Seaway NEws
In a recent interview with iPolitics, David Suzuki said plainly what many scientists have been warning for years: it is now too late to reverse climate change. According to research led by Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute, seven of the nine planetary boundaries that define Earth’s capacity to sustain human life have already been breached.
Suzuki’s warning wasn’t just about science – it was about the failure of our political and economic systems. These systems, designed to chase endless growth and corporate profit, are not equipped to deal with ecological collapse or social crisis. They are also fundamentally incapable of addressing the ever-widening gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else.
Despite this, our federal government continues to support new fossil fuel infrastructure, ignoring its climate commitments, its own and obligations to consult and obtain the consent of Indigenous peoples, and even its own laws – like the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which now affirms that everyone in Canada has a right to a healthy environment. It is false to claim that Canada must expand oil and gas development in order to maintain a strong economy. In reality, these projects serve the short-term interests of a few while putting our shared future at risk.
Meanwhile, regular people are being manipulated into blaming one another for economic hardship – migrants, poor families, workers on strike – while the wealthiest billionaires quietly grow richer, often by investing in industries that are literally destroying our planet. It’s like watching a handful of people hoard gold on a sinking lifeboat.
We’re also being sold the dangerous myth of “decarbonized oil”, a distraction from the fact that fossil fuels, however rebranded, remain incompatible with climate stability.
Suzuki reminds us that “community is the unit of survival.” In that spirit, Cornwall must turn its attention to local resilience and adaptation. That means preparing for the impacts of climate change already underway – extreme heat, heavy rainfall, and growing instability. It also means coming together across lines of difference to build a city that protects the vulnerable, strengthens local systems, and rejects the false choices imposed on us by broken systems.
We cannot count on those in power to fix what they continue to profit from. But we can look after each other and begin to build something better.
Mélanie Ayotte, Cornwall, ON
L’article Letter to the Editor est apparu en premier sur Cornwall Seaway News.
