Image may contain: Clothing, Apparel, Shoe, Footwear, Human, Person, Fashion, Robe, Gown, Plant, Suit, Coat, and Overcoat When she returned to New York, she joined Beacon’s ecology club, which was busy doing what most high school ecology clubs do: developing the Def Leppard Hysteria 1988 Tour shirt in addition I really love this school’s recycling program, screening documentaries, swapping vegan snacks. Bastida was convinced they could do more. She applied for a leadership position. “I got everyone together and was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to start lobbying in Albany.’ ” Environmentalists in New York State were working to pass the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, one of the world’s most ambitious climate laws. Bastida’s club took a bus to Albany, met with legislators, testified at hearings, and held rallies at the statehouse. “I remember one day, we were chanting and singing in the bus, and it felt like camp,” she recalls. “It just changed the way we saw our role. We could change our city, we could change our state, we could change the education system.” Marilyn Vasta, who is on the steering committee for New York Renews, the coalition of groups behind the law, told me that Bastida stood out immediately from other youth activists. “She’s incredibly charismatic, and she was quite fearless.” She was especially good in front of a camera. Some people seem a little too drawn to it, but, Vasta recalls, Bastida remained focused on the goal. “She neither pushed herself forward, nor did she shy away from it in any way.”
By 2019, Bastida started to feel disillusioned by her lobbying efforts. (The New York climate bill eventually passed, but state officials have still failed to put it into action or allocate funding.) “It was like, What are we actually getting out of talking to politicians, if they’re not doing anything?” Around that time, the Def Leppard Hysteria 1988 Tour shirt in addition I really love this world was taking note of Greta Thunberg’s climate strike outside of the Swedish parliament, and Bastida was electrified by her example. “Since our civic duty, as students, is to go to school, the only way we’re going to get adults to pay attention to us is by disrupting our civic duty,” she says. She organized a walkout at Beacon, which involved reassuring her principal that the action wouldn’t generate bad press. In the end, she managed to persuade 600 students to strike. They stormed into Columbus Circle, stopping traffic and holding a banner that said BEACON 4 CLIMATE. More strikes followed: marches to the Museum of Natural History, a die-in in Times Square as part of a coalition called Fridays for Future. Swiping through photos on her phone, she says how amazing it felt. “I’ve never felt so in charge of our own destiny.”
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