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by Kristen Minogue

Kallan Benson with her family’s golden retriever, Osage. The dog is their unofficial “Climate Anxiety Therapy.” (Credit: Carl Benson)

It would be tempting say Kallan Benson isn’t your typical teenage student. Homeschooled since preschool age, she has plenty of memories of doing homeschool programs at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center with her younger brother, Reese.

“We made toothpaste one time,” she recalled. “Reese’s group, him and two of our other friends, their strategy was just put everything in….Every flavor, they just put it all in. No one wanted to taste it.”

But as an organizer for the grassroots climate group Fridays For Future, Kallan is one of thousands. Possibly even tens of thousands. The tidal wave of students striking to demand climate action is gaining momentum, and Benson is among those leading the charge.

Environmental stewardship has a long history in the Benson house. Her mother, Kimberly, is a former marine scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her father, Carl, helped create the group Climate Stewards of Greater Annapolis out of the Annapolis Friends Meeting House. To top that off, the family has been studying and volunteering at SERC for over a decade. After SERC’s homeschool program ended, they joined scientists searching for “zombie” mud crabs, tending trees in SERC’s BiodiversiTREE forest and Fossil Atmospheres project and tagging saw-whet owls.

Left: The Benson family (Kallan, Kimberly and Reese from left to right) help care for SERC’s BiodiversiTREE forest in 2016. (Credit: SERC) Right: Kallan Benson cleans water in a tank at SERC’s Reed Education Center in 2020. (Credit: Kristen Minogue/SERC)

Fridays For Future began in fall 2018, inspired by then-15-year-old Greta Thunberg’s decision to sit outside the Swedish parliament each Friday to demand climate-friendly policies. Kallan began striking for climate in the U.S. that December, first in Washington, D.C., and later in Annapolis. Fridays For Future doesn’t advocate for a specific policy or party. Rather, their mission statement reads, “We profoundly appreciate all efforts to find solutions to the climate crisis.”

However, last September the group received a curveball when the United Nations announced it was giving Fridays for Future one of its Champions of the Earth awards. Suddenly Kallan and roughly a dozen other student members had less than a week to plan a response. As the group scrambled to write an acceptance speech–using Google Docs, to connect editors from different countries and time zones—a radical idea emerged. They would turn the award down.

Kallan Benson (right) shares a hug with a fellow Fridays for Future striker after the U.N. Champions of the Earth award ceremony on Sept. 26, 2019. (Credit: Carl Benson)

“It was quite amusing, because when we said ‘But we cannot accept this award,’ this gasp went through the room,” Kallan said. While the decision to decline came spontaneously just days before, Kallan said the group immediately united behind it. “We said we would hold the award, to give back to our leaders when they actually took action. Because in our view, we’re kind of the facilitators to grow the political will. But they’re the ones that are really going to have to make large-scale change.”

As to what form that change will take, Kallan said it’s difficult to predict. Switching from fossil fuels to renewables is an obvious step. But what the world will look like 100 years from now depends on which climate impacts can be stopped, and which ones the world will need to adapt to. However, she remains doggedly hopeful.

“Climate activism really helps with some of that climate anxiety,” she said. “It helps you to move forward and feel like you’re actually doing something. But also, it’s a huge issue, which means that our action has to be just as big. We have to be out there.”