“Un et deux et trois degrés! C’est un crime contre humanité!” The words echoed off the stone walls and un-shuttered windows of a petite ville on the west coast of France. Armed only with spray-painted cardboard and an insatiable craving for justice, a mass of students pushed down the 900-year-old city’s cobbled streets. Like many that day, La Rochelle joined global mobilization in a climate strike. One, two, three degrees! A crime against humanity! —that’s what they were saying.

In my short time here, I’ve learned how the city approaches sustainability. Public transportation is efficient and centralized, laundry is line-dried, and you pay for every single plastic bag you use. Anti-pesticide groups frequent le centre-ville (center city), water conservation means lightning-fast showers, and the city has even set a goal to be zero-carbon by 2040. Of course, this isn’t to say that France has got the climate-friendly lifestyle locked down. La Rochelle is still flooded by blocks and blocks of fast-fashion, gas-guzzling cars, and lines of people waiting to buy cigarettes—a significant culprit of ocean pollution—from one of the many Tabac windows along the street.

It’s remaining problems like these that la jeunesse marched against that day, shouting endlessly for “justice pour le climat” (justice for the climate). As an exchange student, participating in local protests my second week here was not something I had anticipated. Yet I and a friend—a student from Brazil also studying French at the University of La Rochelle—found ourselves joining about 200 other environmentally-driven students at the school’s library. Scrawled across the pavement in massive letters read “la jeunesse pour le climat”: youth for the climate. From there les manifestants (protesters) began the trek to Place de Verdun— the city’s main public transport terminal—attracting more and more supporters as we went. Along the way, we were charged to fill bottles and bags with cigarettes picked off the sidewalks, by the end, a pile of the waste we’d collected serving as a reminder of the progress made when enough hands come together. Sitting in the streets to stop traffic, we cried how “on est plus chaud de le climat”—we’re hotter than the climate— we won’t be suppressed, we won’t be silenced.

There we were— a Brazilian and an American, amidst a swarm of French manifestants— protesting for the future of our planet. I didn’t feel like a foreigner then. Distinctions like that don’t matter, only my voice joining the hundreds in La Rochelle, the thousands in France, and the millions around the world.  As cliché as it sounds, that day was an affirmation that, even across the globe, we’re not really all that different. And it’s true what they said about being hotter than the climate; this generation is a fiery one.