Varshini Prakash | A New Generation’s Voice On Climate Change

Climate policy speaks with a Bay State accent: Former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry is the global climate czar for the Biden administration, and Gina McCarthy, a Dorchester girl who once worked on Beacon Hill, is his domestic counterpart. But it can be argued that Varshini Prakash, the 28-year-old founder of the Sunrise Movement, is just as responsible for the prominence of climate policy in the new administration’s agenda.

A child of the Boston suburbs, Prakash cut her teeth in organizing as a 19-year-old college junior in the successful fight to get UMass to divest from fossil fuels. She founded Sunrise with fellow recent college grads, and it took off in 2018 when newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined them at a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in support of a Green New Deal. Named by Bernie Sanders as part of his team to bargain with the Biden campaign as the Democratic nomination contest wound down last year, Prakash and her Sunrise colleagues also helped Ed Markey come from behind to decisively beat Joe Kennedy in the Massachusetts Senate primary. She is the co-editor of Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, published last August.

For me, interviewing Prakash was a great pleasure. I was 28—and also a child of the Boston suburbs—in 1989 when I published The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about climate change. I didn’t recognize at the time what a battle it would turn out to be. Varshini has lived in that fight her whole conscious life, and likely will continue to be when she’s my age.

Bill McKibben: So, tell me where your story begins. I know a part of it starts around Boston.

Varshini Prakash:I was born in Waltham and I grew up in Acton, which is just a classic New England suburb. I think my story begins as a love story with the world around me. I spent so much time outside when I was younger, mucking about in the mud and rolling giant stones from one side of my parents’ yard to the other. It became this deeply sacred place, a place to sort of run away from whatever was troubling me in my family or when I was getting anxiety as a preteen and whatnot. I created this real friendship between the trees and the squirrels and myself, and it became home.

McKibben: Waltham and Acton are deep suburbs, Acton especially. Were you just in your backyard? Were you out in the parks and beaches of the Bay State?

Prakash: No, literally it was like I lived in one house and my best friend lived in the house across the street. Behind her, she had this 20-foot stretch of trees. Every afternoon after school or in the summer, we would walk up to that small stretch of trees. We would link arms and we would step in as though it was some kind of ritual of entering nature. It was this really beautiful place where we got to be imaginative. We had agency to create and we built lakes, which were really just sort of mosquito-infested ponds. We would have gardens. We’d take each other on guided tours of the small stretch of woods. You could see the very busy road behind her house right through it, but there was something about that, this liminal space of just being transported and almost being suspended in time.

McKibben: That’s an amazing story. What seasons were your favorite parts of that?

Prakash: Oh, I loved it all. I think I loved spring and summer the most. Spring, because the best smell in the world is the smell of the earth as it’s transitioning from snow to melting. Everything was mushy and starting to get green. It was just very magical. Then summer, it was like I was outside all day every day as much as possible. Winter, we would go sledding and try not to crash into the trees. I think I disliked fall the most because school would be starting and I’d always be sick. So I hated fall when I was younger. Now that I’m older, I love fall. It’s a very contemplative time of the year.

McKibben: How did your family shape your outlook on the world?

Prakash: I think the story of my parents, who grew up in India, was such an intrinsic part of me. I was born near the home of the American Revolution, but I never lost the part of me that yearned for and loved India with all my heart. It’s in your blood. Growing up, I was very privileged and lucky to be able to visit there every couple of years. It is where the beauty of the world is in full force, and the violence and injustice of the world is in full force as well. You see those things literally side by side. I remember one of my first experiences of realizing deep injustice was being in India when I was 4 or 5 years old and seeing little kids who were the exact same age as me on the street begging for food, and just crying to my parents after that, not understanding why we had such different lives.

Then I also remember my dad telling me about growing up in this one-room house in India on the beach. A whole half mile of beach was his front yard, and he’d be playing cricket with his friends and eating mangoes on the rooftop of his house. The food that his mom made. His dad coming home on a motorcycle every night. I felt like the place was alive with so much magic, the color, the vibrancy. I loved it deeply, both for the lessons that it taught me about injustice so early on, and for just what life in its full vibrancy can look like.

McKibben: Why did you decide on UMass? And what was it like to discover your calling there?

Prakash: Well, if I’m being totally honest with you, UMass had two things. One, it had an urban agriculture program that I was very excited about. Two, the food at UMass was just so much better than any other school that I was even contemplating. To this day, I think it’s like number two in the country for quality of food. And I was also going with one of my best friends.

I think my adolescence was demarcated a lot by learning about and feeling this real weight of the crises that were emerging around the world: the water crisis, inequality, climate change, seeing Hurricane Katrina happen, and so on and so forth.

But I was mostly just frustrated by not knowing what to do, not knowing how to take action. I feel like my education at UMass was partially the academic courses that I took, but it became this experiential-growth moment for me in jumping straight into organizing and feeling for the first time that this is where our stories come together.

I feel really grateful, because the divestment movement allowed me to see that it wasn’t just single consumer-based actions that we could take as individuals. It wasn’t just isolated incidents of recycling. It was about a collective effort toward systemic change that ultimately threatens the very status quo. That was what we were doing with the fossil fuel industry. That was how I felt when we were able to get 4,000 UMass students to sign a petition calling for the administration to divest.

I think I learned these lessons so early by walking into meetings with the university’s board of investors and having one of them, after I shared the story of why I cared about the climate crisis, just look at me and say, “I hear what you’re saying, but all I care about is making money.” That campaign culminated in this weeklong sit-in where 34 people were arrested for civil disobedience on UMass’s campus, something that hasn’t happened since the last great divestment movement there, about South African apartheid.

So it was this lesson that ordinary people can work together with each other to do really extraordinary things. Things that seemed completely politically impossible become politically probable or inevitable if we organize to make it so.

McKibben: What did you learn about organizing in the process?

Prakash:That your campaign and your collective effort to achieve whatever your objective is basically starts at the word “no.” So when administrators say, “This is impossible, we don’t support this, we’re not going to do it,” I’ve noticed a lot of young people just say, “Oh well, it seems like they said no. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be possible here.” Or just be caught up in committees and all of these shenanigans that they put you through in large part just to kick the can down the road and hope that you graduate and the problem goes away.

What we did at UMass was refuse to take no for an answer. I know that sounds kind of cliché. If that sit-in hadn’t worked, we wouldn’t have just disbanded our campaign. We would have said what’s next, what’s the next escalation that needs to happen to keep this front and center and ensure that it becomes reality. I think that is the level of tenacity that’s required at any scale.

During the civil rights movement, people could have given up and said, “Oh well, looks like slavery is just going to be a thing forever, or Jim Crow is just going to be a thing forever, or looks like persecuting undocumented students is just going to be a thing forever. I guess we just will give up and go home.” Change then would never happen. So I’ve always been tenacious in my life. “No” has been hard for me to take as an answer in general, and it definitely was not going to be an answer in this vein.

McKibben: One of the arguments I think you were making from the beginning at UMass, and later went on to inform your work at Sunrise, was about intergenerational justice.

Prakash:At the beginning of when I was getting involved in divestment, I was active in a lot of the Massachusetts climate chapters and working with young people but also elder folks as well. One time when we were trying to shut down this coal plant in southern Massachusetts, I was arrested alongside 40 other people. The vast majority of the people who were risking arrest in that moment were either under the age of 30 or over the age of 60. There was this great sense of, These are my elders. This sense of, Wow, this generation of people is deeply contemplating, “We only have a few years left on this earth—what kind of world do we want to leave behind for our children and our grandchildren?” I felt like I was that grandchild who was picking up the baton and thinking, What is the world that I want to grow into and what is the world that I want to leave behind?

This sense of thinking generations in advance or being able to contemplate a sense of the world and its well-being far beyond your own very myopic narrow time on this earth was really meaningful to me. We need a lot more of that. We need the wisdom of our elders. We need their long view. Oftentimes I have young people in our movement who are like, “It’s been six months. Why hasn’t the world completely changed?” I’m like, “It takes longer than that. Be patient.”

So it’s nice to be working with elders who have seen the tides of politics turn and change for decades and decades and are able to give us the long view and yet be balanced by this fierceness, this voracity, this hunger for action and change in the immediate future by young people. I think we need to balance both of those things collectively.

McKibben: Tell me how Sunrise came to be.

Prakash:The idea kind of came about a few months after I graduated in 2015. During this time, we were seeing the rise of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and watching this sort of right-wing populism and left-wing populism emerge all at once. There was a certain point where the movement around divestment also needed to engage with the political sphere to fundamentally pass federal legislation. We were seeing the worsening climate crisis while grappling with the fact that our existing movements were too focused on current navel-gazing and preaching to the choir and inter-squabbling. We were not really focused on building power, to be totally frank, but there was also a ripening. There was a real hunger for a movement that was tailored for young people and really inciting young people to action.

The rationale for Sunrise became: How could we create a youth movement that could reach millions of young people, and that could connect both building grassroots energy and people power with political power that could center the climate conversation in American politics?

So we collected folks from across the climate movement, basically strategic planning for a movement organization for the next year and a half. We tested it with hundreds and hundreds of people and got their, at times, very intense feedback on it, and then launched in the summer of 2017 with a four-year vision for making climate justice a priority in American politics.

McKibben:In a sense, the public coming-out party for Sunrise—the moment when the political world began to pay attention, really—was that day, November 13, 2018, when you sat down in Nancy Pelosi’s office and were joined by AOC. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you could have completely planned out in advance and understood exactly how it was all going to work.

Prakash:We absolutely did not know that [AOC] was going to join. I actually remember three days prior asking her to tweet in support of us. She said, “Actually, I’m going to show up.” We had no idea that she was going to do that, so all of a sudden we knew it was going to become something bigger than what we had anticipated.

I think our expectations at the time were, if we get a line in a New York Times article about this, that is going to be huge. That will change everything. That will be a determinant of success for this action. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on that table and gave that rousing speech, when all that started, I began getting an inkling that, OK, maybe this might be bigger than what we thought it was going to be. In the days following, we just saw thousands and thousands and thousands of articles about the Green New Deal emerge overnight.

McKibben: When you meet someone who hasn’t heard anything more than the phrase “Green New Deal” or maybe seen Fox describe it as getting rid of hamburgers or something, how do you describe what it is, and why is enunciating that vision important?

Prakash: The way I talk about it is essentially it’s a plan that tackles three of the greatest crises we face as a society all at once: economic inequality, racial inequality, and climate change. It’s a plan for addressing the climate crisis that is also a massive investment in the public good and in Americans, and in building a green jobs and manufacturing infrastructure plan that this country hasn’t seen in 100 years. For me, it’s also about connecting with the issue that people care about. Sometimes, before I even talk about the vision of what the Green New Deal is, I’ll ask people, “What do you care about?”

Whenever I tell people what I do for work, it always starts up an interesting conversation. I remember this awesome conversation with a Republican on a flight to Dallas. He was repeating a lot of points that I’ve heard on Fox News about the Green New Deal. We dug into his past a little bit and he said, “Well, I really care about the environment. My parents were dairy farmers. I’m from Idaho. Nature really matters to me.”

We were able to get to a place where I was able to actually share what the Green New Deal was through the vantage point of this is about making sure that everyone has rights to clean air and clean water, and this is about making sure everyone has rights to access green spaces and that we can serve our land. This is a way we can ensure that we create tens of millions of good jobs and actually boost the economy, not destroy it.

McKibben:Do you think it’s radical? Does it strike you as a radical thing?

Prakash:Not at all. To me, the Green New Deal is ultimately just the bare minimum that we need to do to preserve this planet for future generations. It is the bare minimum that we need to do to prevent quite literally humanitarian and ecological breakdown. Maybe the planet will be here for years to come, but we’re in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. We’re in the midst of a climate crisis.

McKibben: The presidential candidate that you all had backed hard for president, Bernie, a fellow New Englander, eventually lost his campaign. The guy that you’d given an F for his climate plan, Joe Biden, emerged as the candidate. Yet, as of the moment he became the candidate last summer, his team was very much in dialogue with you guys in figuring out what his climate agenda was going to look like.

Prakash: I felt surprisingly heard during that task force process. We were coming in having played a significant role in the primary, and that helped us. But also, to their credit, Gina McCarthy and John Kerry were very clear, I think, that they wanted to improve Joe Biden’s climate plan and knew that it wasn’t enough. There was a fair bit of wanting to meet not even in the middle but beyond where Joe Biden wanted to be.

McKibben: Well, it’s an interesting moment now. You got your start with civil disobedience in the office of the Speaker of the House. But you’re also now very much on the inside. You’re seeing the things that you’ve called for be made into law right away. Are you able to explain to your own crew that there are times when calling people out isn’t the only thing to do?

Prakash: Absolutely. I think we’ve been doing a fair bit of that. The key to doing good organizing is to constantly have the full vision, the full North Star, in front of you every step of the way, and to claim victory every step of the way for everything that you win. I think it’s hard for a lot of young people who felt disillusioned by Biden, or who felt frustrated with his policies on the campaign trail, to kind of come around to that, but it’s been important for our leadership to again and again and again communicate that this is a win, this is us being heard. This is our ideas that they told us were fringe becoming mainstream. Because in large part we organized for it and because they are popular good ideas.

McKibben: Sensible ideas.

Prakash: Exactly.

Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books on the environment, including his most recent, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, published in 2019.