Building a Climate Movement in the Gulf South

A year ago, I would not have considered myself an organizer by any means. At the time, I was a college student and food service worker, feeling lost in our direction not just as a country, but as a planet. 

It didn’t make sense to me why extractive industries seemed to be prioritized over human health and the natural environment. It didn’t make sense why the billionaires and their immensely profitable companies needed tax breaks and write offs, while my friends and my neighbors seemed to struggle so much with affording the essentials of life. And it definitely didn’t make sense why we were committing atrocities in other countries in the name of American Greatness.

For years now, the climate and progressive movements have faced significant challenges in translating momentum into meaningful change. Despite large-scale marches and passionate demonstrations, tangible policy outcomes have remained elusive. And while leaders have spoken to the urgency felt by so many, there is a growing sense among supporters that words alone are no longer enough.

What could we do? What could I do? I was just a worker. Just a student. Just one person.  It was when I felt most lost that, through a series of seemingly small, random choices, I joined Ignition Front. 

Ignition Front is a national youth movement that builds up leaders to confront the injustices bred from fossil fuel extraction, and also to challenge its members to envision the better world we know is possible. We are an organization born from the success and failures of the climate movement, renewing the climate fight for our generation, eager and unyielding in our pursuit of liberation.

Through political education, science, and the history of past movements, we give our members the tools to identify our targets for collective action to combat climate change at the local and national levels.

Ignition Front recognizes that the domestic and international crisis we are confronted with cannot wait any longer for a solution. At home in Houston, we see neighborhoods riddled with devastating health problems caused by power plants and fossil fuel infrastructure in their backyards. Our politicians co-conspire with liquid natural gas corporations; money in exchange for power, in exchange for more money, driving us deeper into man-made suffering as CEOs and politicians line their pockets.

We have watched for too long as the smallest, richest group of people in America pillage, plunder, destabilize, and massacre entire populations. We see the people of Congo, enslaved on their own land for minerals to benefit the western world. We see the typhoons in the Philippines that destroy whole cities, intensifying with the development of AI. We see the ravaging of the Amazon and contamination of our earth’s life-sustaining pillars from mineral mining.

We see it all.

But we also know that we the people have the ability to disrupt this system of harm and oppression. Through the mass movement that Ignition Front is building, we know that we can leverage our power and resources as the people against these seemingly insurmountable forces. 

So we have gathered at universities and on the streets, and we have recruited those with the power and the will to fight alongside us. The movement is now budding, and chapters are present in over half a dozen cities, including New York City, Boston, Chicago, and in cities like Houston and Corpus Christi,where fossil fuel infrastructure is industrializing at a rapid rate.

However, our movement has not been without our internal struggles. What we have gained in strategic knowledge and concentrated power, we still lack in mass forces. Our organization is small and growing, but we are committed to the development of a structured movement with educated masses that operates from measurable data and goals. 

We are currently looking forward to our national Earth Day To May Day week of action- a series of teach-ins, community events and direct actions that will officially introduce Ignition Front to the world. This will be a great opportunity for chapters across the country to connect with their communities and strategize around the frontline fights going on in their regions. As the Earth Day 2026 theme—Our Power, Our Planet—offers, we do have the capacity to shape our world through our actions, ideas, and dreams.

Our movement has only just begun, but just as the movements of those who have come before us, we are strengthened by each other, and made stronger by the wisdom of past leaders. By their contributions, their struggles, their sacrifices, and their undying love for the better world they hoped we would create. Our reality today is governed by these past movements, but the reality of tomorrow is shaped by the way we choose to govern ourselves today. In this way, each new generation stands on the shoulders of the last, with certainty that their reality is the culmination of our efforts.