On a bitterly cold day in Waterloo, a new type of protest begins

Nothing is more important than your education, we tell our children as we send them to school. But they know that the most important lessons aren’t always learned there.

That’s how three seventeen-year-old girls walked out early from St. Benedict Catholic Secondary School in Cambridge on Friday. They car-pooled to Waterloo City Hall and demanded action on climate change.

On a bitterly cold day, they were joined by dozens of other students, environmentalists and politicians. It’s part of a new worldwide tradition, inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, to spend a couple of hours on the first Friday each month in public protest..

Thunberg is a new kind of climate activist. Her voice is that of a child accusing her parents of not protecting her better.

“You are not mature enough to tell it like it is,” she told delegates recently at a United Nations summit.

“Even that burden you leave to us children.”

Protesters Holland Rossetto, Shayna Dehaan and Natalie Davidson have such young faces. But, like Thunberg, such old souls.

They know the scientific evidence that the Earth is warming to levels that will soon cause catastrophic flooding, mass displacement and other dire consequences — unless humans take dramatic action.

Yet the international strategies to address the threat, even in the unlikely event that each nation actually delivers on its promise, make no plans beyond 2050.

The evidence of climate change has been with us for decades. Little has been done to stop it.

“People don’t care,” said Davidson. “Their parents don’t talk about this. Their cousins don’t (say), ‘Hey, I went to the climate change march.’”

Instead, she said, many families talk about money. Where is it cheap to eat out? What’s the price of bottled water?

Dehaan said that people like immediate rewards and familiar routines.

“People don’t like change,” she said.

The vast majority continue to drive our cars, even though many of us could switch to public transit. “It’s quite possible, but it’s difficult,” she said.

Or take the act of adding solar panels to a home for energy instead of using fossil fuels like oil and gas. Solar panels are expensive. “It takes years to get the money back,” Dehaan said.

“People like seeing things quickly, and seeing the effects now.”

Rossetto was the only one of the three who had told her teachers she wouldn’t be at school that afternoon. “They were not impressed at all,” she said.

And yet, she marvelled, they teach how important it is to have justice.

For her part, Thunberg has stopped eating meat (production of which generates high amounts of the gases that cause global warming) or flying in planes. The family has installed solar batteries and has an electric car that is used only when necessary.

With her uncompromising and clear voice, she has inspired tens of thousands of students to protest worldwide.

The next step will be harder. “The politics that’s needed to prevent the climate catastrophe — it doesn’t exist today,” she told the New Yorker magazine recently.

“We need to change the system as if we were in crisis, as if there were a war going on.”

Almost as if they had been discussing it with her, these three girls in Waterloo said almost the same thing.

They pointed out that one reason people don’t demand change is that the climate isn’t seen to be an immediate, urgent threat.

“Climate change isn’t a person with a gun in front of us,” Davidson said.

And yet, they agreed, that’s exactly what it is.