Campus environmental organizations are calling on their fellow students to skip classes to participate in the Global Climate Strike on Friday.

The strike, which is specifically targeted toward young people, will take place in cities across the world ahead of Monday’s United Nations Climate Action Summit.


The St. Louis Climate Strike will start outside City Hall on Friday at 10 a.m. and feature local and national speakers such as congressional candidate Cori Bush and President of St. Louis Board of Alderman Lewis Reed. Student activists and members of environmental organizations will be among the other speakers. Strikers will then march past Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world, en route to the Old Courthouse.

Washington University climate activists hope to energize students to engage in the strike, even if it means missing classes.

“There won’t be a point to this education if climate change is going to drastically start affecting major weather events and possibly threatening people’s livelihoods and things like that. This is an incoming crisis,” said Green Action Executive Member and Fossil Free WashU Coordinator for Action sophomore Christina Lee. “There’s no point in preparing for a future if we aren’t going to have a future because of the climate crisis.”

In addition to promoting the event, Green Action is organizing groups to travel downtown from the Danforth Campus, leaving the University City-Big Bend Metro Station on the 9:41 a.m. and 10:01 a.m. trains Friday morning.

The strike comes three days after the University of California (UC) system announced that it will divest its endowment from fossil fuels. Green Action members hope that the decision will inspire students to fight for similar action to be taken by Washington University.

“I think the fact that the whole UC system is divesting definitely shows credence to divestment as an important strategy,” Lee said. “A very large campus system choosing to divest right before [the strike] only shows the need for things like the strike further…For us at Fossil Free WashU, it only shows further that continuing to capitalize on the Climate Strike, continuing to rally people hopefully will have an effect on our administration, as peer institutions clearly are getting the message.”

Green Action member freshman Brianna Chandler has reached out to St. Louis public schools to get young people across the city engaged in the strike. She expressed the importance of participating to increase pressure on both University officials and national politicians to dedicate more resources to combating climate change.

“I’m hoping that the power of social media kicks in and once people see, ‘Oh, I was in class, but half my classmates were downtown striking for climate justice,’ they’ll kind of get a realization that this is an urgent problem and this is a problem that they can have a direct impact on by calling upon the University to divest and just putting more pressure on them to be cleaner overall,” Chandler said.

Although Associate Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology Bret Gustafson doesn’t teach any classes this Friday, he said that if he did, he would cancel them. He tweeted about the strike on Sept.13, encouraging his fellow colleagues to join him in participating.

Gustafson advises students not to worry about missing class and to participate in the strike.

“I recommend that they tell their professor to send me an email and I will encourage the professor to not only excuse them for the strike but to join them on the strike,” Gustafson said.

For those unable to leave campus for the strike, Student Environmental Council President senior Dugan Marieb recommended showing solidarity by wearing red and staying silent in class.

“This is an issue that affects all of us,” Marieb said. “Even for students that don’t think of climate change as the biggest thing that they care about or their biggest priority, it’s something that will affect them and is affecting them and is one of the largest existential threats in our lifetime.”