NEW YORK: On the ninth Friday of her strike, 13-year-old Alexandria Villasenor wakes to a dozen emails, scores of Twitter notifications, and good news from the other side of the planet: Students in China want to join her movement.
Every week since December, the seventh-grader has made a pilgrimage to the United Nations Headquarters demanding action on climate change. She is one of a cadre of young, fierce and mostly female activists behind the "school strikes for climate" movement. On March 15, with the support of some of the world's biggest environmental groups, tens of thousands of kids in at least two dozen countries and nearly 30 U.S. states plan to skip school to protest.
Their demands are uncompromising: Nations must commit to cutting fossil-fuel emissions in half in the next 10 years to avoid catastrophic global warming.
And their message is firm: Kids are done waiting for adults to save their world.
"Mom, this is so cool," Alexandria says, as she reads the latest list of countries where kids have pledged to participate in a global strike: Australia, Thailand, Ghana, France. "Where is Gir--, Girona?"
"That's in Spain," replies her mother, Kristin Hogue.
They sit on the couch, still in their pajamas, and Alexandria pulls out the planner she purchased to keep track of all her commitments. Each task is color-coded by geographic scale: Pink for global organizing. Orange for national. Yellow for New York.
First on the agenda is an interview with a reporter from the U.K., who seems caught off guard by the young woman's fervor.
"My generation is really upset." The deal struck at COP24, the U.N. climate meeting in December, was insufficient, she says. "We're not going to let them . . . hand us down a broken planet."
"Huh. Right," the reporter says. "Big ambitions."
Alexandria raises her eyebrows.
"Yeah," she replies, confident.
Afterward, she changes into her striking uniform: waterproof ski pants and a down jacket, all in white, just like the congresswomen at the State of the Union and the suffragists of old. She packs her bag - planner, thermos, gloves - and grabs her plastic-encased cardboard signs, which read "SCHOOL STRIKE 4 CLIMATE" and "COP 24 FAILED US."
She holds the signs facing inward so other commuters on the subway can't see them. She doesn't like it when people stare.
"They'll probably think it's just a science project," Alexandria tells her mother. Then she laughs. "Well, technically it is. It's project conservation. Project save the Earth."
It's been four months since Alexandria decided the Earth needed saving. Last year, during a visit with family in northern California, she was caught in the cloud of smoke from the Camp Fire, which killed nearly 100 people and filled the air with unbreathable smoke. The girl suffers from asthma, and for days afterward she felt physically ill and emotionally distraught.
This isn't normal, she thought. This isn't right.
She began to look up articles about the West's historic drought, read reports about recent global temperature rise, asked her mother, a graduate student in the Climate and Society program at Columbia University, to explain the drivers behind global warming. She joined the New York chapter of Zero Hour, a network of young American climate activists.
In December she watched as international negotiators met in Poland to carve out a plan for curbing carbon emissions. A recent U.N. report found that humanity has until 2030 - the year Alexandria turns 24 - to achieve "rapid and far-reaching" transformation of society if we wish to avoid the dire environmental consequences of warming 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Yet the agreement that was ultimately reached fell far short of what scientists say is urgently needed.
In the midst of all this, Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old from Sweden, took the podium.
"You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes," the girl proclaimed to a room full of stunned adults. "We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not."
Recalling that speech, Alexandria's eyes light up. "She just put them in their place," Alexandria says. "That was extremely satisfying."