Hyperaware: Youth Activism as the Cause for Change

Laurel is a current Junior at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. She is the Assistant Director at the Debby Ellis Writing Center and enjoys writing in her free time. She is a Psychology major with an English minor and hopes to become a Licensed Professional Counselor in the future.

It is true that the new generation will one day inherit the positions of power that are in place to “protect” them. It is perhaps even more true that the people in these positions are doing more harm than good, as they create and continue problems that the youth will have to face, including environmental, economic, social, and more. Yet, young people were born knowing these problems exist, thus they have taken it upon themselves to fight against our society’s issues. Julie Sze’s, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, analyzes youth activism and its role in repairing our world. In conjunction, Octavia Butler’s, Parable of the Sower, portrays and utilizes youth as the innovators of change. Sze and Butler share a commonality in their belief that the younger generation places themselves at the forefront of powerful movements as they are the key figures in restoring a world destroyed by the generations that preceded them.

In her text, Sze focuses on the Native youth activists of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, protesting against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Sze chooses to highlight the actions of these activists because of the optimism she feels “with students and young people, many unhappy with the world that past generations have made and who want to reshape the world with different ways of being and feeling” (Sze 22). Butler demonstrates these desires through her character, Lauren Olamina. Lauren represents many children her age, both within the book and those reading it, as she understands she is living in catastrophe and cannot depend on the adults to fix it. In contrast, her father is reliant on nostalgia, steadfast in his belief that the world can return to what it once was.

Lauren’s actions juxtapose those of her father, as she prepares herself for survival in the new world by assembling an emergency backpack. Lauren’s intuition comes true and her community is attacked in the night. This moment not only confirms Sze’s confidence in young people’s logic but suggests to readers that the beliefs of the new generation, however different, may be our key to survival.

Additionally, Parable of the Sower depicts youth activism through the theme of change, spearheaded by Lauren once again. Lauren’s initial community was closed-off and ignorant to the idea of change. As a reaction, she finds faith in the everlasting idea of change. She utilizes this idea to establish her own religion, Earthseed, a belief system founded under the claim that “God is Change” (Butler 3). As the name would suggest, Lauren wants to spread Earthseed across the world to provide people with a sense of comfort in the idea of change. Even more so, she wants to start communities of Earthseed everywhere she goes so they can shape the religion together. In this way, change is her way of protesting the world around her. She protests a world that won’t allow time for

rest by framing constant change as a good thing. She protests a president and a people that hang tight onto the strings of the past by focusing on the future. Most importantly, she protests by creating groups of people just like her to help restore the world, an idea that a struggling reader might find comfort in.

In order to do this, Lauren establishes the first Earthseed community after leading a growing group of survivors to safety. This group is formed over time and made up of people who don’t have much in common besides their desire to survive. Yet, it is Lauren who brings them together because of her outlook on life and empathy for those around her. Sze would explain this by saying that “youth have experiences and perspectives that

can offer wisdom to those who share values of community” (Butler 22). Community is an incredibly important aspect of activism and without it, movements often die off. If it wasn’t for community, the strength of movements like #NoDAPL might crack under the pressure of opposing forces. Butler demonstrates this importance, as Lauren’s group, Acorn, succeeds by sharing resources, fostering strength in numbers, and learning to trust

one another.

Something Sze suggests but doesn’t quite illustrate as firmly as Butler is the notion that young people are compelled to fight against their society as a reaction to the destruction of their youth. As Lauren is fleeing her community overrun by pyros and scavengers, she finds the littered bodies of several children who have not only been brutally murdered but sexually assaulted. She describes a graphic and grotesque scene of “little Robin Balter, naked, filthy, bloody between her legs, cold, bony, barely pubescent” painting the destruction of youth that children in this world are so often plagued with (Butler 163). This horrifying use of imagery may be a dramatization of young people’s current experience but it does not stray too far from what youth activists may have to experience. Sze tells us they endure harsh punishment from police including tear gas, police batons, and even water cannons. Age may not matter to those who destroy youth, but this destruction certainly matters to the youth who must face it every day.

Perhaps it is also true that our world is too far gone to be saved, regardless of the hard work of our youth. Yet, as Sze and Butler would agree, if there is any hope, it is in the generation raised on chaos. Even Lauren Olamina would protest, “The stars ignite, burn, age, cool, Evolving. God is Change. God prevails” (Butler 225).

Work Cited

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 1993.

Sze, Julie. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. University of California Press,

2020.