news
Oregon’s
Climate
Leader
15-YEAR-OLD CLIMATE ACTIVIST
ADAH CRANDALL SAYS SHE
‘HAD A LOT OF HOPE FOR THE
FUTURE.’ THEN GOV. KATE
BROWN ‘LET US DOWN.’
By Nika Bartoo-Smith
A
dah Crandall started her fight for climate
justice after attending Harriet Tubman
Middle School, which is bordered by
I-5 and scheduled for relocation due to
the freeway’s proposed expansion. She
remembers learning about diesel pollu-
tion and seeing classmates afraid to go
outside for fear of the toll it could take on their health.
Now, Crandall — a sophomore at Grant High School in
Portland — is actively calling on Gov. Kate Brown to stick to
her promise of climate justice and focus on the issue of trans-
portation. Brown asked the Oregon Legislature to set aside
$120 million to relocate the middle school earlier this year.
At 15, Crandall has been called the Greta Thunberg
of Oregon, a comparison she is not fond of. Every other
week, she gathers outside different government build-
ings in Portland with a group called Youth vs. ODOT and
leads the demonstrators in chants as they call on elected
officials to halt freeway expansion.
Crandall and other Sunrise PDX activists started Youth
vs. ODOT in April 2021. What began as only a handful of
demonstrators from Grant High School has since grown
to a demonstration that has drawn more than 70 people
from high schools and communities all around Portland.
The group has four demands: Put all the funds from
the federal infrastructure bill towards projects that will
reduce carbon emissions, appoint a youth climate advo-
cate to the Oregon Transportation Commission, create
an environmental impact statement on the Rose Quar-
ter freeway expansion from ODOT, and place a morato-
rium on all freeway expansions within Portland’s urban
growth boundary.
After almost a year of rallies, not one of these demands has
been met, but that is not to say the group isn’t being heard.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What propelled you to where you are now, and do
you remember a moment that solidified that your
calling is to fight against climate change?
I don’t think there was one particular moment, but my
experience at Tubman Middle School definitely informed
the work that I am doing today because I could see and
experience the firsthand impact of students breathing
pollution and students getting hit by cars while walking
and biking to school because there aren’t safe crosswalks.
And so I think it was really just as I learned more and more
about these issues, the more scared I became about the
future, and the more motivation I had to take action.
How did your motivation for climate activism form into
the action we see today with the bi-weekly protests?
Youth vs. ODOT was really born from a lot of different
young people. Having different experiences either with
transportation injustice or climate injustice, or both, and
then coming together in a collective understanding that
our transportation system needs to change.
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M
as she gave her victory speech. I wasn’t nearly as politi-
cally involved as I am now, but I was very excited to see a
leader like Gov. Brown in office. I had a lot of hope for the
future. She was a person that my peers and I were rally-
ing behind. We were excited. And then she let us down.
What originally had you rallying behind her?
Gov. Brown made a lot of promises about fighting for
the future, fighting for climate justice and fighting to
better our communities. There’s this line in her victory
speech: “We’re going to fight to protect our air and our
water and our pristine coastline” or something like that.
And she also talked a lot about education reform, which
was something that was very important to students. In
retrospect, I am able to understand that the things politi-
cians say when they are running their campaigns are often
for the purpose of getting them elected, and not necessar-
ily because that’s what they are actually planning to do.
Is fear one of the primary drivers for you in calling
on everyone to pay attention to climate change?
Yes, but I also think that it is unsustainable for these
movements to be built purely on fear. They also have to be
built on hope for a better future. And we also need to be
keeping in mind the better world that we are fighting for
and not just the scary world that we are fighting against.
What does the better world you’re fighting for look like?
Teenagers wouldn’t have to worry about the climate
crisis. Middle schoolers wouldn’t have to worry that the
air they breathe is going to cause asthma or lung cancer.
Buses that run every five minutes, so we don’t rely on
freeways or cars.
What do you do to remain hopeful?
It’s hard, I’m not very good at being hopeful. I surround
myself with a lot of people who are better at it than I am. A
lot of people say that I am negative or pessimistic — I think
that I am being realistic, because things really are pretty bad.
Will you expand on that and why you find it hard to
have hope?
The climate movement is often very reactionary. It’s
often about what we are fighting against, not what we are
fighting for. So it’s hard to be hopeful as a young person
who is watching wildfires and record-breaking heatwaves
and snowstorms in April and to see that the people in
power just keep going like everything is normal. So I do
lean on other people for the feeling of hopefulness.
There is a lot of hope that comes from joining together
and taking action, like the Youth vs. ODOT rallies that
happen every other week. There are all of these people
who are gathering together, fighting for the same things
— we sing, we chant and it’s very unifying in a way that
makes this movement really powerful.
Why do you think it is so important that youth are play-
ing an active role in the fight against climate change?
It’s really as simple as the fact that people in power right
now aren’t going to live to see the lasting impacts of their
decisions. They are not acting with the future in mind. They
don’t have the same stake in it as young people do. I think
that as youth, we have the ability to understand all the stakes,
and also more imagination to believe that a better world is
possible. We have an ability to vocalize the radical changes
that we need in a way that older generations often can’t.
How is climate change directly related to the Oregon
Department of Transportation freeway expansions,
and why did you choose this particular issue to focus on?
Forty percent of Oregon’s reported carbon emissions
come from transportation, and those emissions aren’t
coming from people who walk or bike — they are coming
from cars and diesel trucks on giant polluting freeways
that ODOT is trying to expand. So for me, it’s a combina-
tion of knowing that statistic, but also understanding the
smaller scale impacts that freeways have on communities.
Where were you — both emotionally and physically —
on election night when Kate Brown was re-elected?
In 2018, I was standing on stage behind Gov. Brown
When did things change for you, Brown becoming some-
one you believed in to someone who “let you down”?
It was sort of a slow, over time thing. But it really became
clear when I started organizing with the Youth vs. ODOT
campaign and realizing that Gov. Brown was one of the
people who was pretty directly standing in the way of meet-
ing our demands. I hadn’t really had reason up until then
to pay attention to what she was doing. But that came into
stark focus when we realized that she was basically the
most powerful person in the state and she was OKing all
of these freeway expansions ODOT was proposing. That’s
very contradictory to her supposed values of climate justice.
You have been compared to Greta Thunberg in the
past, what do you think about this comparison?
I don’t love it. I like that the comparison ties what we are
doing to a global movement for climate justice, but I am
my own person. In our society, the media often feels the
need to find the “one perfect hero” — the climate move-
ment has framed Thunberg as that person. The work that
she is doing is great, but there are so many other people
doing that work that don’t get nearly as much credit. I’m
also not doing this work by myself. I would not have been
able to do any of this work without the incredible team of
people that I am working with.
What do you think is the most important thing that
needs to be done to combat climate change?
To stop climate change, our entire society needs to
change the way that we are thinking about these issues.
Climate justice work needs to be centered in all of the
decisions that we are making, but also through an inter-
sectional lens and understanding that it connects to all
these other issues because if we section off climate change
as its own issue, nothing is going to get solved.
Our society has a tendency to put things in boxes, and
I think that’s a barrier to progress because that’s not how
the world works.
What gives you a sense of hope?
Knowing that I am not in this fight alone gives me a lot
of hope. And knowing that even if we do lose, I will have
learned so much and met so many incredible people. We
try to find joy in the advocacy work that we are doing
because if it’s constantly all serious and terrified urgency,
then that’s not sustainable. At a logical level, I do have
hope because I know that there are so many people fight-
ing for climate justice.
What’s next for Youth vs. ODOT?
Youth vs. ODOT is coming up on our one-year birthday
at the strike that is on April 27. It will be our 26th strike,
which is wild to me. It’s been a year, and none of the elected
officials have met any of our demands. But we are not going
away. We are going to continue showing up. Because we
have a bigger stake in this than our leaders do. ■
This story was developed as part of the Catalyst Journalism Project
at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.
Catalyst brings together investigative reporting and solutions journal-
ism to spark action and response to Oregon’s most perplexing issues.
To learn more visit CatalystJournalism.uoregon.edu or follow the proj-
ect on Twitter @UO_catalyst.
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