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---
title: Paris Resurfaces Buried Bièvre River to Fight Climate Change
description: Paris buried the Bièvre river in 1912 because of pollution. Now, faced with rising summer temperatures, city hall is working to restore it.
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author: Ciara Nugent
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article:published_time: 2022-01-24T16:14:40.000Z
article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:43:22.943Z
article:section: Climate
og:title: Paris Buried a River More than 100 years Ago. Now it Needs it to Combat Climate Change
og:description: &quot;Cities are learning to live with nature”
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og:image:alt: Workshops of the tanners on the banks of Bievre in Paris, in the district of the Gobelins in 1891
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twitter:title: Paris Buried a River More than 100 years Ago. Now it Needs it to Combat Climate Change
twitter:description: &quot;Cities are learning to live with nature”
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![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt56af49f1dd6f025b/698a210db3fce358d10c8cac/Bievre-Paris-1891.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9)


# Paris Buried a River 100 Years Ago. Now The City Needs To Resurface It to Combat Climate Change

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## Video: Generation Now: The Fight for Climate Justice

[Watch (HLS stream): Generation Now: The Fight for Climate Justice](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/CIHrS8Mv.m3u8) (14:03)

![Generation Now: The Fight for Climate Justice](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/CIHrS8Mv/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2021-11-05. Today’s young people are coming of age just as the stable climate that has allowed previous generations to thrive on our planet begins to visibly break down—and just before our last chance to stop it falls out of reach._


by [Ciara Nugent](https://time.com/author/ciara-nugent/) and [Mapping by Elijah Wolfson](https://time.com/author/elijah-wolfson/)

Jan 24, 2022 4:14 PM UTC

![Workshops of the tanners on the banks of Bievre in Paris, in the district of the Gobelins in 1891](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt56af49f1dd6f025b/698a210db3fce358d10c8cac/Bievre-Paris-1891.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=3:2)

Tanners' workshops on the banks of Bièvre in Paris, in the Gobelins district, in 1891

Tanners' workshops on the banks of Bièvre in Paris, in the Gobelins district, in 1891 Apic/Getty Images

by [Ciara Nugent](https://time.com/author/ciara-nugent/) and [Mapping by Elijah Wolfson](https://time.com/author/elijah-wolfson/)

Jan 24, 2022 4:14 PM UTC

In 1899, a writer for French newspaper _Le Figaro_ surveyed the damage Parisians had done to the Bièvre, a river that for hundreds of years had snaked up through southern [Paris](https://time.com/6124032/paris-electric-flying-taxi-olympics/), joining the Seine near the Jardin des Plantes. “It flows slowly, oily and black, streaked with acids, dotted with soapy and putrid pustules,” [the writer observed.](https://www.paris-treizieme.fr/page4.php?Z=bievre-1899) “In the sparse and sordid grass, peeled like the back of a worn-out horse, parasitic plants grow in abundance.”

The waterway, averaging 13 ft. in width, had featured in Renaissance poetry by François Rabelais and in Victor Hugo’s _Les Misérables._ But as the Industrial Revolution took off, masses of tanneries, dyers and laundries used and abused the Bièvre’s waters, leaving it resembling an open-air sewer, which authorities decided to pave over. “Tomorrow,” _Le Figaro_ mourned as the 20th century approached, “this once ‘beautiful river’ … will be walled up and bewitched like a sorceress during the middle ages, and in this strange and desolate valley … a new district of tall and flaming buildings will rise.”

Paris’ last stretch of the Bièvre was sealed up in 1912\. Since then, a deep-rooted cultural fascination with the lost river has powered several heritage campaigns to reopen it. But none have succeeded: its waters no longer even run under the city, having been cut off at towns closer to its source, 13 miles southwest of Paris.

Today, though, the Bièvre has an unlikely ally: climate change. The same industrial activity that destroyed the river has helped drive global warming, with Paris’ average temperature already 4.1°F (2.3°C) higher than in Rabelais’ day. The[ urban heat-island effect](https://time.com/6078019/city-heat-climate-change-inequity/), in which buildings and paved roads absorb more heat than vegetation and water do, is making matters worse, driving Paris’ temperature [up by as much as 14.4](https://www.apc-paris.com/publication/brochure-lilot-chaleur-urbain-a-paris-microclimat-coeur-ville)°F ([8°C](https://www.apc-paris.com/publication/brochure-lilot-chaleur-urbain-a-paris-microclimat-coeur-ville)) than nearby rural areas during[ heatwaves](https://time.com/6093845/how-heat-hurts-the-economy/). By the mid-21st century, according to[ local government estimates](https://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/en-2050-paris-pourrait-connaitre-le-meme-climat-que-seville/), Paris could have a climate resembling the much hotter city of Seville in southern Spain.


“We have to adapt Paris to the future and yet, this is one of the [most densely populated](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20200430-1) cities in the world, and on top of that, it’s a historic city with lots of heritage restrictions, so we are limited in what we can do,” says Dan Lert, Paris’ deputy mayor for climate, water and energy. “La Bièvre is one of the great tools that we have.”

![Tannerie au bord de la Bievre / La Bievre et les tanneries. A l'heure actuelle](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfdc062ca2a491705/698a210c457a528c90d65f1c/Bievre-Paris-1860.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp)

The Bièvre in the 1860's Sepia Times/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

### **Living with nature**

Bodies of water, just like trees and plants,[ help to cool down their surrounding areas:](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095311913605432) water absorbs heat from the air, and when water particles evaporate, they carry the heat away with them, lowering the ground-level temperature. They can also mitigate floods by giving excess rainwater somewhere to go, and make cities a more pleasant place to live. So it makes sense that Parisians would welcome the return of a long-lost waterway. Paris’ Green Party proposed “the rebirth of la Bièvre” during the campaign for elections last year, and [Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s](https://time.com/5864707/paris-green-city-2/) Socialist Party agreed to pursue it as part of a coalition deal. A feasibility study is underway and Lert expects to complete the first section within city limits by the end of the mayor’s current term in 2026\. It will join several stretches of the Bièvre uncovered over the last few years in smaller towns, in parks and other underdeveloped areas.


The Bièvre is far from the first urban river to get a new chance at life in the climate change era. A movement to “daylight” rivers has been building for roughly a decade. In[ 2014,](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/29/river-runs-global-movement-daylight-urban-rivers) Auckland, New Zealand, stripped away thousands of cubic meters of clay and pipes to uncover streams in its city center. In May of this year, a construction team in Manchester, U.K. [uncovered a downtown section ](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/first-glimpse-one-manchesters-founding-20674913)of the River Medlock, which was buried in an underground tunnel 50 years ago. Authorities in New York City [are currently studying](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/nyregion/tibbets-brook-bronx-daylighting.html) a $130 million plan to reopen the Tibbetts Brook in the Bronx, which was enclosed in a drain around the same time as the Bièvre, to help mitigate growing flood risks.

**_Read More:_**[_City Heat is Worse if You’re Not Rich or White. The World’s First Heat Officer Wants to Change That_](https://time.com/6078019/city-heat-climate-change-inequity/)

The trend represents a reversal among urban leaders, who for centuries saw limiting nature’s footprint as crucial to development, says Snigdha Garg, head of adaptation research at C40, a coalition of 97 cities seeking to be climate leaders. In July, Paris, along with 30 other major cities, [signed a C40 pledge ](https://www.c40.org/declarations/urban-nature-declaration/)to expand blue and green spaces by 2030, either to cover 30-40% of city surface area or to make sure 70% of city residents are living within 15 minutes of them.


“We are seeing that it’s moving away from nature—whether that’s the true course of a river or where trees should be—that is causing many of our problems,” Garg says. “And now, gradually, cities are learning to live with nature.”

### **Keeping the AC off**

On July 25, 2019, Paris recorded its highest temperature in history, at 108.7°F (42.6°C). A government study [published in September](https://cdn.paris.fr/paris/2021/09/22/6a5f415362b3420307bd2b247a3ede1f.pdf) predicts that unusually intense and long heat waves, which the city endured in 2018, 2019 and 2020, will likely become common in summertime within a few decades, potentially stretching into spring and autumn.

Paris must adapt to its new climate, but city officials are keen to avoid one measure in particular. “We want at all costs to prevent Parisians resorting to[ individual air conditioning systems](https://time.com/6077120/how-the-extreme-heat-in-the-pacific-northwest-is-taxing-electric-grids-and-peoples-air-conditioners/); unlike U.S. cities, it’s not yet an established custom here,” Lert says. Though hotels, shops and restaurants sometimes offer AC, it remains exceedingly rare in Paris’ private homes, which were mostly built in a pre-AC era.


**_Read More:_** [_Extreme Heat in the American West Shows Climate Change is Here_](https://time.com/extreme-heat-climate-change/)

While they may cool the inside of a building effectively, AC units also belch heat out into city streets. A city-commissioned study found that if use of individual units became widespread across Paris, it would increase the outside temperature by 3.6-5.4°F (2-3°C) during heatwaves. That’s not even to speak of [the surge in greenhouse-gas emissions](https://time.com/6077220/air-conditioning-bad-for-planet-how-to-fix/) that would come from an increase in AC usage, which would threaten the city’s 2050 net zero target.

Instead, to keep Paris cool, officials want to rely largely on greenery (with [170,000 trees ](https://www.latribune.fr/opinions/tribunes/municipales-2020-planter-170-000-arbres-a-paris-en-6-ans-est-ce-faisable-841349.html)to be planted by 2027) and the city’s rivers. Paris has a district cooling system—an environmentally friendly technology that uses water or another medium to move heat from hotter areas to naturally cooler ones—that’s [the largest in Europe](https://www.climespace.fr/en/climespace-the-european-leader-of-District-Cooling-and-cold-distribution). Built in 1991**,** it pumps chilled water from the Seine across 56 miles (90 km) of pipes to cool hotels, department stores, offices, museums and more. Over the next 20 years, the city[ plans to triple](https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/energie-environnement/engie-conserve-le-reseau-de-climatisation-de-la-ville-de-paris-1370131) the length of the network and hook up all of its hospitals and healthcare centers.


A push to clean up rivers will also give Parisians more opportunities to take a dip. By the 2024 summer Olympics, the city wants to realize the long-held dream of making the Seine swimmable. Years of incremental improvements to water quality, thanks to better waste management, have already allowed the city to open, in 2017, a free-to-use swimming area in the eastern Canal Saint Martin: the pool’s waters are separated from the rest of the canal only by [a mesh filter](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-19/after-water-quality-fixes-a-paris-canal-is-swimmable) to keep out leaves. It receives around 100,000 visitors every summer. To allow swimming in the Seine—a much bigger and harder to control waterway—the city is taking a bolder step: constructing [a 46,000-cubic-meter underground water tank ](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-04/how-paris-plans-to-make-the-seine-swimmable-by-2024)currently in the works near the Gare D’Austerlitz, a central train station. During storms, the tank will store excess water, preventing sewers from overflowing and spilling harmful bacteria into the Seine.


### **A symbol of progress** 

The Bièvre also owes its likely rebirth to improvements in water quality. Throughout the 1900s, the foul contents of the river prompted smaller towns along its course to pave over it or divert it into pipes. But over the last two decades, the regional Seine-Normandie Water Agency has worked to fix poorly made pipes that leaked wastewater into the Bièvre, and tightened monitoring of the homes and businesses located along its course. The water quality is now good enough that several towns have been able to uncover stretches of the river, each citing heat and flood risks from climate change as the reasons to do so: at L’Haÿ-les-Roses, 3.5 miles from southern Paris, [in 2016](https://www.valdemarne.fr/vivre-en-val-de-marne/informations/renaissance-de-la-bievre-les-travaux-se-poursuivent-a-arcueil-et-gentilly); at Massy, 8 miles away, [in 2018;](https://www.telerama.fr/sortir/a-massy,-la-bievre-retrouve-son-cote-sauvage,n5698431.php) and at Jouy-en-Josas, 11 miles away, in [May](https://www.leparisien.fr/yvelines-78/jouy-en-josas-la-bievre-reverra-la-lumiere-en-mai-15-03-2021-8428602.php) of this year.

In the spring of 2022, Arcueil, a densely populated suburb just outside Paris’ city limits, will reopen a 0.37 mile (600m) stretch of the Bièvre, at which point its waters will also begin flowing through underground channels in Paris, meeting the Seine again (and technically contributing a little water to the district cooling system). The water will be diverted to a treatment plant during rainy weather. “The fact we can do this shows we’re going in the right direction on water quality,” Lert says.


The first Parisian section of the Bièvre to reopen will be in Parc Kellerman, a public park on the southwestern edge of the city. It would take two or three six-year mayoral terms, Lert says, to uncover all the possible sections of the river—those that won’t require demolishing buildings or other infrastructure—up to where it meets the Seine. The initial projected cost is around 14 million euros ($15.8 million at current exchange rates): half to be paid by city hall and the other half to be split between the greater Paris metropolitan authority and the regional water agency.

**_Read More:_**[_How Can Cities Keep Subways Safe in an Era of Climate Crisis Flooding?_](https://time.com/6095111/subways-climate-change-floods/)

Daylighting a river is almost always an expensive process, according to C40’s Garg. But, as with many costly climate adaptation projects, “the cost of damages, from heat and flooding, will be even higher if you don’t do it,” she says. For example, in 2005, Seoul built a $900 million artificial version of the Cheonggyecheon stream on the course of the original river, which had been covered up by a highway during the 1970s. The new waterway, which diverts water from an underground river, acts as a major flood-relief channel, capable of protecting the surrounding area from a 200-year storm. The Cheonggyecheon has also become a major tourist attraction, receiving 60,000 visitors a day, and is credited with revitalizing an economically moribund neighborhood. “Financially, there’s a clear case for these projects,” Garg says.


For Parisians, the rebirth of the Bièvre also represents a chance to assuage a distinctly French cultural guilt over its destruction. “The Bièvre disappeared because of the disregard of residents,” three local historians bemoaned in [a book about the river](https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Sur%5Fles%5Ftraces%5Fde%5Fla%5FBi%C3%A8vre%5Fparisienne/GegiAQAAIAAJ?hl=en) published in 2002, during the last push to reopen it. “Just maybe, the new interest in the river will open a new era, in which humans will learn to live while respecting their environment.”

**_Correction, Jan. 24:_** _The original version of this story misstated which political party proposed uncovering the Bièvre during the 2021 Paris election campaign. It was the Green Party, not the Socialist Party._


## Transcript

[Namrata Iyer]: I think some of the biggest challenges my generation faces is convincing the previous generations about why it's important to talk about what we believe in. [Greta Thunberg]: We can't choose between us young people saying to adults you must behave but we can't wait for us to become the ones in charge because we don't have time for that. [Timothée Chalamet]: Your youth does not have to work against you by way of experience, your youth can be a virtue by way of what you ethically and earnestly expect of the world. [Billie Eilish]: People can be so selfish about the environment and their experience versus the globe and literally our lifespan.

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]: The America we grew up in is like nothing like the America our parents or grandparents grew up in. [Nyke Slawik]: When you have young people who are confronted with not having a future at all of course this is going to radicalize a whole generation. This is a question of survival basically. [John Kerry]: I don't doubt that we will get to a net zero carbon economy. Will we get there fast enough to heed the science and avoid the worst consequences? That's the battle. That's what we're trying to do with Glasgow. [Thunberg]: What do we want? [Audience]: Climate justice.

[Thunberg]: When do we want it? [Audience]: Now. [Thunberg]: What do we want? [Audience]: Climate justice. [Thunberg]: When do we want it? [Audience]: Now. [Thunberg]: Thank you. [Justin Worland]: This generation has reframed the way we talk and think about climate to make it an issue of intergenerational justice. The question is will this anger turn into action? Will leaders who have been listening actually take the message to heart and do something about it? [Kerry]: Our diplomacy is guided by what the scientists are telling us we must achieve. Three years ago they had a report in 2018 the IPCC gave us 12 years within which to make the critical decisions to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.

[Hoesung Lee]: Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is not impossible but will require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society. [Worland]: It was alarming in its the seriousness with which it portrayed the consequences of climate change. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people migrating. We're talking about the possibility of countries disappearing in their entirety. We're talking about a world that is totally transformed. Already 85 percent of the world's population has been affected by human-caused climate change. [Jim Skea]: The message is over to governments at this stage.

We've told you what you—the scientific facts, the evidence, the costs. It is up to the governments now to decide what to do with it. [Ciara Nugent]: We've had loads and loads of reports about climate change over the last couple of decades and the massive threat to our planet but despite all of the science there are still people who are skeptical about how much of a big deal it really is. And I think for those people it's much harder to dismiss young people, normal school kids because they're part of their communities, they're part of their families often. [Nyke Slawik]: What we need is politicians who implement the policies in their home countries and that's—that's what has not been happening in the last years.

And so now young people are saying why go to school? Why go to university? Why start planning a family? Why buy a house when I don't even know that in 50 years time or 70 years time I will still have a future, because right now that's at stake. [Ocasio-Cortez]: If we do nothing this is what's going to happen: sea levels are going rise, crops are going to die out, there will be mass starvation. There's going to be all of these things that are going to happen and kids see that, they internalize it. [Charlotte Alter]: Researchers have found that young voters form their lifelong political attitudes in response to the events of their early adulthood, mostly late teens into the late 20s.

And for millennials and gen z that period of time has been defined by climate catastrophe. [Christian Hidalgo]: I'm from Bakersfield, California, central valley. Earlier today I've been getting snapchats from all of my friends talking about how orange the sky is because of the wildfire surrounding us. The closest wildfire is probably not even 60 miles away but we have horrible air quality like we're—I'm in the middle of the valley and it just it really strongly affects us and that's what—that's what's drawn me to climate activism. [Isabella Guariniello]: This is my first strike ever. I watched a bunch of like sad penguin videos on YouTube and I started to get really sad when I learned about the effects of animals and like how much earth that we're actually losing.

It's hard not to get discouraged when you're constantly learning about what people before you did wrong. [Sassy Fernandez]: Like I remember being in elementary school and watching Al Gore's documentary about climate change and the effects that we could be seeing within the next 10, 15 years and so far he's been pretty right about everything that he said in his documentary. I totally forgot what it was called but shout outs to my science teacher. [Thunberg]: We are being betrayed by those in power and they are failing us but we will not back down. And if you feel threatened by that then I have some very bad news for you.

We will not be silenced because we are the change and change is coming whether you like it or not. We need to work together intergenerational of course that is the only way and we need to—everyone needs to participate and help out in the way we can. So I'm doing what I can. I'm trying to use my voice to spread awareness and to—to put pressure on those in power. [Alter]: When TIME put Greta on the cover in 2019 she had just gone from being a school girl protesting alone outside of Swedish parliament to being the leader of a global climate movement. That year her activism inspired four million people to join the global climate strike in 2019 which was at that point the largest climate movement in world history.

[Worland]: Across the world with very few exceptions there are examples of people who have been inspired by her and have led—who've taken up the mantle the Fridays for Future movement in countries across the world. [Thunberg]: I'm not a leader or the face of the climate movement, I'm just one of many faces. [Vanessa Nakate]: There are far too little evidence of the 100 billion dollars per year that was promised to help climate vulnerable countries to meet these challenges. In fact, those funds were promised to arrive by 2020 and we are still waiting. [Nugent]: Vanessa Nakate, a Ugandan climate activist, is one of many people who have been working to remind us that climate action is going to be expensive and many countries who are most vulnerable to climate change can't afford to pay for it alone.

[Nakate]: Historically Africa is responsible for only three percent of global emissions and yet some Africans are already suffering some of the worst and brutal impacts of climate change, so to me climate justice doesn't just have to be about reducing greenhouse gas emissions it goes beyond the primary disasters that we see. It is what happens in the aftermath of those disasters, what happens to families, what happens to individuals, what happens to communities. [Worland]: You think about the fact that the U.S. has emitted a quarter of emissions historically. Africa has emitted three percent of emissions historically and the U.S.

is able to isolate itself, to pay for adaptation, to pay for the costs in a way that developing countries in sub-saharan Africa and across the globe just can't. And so climate change is a justice issue on many different levels. [Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala]: We we have to bear in mind that whether you're rich or poor, a rich country or poor country, there are some things you just cannot do on your own. You can't deliver on this pandemic on your own, you cannot deliver on climate change on your own. [Nakate]: So what we really want is a future that is healthy, that is sustainable, that is clean, that is livable and equitable for all of us.

[Nugent]: Some of the activists that I speak to are realizing they can't wait for the older generation to take action so they're trying to get elected to governments themselves. In Germany, the Green Party has really been in the ascendancy. In September they've almost doubled their number of seats in parliament and one of the 118 lawmakers they now have is Nyke Slawik. She's a 27 year old German politician who was elected in September to the Bundestag and she has been involved in climate activism for almost 12 years and now she has political power to make a difference. [Slawik]: The time of just implementing small changes has passed and this is a reality we as younger politicians are bringing with us to the parliament now but of course there's lots of older colleagues who have not quite grasped this yet, and I think this is why we might be more determined to not go for the small compromises, to be a bit more rebellious about these things.

The last German government has decided to exit coal in 2038 which is still too late way too late but now we even have the chance to accelerate energy transition from coal to renewables way quicker and that's a major achievement of the youth climate movement. [Alter]: In the United States young voters across the political spectrum understand that climate change is a major issue that needs to be addressed, they just disagree on how best to do it. So even younger Republicans, Republicans under 40, they understand that climate change is happening, they understand that something has to be done about it, they just don't agree with their more progressive peers about the scale and scope of what that intervention needs to be.

So this is a big shift from a couple generations ago when you had one side insisting that climate change was a problem and the other side basically denying that it was happening at all. [Worland]: When TIME spoke to Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, he spoke about how the youth movement had made him want to do better. When I talked to the U.N. Secretary General he talked about how he was trying to bring youth into the climate discussion because it had enthused him and he thought it would help change the conversation. Talking to members of Congress about how inspirational Greta was really made clear to me that she was changing the conversation.

[Nugent]: In my reporting activists are telling me that COP 26 is a crucial moment to find out if politicians are really listening to them and really taking action or if they're just saying they're listening and delaying action. [Nakate]: Leaders keep praising young people for standing up and protesting but saving the world needs action, it needs decisions from the leaders, decisions that prioritize the lives of the people and the planet, and that is not something that we are doing. The words of the leaders are not matching up with their actions. [Thunberg]: Words. Words that sound great but so far has led to no action.

Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises. Of course we need constructive dialogue but they've now had 30 years of blah blah blah and where has that led us? [Jane Goodall]: I'm about to leave the world and leave it behind me with all the mess whereas young people have to grow up into it. That's why they need every bit of help they can. And if, you know, if they succumb to the doom and gloom ,which many have, then they lose hope. If you lose hope that's the end, because if you don't hope that there's a way out, if you don't hope that your actions can make a difference then you sink into apathy and do nothing.

So hope is absolutely crucial if we're to get through this. [Singing]: We're going to strike because our waters are rising. We're going to strike because our people are dying. We're going to strike for life and everything we love. We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike because our waters are rising. We're going to strike because our people are dying. We're going to strike for life and everything we love. We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us?

Beautiful.

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