I Was Arrested for Protesting Billionaires' Jet Pollution. Here's Why I Did It.

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In April 2024, I was arrested alongside 20 others at Hanscom Field, an airport in Bedford, Massachusetts that primarily serves private and corporate aircraft. We sang as the police arrived, confiscated our fabric signs (including this gorgeous twist on Britney Spears’s “Toxic”), and rounded us up. The song on our lips was a fervent rejection of the airport’s planned expansion of 17 private jet hangars that, if completed, would effectively cancel out over half, if not more, of Massachusetts’ carbon emissions reductions from solar power, according to an estimate from local nonprofit Save Our Heritage. Starting this May, some of my friends who were arrested are slated to go on trial for trespassing and disorderly conduct, while billionaires are free to trespass on the rights of our planet and our people and conduct climate chaos. (The Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) told Teen Vogue to direct all questions about the expansion to the project developers. A representative for the developers did not return our request for comment.)

So many lives have already been lost to climate disasters fueled by a concentration of largely wealthy man-made pollutants in our atmosphere. My fellow arrestees and I were infuriated that the people whose wealth far exceeds whatever wealth the majority of the population can scrape together in their lifetimes would seek to expand the use of their private jets, irrespective of the increases their jets’ excess carbon emissions would contribute to asthma rates, air and noise pollution, biodiversity and habitat loss, and the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. As British climate scientist Kevin Anderson suggested in 2018, if the richest 10% reduced their emissions to the average carbon footprint of an individual in the European Union, that reduction alone could cut global emissions by a third. Luxury emissions from ultrarich lifestyles violate our common right to a livable climate.

Sitting on the sidewalk in the rain, hands cuffed behind our backs, cheeks flushed with the invigorating gratitude one feels when taking a stand alongside loved ones to resist injustice, my friends and I called upon Massport (which operates the airport and backs the expansion project) to do the right thing and halt the airport expansion. We gathered in the downpour to be arrested merely a town away from where Henry David Thoreau resided, who himself was arrested in 1846 for refusing to pay his poll tax to a government that enslaved people. Like Thoreau, we were arrested for disrupting business as usual. In the spirit of Thoreau, we could not sit idly by and watch as private jets take off with our future.