Creating the Future We Deserve: My generation has set out to solve the climate crisis because we know things can't go on as they are.

• Author: Barrett, Vic

Many are coming to realize what young people have known for some time: A future filled with the comforts of modern living is not assured.

I am a first-generation Garifuna American. My people are an Afro-Indigenous community originally from the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we were pushed from our homeland on St. Vincent by British colonialists, ending up on the eastern coast of Central America in Honduras. Despite the overwhelming adversity we experienced, we organized our community and emancipated ourselves to protect our future as a people.

My lived experience is molded through hundreds of years of a seemingly universal agreement that, due to my identity, things cannot come easily. People are often surprised that I'm a "tree hugger," and that the climate movement is what I've found myself dedicated to. I am transgender, first-generation American, Latino, Black, and neurodivergent--there are so many movement spaces where I could have been welcomed and found a home.

Somehow, I chose environmentalism, which has historically been one of the whitest and most elite movement spaces. But climate change isn't just about rising temperatures and melting glaciers. It is not a singular problem, but rather a catastrophic symptom of the way the world is set up. To solve it, we need to address a range of issues having to do with how we treat each other.

I've spent nearly five years, a fifth of my life, as a plaintiff in the Juliana v. United States case, along with about twenty other young activists. The lawsuit asserts that the U.S. federal government's actions and inactions with regard to climate change violate our generation's Constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. Since I was fifteen, I've given up many things--personal finances, friendships, a normal adolescence--to get up on the global stage, such as when I spoke at the U.N. General Assembly to address youth involvement in sustainability goals.

Though Juliana v. United States is still making its way through the courts, I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to actually hold the government...