolutionaries” to give me one example. Others: “Reinventing Organizations,” by Frederic Laloux; “Where Do We Go from Here,” by Martin Luther King, Jr.; “This Is an Uprising,” by Mark and Paul Engler. Several of their members had attended a workshop at a social-movement training institute called Momentum, where they had studied how to effectively combine structured organizing with mass protest.

The idea was to build a movement that people would join to feel a part of some larger history. “In the Bernie moment, I was seeing so many young people who were, like, ‘I would drop everything to be a part of the political revolution,’ ” Blazevic said. “After the primary ended in their states, there wasn’t anything to be a part of, and we weren’t seeing many movements or organizations rising to that challenge of creating a way for those people to stay meaningfully engaged longer-term. We certainly weren’t seeing it in our own organizing in the climate movement.”

After Trump’s election, they responded to the populism of the moment. “We think that the climate movement has missed a big opportunity to tap into the really genuine and valid frustration at the political class in this country that have for our whole lives chosen to prioritize their campaign donors over the interests of young people, of the American people at large,” O’Hanlan said. “So we are here naming who is responsible for this crisis, the fossil-fuel billionaires who have been buying out Washington, D.C.”

“But a big part of our story is not just about naming who’s responsible but actually saying that we can do this, and that this is a problem that we can solve, which I think all of us believe in the deepest core of our hearts,” Weber interjected. “There are solutions that are ready to go and will make people’s lives better and create millions of good jobs, if we can just get these handful of wealthy billionaires and executives and lobbyists and the politicians they collude with out of the way.”


Emily Witt is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Future Sex” and “Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire.”

[Photo: Sunrise, founded a year and a half ago by a dozen or so twentysomethings, has established itself as the dominant influence on the environmental policy of the Democrat’s young, progressive wing.​ Photograph by Michael Brochstein / SOPA / Getty]