What Are Frontline Youth Fighting For?
Nyiesha Mallet, an 18-year-old artist and activist from the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, boils down the frontline youth fight to this axiom: Climate justice entails an economic shift that swaps an economy focused on the individual for one focused on people. Beyond clean energy, that involves a just transition, which means helping phase out environmentally harmful industrial practices for better pathways, while also making sure workers from those industries aren’t left out in the cold. And she believes people of color know just how to do it.
“We need people to start listening to frontline community members because we are the ones with the solutions, not the people higher up, who’re looking out on the map and judging us based on [our experiences, saying,] ‘There’s a heat wave here, and there’s water melting here,’” she tells Teen Vogue.
“Young people of color have been doing the work to fight climate change for hundreds of years. It’s something that we are born into,” she says. “We’ve lived in an extractive economy our entire lives; we come from a generation of families that have to live through this extraction and we know what it is, we know how it affects us, and we know what kind of change we want to see.”