December 10, 2025

Joseph speaking at a press conference in Washington, DC, in July 2025 to introduce Our Children’s Trust “Children's Fundamental Rights to Life and a Stable Climate System” resolution alongside members of Congress. Photo by Eillin Delapaz-Aceves.

Joseph’s first memory of nature was when his parents took him to Sequoia National Park. That was the first time he realized how vast the wonders of nature were, “relative to my tiny, itsy bitsy, 5-year-old self.”

An Instinct to Protect

It wasn’t just the size of the forest or the trees that awed him, but the responsibility he felt towards it. “Part of me just had an intrinsic understanding that, you know, obviously, life is beyond just taking care of myself and family,” Joseph says. “To be so young and to appreciate that beauty kind of just instilled in me this protective sense that like, I really love nature and I want to do everything I can to protect it.”

In second grade, after reading an article on climate change, he saw what was at risk. “I was just devastated,” Joseph says. He remembered all of the trips to National Parks, his time playing in his backyard in North Carolina, and hiking in the canyons. “This could be taken away from me,” he realized.

Climate Change is Now

*Joseph taking in nature in Missoula, Montana. Photo by Eillin Delapaz-Aceves.*

Yet, to Joseph, climate change is not just a future at risk. It's his present, too.

Joseph spent the first years of his life in a California neighborhood plagued by air pollution from nearby fossil fuel wells. He was diagnosed with asthma at age three, causing his family to move to a less-polluted city. Nevertheless, Joseph cannot escape the wildfire smoke that infiltrates his home and school, causing spasms in his lungs.

With several medical conditions worsened by climate change and pollution, even leading to hospitalizations, he worries about the climate: “The mental impact and anxiety related to the climate, has just been a large burden on me.”

As a plaintiff in Lighthiser v. Trump, Joseph has been personally affected by the executive orders challenged in the lawsuit. “I was intending to obtain a degree in environmental policy,” Joseph says. “But unfortunately, because of the surrounding circumstances with federal funding and just research opportunities being shut down within my field, I’m in the process of transitioning to an economics major. The opportunities to study this kind of stuff, it’s evaporating essentially.”

Young People’s Place in Democracy

*Joseph in front of the federal courthouse in Missoula, Montana, after a two-day hearing in Lighthiser v. Trump, September 2025. Photo by Eillin-Delapaz-Aceves.*

Though Joseph is old enough to vote, some of his fellow plaintiffs are younger than 18. But Joseph doesn’t believe telling youth to wait to vote is the answer.

“Young people shouldn’t wait for a future that’s going to send them to the hospital... And, it’s just adding salt to the wound with my fellow plaintiffs—they've already gone through so many climate harms, myself included, and for them to tell us to wait in spite of all of that, because for some reason, an age magically translates to a more validated opinion, is absolutely illogical and just is insulting to our own livelihoods.”

“We have a voice, regardless of if we’re young, and I think that makes it more powerful, because we’re going to be the generation that’s going to take over in the next few years [to] lead and manage our governments and systems.”