Inside the Sunrise Movement: Six Weeks With the Young Activists Defining the Climate Debate
“It’s so relevant!” ... as the early May weather shifts from fog to mist to rain and back again. Thunderstorms are a good omen, Prakash tells me... It thundered ... during Sunrise’s occupation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, the action that catapulted the Green New Deal, and the Sunrise Movement with it, to the forefront of the nation’s conversation on climate..
“Kids these days are lit and ready to go,” says Prakash of Sunrise’s base, which is trending increasingly younger—it’s not uncommon to find preteens at their rallies and events. Born too late to be seduced by the promises of Reaganite neoliberalism and coming of age between late–Obama era languor and early–Trump era despair, Sunrise’s members are furious at what they see as inaction on climate and ready to take matters into their own hands.
ng and the global student climate strikes that were inspired by Greta Thunberg in Sweden,” says Naomi Klein, activist and author of 2014’s best-selling This Changes Everything. “I think young people have a particular moral voice that is just getting stronger and clearer, a combination of optimism and existential terror. There’s also a rage and rightful disappointment with the people who were supposed to protect their future.”
Like Prakash, Sara Blazevic, 26, is one of Sunrise’s cofounders... Blazevic wears a discreet nose ring, a trout tattoo on her inner arm, and projects an air of serene competence.
“Almost everybody in Sunrise has lived our entire lives in a world on the cusp of climate apocalypse,” she tells me. “That’s what drives them—just the sheer scale of the devastation on the horizon.” Meisenhelter, who grew up in a commune with goats in Portland, Oregon, routinely shares favorite fantasy or science fiction with her fellow Sunrisers. “Organizing is making science fiction real,” she says.. Though Harry Potter is her favorite of the genre—“Duh! Is that even a question...—and there are plans to name the conference rooms in the new D.C. Sunrise offices after Hogwarts houses...
Nineteen-year-old Munira Berhe, smiling and moon-faced and wearing a black hijab, says she is here because droughts in the Horn of Africa affected her family in Ethiopia. Like most Sunrisers, Berhe does not fit the environmental-movement cliché of the white, hacky sack–toting trustafarian. A rising sophomore at Minneapolis Community College, Berhe has nails painted neon yellow and clutches her iPhone emblazoned with a Glossier sticker (her favorite product is the Boy Brow)
.Before that night’s taco dinner, Emily LaShelle, a 21-year-old with a blonde Megan Rapinoe–esque coif, leads a song workshop. One of four daughters of a former Evangelical pastor from Bozeman, Montana, LaShelle explains that the unifying power of song in the church applies to movement building. Quartets cluster in the hall with the assignment to write a Sunrise-inspired verse to a classic song. ABBA’s Dancing Queen becomes
“Gee N Dee/Saves the Earth and economeee/Oh, yeah. . . .”
Three different groups rewrite lyrics to Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road:
“AOC’s got our back/Markey is on trackBiden’s plan is whack/Elites feelin’ attacked.”
The mood is playful and sometimes astoundingly earnest (there is a gratitude Slack channel, and most Sunrisers ask permission before hugging each other in greeting). But taped to a wall behind a group presenting their parody of “Old MacDonald”—naturally changed to “Old McConnell”—there are savvy diagrams of how to stand during a protest for maximum visual impact.
At the end of the debate Prakash looks up from her laptop, eyes blazing. “The folks in D.C. have just decided they are going to sleep out another night,” she announces to cheers and snaps. “Because fuck this bullshit! Nine minutes for the greatest existential threat to our existence? I’m pretty enraged! How are y’all feeling?”
