CHENNAI: Eight youth groups on Saturday organized a climate rally in Besant Nagar beach that attracted more than 500 people including a crowd of fishermen, youth and children from the city’s environmental sacrifice areas of Ennore, Manali and Thiruvottiyur.
In a statement of problems and solutions addressed to corporations and governments making decisions today, youth organizers “Namma Chennai; Namma Future” said, “We are the future and we will not let you harm it. We believe that the future of Chennai and the world is too precious to be left in the hands of the same people and agencies that created the crisis in the first place.”
“They tell us that technology will save us from climate change. But we know that the climate and ecological crisis are the result of a capitalist world order that thrives on an inherently unsustainable and unjust economy. This system exploits workers, pollutes the environment, ignores the rights of non-human life, and wastes the future of all life on the planet. We believe that the real response to climate change is changing the very system that caused it,” the statement reads.
The groups expressed their solidarity with the fishermen of Ennore and Pulicatfarmers in Parandur, a community of fences around Koodankulam the nuclear complex, to the people fighting various expressways that degrade the land, the urban poor resisting the state’s attempts to evict them in the name of wetland conservation or infrastructure development, gender justice, the disability rights movement, and the urban fisherman, who are clamoring for long-term housing plans guaranteed to them by law in the face of rising sea levels and countless struggles by ordinary people against improper development and maladjustment in Chennai and elsewhere.
In a statement of problems and solutions addressed to corporations and governments making decisions today, youth organizers “Namma Chennai; Namma Future” said, “We are the future and we will not let you harm it. We believe that the future of Chennai and the world is too precious to be left in the hands of the same people and agencies that created the crisis in the first place.”
“They tell us that technology will save us from climate change. But we know that the climate and ecological crisis are the result of a capitalist world order that thrives on an inherently unsustainable and unjust economy. This system exploits workers, pollutes the environment, ignores the rights of non-human life, and wastes the future of all life on the planet. We believe that the real response to climate change is changing the very system that caused it,” the statement reads.
The groups expressed their solidarity with the fishermen of Ennore and Pulicatfarmers in Parandur, a community of fences around Koodankulam the nuclear complex, to the people fighting various expressways that degrade the land, the urban poor resisting the state’s attempts to evict them in the name of wetland conservation or infrastructure development, gender justice, the disability rights movement, and the urban fisherman, who are clamoring for long-term housing plans guaranteed to them by law in the face of rising sea levels and countless struggles by ordinary people against improper development and maladjustment in Chennai and elsewhere.