A funeral for the planet this Saturday

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island and Dr. David Suzuki will host a Funeral for the Future in Victoria this Saturday, November 20th. It starts at 12:30 PM in Centennial Square, after which participants will march to Bellevue street opposite the Provincial Legislature.

Cortes Currents reached Dr. Don Goodeve, an organizer with Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island, at his home in Campbell River.

“We could wait for other people around the planet to make a difference, but we actually have to start with what we're doing here. So what we're going on the streets for, on Saturday with Dr. David Suzuki, is to demand the climate leadership that British Colombians expect and need,” he said.

“The future is going to be bleak. We are going to see more extreme weather events. More floods, more heatwaves, more drought conditions, more crop failures. This is going to get worse before we have a chance of making it better, but we have to start making it better now.”

Goodeve asked, “how will future generations remember us?”

As the generation that left this planet with an absolute catastrophe? Or the generation that made changes.

“It's clear that the COP process for addressing this crisis is broken and it's not moving forward. We have the same old vested interests who are trying to protect their investments in fossil fuels and trying to protect the fossil fuel industry from what we know has got to be the end of it.”

The province’s clean BC plan would have been fantastic 20 years ago, but now we are in an emergency.

What is it going to take for the province to realize that?

“We have not had the action that's needed and across the board, we've got them proposing and putting money into the fracked gas industry and the coastal gasoline pipeline on the basis that, this is somehow going to be good for the province and good for our long-term future. It's clear with the events that are unfolding - they’re not.”  

He hopes the people of British Columbia demand that our government get responsive.

“Waiting for other countries to act, as a condition for us acting, is a suicide,” said Goodeve. “We actually need an emergency declaration. We need an end to fossil fuel subsidies, which were $1.3 billion in this province during 2020, and we need to protect our forests. The floods, the landslides that have happened and so many of the effects that we've seen come down to forest management practices that have caused slope destabilization. We need to understand that the forests we have, which have become a net carbon source, can be part of the solution.”

The people of British Columbia have a choice.

Schedule of events for this Saturday, Nov 20, 2021:

Event Starts - 12:30pm at Centennial SquareFuneral Procession - 1:00-1:30pm - down Douglas to Belleville St.
Speakers - 1:30pm on Belleville St. opposite Legislature
Symbolic Funeral Action -  2:10pm on Belleville St

Photo credit: Looking up from beneath the waves - Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash