David Suzuki, academic and climate activist, made headlines earlier this year with a sobering statement on climate action: “It’s too late.”
The reverberating panic in activist spaces was immediate: “if David Suzuki’s given up, we’re really screwed!”
Admittedly, he hasn’t given up, per se. But rather than calling for large-scale legal, economic or policy changes — as he has for decades — he is now encouraging communities to build resilience in the face of the climate crisis. Suzuki’s new stance might be apt, as we have surpassed six of the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s nine planetary boundaries which define our habitable Earth: climate change, biogeochemical flows, freshwater change, land system change, biosphere integrity, and novel entities— synthetic chemicals emitted by technological developments. Yet investments in fossil fuel capital continue to grow, alongside climate anxiety and ensuing feelings of defeatism.
By the end of the 2010s, climate activism had obtained immense popularity, especially among youth and students. Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future movement was the most visible of its type — inspiring school strikes, protests, and die-ins by young people around the world. Protests calling for the Canadian government to ban fossil fuels had reached a fever pitch, or so it seemed.
Then, the unprecedented chaos of 2020 changed it all. During these years, the world grappled with illness, social isolation, economic uncertainty, police brutality, and countless other injustices. However, in the face of those challenges, we showed an unprecedented capacity for collective action. The New York Times called the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement the largest protest movement in U.S. history, with between 15 and 26 million participants.
Ironically, amidst all this politicization and protest, the climate movement fell flat on its back.
Although the pandemic is over, climate activism has not recovered. The Canadian Press
calls the current Canadian government “noncommittal about meeting 2030 climate goals” and climate issues have been pushed to the back of the Canadian mind. However, they fuel every other issue we face. The climate crisis is not impending, it is current. Places across the world, including Iraq, Somalia, and the Gulf Coast of the United States, are experiencing extreme natural disasters that herald a new era of climate devastation. Meanwhile, the school strikes, marches, and dialogue around climate action are notably absent from the global stage. In a sense, it is “too late” to prevent the catastrophe we predicted decades ago. But is it too late to call for government action, and to limit the scope of destruction?
To answer this question, I interviewed McGill students from a range of fields and backgrounds. I wanted to know whether climate defeatism has taken hold of our student body and whether McGill students see a path forward through this crisis. I wanted to know whether we, as students and as global citizens, can still be mobilized in the name of climate action.
My first conversation was with Cam*, a U2 student double majoring in Physics and Latin
American and Caribbean Studies. Cam has been involved in climate activism since the age of 12. I asked him what he thought about environmental defeatism.
“The idea that we won’t face catastrophic climate change is a fallacy,” he claimed, “but I am not a defeatist in that I don’t believe there is nothing left to be done.”
It is a daunting thought that catastrophe will strike regardless of the action we take now. Cam knows that “the rest of [his] life will be spent in a constant battle to mitigate the
effects of fossil fuel emissions.” And yet, we can still lessen these effects by taking a stand against the fossil fuel industry. “There’s an infinite amount of difference [between] category 5 hurricanes happening twice a year and four times a year…every human life is a massive difference.” says Cam.
For every degree of warming and every extreme weather event, human lives hang in the
balance. Such high stakes have led to ample debate over the best protest practices; namely, whether or not peaceful protest is enough.
“[New fossil fuel investment] is a crime,” Cam told me, “not just against society but against humanity as a whole. So I think that as citizens of Earth, it’s completely justified to take direct action.”
According to the Activist Handbook, direct action can refer to a range of physical tactics, from civil disobedience to property destruction and violence. In his notable book How to Blow up a Pipeline, climate activist and author Andreas Malm asserts that historically, direct action has proven to be highly effective in toppling status-quo systems, and was instrumental in ending oppressive regimes throughout the 20th century, from racial segregation in the United States to Israeli occupation of Lebanon to South African apartheid.
While direct action involves higher physical and legal risk to protesters, and is not always
popular with the masses, many argue that it is sometimes necessary to make a movement heard. Cam pointed out that “resistance is not the same as assault. The destruction of the physical infrastructure of fossil capital is completely justified, [and] it is something we should be doing more of.”
To investigate the feeling underlying student inaction, I talked to Max*, a U2 Biology and
Philosophy major who characterizes himself as a “realist.” Max is skeptical of the
power of protest, especially radical protest which might alienate those unfamiliar with the movement.
“Government structures are set in place […] and they’re very protected,” Max pointed out,
when asked whether he thinks protests are effective in promoting systemic progress.
“The best way to create impactful change is not to try to dismantle social structures from the bottom up. It’s to infiltrate and move top-down.”
Top down initiatives for climate action have been advocated for and attempted ad
nauseam over the last five-plus decades, to very little success: the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement, arguably the two most prominent top-down climate efforts, have been largely ineffective. John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, in their book The Politics of the Anthropocene, name the 1987 Montreal Protocol for protection of the ozone layer the only example of successful top-down climate action in history. This has pushed many frustrated people to campaign from the bottom up, through protests, civil disobedience, and NGOs. Young people like Cam describe a feeling of obligation to fight for climate action, from whichever elevation they can reach — Max is not one of these people, despite believing in the severity of the crisis.
“Everyone feels [obligated to] do the little things that provoke a more sustainable lifestyle,” he told me. “[But] I don’t think […] I have to go the extra mile.” Some further key insights came from Emily,* a U3 Biodiversity and Conservation major in the Bieler School of Environment. As an American studying in Canada, Emily has a valuable outside perspective on Canadian climate politics. Emily tells me that the current government’s stance on climate action reminds her of many previous U.S. administrations, which she says were characterized by a dissonance between words and actions.
“The executive branch is making speeches about the importance of this or that,” she said, “but it often stops at rhetoric and doesn’t continue into reshaping policies.” As an environment student, Emily’s coursework involves a lot of discussion about climate change, and the myriad potential approaches to the crisis. While she recognizes that full societal upheaval will be necessary, Emily also knows that critical change can also happen on a small scale.
“Speak with people about [climate change…] and [get] them to participate in lowering their consumption with you,” she told me, when asked what McGill students can do about the crisis. “Get them to do actions with you.”
In the face of government inaction, it is difficult to remain hopeful. But while Emily characterizes herself as “somewhere in between” climate optimism and defeatism, she definitely errs on the side of hope.
“There’s no capacity to maintain ‘normal life,’” Emily told me. But there is still room for optimism in her eyes. “The place where [it’s relevant to be] defeatist or optimistic is […] what degree of human rights will maintain themselves during the climate crisis,” she said. “I believe we have the capacity to confront the problems we’re facing.”
Let’s hope she’s right.
*All names have been changed for anonymity