Ayla Boylen has been striking every Friday, asking local and state leaders in Iowa to take action on climate change. She began her strike outside Cedar Rapids City Hall last fall, then changed her location to the federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids on March 6.
But a few days later, on March 8, the first cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Iowa. Following that came business closures, social distancing and recommendations to stay home.
So, Boylen moved her strikes online, as other climate activists have. And events scheduled for this year’s Earth Day — which marks 50 years since the first event on April 22, 1970 — have also been moved online.
Taking her demonstration from the street to a screen has been both empowering and defeating, Boylen said.
“As an activist, it’s a little bit hard to stay motivated and hopeful and feel like what I do matters,” said Boylen, a third-year student at Mount Mercy University. “However, it does help, for me personally at least, to see the amount of other Fridays for Future strikers that have moved online and continue to strike.”
“It’s disappointing in some ways because I feel like we have lost some of the momentum that we gained … and it gave us a lot of hope that our strikes were working,” Boylen added, referring to the Cedar Rapids City Council’s climate resolution, which unanimously passed in February.
The resolution recognizes the urgency of taking action to address climate change and outlines steps for creating a community-wide sustainability plan. It commits the council to following recommendations set forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and directs city staff to develop a greenhouse gas inventory to determine exactly where emissions are coming from in Cedar Rapids.
A few months before that, in December, the Linn County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution declaring a climate crisis.
“I guess I just haven’t seen a lot of online strikes cause the same sort of effect, but it is really amazing to see the amount of people who are still striking online at home, and it has opened up some windows for people who might not be able to strike otherwise — that are able to do [so] from the comfort of their home, so it’s a little bit more accessible for people, which I think is a good thing.”
Solidarity from home. This pandemic continues to remind us of the short comings of our government. #ClimateStrikeOnline #GreenNewDeal #ClimateCrisis @SenJoniErnst @GretaThunberg @SenatorRobHogg pic.twitter.com/flbpGmFZJq
— Ayla The Climate Striker (@aylanimalplanet) April 18, 2020
Boylen said she’s been doing some form of climate activism for pretty much her entire life.
“I guess I feel like the fight against climate change isn’t necessarily something that I chose for myself,” Boylen said. “It’s something that was sort of passed on to me, given the current circumstances. My generation, for better or for worse, has basically been given a countdown for the amount of time that we still have to act in order to prevent irreparable damage, and I think that that’s both a blessing and a curse. I think that it gives us some clarity in light of how severe the situation is, but it also means that we still have time to do something.”
She began her strikes last October, feeling like going to school wasn’t enough. Boylen is majoring in art and getting two minors — one in environmental justice and the other in psychology.
“I really needed to take action, and I needed to do it quickly,” Boylen said. “I kept kind of waiting for another group to pop up in Cedar Rapids doing strikes because there were high school kids striking in Iowa City.”
Boylen said she reached out to City High student Massimo Biggers, who started strikes in Iowa City, to ask him if he knew of anyone striking in Cedar Rapids.
“He didn’t know of anyone, so basically I felt I had waited long enough for somebody else to start doing it, and I had to step up,” Boylen said.
Boylen considers Cedar Rapids’ new climate resolution a big deal, but there’s still more work to be done. She would like to see Linn County take steps beyond declaring a climate crisis, and a Green New Deal passed.
The most common arguments Boylen hears from those who are against the Green New Deal are that there isn’t enough money to fund it.
“When faced with this pandemic, we were able to find resources that we didn’t know that we have, and we’re continuing to do that, and it’s absolutely necessary to fight the current crisis that we’re in,” Boylen said. “But I think that it really shows that when we recognize something as a threat to our society and our humanity, we are able to pull together the resources no matter how difficult that may be.”
“I’d really hope that that sort of dismisses some of the qualms that people have with things like the Green New Deal and lifestyle changes because we’ve had to make a lot of lifestyle changes and repurpose a lot of resources in order to fight this [pandemic]. And I think we’re going to need to do the same with the climate crisis.”
