Blog Post #1
The global youth climate marches on Sept. 20, 2019, brought millions of people into the streets in cities around the world. Young people in New York City marched through Wall Street. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
My daughter opened the very full recycling bin in my kitchen today. “You know this really isn’t going to make a difference, right?”
I thought for a few moments – of the corporations that are emptying colossal amounts of toxic chemicals into rivers and streams, of automobiles producing significant amounts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and other pollution into our atmosphere, of the Dakota Access Pipeline which has had at least 10 spills totaling hundreds of gallons of crude oil since it began operations in June 2017, and everywhere on earth, the ice is changing. Kilimanjaro’s snows have melted more than 80 percent since 1912. Glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya in India are retreating so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035. Arctic sea ice has thinned significantly over the past half century, and its extent has declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years, and the edges of Greenland's ice sheet are shrinking. (Glick 2019)
She placed the bottle in the bin for glass and plastic.
We sighed.
“I thought recycling was making a difference until ten years ago when I learned about the Pacific Gyre.”
She nodded. “We have to try.”
Our world is filled with contentious sides that disagree about how to sustain life and how we should be stewards for the earth, or if we even should. David Courchene, a knowledge keeper of the Anishinabe Nation and founder of Turtle Lodge, an international center for Indigenous education and wellness center in Manitoba, Canada says, “Working in alliance with nature and her natural laws is the key to ensuring our survival. Mother Earth, the root of all life, like all living beings, is a living entity with her own spirit. We need to develop a deeper, more respectful and sacred relationship with her.”
I have begun following Jamie Margolin, a 17-year-old climate justice activist from Seattle, Washington who co-founded Zero Hour. When she spoke before the Foreign Affairs Committee of Congress, she said, “This past July of 2019, Zero Hour organized the Youth Climate Summit in Miami Florida, where we educated and united roughly 350 young people from across the country on climate action. Throughout the entirety of 2019 we have implemented a campaign called Getting to The Roots of Climate Change, where we have trained over 600 youth climate justice ambassadors (and counting) to educate their communities on the root systems of oppression that caused the climate crisis… By 2030 we will have known if we have created the political climate that will have allowed us to salvage life on earth, or if we acted too late… Solving the climate crisis goes against what this country was unfortunately built on: colonialism, slavery and natural resource extraction. This is why youth are calling for a new era all together.”
I listen to Isabella Zizi (Earth Guardians), the Emeryville Shellmound activists, Zero Hour, Greta Thunberg, and Earth Uprising. They speak truth to power about the climate crisis and are unafraid to demand radical change. I need to learn what I can do, even if I have to change everything I do.
