Looking at the numbers coming in, I got Australia at 300,000 people apparently Germany had 1.4 million on its own, so this crowd might be actually huge. Vic Barrett is a 20 year old climate activist from White Plains, New York. Please welcome Vic to the stage. Every on this day, September 20, 2019, everything began to change. My mother left the coast of Honduras, a place battered by storms and sea level rise, to find opportunity in New York City, the city of immigrants. I wonder how many people trying to find refuge here knew that because of the amount of money in their bank account or the color of their skin, they'd be placed on the front lines of disasters, disasters like Hurricane Sandy. Sandy, Maria, Irma, Dorian, this crisis follows people. My name is Vic Barrett. I'm 20 years old and I'm one of the 21 youth plaintiffs in the Julianna versus United States Constitutional Lawsuit, suing the executive branch of the federal government for knowingly causing climate change. You're reversively threatening our health, our personal security, our homes and our communities by recreating a dangerous climate system. The youth who have come before us and the civil rights movement and other social justice movements, it is often the youth that must shine a light on systems of injustice. We know the world we want to grow up in better than anybody else does. So we need to be listening to you. I was born into a world in which my future is being stolen from me. Born into a world where my people face extinction. Indigenous lands all over our planet are being flooded, poisoned and destroyed. My Black brothers and sisters are being gunned down by police. Migrant children are dying at the border. Trans folks are being murdered. Violence is in the air that we breathe. There is a lesson I have learned from my ancestors. Some of us are blessed with the ability to withstand the unthinkable in our blood. My people were stripped of their humanity, were made a product. They fought back risking it all so that I can exist. I exist at the intersection of the identities I inhabit. I wish gen, trans, indigenous, Latino, black. It took 20 years for me to realize that I had developed mechanisms for resilience that I didn't even know I had. I will never simply hand over what centuries of struggle made mine. And I'm not alone. We must do whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Do y'all make some noise? Oh, yeah! Hey, guys! Definitely high energy in this park right now. There are so many people here I couldn't even tell you how much. Out here to strike and get their voices heard and make sure that we're marking a battery park and letting the politicians and the political leaders who are about to be here for the UN summit know that young people care about this issue. We're here to write a new story. A story in which our country is doing everything in its power to just not only the climate crisis but the systemic injustices at its roots. Those history books won't write themselves. So I want you to repeat after me. This is our future. And I will do whatever it takes to protect our rights, to protect our planet, and to protect our people. Thank you. you