On September 20th and 27th at 4:30 PM, students and their supporters from across Grey Bruce will be gathering at the Owen Sound City Hall as part of the third International Climate Strike ( #climatestrike ) where they will sing and chant for climate action.
The Owen Sound Climate Action Team Youth Group and Fridays for Future Owen Sound / BGOS will be in attendance. Among young people singing will be Eloise Farla (age 9). Eloise has been striking with ‘Fridays for Future’ since May 2019. Sonja Ostertag, an environmental scientist and activist, along with concerned parents and supporters are helping to organize the strike.
These strikes are among 4685 events in 142 countries on all continents including Antarctica as of this writing.
Students and citizens are calling for immediate climate action to keep global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celcius, as deemed necessary by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of October 2018 to avoid catastrophic ecosystem collapse. The IPCC states that if we are to have a chance of achieving this, we must cut emissions by 50% by 2030 and to zero by 2050. Immediate, deep and sweeping change must occur at a local and global scale if we are to save our children’s future. Youth have led the non-partisan climate strikes as the climate crisis is seen as a direct threat to their future.
When asked why she is participating in Fridays for Future strikes, Chloe Chevalier, 10, says, “I don’t want to die.”
Local youth have been participating in Fridays for Future school strikes for climate in Owen Sound since the first International Climate Strike on March 15, 2019, when 1.6 million children worldwide took to the streets to call for urgent climate action. Since then, youth and their supporters have demonstrated locally many times, bringing out 77 on the second International Climate Strike May 3, 2019.
As of this writing, over 3,500 events have been registered, and the strikes on September 20th and 27th are expected to break all past participation records. Supporters include Amnesty International, The Pope, HSBC Bank, unions, among hundreds of other organizations. A Digital Strike involving the shutdown of over 6,000 websites including WordPress, Tumblr, Kickstarter, Imgur and BitTorrent is also planned.
Concerned youth and their parents have been meeting regularly since the film premiere of “Resilience” at the Owen Sound Roxy Theatre May 8th, 2019 to brainstorm ways to spread awareness.
Evidence of climate heating and the biodiversity crisis is not only quantified by the IPCC, it is impossible to ignore: Extreme weather events, wildfires, rapid melting, mass die-offs, hundreds of species extinctions daily, and desertification are resulting in drought, famine, violence and mass human migration - all of which hits vulnerable communities hardest.
Further, the climate crisis is a humanitarian and moral crisis. The call for action aims to protect those enduring massive suffering on the frontlines of climate disaster, such as the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have seen their home – the lungs of the world -- set ablaze all for the sake of fast food. Becoming aware of the source of such suffering is a large focus of the climate movement and a further reason to become better informed and support the strikes.
The Fridays for Future school strike movement began in August 2018, when Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg sat quietly on the steps of the Swedish Parliament, skipping school for two weeks with her sign, “Skolstrejk för Klimatet” to protest her government’s inadequate response to the climate crisis.
She says “Why should I care about my future if you do not? Why should I go to school to learn science when you do not even listen to the science?”
Others joined Fridays for Future strikes, spread through social media with the hashtags #schoolstrikeforclimate and #fridaysforfuture. Greta and children the world over have maintained weekly strikes every Friday since.
Greta is now taking a full year off school to advocate for climate action, traveling to North America by sailboat to avoid the massive carbon cost of a transatlantic flight (one transatlantic flight negates the carbon benefit of 20 years of recycling).
Greta Thunberg will be striking in New York City on Friday, September 20, addressing the United Nations Climate Summit Wednesday the 25th, and striking in Montreal Friday the 27th. These actions are part of the International Week for Climate September 20-27 that overlaps with the Summit.
This moment is a unique opportunity to create a roaring upswell of public support for the ambitious climate solutions all levels of government worldwide must embrace to protect our children’s future. Although Canada is in the midst of an election, this event is non-partisan. Politicians and supporters are asked to refrain from displaying party signs or distributing campaign leaflets at the event. Addressing climate change requires political leadership and action but it is not the mandate of the movement to dictate how this is done, only that we must unite behind the science. Now.
Everyone is welcome. Everyone is needed. Find your closest strike or register your own at https://www.fridaysforfuture.org Spread the word.
source: media release