– Audre Lorde

Albert Lalonde, co- spokesperson for the 2019 student movement Pour le Future de Montreal (PLF) since its inception, agreed to speak with me about his experience: “The first call to protest was for February 15th 2019 through an anonymous Instagram story, and suddenly we were 400 kids skipping classes protesting downtown,” he recalls. On September 27 of that year, more than 500,000 people mobilized in the streets of Montreal, demanding climate justice; which at the time, was the biggest climate-related protest in Canada since Earth Day in 2012.

I remember 2019 vividly: I was 15 years old when I first heard Greta Thunberg’s Stockholm speech, famously denouncing global leaders and their lack of action in the face of the climate crisis. I was outraged. This speech marked a shift in much of my generation’s collective consciousness. Adults and leaders of the world were largely not stepping up; radical action had to be taken, and this fight would have to be led by us, the youth. At only 17 years old, Lalonde helped create a movement led by high-school students that disturbed the status quo, bringing the issue of climate change to the forefront. “We were going against all these different levels of authority: our parents, our teachers, principals, the school board, including theMinister of Education.”

Today, however, this sense of responsibility towards future generations seems to have been erased from our collective memory. In October, I posted a questionnaire on Instagram, asking people I know between the ages of 18 and 24 years old to describe how they felt about the current state of the world and the environmental crisis. It quickly became clear that the overwhelming majority felt helpless, describing themselves as anxious, scared, tired, stressed, hopeless, and doomed.

This September, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a report sounding the alarm about the increasingly unavoidable overshoot of the Paris Agreement limit, a legally binding international treaty aiming to hold our global temperatures to 1.5 °C. It urged the need for immediate, drastic mitigation efforts from governments worldwide. In contrast, over the past few years, there has reportedly been a downward trend in engagement for environmental mobilization. Now, according to GlobeScan and BBMG, 42 per cent of youth (between 18 and 24 years old) were disillusioned with individual action in 2024, up by 24 per cent since 2020. The report suggests this decline is due to young people feeling more and more powerless in the face of climate change.

Considering the global socio- political context of the past few years, this is not all that surprising. “In times where there is more urgency, the climate always falls to the wayside,” says Dr. Sejhal Bharghava, a young global health advocate and family doctor based in Ottawa, who agreed to discuss the issue with me after guest lecturing at McGill. Bharghava who is involved in many climate action organizations around the country, does not blame youth for choosing to step back from the overwhelming issue that is the climate crisis: “How much do people expect young people to do? We’re in school, we’re unemployed, we have debt and in our spare time you want us to fix your mess?” It is no longer effective to just tell people about how bad things are; instead, Bharghava strongly believes “we need to present people with a vision of what we can move towards.”

The CEVES — a student-led Quebec sustainable action collective that included organizers from PLF — did have a vision to share. In 2019, students behind this collective including Lalonde were preparing to call for an unlimited strike where they would host workshops on different school campuses and share perspectives on how climate justice could become part of school curriculums. However, these promising plans came to a halt when the global lockdown was called two weeks before they were set to strike. Between 2020 and 2022, core organizers started to experience burnout, making attempts to build on the movement’s momentum difficult.

Lalonde, along with many other young PLF participants, decided to focus his attention on more local issues. “One thing that we saw during the pandemic is that all of these networks didn’t just vanish. They just transferred onto other projects and work that, in many ways, are more rooted.” Indeed, all the young and motivated people who had been engaged in the cause had come too far to do nothing with all the valuable knowledge gained. Many shifted their efforts towards issues such as indigenous sovereignty, migrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and Palestine. In that way, these young PLF organizers have remained active in their fight for justice, and — by extension, environmental justice — at a grassroots level.

At 24 years old, still motivated by the issue of the climate crisis, Lalonde is actively working alongside Our Children’s Trust, a coalition of young plaintiffs (some of which were part of the CEVES) suing the federal government for their lack of commitment toward solving climate change. Though this lawsuit has been ongoing for 7 years, the Federal Court is only now proceeding to a five-week trial that started on October 26 in Vancouver. Despite the disappointing conclusion to the PLF movement’s promising prospects, Albert still affirms that the solution to this deep feeling of doomism among the youth (the belief that catastrophic outcomes of global crises are inevitable) is to get out there and do something.And, fortunately, many young people are.

Sustainable Youth Canada (SYC), a non-profit organization led by youth for youth, organizes climate-related events across the country, hosting workshops in schools and communities, as well as providing policy writing and consultation opportunities. In our email exchanges, Sara Carling and Allie Wang, co- directors of SYC in Montreal (SYC’s oldest and most established Canadian branch) say that people get involved on a volunteer basis as youth-climate activism lacks funding. Though they notice that news related to climate change is rarely positive, Carling and Wang contend that engaging with SYC allows them to “have a different perspective, and see people working alongside each other towards making positive change.”

Bharghava is part of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), an interdisciplinary group uniting health care workers in Canada to connect the dots between the impacts of climate change and human health to governments and the general public. “I think finding community is huge. I know it’s said a lot, but truly, joining CAPE was the best thing I could have ever done for my mental health and my sustainability and resiliency in this movement, because it gets hard,” she admits. People who stay engaged in these important issues continue to be hopeful, even if that sometimes feels radical.

When we turn to the rest of the world for evidence of hope and important activist work, we can find it everywhere. As many of us find ourselves grappling with eco-anxiety or a general sense of doom, let us use these inspiring people and movements as a reminder that we don’t have to deal with these emotions on our own. The healing nature of community cannot be underestimated as an antidote to doomism: “Community isn’t very far and you don’t have to look very hard foritbutyoudohavetomakea bit of an effort to make those connections.” Indeed, to Bharghava, getting involved is all about taking the first step, and that should be the easiest part: “Any sort of advocacy is better than nothing — anything is better than nothing!”

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