Humanity's Climate Crossroads - By: Steven. H

Milestones

​     Every year we seem to be hit with ever more bleak milestones. From hottest year on record, to lowest volume of ice in the arctic, to the most hectares of forest burnt - the effects of human-caused climate change is having a dramatic impact on our planet and taking a toll on both our environment and infrastructure. For the last couple of decdes we've hade numerous summets like the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and the Paris Climate Accord all aimed at reducing our global emmisons. These summits encourage every participating country to curb their emmisions through a variety of methods like mobilizing monetary funds for developing countries to pursue a low-carbon growth path, creating incentives to pursure the further developement of green energies in developed countries, ripping out fossil fuel plants, and other methods. The thing is, none of these summits have worked. This is because every time we've set an emmisions reductions target, it has never been even close to being met; We've kept polluting at the same rate as before or even more - while small island nations are swallowed by rising tides and developing nations engulfed by famine. As a society, we must do a lot more to develop the necessary infrastucture to support climate action and provide developing nations with the rescources needed for a clean transition to industrialization.

Credit: equiterre.org

Sheila Watt-Cloutier

     Sheila Watt Cloutier is a world-renowned Inuit Canadian enviromental advocate with a background of growing up in with her culture in the frigid climate of north-eastern Quebec and seeing first-hand of the effects of climate change on her way of life and the erosion of her culture within close bounds of the arctic circle. I recently read her book: The Right To Be Cold and it tells us about her Inuit life as a child in the small community of Inuktitut and tells us about how she lived within the environment and how her culture thrived within such conditions until being drastically transformed by the warmer weather. Sheila was fociblily driven from home and family to attend residential schools. Even though life was very tough under such oppressive conditions, she later pulled through and she worked to improve education and awareness about Inuit life and culture, and how it was in great danger in the face of melting ice caps and warming seasons caused by climate change; Some of the examples she highlights is that it was now very dangerous to go on a dogslead to go hunting on ice due to thinner ice, and that the foundations of buildings were falling into disrepair due to having no support from the thawing permafrost. Her book offers great insight into the dire issues facing Inuits (Like having 1/3 of ice being melted since 1980!) from an Inuit perspective and inspires readers to take action on a local level against such an unprecedented crises we face today and will face for generations to come if we don't take sufficient action at vital crossroads for addresing the climate.

​A portrait of Sheila Watt-Cloutier (Top)
Right To Be Cold Book Cover (Bottom)

Reasons to Take Local Action

Credit: Rowena P & Huda C, HEN Team.

...sinks by 10cm a year, we are in dire times and that calls for immediate action by those who have the ability to cut their emmisions - that includes us. If we want to reduce the amount of climate-related fatalities (~150,000 / year), property lost from rising seas, the amount of species lost from habitat destruction (3 species go extinct every hour!), traditions lost from Inuit culture and others, then there is a meaningful reason to do the following to reduce our environmental impact: Flying less, partcipating in conservation efforts, using mass transit, biking, carpooling, buying food that you can finish, resisting buying items to reduce emmisions like resisting fast fasion, raising awareness, and others.

     I'm Steven. H and I come from a community called Oakville whithin the Halton Region in the GTA in Canada. The statistics provided for us from Halton's Climate Collective website show our ecological footprint accurately: In 2017, every household in the region emited 11 tonnes of greenhouse gases each, mostly coming from personal vehicles (We're car dependant as a result of poor urban planning and lack of investment and access in mass transit) and household emmisions. In a time where each year is the hottest in recorded human history, when sea levels have risen at an average of 19cm since 1990, where forest fires have burned a record 1.2 million hectares of B.C.'s forests in 2017, when millions of farmers have been affected by drought in India and when the city of Jakarta...

Credit: Rowena P & Huda C, HEN Team.

Verdict

     It's a real shame of how indigenous groups always only used the rescources they needed and never wasted them, thus resulting with close to no environmental impact, however, we've contribued so much greenhouse emmisions without batting an eye, and affecting the lives of people on the other side of the globe. We need to put more pressure on both ourselves and our governments for those who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change as we might not notice such destructive consequenses in a rich country like Canada but people in poor, rural countries will experience the brunt of our actions if we don't take action as soon as possible.

     I've personally contributed to help the environment by volunteering to help Oakville plant more trees in my scouts group, biking to places I needed to go to in Oakville, and carpooling with friends to go to tutor classes and badminton practice. You've also may have noticed that this blogpost that will be posted in the HCC website I've been writing is to help spread the world about climate change and to inspire people like me in this community to take action on climate change because every person's actions counts on this important crossroad.​

Contributors: Huda C & Rowena P from the HEN Team

Email us at:
Steven H: [email protected] 
Rowena P: [email protected]
​Huda C: [email protected]
HEN: [email protected]

Visit HEN's website: http://haltonenvironment.ca