If you don’t want to join the strike this week, you’re living in a bubble. On Friday, your Camosun classmates will walk out, but if you don’t participate you’re living in denial and making climate destruction someone else’s problem. But, to quote 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg at her address to the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, “How dare you?”
It’s never been more important that we stand with the millions of students who have taken responsibility for a problem that has never been theirs and join the walkout, demanding climate justice.
When I was a kid, I learned about the greenhouse effect and that the climate was changing. But here we are, with a decade to stop the devastating climate chaos that is already wreaking havoc in our world. How dare we?
When I saw Thunberg on the news last year, I got nervous. I bought wax wraps for my food and stocked up on reusable bags for my groceries. But here we are, with frequent extreme weather warnings across the world. More than 6,000 people have died in heat waves in India since 2010. How dare we?
When, this summer, Alberta’s wildfire smoke blocked out the sun, the sky was orange, and the air quality was literally off the charts, I got scared. I signed petitions. I shared articles on Facebook. I tried to drive less. But here we are. Greenland lost 11 billiontonsof ice to the ocean in one day this August. More than 28,000 species are threatened with extinction. Trudeau just approved a pipeline. How dare we?
I’m grieving—and I know many of you are too—for the loss of the future we pictured. And when you’re grieving, it can be really hard to show up. But one of the most effective treatments for grief is to find community. If we stand together and demand our leaders take action now, we don’t have to live in fear that our future will be taken from us. We will be able to tell our kids we fought for them.
This is not a problem we caused and it’s not a problem we individually can fix. That used to make me feel powerless, but that was naive. We have always been taught there is power in numbers.
On Friday, September 20, an estimated 4 million people joined the first walkout, kicking off the week’s worth of climate-related events. I dare all Camosun students to join the climate strike at 11 am on Friday at the Camosun fountain on the Lansdowne campus and show the world we stand together and demand climate justice.
After all, what good is a degree if the school you got it from is underwater?
SO GOOD. SO IMPORTANT.