COP26 live updates: 100,000 march for climate justice in Glasgow

There were the young climate marchers on Saturday. And then the truly young climate marchers.

Like Ewen Corke, 8, of Fife, Scotland, who wore a shirt that read: “Sorry I can’t tidy my bedroom, I am too busy saving the planet.”

Ewen traveled to the protest Saturday with his parents, Liz and Tom, and his 6-year-old brother, Ruis.

They joined a small army of protesters who had brought along their children to witness the moment. Babies in strollers, toddlers riding on their fathers’ shoulders, elementary-school students joining in chants or waving signs including one that read, “I might be small but I can make a big difference.”

“They are getting old enough to understand,” Liz Corke said. “I couldn’t have lived with myself if we didn’t come.”

Nearby, Nori Nicholson, 7, from near Edinburgh, and her brother Ted, 5, walked with homemade Dr. Seuss-themed signs. On one of them, the Lorax says, “I speak for trees.”

“It’s their future we are talking about here,” their mother, Amy, said of why they made the trip. “We can’t be silent.”

Ashley Jackman of Glasgow brought his two daughters — Martha, 9, and Georgia, 5 — to Saturday’s march for a simple reason: “To show them that they have a voice.”

That’s the same reason Molly and Nick Taylor brought their three children — ages 8, 10 and 12 — into the cold and rain to protest.

Their oldest son, Molly Taylor said, has begun to ask why the small actions their family takes matter, when climate change is such a massive, global problem.

She wanted him to see that many people care enough to act and demand change, and to know that although no one person can resolve global warming, “You can always play a part, no matter how small.”

Actor Idris Elba joined COP26 on Saturday to put a spotlight on climate change’s impact on the world’s food supply.

The matter may have seemed a little off-topic for the star of the HBO series “The Wire” and, more recently, “Suicide Squad,” but he said the issue is an urgent one.

“If you’re anything like me and you see a well-known face on a celebrity in a forum like this, you still wonder why they’re there sometimes,” Elba said. “But I’ll tell you why I’m here — why we’re here — is because this conversation around food is something that needs to be really amplified. And one thing I’ve got is a big mouth.”

Elba was appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in April 2020. He visited a project in Sierra Leone, where he met farmers receiving funds and assistance after the Ebola crisis.

“Small-scale farmers deliver 80 percent of the food that we eat,” he said.

Elba said the impact of climate change may not be obvious to us when we walk into a grocery store. As farmers are combating varying rain and soil conditions, crops are affected. One day, Elba said, we’re going to walk into a grocery store and the food’s not going to be there.

Elba then invited 24-year-old Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate to speak.

Nakate, from Kampala, said her country has one of the world’s fastest-changing climates. She said that although Africa is responsible for only 3 percent of global emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases, the climate crisis is causing “withering droughts, catastrophic floods and devastating landslides” across the continent.

“The emissions creating global heating are not just coming from coal-fired power plants and diesel and petrol vehicles,” Nakate said. “Agriculture and land use together is about 25 percent of our global emissions.”

Nakate said the use of nitrogen fertilizers for food production and animal agriculture also increase global emissions. For example, she said, the animal agriculture industry accounts for 15 percent of global emissions and occupies 83 percent of the world’s cultivated land, yet livestock provides only 18 percent of our calories.

“If we want to change towards a plant-based diet, we can save up to 8 billion ton of CO2,” she said. “Not everyone has the ability to make such changes, but most of us could do something, and it is those who have the most power who also have the most responsibility.”

Extinction Rebellion is part of the more radical arm of the climate-change protest movement. Its message: Climate change is an emergency that requires drastic and immediate action.

The group’s tactics test public tolerance for social and economic disruption.

Launched in a small English town in the Cotswolds, Extinction Rebellion has grown in parallel to the climate strike protests inspired by teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. It has attracted not just schoolchildren but also young professionals, parents, grannies and others concerned about climate change and habitat loss. And, pretty much from the beginning, Extinction Rebellion’s strategy has been very different from that of the students skipping school on Fridays to protest peacefully.

To get attention for their cause, protesters have blocked bridges, glued themselves to roads, stripped in Parliament and staged a “die-in” at London’s Natural History Museum. When the group staged protests in London in April 2019, more than 1,000 people were arrested, in a police operation that cost nearly $20 million.

On Saturday, they were chaining themselves across a Glasgow bridge to block traffic. Earlier in the summit, they held a “greenwash march,” where protesters were encouraged to dress in green. Scottish police said that two arrests were made at that rally, after officers were sprayed with paint.

The protesters are walking a tightrope — they want to spark enough disruption to effect change, but not so much that they alienate the public.

By 1 p.m., the marchers were making their way through the center of Glasgow, beating drums, chanting slogans, their flags whipping in the wind.

Camilla Campbell, 28, a waitress at the Finnieston, a restaurant on Argyle Street, looked on with a grin.

“I love this city,” she said. “Look at it out there, pissing rain. Any other city in the world they’d be like, nah, we’ll protest another day. But not Glasgow.”

Across the street, a supportive Glaswegian unfurled a banner from her apartment window.

“Save our planet,” it read, in bright green and yellow letters. The woman leaned out of her window, a small drum in one hand and mallet in the other, and began beating in time with the protest chants.

Thousands of people have joined the protests. Friends have had to shout to hear each other over the chants and songs and wind.

But Hermione Spriggs, 33, reveled in the sodden chaos. “It’s lovely being part of being part of this big blob of humans,” she said.

Spriggs, who runs tracking and foraging workshops in her native Yorkshire, was decked out in a costume made of netting woven with leaves and native grasses. Only her face was visible through the mass of green. When she’s tracking, she said, the outfit helps her blend in. “And it helps us stand out at a protest,” she said.

As she walked through the park with similarly dressed Tamara Colchester, 35, strangers kept stopping them to take photos. The women vamped and laughed.

But at a climate protest, even two foragers clad in clothing made of leaves can find kindred spirits.

Derick MacKinnon, a 39-year-old musician from the Scottish highlands, handed them a concert flier made of biodegradable paper embedded with wildflower seeds.

“Oh, how lovely,” Spriggs cooed, tucking the flier into her costume.

“I’m moved by the way people are gathering here,” Colchester said. “People are meeting who wouldn’t otherwise meet. We’re all here for a common purpose. Weathering the weather together.”

The protesters streamed into Kelvingrove Park from every direction. They traipsed through the mud, occupied a playground and a skatepark, and crammed sardine-like into a marching line.

Grandmothers are wearing small Earths on their heads that read, “There is no Planet B.” Friends have been sharing tall mugs of hot coffee. A brass band played Bourbon Street. One man walked on stilts, near another inextricably dressed as a T. rex. Children look bewildered. Sopping dogs of every breed look miserable.

There are health workers marching for climate justice, and firefighters shouting for climate justice through a bullhorn, and Quakers for climate justice marching peacefully, of course. And countless young people shouting, “We want climate justice!” When do they want it? Now.

Some demonstrators had come to push other causes altogether. Some were advocating for Scottish independence. Some people were protesting Israeli violence in Palestinian territories. The Socialist Workers Party had a recruitment tent.

On King George V Bridge, about a 25-minute walk from the conference venue, more than a dozen protesters used locks and metal chains to link themselves together. They sat in a line across the road, blocking traffic over the bridge.

The protesters were with the group Extinction Rebellion, and they were staging a “Scientist Rebellion” to highlight that climate scientists have known for decades about the catastrophic effects for the planet of burning fossil fuels.

“Scientists know what’s happening, and they’re being ignored. So we’re trying to get the word out,” said a woman who gave her name as Imogen. She declined to give her last name for fear of legal repercussions.

Police have made no arrests so far.

Costumes and creative signs abound at the Glasgow protests.

One man on stilts was bedecked in blue fabric and cloth sea creatures. Several schoolchildren held up a long piece of fabric meant to look like a caterpillar.

Alice Francis and Malcom Strong, from southwest Scotland, arrived pushing a homemade “bulls--- cart,” complete with a trash bin, rake and real manure from their horse Dougal. Strong, a woodworker, was particularly angered by what he deemed problematic forestry practices in Britain.

Humanity — and specifically Britain’s Conservative government — needs to clean up its mess, he said.

In contrast to Friday’s youth protests, foul language and absurdist humor appear to be ruling the day. Another woman carried a long stick topped with a poop emoji plushie — a detector for you-know-what.