Examples and the girls-participants’ personal experiences

Daniele 16 years old, Pasvalys Levens basic school, Lithuania

I come from a farmers’ family background. When I was younger, my family and other families used to rely a lot on natural resources from the few acres of land that we own. A lot of our food would come from the environment. But that slowly started to dwindle away as I got older because of climate change and the use of our waterways by big agricultural farms. Our water resources also decreased due to estate repurposing and land exploitation or littering, and since our culture is so intertwined with the land and natural resources, it has become a lot harder to keep up.

It has also been difficult to make seasonal preparations or grow our own food because natural resources globally are becoming scarce, and as a consequence, the price of grains and fertilizers has increased quite a bit. For some of my younger peers, it has been perplexing to grow up without having access to the typical farm practices that would allow them to experience the various aspects of nature, including an abundance of fresh food, which used to be typical in the warmer seasons. Nowadays most of us rely on what we buy in the store, and often the produce is out of season, while what we want is fresh food in abundance, like what our parents grew up with in the 90s. I fear that our future is headed in the direction of current-day Sri Lanka and the pandemonium therein concerning the imminent food shortages.

In my community, there’s a huge uprising in garnering support for ecological knowledge to be recognized in the realm of science, especially with regenerative practices, including pruning and tending the land, which result in healthier ecosystems being built over time. My part was influential in developing a team of peers that developed various traditional ecological knowledge curricula to be implemented into the system locally. In school, I took the same ideas further, and thanks to Erasmus+  initiatives through science missions I was taught how to repurpose certain materials and parts of waste into something useful, for example, recycling used textile into canvases for painting.

I feel like we are beginning, as young people, to be recognized for our role in the climate crisis solution. As we’re becoming aware of how bad the environmental damage is in various parts of the world, and how horrific the rise in global temperatures seems, scientists and people in general are starting to realize that we, the future generations, also know how to tend to the land. In that way, we’ve gotten a larger platform for our voices, even though it was caused by unmitigated environmental damage and the societal changes that it has brought.

I became a supporter of climate mitigation after seeing my mother and my peers protest the environmental damage caused to the wildlife reservations from the various dams on our country’s rivers. I believe every human should have the right to clean all-purpose water, and no ecosystems should be damaged in its acquisition. When I was first starting in my climate journey, and the science missions I’ve been lucky to participate in, I thought that being an upstanding messenger for the climate would only entail joining political debates, going to local and national board meetings, and writing articles. And it really was nice being recognized as a female leader in spearheading climate policy changes on each of those occasions. But I realized that the climate awareness missions were also about attaining wisdom, continuing to ensure the fulfillment of our needs as young people, and showing that we’re still here and that we want our voices to matter as much as possible”.