School pupils, students and headmasters demonstrate against climate change

Some 100 school pupils, students and others gathered on Postplatz on Friday to demonstrate, yet again, their concern for the environment.
 

This was the second such demonstration, a previous one having been held last month, also on Postplatz.
As some demonstrators held up official-style placards calling for “human change, not climate change,” others held up home-made ones, asking, “Who is to determine the future?” while others simply held up umbrellas to keep dry. A number of them began shouting, “We are here protesting loudly as our future is being stolen from us,” the rhyme lost in translation.
 

The protestors enjoyed much solidarity, with some 1,600 such events on this theme taking place across the world that day, 25 of them in Switzerland.
 

One pupil, Flavia Rader, felt that, as a child, it was difficult to achieve change, but that was why she was there that day, to make her views known. Her schoolmate, Eveline Schniepp, felt there was no harm in trying to bring about change. “If we do not do anything, nothing will change, will it?” she asked. When they get back to school the pair plan to talk about climate change and the need to act to other members of their class.

Student Tom Kilchsperger, who belongs to the ten-member organisation committee of the event in Zug, was also present, and mentioned how this movement was the largest non-violent youth movement to get off the ground since the Eighties, social media and mouth-to-mouth communication responsible for so many gathering that day, all demanding no further emissions of greenhouse gases in Switzerland by 2030.
 

Not only were pupils of the cantonal schools there, so were senior teachers, with Markus Lüdin, the headmaster of the Cantonal School in Menzingen, saying that there had been a ban on school-related travel by air since 2002, including for trips relating to school-leaving festivities, with Peter Hörler, the headmaster of the Zug Cantonal School, adding how air travel there had been banned for ecological reasons, too, all of which met with the approval of 13-year-old Victoria Bonny, who declined to take the plane to go on holiday, taking the train instead to visit relatives in Paris.
 

As other young demonstrators expressed their concern for the plight of the penguin if global warming continues, Kilchsperger took to the microphone to say, “Up with tighter climate change targets and down with CO2.”