What is it like to grow up with this new climate reality? Chloe Maxmin, who delivered a passionate youth keynote about divesting from fossil fuels at Bioneers in 2015, spoke to six young people who have been working on climate change from a young age and know what it’s like to grow up with this crisis. Her piece Growing Up With Climate Change was featured in The Nation this month.

The common thread she found when speaking with these young activists is their commitment to self-determination in the face of crisis:

They refuse to be defined by the world they inherited. Instead, they define climate change as the opportunity to create a different world. They choose to protect what they love, to create the kind of life that they want, to fight with all their souls for a better future. They define their own fates. They declare that agency, power, and possibility can exist amid crisis.

Included in the article are two fellow Bioneers youth keynote speakers Junior Walk and Alex Loorz. Watch their inspiring Bioneers talks below:

That’s the only way you’re going to stop any kind of extraction: make it too costly for them to keep doing it. – Junior Walk

At the core of it all, our revolution is about sustainability, which I define as this: living as if the future matters. – Alec Loorz

A lot of the rhetoric I see around the climate movement is about anger and frustration toward the government, Exxon, the fossil fuel industry – and these emotions are warranted! We should be! But why exactly are we angry and frustrated? It’s because these entities are threatening everything we love, everything we care about it. We have to go down to that deeper level and make that love more explicit, bringing it to the forefront of our work. – Chloe Maxmin