How to Save the Future: Audio Diaries From a High School Climate Leader

Young people in the generation known as Gen-Z consider climate change to be the biggest challenge we’re facing. Gen-Z being people born between 1996 and 2012, it may explain why many environmental protests are often led by people who aren’t old enough to vote.

Paola Hoffman is one of those leaders. She volunteers with a group called Youth Climate Strike Los Angeles. For months, she kept an audio diary and shared her experiences. In those months she wrote speeches for protests and spoke on a youth summit climate change panel. She also testified before the state legislature about SB 1173, which would require that two of the state and nation’s largest public pension funds divest from fossil fuels. That was in her free time, when she wasn’t keeping up with her school work as a senior at The Archer School for Girls, or leading the second violins in her school orchestra. And she did it all while carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.

These entries have been edited for clarity and brevity.

April 4

Hi, it's Paola, today is Monday, April 4, and it's 1:14pm. I was just playing guitar and then figured I should probably check in. Yeah, so I've been pretty busy this weekend, mostly with a mix of personal deadlines and Youth Climate strike LA work.

Today, there will be the Monday meeting for the Senate Retirement Committee, around 3pm. And they're going to have a hearing on SB 1173. And we're trying to get people to call in because, like I said, we have people who are impacted, and the people who are trying to shut down this bill, which, if this doesn't pass, if the Senate Retirement Committee doesn't go through with this, the bill halts again. We've made so much progress with it, so we really can't afford to lose this momentum. So I guess I'm preparing to do some calling in, and calling all my friends and getting them to call in. And I'm kind of nervous.

April 12

Well, my miniature break was fun while it lasted. I'm back home from my trip out of town to check out college. And now that I have officially made my enrollment, we have to go right back to work. I'm currently in my room at my desk. I have brought my food upstairs so I can work on finishing up our endorsement graphics while I eat because I want to get this done as fast as possible. Then I also have to record two videos. We're still working to get SB 1173, through as many different Senate hearings as we can. Next Tuesday is the next one. We have the Judiciary Committee that's meeting.

[The opposition] did not think we were going to get through the last committee. The bill is supposed to die there. And they had people calling in, they had people showing up, but we had more. But the issue is, they have money. And they have time. And they can have meetings with senators and meetings with politicians. And we have none of that. We have people, but that's not enough.

Hopefully I won't be up too late, but it's already nine. You know, fun times. But honestly we're doing important things, so I don't even mind so long as I have time to get my schoolwork done as well…or not. That'll come second.

April 21

I am currently working on writing a speech. Tomorrow is Earth Day, or Earth Crisis Day, as we have been preparing for. I'm gonna be talking about greenwashing [disinformation distributed by organizations to inflate environmental initiatives or present themselves as more environmentally conscious than they are]. Because it's insidious. And a lot of what the UCLA protest is talking about is getting the UC system to divest and actually make changes that will actually do something.

My orchestra at school is in tech week currently, and I'm the section leader. So as much as I want to skip my actual school – I'm willing to skip my actual school to protest – I also have responsibility to my orchestra. So I'm going to have a very long day, and the next day I have my prom. I’m going with a bunch of friends; we’re really excited. Because despite all of this, I'm somehow still a high-schooler. And it's my senior prom. That's crazy.

Earth Crisis Day

I feel really good. There's a good kind of tired after these kinds of events because you're exhausted, but you feel like maybe there's a chance that, this time, things will go better.

I'm really sad that I'm not going to be in the LA area anymore, especially now I feel like I've created such a close bond. I'm going to go to Houston. I'm going to go to Rice University. I'm currently dedicated to study astrophysics, but sometimes I feel guilty about it, because how am I going into the sciences, but not the science that we need right now to save the Earth? And then I think about how depressing that is because you tell kids to chase their dreams. And I'm sitting here feeling bad because I want to do that.

I also have to be realistic.

June 8

I just woke up from a dream where the world ended.

It started with the coastal cities and then it spread. I was on one of the last planes, and there was a little boy on the intercom, just telling us about our failure, telling us about how we were supposed to act. And here we were at the end. Then I woke up and I came downstairs. And I saw an article on The New York Times on the front page that says environmental nuclear bomb as the Great Salt Lake dries up.

So yeah, that's a fun way to start my day.

I was trying to think what might have caused the nightmare. And all I can think about is we just had elections, the primary elections in LA. And last I went to sleep, I had checked to see what the results were looking like. And a lot of the progressive candidates, the candidates that I've had the honor of just being able to work with, so many of them were not in the lead. It kind of felt like a punch in the gut. Because I know these people, and I know how dedicated they are and how driven they are and how they actually care about me, you know? And then I went to sleep and I saw the world ending.

I guess I have some good news. I recently spoke on the Changeist panel. They were holding a summit over three days. And we got to talk about the urgency of the climate crisis and provide information and tips. And I said, “We find the strength to keep going by doing things in groups. We find the strength to keep going by doing things together. We find the strength to keep going when we realize that we're not the only people in this fight.”

That's what gives us the strength to keep going even when we have nightmares about the world ending. It's the thought that there's other people by our side who are just as passionate about making sure it doesn't.

June 21

Hi, this is Paola. I am so angry right now. I don't even know what to do with it.

Our bill [SB1173] is dead.

We didn't get voted down, no. We still have tons of support, the support of 10 unions, five cities, three government offices, six local political party groups, over 100 organizations. We have the support of thousands of calls, nearly 20,000 letters, dozens of meetings with legislators all advocating for SB 1173. We have the support of everyone except Assemblymember Jim Cooper, who's the Chair of the Assembly Committee on Public Employment and Retirement, who has just pulled the bill. So the bill will not be heard in the committee. It will not be voted on. Instead, he vetoed it, essentially.

You know, you see people marching in the streets and you think with that many people, surely, surely we can get something done.

It’s hard to feel happy about what you’ve done. You just feel so small. I'm really tired of feeling small.

Graduation

I am officially a high school graduate. Our school does a few things for graduating. We have a few events at school before we have the main ceremony with our family. And one of them, they give awards out to some members of the graduating class. And I got an award this year. I won it for my work with both Teen Line [a teen-to-teen crisis hotline] and Youth Climate Strike Los Angeles. That was pretty incredible. It's weird to get recognition for things, especially after all those years I've been to Archer seeing other students get these kinds of awards and graduate, and it's surreal to graduate in general. Just being on that stage singing our graduation song, hearing our names get called, walking across. I've gone to The Archer School for Girls for six years. So it's very hard to say goodbye. But we did it and I am off to college next.