The Next Eco-Warriors Read Online Free PDF Page A

agreement among some of the world's biggest polluters in secret. For others, it was nothing more than that “Danish Text” realized, a well-orchestrated dress rehearsal that had finally come to its stage with its main actors: excludingmost of the world leaders and the majority of people from having a say to instead allow the biggest polluters and their self-interests to decide the fate of our world. For me, the only thing worse would have been if a black hole had sucked up the universe in that instant.
    I found myself at the activist convergence space, shaking, trembling, and defeated. I knew the summit was a wash at this point, but didn't want to say it out loud. Instead, just suicidal fantasies fogged my mind. I know that may sound overly dramatic, but I had made no difference whatsoever, none of us had. Despite all the best intentions, all the hard work, and years upon years of sacrificing for this moment— poof —it was all gone. Vanished with two words: Copenhagen Accord, the so-called climate deal that only added injury to an insulting failure of a conference.
    After two years of intense negotiations to establish this treaty—some would say even twelve years' work with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997—it all ended in a few hours of a secret meeting with a few heads of state that created an alternative text. A noncommittal draft that circumnavigated the UN multilateral process and fell far below scientific demands. We didn't get any of our requests for a “binding, fair, and ambitious” deal. Civil society's message was so clear and yet we got none of it. If anything, this Accord had now created a path for climate tyranny, doing away with the shaping of a global treaty and putting most at the mercy of those few that predominantly created the problem.
    Some might say that the only way to accomplish a climate deal is to negotiate strictly with the biggest polluters, and that the world is too divergent to unite on any single issue. Maybe there is some merit in that, but one thing I do know is that if I have ever seen one thing unite us, it is our very basic need to survive. In the last few years, people have crossed boundaries, divides, and oceans for the purposes of uniting on one issue. What many say is impossible may be impossible for the elites and politicians but is very probable for us, the masses. Despite all our differences, single issues, and criticism of one another, we are uniting, uniting in the face of climate change. It is the umbrella issue of our generation.
    To testify to this, four thousand cities, in 128 countries, with nearly one billion people—that's nearly one-sixth the Earth's population—participatedin Earth Hour in 2010, turning off their lights to support the fight against the climate crisis. In its first year, the 350.org movement synchronized more than 5,200 events in more than 180 countries to perform climate rallies. CNN later called it “the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.”
    In my home country of Canada, where I felt the environmental movement was in its grave, nearly five thousand individuals showed up in the nation's capital for Power Shift 2009, a youth-oriented demand for an energy shift. The reality is the movement was widespread and growing—from social justice spectrums to environmental justice spectrums to apathetic spectrums— all because climate change was uniting us, in a way that people like my father had only dreamed possible.
    If I have ever seen one thing unite us, it is our very basic need to survive. In the last few years, people have crossed boundaries, divides, and oceans for the purposes of uniting in the face of climate change. It is the umbrella issue of our generation .
    So to say that the world cannot unite on one issue and that therefore only the elites should make the decisions for us is simply not true. The elite power structures have created the problem, not the solution. The only question is, can the masses defeat an elite