This Is The 16-Year-Old Leading The Next Climate March
Originally published on The Climate Reality Project.
At just 16 years old, Climate Reality Leader Jamie Margolin is one of the 13 plaintiffs suing Washington State for failing to take adequate steps to fight climate change.
And on July 21, she’ll be at the helm of a mass youth climate march in Washington, DC, led by her organization, Zero Hour.
Jamie, who hails from Seattle, WA, says her upbringing was what led her to take interest in environmental issues, which she believes are inevitably intertwined with social justice.
“I’ve always just been a political nerd and a science nerd in general,” she said. “I grew up in a politically aware household.”
Back in 2016, she gained hands-on experience organizing voters while volunteering on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“My mom is a Latina immigrant from Columbia, so I did a lot of translating for people who didn’t speak English,” she says. “After that, my already big political awareness and passion just exploded.”
Following the election, Jamie became a community organizer at Plant for the Planet, a youth organization that seeks to fight the climate crisis by planting trees across the world.
Since her involvement with Plant for the Planet began, Jamie has traveled several times to the state capitol in Olympia to lobby for common sense legislation to curb climate change.
“I wanted to take it to the next level,” she says. “I very much saw the emergency that is the climate crisis – this is a ticking time bomb, and I wanted to make more national waves.”
Then, in the summer of 2017, Jamie was accepted to attend the Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training in Seattle, which she says pushed her to further her environmental activism.
“There were a lot of awesome youth present at the training,” she says. “It was nice to be in a room full of people who understood.”
From there, she says she began to think seriously about organizing a youth climate march, which then evolved into her organization, Zero Hour.