It is not the old guard leading the local climate activism charge; it is busy working parents worried about their children’s future — and the children themselves.

Three forces seem to be motivating the Island’s two youngest generations: the alarming forecast of a warming planet, its implications for the children of the world and the indefensible lack of federal leadership. The old guard is active as always, a deep core of battle-scarred environmental stewards, yet it is the new energy sizzling across the Island that bodes especially well for the future.

Noli Taylor of Aquinnah is the community food education director at the Island Grown Initiative (IGI) and a mother of two. Her gently persuasive enthusiasm launched the Island Climate Action Network (ICAN) last December. The information clearinghouse and advocacy group is hosting six climate solution talks this fall and winter. They are at work on a roadmap to town meeting, a tool to educate the public on upcoming climate-related town meeting votes, including the Vineyard sustainable energy committee’s nonbinding 100 per cent renewable Martha’s Vineyard warrant article.

On the same day last December that Ms. Taylor formed ICAN, Vineyard Haven resident and architect Ben Robinson, along with his family, was in Washington D.C. with the Sunrise Movement lobbying for support of the Green New Deal. Soon afterward Mr. Robinson, an Island native, got the okay from his colleagues on the Martha’s Vineyard Commission to form a climate action task force. He felt that as the Island’s planning agency, the commission had an obligation to act. Today the task force is developing Islandwide climate change adaptation and energy master plans.

IGI focuses on local food security, a necessity in a climate-stressed world. The nonprofit has set up school and community gardens, a gleaning program, mobile food markets, a food waste collection program and regenerative gardening workshops. They practice no-till farming in the fields at Thimble Farm, a technique that enriches the soil, increases crop yields and captures carbon.

The Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary’s entire middle and high school education program is climate-based. Classes include sea level rise and salt marsh ecology. Another, an Island climate vulnerability assessment, is tailored after the state’s Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program, in which all Island towns participate. A Cape and Islands youth climate action summit is set for next month in Barnstable. Felix Neck education coordinator Josey Kirkland says education and environmental stewardship is the least she can do. “This is the planet I get to live on,” she said.

Samantha Look, also an Island native, is the youth and education coordinator for the Vineyard Conservation Society. For VCS, long involved in climate education, the current focus is on open space protection. Ms. Look, a mother of two, notes that open spaces have economic, environmental and human health values, but because the price per acre of land here is so high, it is a challenge to protect them.

Island native and new mom Kristen Geagan is director of stewardship at the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, which has three ongoing climate initiatives: forest protection, unbuilding and stream restoration. The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank Commission is also unbuilding — removing homes in vulnerable locations and returning the land to its natural state.

Island youth are making booming waves, just like their 16-year old Swedish counterpart, the searingly forthright activist Greta Thunberg.

A group of up-Island middle school students are responsible for a ban on the sale of single use plastic soda bottles, a first in North America. Last year the students lobbied West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah to ban the sale of single use plastic under 34 ounces. Now they are targeting the down-Island towns. Many billions of tons of carbon are released in the production and breakdown of plastic.

Island students recently took part in the New York city global climate march and Boston climate strike.

Regional high school and charter school members of the Protect Your Environment Club, along with Felix Neck, hold Climate Cafes with student-led conversations on topics ranging from energy to waste to climate adaptation. The next café, with a focus on food, is Nov. 17 at 2 p.m. at the charter school.

High school science teacher, Island native and father of three Louis Hall reinvigorated Protect Your Environment, and on Fridays students can be found picketing outside the high school to raise climate awareness.

At the West Tisbury School, teacher Annemarie Ralph reports that her plastic-free kids are creating a climate change keynote — a slide show update of former Vice President Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Sam Hart, Island native, father and Aquinnah resident, is the Islands director for the Trustees of Reservations. He said in the Oct. 17 storm at Norton Point they lost beach from the end of the entrance to the ranger station. “Every day we see something new,” he said. “We try to provide access and also protect the beautiful places; it’s all about balance and climate change adds a new dimension.”

Liz Durkee lives in Oak Bluffs.