In the summer of 2021, Liv Schroeder was working at a snack bar in her hometown of Seattle. What would have been a normal day ended up as a visit to the emergency room because of temperatures that got up to 120 degrees.
“Seattle doesn’t really have that kind of AC infrastructure,” she said. “Since maybe 2019 the heat waves in Seattle have been noticeably bad and getting worse.”
Schroeder, now a junior at Georgetown University, has a chronic kidney condition that makes her prone to dehydration. The summers in Seattle have been getting worse every year she said, and it’s something she has to keep in mind when she goes home.
“I love spending my summers in Seattle, but I know that there’s going to be a period of time where the air quality is going to be really bad and that it’s gonna get really hot and things like that,” Schroeder said.
Last June, she realized how widespread the effects of climate change were becoming when Canadian wildfires brought smoke to the Washington, D.C. area.
“Everyone was like, ‘Oh man, like these wildfires are real now,’ but like on the West Coast this has been happening for like a decade,” she said. “The air in Seattle in August is just ridiculous, they basically tell you basically to not go outside because going outside and going on walks is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes.”
Schroeder turned her concerns into action as the director of Fridays for Future US — the United States branch of the climate strike movement founded by Greta Thunberg — and is now a legal intern at the Natural Resources Section within the Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division.
“I got into it because everyone in Seattle cares about the environment, and obviously I care about the environment so I was like I’ll do this too,” she said. “But then when you have a personal experience like that, adds in a bit of a self preservation factor. It’s kind of like, oh I’ve been doing this work because I believe in it, and I believe in the cause.”