2008 Oct 4: Sunshine Walk for Climate Justice

Sunshine Walk for Climate Justice
Saturday, 2008 October 4, 12 noon
Toronto to Ottawa

Join us.  We’ll be taking letters from our friends and supporters to Prime Minister Harper, asking him to make Canada a leader in clean, renewable living systems at home, and in compassion and responsibility abroad.

This is an organization that’s very near and dear to my heart.  I’ve been involved in human rights issues all my adult life.  Although environmental degradation has always been a concern to me, climate change has only recently taken over my life, and that has been because I recognized the looming environmental catastrophe as the biggest human rights issue in human history.  I’m also a walker.  I walk everywhere, several hours daily.

So when, at a climate justice meeting, I met a wonderful man from Bangladesh who spoke about the deep threats to his home country, and suggested taking a walk to Ottawa to publicize the issue, I knew I had to be on board.  It combines walking for a combination of both causes I believe in.  I’ve been on the committee working on this issue from the beginning and have every intention of walking every bit of the way alongside Dewan.

The Sunshine Walk is intended to publicize Canada’s responsibility in unleashing climate fury that is even now having an impact on people who often had nothing to do with creating the problem.  These include our own Inuit, whose homes are collapsing with the permafrost, the people of Darfur, whose drought ravaged land is being fought over in what’s considered the first resource war caused in part by climate change, parts of China now plagued by droughts and dust storms and island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu slowly slipping under the water.

But nowhere is the threat to humanity greater than in Bangladesh, where over 100 million people live within a few metres above a rising sea, densely packed into an area smaller than Iowa.  These people have nowhere to go.  Cyclones are increasing in ferocity, the Tibetan meltwaters that feed their rivers are pouring down as glaciers melt, eroding their land, and the rising seas not only inundate settlements but also salinate agricultural lands much further up, making them unproductive.  If nothing is done, Bangladesh will perish.