Despite widespread political inertia in responding to the climate crisis, youth climate activists are reshaping politics. Turkan Firinci Orman argues that by embodying Hannah Arendt’s ideas of freedom and action, they are transforming utopias from rigid blueprints into living practices of collective possibility
Politics in motion
Young people are striking, marching, and organising across the world to confront the climate emergency. Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion Youth, and countless local collectives mobilise not only against carbon emissions but against entrenched injustices of race, class, gender, and global inequality. In 2025, as climate crises intensify and economic divides deepen, the Draw the Line global strikes rally thousands for a week of climate justice actions, demanding equitable resource distribution, debt relief, and climate reparation.
These actions are often dismissed as idealistic and inconsequential, with little political impact. Yet they offer one profound political insight: we cannot postpone justice. Change must begin in the present. Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s most influential political thinkers, helps us see why.
For Arendt, true freedom is not about private choice but about public action among equals. Politics lives in the moment, when people speak and act together. Youth climate activists embody this principle. Their activism reveals politics not as a slow institutional process, but as collective action in motion.
Youth climate activism: transforming utopias from abstract ideals into living practices
Utopias have long been associated with rigid blueprints: a perfect society imposed from above. Arendt warned that such schemes, which postpone utopia to a distant future and enforce a singular path to achieve it, erase plurality and pave the way for totalitarianism. Such regimes, she argued, thrived by enforcing a single vision and silencing difference. Arendt’s thought is not anti-utopian but radically dynamic. She treats utopias as flexible tools of political imagination rather than fixed ideologies.
Youth climate activists practise what scholars call prefiguration: creating in the here and now the kinds of relationships, communities, and worlds they want for the future.
Climate strikes are not only protests against inaction. They are experiments in democratic participation, inclusive organising, and solidarity across borders
This prefigurative spirit transforms utopias from abstract ideals into lived practices. The future is not simply imagined; it is enacted in the present.
Prefiguration as political power
In Arendt’s terms, prefigurative action reflects natality, the human capacity to begin anew. Greta Thunberg’s lone strike in 2018 shows this vividly. What began as one teenager’s refusal to attend school became a global movement. Arendt reminds us that action sparks unpredictable chains of events: one deed can inspire widespread change, reshaping networks of people, ideas, and movements in unexpected ways, like ripples spreading across a global landscape of activism.
Critics argue that climate movements lack a clear structure. But Arendt saw unpredictability as the essence of politics. Freedom is not found in fixed outcomes but in the ability to act together, to start something unforeseen. Prefigurative politics embodies this. It connects ideals to everyday practices, whether by centring marginalised voices, modelling climate justice through horizontal decision-making, or rejecting consumerist culture in favour of sustainable living.
In these acts, young people are not simply demanding a better world from policymakers. They are already building it.
Collective power and radical plurality
Arendt stressed that plurality, our differences as humans, is the foundation of political freedom. Without it, politics collapses into domination. Youth climate movements put plurality into practice. They amplify diverse voices, from Indigenous land defenders to queer climate activists. They link ecological struggles to fights for housing, food security, and migrant justice. This inclusivity is more than a strategy. It is a form of political power.
Arendt defined power not as domination but as the capacity to act together
At a 2019 climate strike in New York, Greta Thunberg captured this when she told the crowd, ‘together and united, we are unstoppable’:
Power, then, emerges from collective solidarity, not from economic or military might. This understanding challenges the very systems that profit from environmental destruction.
Joy, hope, and new beginnings
Despite the gravity of the climate crisis, youth strikes are often joyful, creative, even playful. This echoes Arendt’s belief that politics is not only a struggle but also a kind of performance; a space where humans discover the joy of acting together.
Arendt’s concept of natality resonates here. For her, action is like a ‘second birth’, a chance to bring something unprecedented into the world. Youth climate activism embodies this capacity for renewal.
Through prefiguration, activists show that another world is not only necessary but already in the making
Hope is central. Not the passive hope that leaders will one day act, but the constructive hope born of shared action.
Why youth climate activism matters now
At a time when governments delay and corporations greenwash, youth climate activism insists that utopias are not distant goals. They are practices we enact today. Prefigurative politics challenges the cynicism of business-as-usual by reminding us that politics is about beginnings, plurality, difference, and collective imagination.
This vibrant democratic renewal echoes the themes of radical democracy and participatory engagement as articulated in the book The Politics of Becoming by this series’ curator, Hans Asenbaum. Hans’ book shows how spaces of appearance, both online and offline, enable evolving democratic practices and inspire activists to reshape societal structures through inclusive participation.
This lesson reaches far beyond the climate movement. It invites us to rethink democracy itself, not as a fixed system but as a living practice, renewed each time people gather to act in common.
Youth activists are not naïve dreamers. They are builders of possibility. Their politics is not about waiting for the future but about prefiguring it now.
No.20 in our 🎭 Democratic Transformations series
This article was originally published at The Loop and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.