Why I’m Fasting to Demand Bold Action on Climate Change

For one day last week, I didn’t eat anything. From sunset on Wednesday to the appearance of the first stars in the sky on Thursday, I fasted—because I did not know what else to do. I have phone-banked, text-banked, canvassed, and talked to my friends and neighbors to try to bring into being an ambitious federal climate bill, one that protects our communities from climate disasters, delivers good jobs, and helps build a more just society. I have yelled in the streets, held up funny signs, held up accusatory signs, held up plaintive signs, and joined the last 100 miles of a trek from Paradise, California, to Nancy Pelosi’s doorstep, where we left the ashes of a home that had burned in the deadly Camp Fire. 

But it's unclear if the advocacy I and millions of others have undertaken will be enough to convince our leaders to address the climate crisis. The legislation we’ve been working toward is under threat from a few intransigent senators, especially West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. For months now, Congress has been debating the size and scope of the Build Back Better Act, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver transformational investments to tackle the climate crisis, create millions of family-sustaining jobs, and promote economic, racial, environmental, and gender justice. Recently, Manchin declared his opposition to one of the bill’s most important climate provisions, the Clean Electricity Performance Plan, which would incentivize electric utilities to transition to clean energy. 

In response to the stalemate on Capitol Hill, five brave young people from the Sunrise Movement have embarked on a hunger strike that will last until Congress passes, in their words, “the fullest possible federal legislative effort to combat the climate emergency.” Along with members of Sunrise across the country, I spent last Thursday fasting in solidarity with them—and I’ll be doing it again this week, and every week, until the legislation passes.

We are fasting to demand that President Biden and our representatives fight for a livable future for our generation, and those that come after. We know all too well that the choices we make now will shape society’s direction and the health of the planet for centuries to come—and that we have no time to lose in charting a better path. We’re willing to put our bodies on the line to ensure that happens.

At 10 A.M. last Thursday, when I began writing this essay, I typed confidently, “My fast is little more than an inconvenience.” By 4 P.M., I was listless, foggy, and begging out of every possible obligation. Had I continued fasting, as the hunger strikers have, my muscles and mental health would have started to deteriorate in the next day or two. As the weeks go on, the five young people fasting in DC risk organ failure and even death.

As I followed the strikers’ progress on social media, I was shocked to see how quickly and severely fasting affected their bodies. After two days, they reported, they were having to use wheelchairs to cover long distances. One of the strikers, 18-year-old Ema Govea, had covered more than 300 miles, 15 miles a day, during the trek from Paradise to San Francisco. I remember watching with awe as, 12 miles in, she sprinted up the last section of a steep hill and proceeded to absolutely lose it to Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that she now needed help to walk. Last Saturday night, one striker, Kidus Girma, had to be taken to the emergency room. He returned to the White House to continue his fast the next day.

My one-day fast was substantially lower risk, of course. And still, my hunger pangs made me feel the stakes of this moment. I am sick with rage at the powerful few who are once again impeding climate action to please their corporate donors. I am heartbroken that my friends and comrades have to do this. But I am also filled with love for the place I call home, California, which has been lurching from drought to fire to flood since I moved here in 2019. I want to be able to put down roots here long-term, and maybe even raise children here. Will that be possible?

Rebecca Stoner as she begins her second fast | Photo courtesy of Lia Leibman

As I fasted, I thought of the last time I hadn’t eaten for a whole day: Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. I spent this year’s Yom Kippur at a summer camp in Sonoma County that had burned in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. If you wandered off from the circle of shiny, new camp buildings, you could glimpse the fire's remnants: blackened stumps, the charred skeleton of a shed. On Yom Kippur, we Jews fast because life and death are on the line. As we chant together during Yom Kippur services, “On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed—how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die after a long life and who before his time; who by water and who by fire.”

Similarly, the hunger strikers are fasting to remind us of the life-and-death stakes of this moment. Their courage is a reminder that the fate and final shape of US climate legislation will also help determine who will die by water, and who by fire. Who will suffer famine, and who will have clean drinking water. Who will enjoy the privilege of a long life and who may not. The hunger strikers are using their bodies to pose a question many young people have wondered in the face of their elected representatives' inaction on the climate crisis: So, are you just gonna let us die?

Now is our opportunity to pass the historic climate-action legislation our communities desperately need to tackle the country’s interconnected crises—climate change, racial injustice, economic insecurity, and public health inequities. We won’t stop fighting for a Build Back Better bill that includes a package of policies to cut climate pollution in half by 2030, getting us off the path to climate catastrophe. We are determined to reinscribe ourselves—and our country—in the Book of Life.