Faith in Young People

 Last weekend, I contacted Radio Sidney, asking to participate in their election interviews. They responded by saying their election coverage was finished.

Had they chosen to invite me to speak, I would have shared this message with my fellow North Saanich citizens.

By voting today, and on Saturday, October 15th, North Saanich citizens are making a critical, time sensitive decision on one underlying question.

Do we continue to think and do things the way they are always done? Do we accept, albeit regretfully, the slow inevitability of human built environments, everywhere? Or do we take the opportunity to change ourselves. Do we choose to change our thinking and our direction, guided by our unique superpower; evidence based thinking.

Many people claim that we must keep building more of everything, everywhere. More houses, more condos, more commercial ‘nooks’: just build more and things will get better. But this is the behaviour which has brought us to today; living in an overheated planet, where climate change disasters are pelting down around us, rather than rain.

Parents and grandparents do not have young people’s best interests at heart, when they encourage them to buy a house at any cost, teach them to complain if their neighbourhood is unaffordable and otherwise rail at life’s injustices.

They would be wiser to trust their children’s immense creativity, intelligence and kindness, and allow them to fly free without such suffocating guidance, however well intentioned that may be. The Drawdown Review of 2020 is an extremely readable document that describes actions that we can take on a municipal level that will have a profound positive effect on young people’s future lives. They are easy to understand and easy to do if we all work together, with common purpose.

Drawdown actions belong in our Official Community plan. By not including them, we show a generational arrogance and a childish fear of the future, preferring to hide under the bed, rather than face our responsibilities.

The future doesn’t have to be apocalypic. We don’t need to deny it by pretending it’ll never come. Human created climate change is reversible, over time. But we won’t reverse it by doing the same things that got us here in the first place.

I put my faith in young people. They have the spirit, the intelligence, the creativity and the compassion to face the challenges of climate change, both locally and globally. It’s time to set them free.