Julia Beatty - Shuswap Climate Action

[upbeat music] But first, we openly and freely acknowledge that we live and work in Secwépemcúl’ecw, the stolen ancestral and unceded lands of the Secwépemc people.

We in the settler community have a critical responsibility to do our very best to resolve this historical injustice in a way that is satisfactory to our indigenous friends and neighbors.

[upbeat music] Many observers have commented that today's high-level political figures appear to be lost and confused, while community-centered citizen activists are really driving meaningful change.

This makes sense because for most of the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens existence, we have lived in small gatherings or communities in which we got to know each other and learned how to cooperate effectively because we could see strengths and weaknesses in our friends and neighbors.

There's something important about knowing people personally when you want to get something done.

Now, in today's turbulent world in which urgent global challenges affect every person in every community, taking action for change is no longer an option, it's a necessity.

Among many challenges, none are more important than the disruptive and destructive impacts we humans are now having on our planetary home and on one another.

Overconsumption of the planet's resources, pollution, gross material inequity, and what is being called the sixth mass e- extinction are just some of the problems we have created.

And underlying them all is something we all experience on a day-to-day basis, a clear-cut and now unmistakable change in the earth's climate.

From melting polar glaciers to heat domes to expanding deserts to devastating extreme weather events, humanity is discovering that we have inadvertently developed the power to change what we might call the planet's metabolism.

We have changed the energy flow and circulation in air and water, and are thus bringing on what we might well be called, calling a progressive planetary fever.

Global climate changes have happened many times in the past, some far more extreme than at the present.

These have all taken place slowly, however, over hundreds of thousands or sometimes even millions of years, allowing living organisms time to adapt.

According to geological and other evidence, apart from the meteorite impact 60 million years ago that eliminated the dinosaurs almost overnight, no change in climate has taken place as quickly as the one we are now causing.

It is the rapidity of climate change that is making life equally dif- difficult for us and all life forms.

The climate crisis is something to which, one way or another, we are all contributing.

The largest contributor to the crisis are widespread use of fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas, whose abundant energy content has played an important role in advancing many improvements in our lives for the last 150 years.

But now the dark side of this process is clear.

Greenhouse gases generated by burning fossil fuels has generated a relentless increase in temperatures on the surface of our planet, an increase that will eventually make the planet profoundly inhospitable for most of today's forms of life, including us.

We owe it to future generations to address this issue, and if our high-level leaders are stalled, then we must take up the challenge at the grassroots level.