Students in Park High School’s Green Initiative club walk around the campus in March looking for the best place to plant a tree. Ripley Cunningham took the microphone and looked out at an audience of about 350 people in the echoey, ornate rotunda of Montana’s state Capitol, her favorite thrift-store flower pendant around her neck. It was January, the start of the legislative session, and the high school senior, a speech and debate star, was emceeing a statewide climate gathering. “I am comforted in knowing that we have an interconnected community of people fighting for the future of our home,” she said. Cunningham, who’d just turned 18, added that she’d not yet been able to vote in an election, but “being here today helps me realize the power that my voice carries and the change that it can create.” Cunningham and five other members of Green Initiative, a student climate club at Park High School, a public school in Livingston, Montana, had driven hours along icy, wind-drifted roads to get here. Just weeks earlier, Montana’s Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling in favor of a group of young people who sued the state over its climate inaction in Held v. Montana . Now, state lawmakers had to implement that decision. As Cunningham spoke, the Green Initiative members who were in the audience hoisted a massive sign: “PROTECT OUR HOME.” Livingston, population about 9,000, is located in a fossil fuel-driven, Republican-led state whose leaders are working to quash any action to slow climate change. But Park High’s Green Initiative is an incubator for climate action, and these students aim to show those in power that there’s still a groundswell of resistance. “I am comforted in knowing that we have an interconnected community of people fighting for the future of […]