Dear Mr. Prime Minister and all those it may concern,
My name is Amelia Penney-Crocker. I’m a 14 year old writer and activist from Halifax and I’m concerned about climate change; I’d be stupid to not be concerned.
Many people say that the corona virus is the “perfect” virus. You’re able to infect others before you know you have it. It‘s deadly but not deadly enough to die out. It’s a perfect virus for hurting human society. Climate Change is also very well designed to hurt us. For one, it’s so gradual. We hardly notice our standards change for how hot the summer is or how many fires there are.
Yesterday I was half listening to CBC radio and half daydreaming when I heard something that made me listen closer. “The water levels are already higher than the so-called flood of the century a few years ago.” The story ended after that so I’m not sure exactly which flood they were talking about. You’re probably wondering why I haven’t tracked down the exact information and that’s because it doesn’t really matter to the point I’m making. I want to point out that ‘Once in a century’ is a meaningless sentence when it comes to flooding and fire in the age of climate change, they happen all the time now. Once in a century, became once in a decade, became once in a year. The news is a little occupied with COVID-19, Black Live Matter protests and all the crazy stuff that Donald Trump is doing so it doesn’t have much time to cover flooding. But even in ‘normal’ times climate change is often not the big headline despite it’s significance to all of our lives, present and future. That’s because ‘Once in a century floods are becoming once in a year,’ isn’t a breaking news headline. It doesn’t smash its way into our consciousness like a rock flying through a window. It slides in slowly like the sun coming up. then it was an hour ago. The sun coming up is never noteworthy, but no one can deny it’s an extraordinarily important thing.
We are getting used to things, to temperatures, that shouldn’t be normal. To draw some connections between current events (not that climate change is not a current event) we’re all very used to police beating or killing black people. But that shouldn’t be normal! To connect to the other big news story of today, we didn’t do much about corona virus while it was still in China. Many people predicted that it would make its way around the world and start a pandemic if we didn’t take drastic action (that wouldn’t be good for our economies) to stop it’s spread. But we didn’t do it, because it felt far away and it might just die out in China. We didn’t want to do things that could hurt our economy so we didn’t and now we’re in a worse economic crisis, plus people all over the world are dying in the millions. Do you see how this is happening with climate change?
We all need to be conscious that even though ‘climate change is still getting worse’ isn’t a breaking news headline, it should be treated with the same concern as ‘a million new cases of COVID’. Address every crisis. The crisis of racism. The crisis of corona. The crisis in our climate. They are all crises, and they are all now.
I hope you have a wonderful day!
Amelia Penney-Crocker