Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sudbury’s #FridaysforFuture youth movement went virtual on Friday, April 24.
Inspired by teenage Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, back in 2018, Sudbury girl Sophia Mathur began striking once a month on Fridays to draw attention to the impact humans are having on the climate.
There have since been several large youth climate rallies in Greater Sudbury, but events like these are impossible right now due to the pandemic.
So the local #FridaysforFuture youth group held a Zoom rally instead on April 24. It was attended not only by youth and local media, but also all of the area’s MPs and MPPs, as well as Senator Josée Forest-Niesing of Sudbury.
The 45-minute-long event included the screening of a video drawing parallels between the COVID-19 and climate change crises, speeches by the politicians and the youth, and even a virtual parachute game.
The youth announced they will be holding weekly #FridaysforFuture Zoom meetings each Friday at noon for the near future.
“There have been multiple FFF rallies where people have been going on Zoom and doing this,” 13-year-old Mathur said during the Zoom rally.
“We got the inspiration from #FridaysforFuture Toronto. We saw that they were also doing one of these, and we thought maybe we could do one here, and we started organizing with youth.”
Mathur said Sudbury’s #FridaysforFuture youth movement has come a long way since it had its first major rally about a year ago.
“Some of our achievements were we’ve grown as a movement, as you can see the amount of people on this Zoom rally,” she said. “The City of Greater Sudbury declared a climate emergency. We’ve had a lot of successes.”
Nickel Belt MPP France Gélinas said the governing Progressive Conservatives in Ontario “never said” climate change for the first nearly two years they were in power, and using science to guide their decisions was not part of their vocabulary.
But then COVID-19 arrived, and “to everybody’s surprise, the Conservative party listened to science, they listened to the experts,” she said.
Gélinas said the parallel between COVID-19 and climate change is that tough decisions can be made when it’s necessary.
“We are doing the right thing because it is driven by science that was explained to us all in a way we can understand,” she said.
“So we all know we have to do our share. Let’s learn from this human experiment we have all just gone through, and let’s draw the parallel so we can help this movement forward to protect our environment.”
