The Stratford District Secondary School Eco Club hosted a climate strike at Stratford city hall Friday evening.
As global warming continues to fuel increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters, a group of Stratford students urged residents and local governments to make climate change part of their daily decision making during a climate strike at Stratford’s city hall.
Hosted by the Stratford District secondary school’s Eco Club, the Friday evening climate strike saw students, environmental activists and other community members gather at the steps to city hall to bring awareness to the existential threats posed by climate change.
“Our focus (at these climate strikes) is usually mitigation because we really need to get at the root cause of climate change, but recently, all throughout the globe and in Canada too, we’ve seen floods everywhere, including our local region. We’ve seen heat waves and we’ve seen droughts,” Eco Club member Sammie Orr told the small group gathered at city hall. “All of these are because of climate change. Although we can’t directly correlate them, we do have evidence that climate change will increase the intensity and frequency of these weather events.
“So today, our focus is to make it clear that we need to adapt because we are now in the time of climate change. It is not a future problem. We are living this crisis.”
While the threats posed by natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires need to be addressed by all levels of government, she emphasized that local governments and the residents they serve also have important roles to play.
“You have power,” she told the Beacon Herald. “It is a global issue, and it can seem overwhelming looking at climate change and thinking, ‘How can I, as an individual, make an impact,’ but we really do need everyone’s help. We need everyone’s support. So even just getting involved locally to make sure that you’re trying to help do your part in the climate movement and reaching out into your government systems to encourage them to take action, taking action yourself is really so important.
“And most important is just to talk about it. Make sure … you’re incorporating environmental sustainability into all aspects of your life.”
Both Orr and fellow Eco Club member Thomas Sheldon participated in a project during the recent municipal election aimed at educating voters about local candidates. As part of that project, they kept track of the promises made by candidates during their campaigns. Now that the election is over, Orr and Sheldon said they plan to hold Stratford’s new council accountable, especially when it comes to the promises made about addressing climate change at a local level.
“We have to remember that we control the government and it’s supposed to act on our behalf,” Sheldon said. “This is something where we have the responsibility to make it clear to our elected officials where we stand and remind them what needs to be done.”
Completely by coincidence, the student climate strike was held on the same day that a local environmental advocacy group, the Perth County Sustainability Hub, organized a protest of roughly 100 people against the Ontario Government’s controversial Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, which is aimed at opening up large swaths of the province’s Greenbelt for housing development.
“It’s actually great that they coincided on the same day and at different times so it kind of extended the amount of noise that we’re making,” Orr said. “Our focus from the beginning was adaptation, but with Bill 23, the fact that it arose during the time we were planning this strike is so evident of how unaware our provincial government is around environmental justice.
“Housing is so important, but we do have other lands we can build on. We don’t have to go into lands that are protected for the environment. We don’t need to create more urban sprawl, which makes the climate crisis even worse. I think the provincial government needs to be more aware of the fact that you can approach homelessness and you can approach the housing crisis … in a more environmentally sustainable way.”