WIRED25: Stories of People Who Are Racing to Save Us (2024)

“At stake are the lives and safety of these young people,” says Julia Olson, the lead attorney in the case. “This is really their last stand.”

Juliana, who is now 23, agrees. “I want to be a parent and have a family,” she says. “I don’t know if I’d be able to do that unless I felt like our leaders did everything they possibly could to ensure a livable future.” To lose this case, she adds, “would be a huge blow to myself and to my peers who are still holding on to this belief in democracy and justice.” Five of her coplaintiffs weigh in above. —Saraswati Rathod

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Tia Hatton, age 22
When Hatton was young, she and her family weren't necessarily convinced by scientists’ claims about climate change. But when rising temperatures threatened her beloved pastime as a cross-country skier, Hatton dug into the data. She now has a degree in environmentalsciences and works for a land trust in a conservative part of rural Oregon. “This is something that should have been resolved 50 years ago,” she says. “It totallypisses me off that our government knew about it.”

Avery M., age 14
Avery identifies as a “very big animal person.” When she was in kindergarten, she raised $200 for the Snow Leopard Trust. Later she did the same thing for wolves, then salmon. At 9 years old, she testified before her city council in Oregon in support of a climate ordinance. The following year, she signed on to Juliana v. United States. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” she says. “It’s kind of disgusting how slow everything is. We have the world on the line, and it’s been four years.”

Nathan Baring, age 20
Baring grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska. He worries that the formative experiences of his youth—huddling by a wood stove at 40 below, shoveling himself out of snow—are under threat. “We’ve had to repair roads almost every year because of permafrost melt,” he says. “The Arctic is never going to be the same.” Baring’s parents are state employees, which means their salaries are tied to oil revenues. As the US works to end its reliance on fossil fuels, he says, it can’t “just let these oil towns screw themselves. These are my neighbors.”

Kiran Oommen, age 22
Oommen fears for their relatives in hurricane-prone Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and in coastal India, where last year more than 480 people died in flooding and landslides from an exceptionally devastating monsoon season. What scares Oommen most about climate change is its disproportionate effect on marginalized communities. “Having loved ones in these places, it doesn’t feel great,” they say. “What makes it worse is knowing that it’s not just natural changes in the environment; it’s human-caused.”

Levi D., age 12
Levi is the youngest plaintiff in the case. He grew up on a barrier island on the eastern coast of Florida; each year, he and his mother plant beach grass to shore up the dunes. “Every time I see the street flood outside my house, I think about how fragile our barrier island is,” he says. “If sea-level rise continues, that means the island I spent my whole entire life on will eventually go underwater.”

GENETICS

Unmasking Precisely How Human Cells Can Malfunction

Jason Buenrostro

RESEARCHER / Harvard

When Jason Buenrostro started graduate school at Stanford, he became captivated by a problem that had long frustrated researchers. At the time, Buenrostro was already something of a prodigy: A child of immigrants without high school diplomas, he had attended a small liberal arts college and then worked in a lab where he helped invent a new tool for diagnosing cancer and other diseases.

Within weeks of his arrival, though, Buenrostro was singularly focused. The human body is made of trillions of cells, nearly all carrying the same DNA. What makes a kidney cell different from a brain cell lies in which set of genes—out of the roughly 25,000 in the human genome—are active, meaning turned on and doing stuff (undergoing methylation, interfacing with RNA, and so on). If you think of each individual gene as a single book in the library of our DNA, active genes are the books that are open and being read—and those determine not only what a cell becomes (part of your ear or part of your heart) but what it does (e.g., make a certain set of proteins that prevent cholesterol from sticking to an artery wall).