By: Xavier Ranville
Recently, I went to a two-day Youth Summit on Climate Change in Kenora with a few other high school students and teachers from across Treaty 3. It was interesting to learn about how climate change will affect the future. Speakers explained in what ways we will notice more climate change as time goes on.
I can already see what it’s doing to the planet and everything that lives on it. When I was a kid, there was a lot of snow, and we could build snowmen and go sliding, but now, sometimes the snow isn’t deep enough to slide and it isn’t that much fun and it’s also dangerous.
I’ve learned from the conference that we can prevent further damage from happening to our planet. This includes being aware of one’s own responsibility to stop putting pollutants into the atmosphere with their unhealthy daily routines.
An example where climate change is being affected the most is in the Canadian Arctic. This was explained by one of the speakers, Dr. John Iacozza, a professor at the University of Manitoba, who has spent over two decades of living and researching in the Arctic.
Iacozza explained in an interview that it is in our lifetime that the effects of warming, on animals and people, will be irreversible.
He said that more recently, people are speaking about the lack of action on climate change and that more of his research and expertise is being called upon internationally.
“More and more, it is understood especially in the Canadian government, climate change is happening and is a major problem in the north as well as the south,” he said. “There are steps being taken, especially with the engagement of the Inuit and the other communities in the north, to deal with climate change.
“To work with economic development in a more sustainable way, we can have both, we just have to do it in a better way that we have in the past,” he said.
Iacozza provided steps youth (and adults) can take in helping to reduce the impact of climate change in the north:
1) Appreciate that climate change is happening and understand that it’s happening and it’s not something that people have made up or things like that.
2) To understand that what we do down in the south effects what happens in the north.
3) Start working with other communities in the north to better understand the impacts of climate change, and that economic development needs to happen in a sustainable way
On the second day, during our lunch break, the organizers handed us a set of questions to answer and hand in for marking. Near the end of the conference, they added up the marks to who answered the most questions correctly.
When they said that the winner was from our school, I wondered who it could be. Then they said my name! I walked up to the front table to receive a MacBook, then later took pictures with it and was congratulated.
The conference was hosted by Grand Council Treaty #3 and was held at Seven Generations Education Institute. Baibombeh Anishinaabe School student attendees were Isaac Kavenaugh, Ireland Bird, Danton Monias, Drayston White, Dorian Fair, Corban Crow, Carmen Loon, Mackenzie Blackhawk, Lucey Oshie and Xavier Ranville.
Naotkamegwanning News 