Back in 1990, when Sarah Barger Ranney was 10, she saw a newspaper survey asking: “Kids, 12-16: Tell us your future.”
One of the questions was “By the time you’re 40, what do you think will be the biggest problem confronting the USA?” Options included nuclear war, homelessness, disease, the environment, drugs, racism and crime.
In green felt tip pen, Ranney, of Tacoma, Washington, checked “The environment.”
Her mom, a rule-follower, didn’t send in the survey because Ranney was younger than the designated age group. But she found the clip a few years ago and mailed it to her daughter, now 44.
Under the question “If you could grow up to be like anyone who’s alive today, who would it be?” Ranney had carefully written “An environmentalist.”
Today, she keeps a picture of that small, ripped piece of paper on her phone "to remind me that this has always been something I’ve cared about,” she said.
As with many people, Ranney’s relationship to the environment has changed over the decades as more has been learned about our transforming climate and the changes became too obvious to ignore.
The stereotype is that only young people care about climate change. After all, they’re the ones who will live the longest with the consequences of a warming world, as Swedish activist Greta Thunberg began reminding everyone when she was barely out of middle school.
But activists in their 80s have protested from rocking chairs on New York City streets, and plenty of other people who don’t protest want to protect the environment.
To better understand the relationship between age and climate activism, USA TODAY conducted interviews with more than 20 people ages 17 to 80 – Gen Z to the so-called Silent Generation.
From Ranney to the aging farmer who sees more rainfall and starts planting earlier than he’s used to, to the teen who will probably never see the volume of snow his mother remembers, Americans of all ages are worried about the country’s changing climate.
But they see different causes, have different responses and have decided to take different actions in response, often split by political leanings.
Here are some snapshots of American climate consciousness from across the age spectrum:
Ray Gaesser, 72, counts himself a solid conservative.
He farms soybeans and corn in southwest Iowa, and he's seen how the climate has changed in the close to 50 years he's been tilling the soil.
"We seem to be able to plant one to two weeks earlier than we did," he said.
The weather has also gotten more extreme. Instead of rain falling a few inches in the course of a week, now it sometimes comes down as much as 12 to 18 inches over the course of two to three weeks. That has caused flooding and devastated some of his neighbors, he said.
But he's not so sure climate change has been entirely caused by humans.
"I think it’s partly human-induced – at 8 billion people we're bound to have an impact," he said. "Whether it’s all human, I don't know."
Climate change is one of the most politically divisive issues in the United States – even more than abortion, data from Yale University's program on climate change communication shows.
What divides Americans on the issue isn't their age; rather, it's their political leanings, program director Anthony Leiserowitz said. Overall, conservatives aren't as worried or may not believe global warming is human-caused, while progressives are far more anxious.
In the 1980s, Republicans and Democrats alike were concerned about global warming. In that decade, President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, embraced climate science as he campaigned.
At the same time, a now well-documented campaign by fossil fuel companies and large corporations worked to discredit climate science, sow doubt and increase polarization on the question, as multiple investigations and reports have shown.
By 2022 the political division was clear, even though the science solidly supported human-driven climate change: 78% of those who leaned Democratic saw climate change as a major threat, while only 23% of those who leaned Republican did.
Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, at 39 a millennial, began his remarks at a December GOP primary debate saying, "Climate change is a hoax."
But most Americans lie in the middle on climate change, as with most political issues. Even Gaesser, the self-described conservative, puts himself there.
Gaesser isn't much for extreme positions, shouting or attacks on others' beliefs. He's more about working and talking with his neighbors, whether it's about cover crops or clean energy.
"We have a responsibility to care for the land and the environment and do the best job we can with the resources we have today," he said. "It's about using the least amount of resources to grow the most amount of food. It's what I believe in and I think many of us believe."
On an early morning in June, 25-year-old Benn McGregor zigzagged on foot across the front mezzanine of Citigroup's global headquarters in Manhattan, using his iPhone to record a group of mostly gray-haired folks sitting in rocking chairs demonstrating against banks’ entanglement with fossil fuel projects.
Under the watchful eyes of riot-ready New York City police officers, the septa- and octogenarians held signs reading "We've Reached the Boiling Point!" and chanted as people passed by and workers tried to enter the building. Some waved signs featuring pictures of their children and grandchildren. One hand-lettered placard read, "They deserve a future."
When the sitting demonstrators finally blocked the tower’s entrance, officers pried them from their rockers, put them in handcuffs and dragged them to waiting police vans.
The Rocking Chair Rebellion protesters know they won’t be alive for the worst effects of climate change. But for those who strongly believe humans are rapidly warming Earth, urgency and action unite generations.
McGregor, a Gen Zer from Toronto who protested against climate change for the first time this summer, said he and many of his peers are angry about what older generations have left them.
“We’re kids and we’re mad at the adults in the room," he said. "I feel like the weight of the world is put on my shoulders and my generation."
Andy Platt understands. The 80-year-old, who traveled from Massachusetts for the protest, said older people have a "special responsibility" to speak out and help create a "sense of urgency."
"I have grandkids and I'm worried sick about their future," he said. "We're out of options and we have to do something dramatic. And that's why I'm here."
For now, he plans to give his “energy, effort and enthusiasm.”
Though the political divide transcends generations, climate protest has become increasingly common, especially among Gen Z and millennials, research by the Pew Foundation has found. Millennials are ages 28 to 43. Gen Zers are now 12 to 27.
For protesters, it’s not a theoretical argument: It’s a generational crisis.
Though the climate affects everyone, younger generations are making major life decisions based on what is to come. Some presume they'll only ever drive electric cars or not even drive a car at all. Others choose to go vegetarian or even vegan for climate benefits or reject jobs or assignments because of climate ethics.
Even choices about family are colored by climate change.
“If we don’t make a change, I don’t think I want to bring a child into this,” said 29-year-old Michelle Recinos Flores. “I would like to have family, but I don’t feel safe. I don’t want my child to be brought into this world if I can’t make it better than it is right now.”
Working for AmeriCorps in 2018, she helped victims of the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in California. (Experts say climate change effects increase the chances of such massive blazes.) Seeing burnt-out homes and grieving families changed how she saw the world, she said. It made the climate crisis undeniable and unable to ignore.
"People died. That touched me, it shook me to the core," she said. "We can no longer be passive, because it's here."
Earlier this year, Recinos Flores uprooted her life in North Carolina to take a new job at Unidos MN in Minneapolis working with immigrant communities to help them understand and cope with climate change. She has put her moral compass before her material well-being ‒ the new job pays half what she was making before.
But so far, she says, it’s been “exhilarating” and “life-changing.”
For Ranney, putting her passion for the environment into action took a while.
She studied geosciences and environmental studies in college, and then life kind of moved on.
The 9/11 attacks happened during her senior year in college; then the Great Recession hit in 2007. Ranney ended up a vice president in a marketing company, but her concern about the environment never ceased.
“It was like a seed inside me,” she said. “In 2016, I finally realized I can’t be on the sidelines anymore.”
She began volunteering for environmental causes. Eight years later, she decided she needed to do more.
In April, Ranney made the final leap, taking a substantial pay cut to become director of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay chapter. She talked with her two sons – 10 and 12 – about what that might mean for their family.
“I thought, ‘If I don’t do it, it might not get done,’” she said.
But her sons embraced it. “It’s the atmosphere they’ve grown up in, seeing me be engaged and kind of worried,” she said. “They were proud of me.”
Tianna Shaw-Wakeman, 26, also chose to work as a professional activist. She’s an environmental justice coordinator at Black Women for Wellness, a Los Angeles-based reproductive justice organization that also advocates for environmental justice across the Golden State.
To her, fighting climate change is about more than protecting the environment. It’s also about righting historical injustices.
As the real-world consequences of climate change grow, it’s increasingly clear, experts say, that people with the fewest advantages will be hit the hardest.
A 2021 analysis from the Environmental Protection Agency shows that the “most severe harms from climate change fall disproportionately upon underserved communities who are least able to prepare for, and recover from, heat waves, poor air quality, flooding, and other impacts.”
The EPA’s analysis shows that Black people in the U.S. are more likely to live in areas where heat-related deaths are increasing the most and Latinos are more likely to work in hot weather-exposed industries.
Shaw-Wakeman, who is Black, was raised in the South, but her perspective on how climate change and racism intersect grew during her work in California.
“Back home people think of racism as old Confederate statues or Confederate flags or police brutality, which is true and plays a role,” she said. But just as important is how highways were placed and how Black families lost homes and wealth, she said.
“We need to transition away from using the same capitalistic mentality of putting an environmental burden on people of color,” she said.
Growing fears about a slow-moving catastrophe that may never improve in their lifetimes is a weight on young Americans. It's an emotional burden that can cause what has been called "climate anxiety." A survey by the medical journal The Lancet in 2021 found more than half of 16- to 25-year-olds believed humanity is doomed.
The 10 warmest years in the 174-year record of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration occurred from 2014 onward. The current record holder for warmest year was 2023, but experts think 2024 could surpass it. This summer featured the hottest day on record.
Austin Gordon is only 17, but he has already seen the impact on his small hometown of Felton, Pennsylvania.
“It doesn’t snow anymore,” he said. “When my mom was growing up, she said they couldn’t even get up the driveway some days, there was so much snow. But that’s never happened to my generation.”
Even so, climate change as a concept isn’t something that gets discussed among his friends or at the high school where he has just begun his senior year. He hears about it on the news or sees videos on TikTok, but most acutely he notices changes in day-to-day life.
He said he stepped outside one day in late September to look at a thermometer. The mercury read 79 degrees.
"The leaves are falling right now because it's fall, but sometimes it's in the 80s," he said.
And as hot as the years he has been in high school have been, he worries about what's to come.
This summer was the hottest on record, and 2024 was on track to be the hottest year.
Gordon realizes future years will likely be far warmer. "Which is kind of scary."
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