Fast for Climate Action on the First of the Month -- Join Us

For two years now, ClimateFast has conducted a fast on parliament hill – Hungry for Climate Leadership – from September 21^st to October 2^nd.  (The UN Day of Peace and the UN Day of Non-violence.)  It was to be a peaceful protest of the inaction of our own government and of governments around the world and their refusal to take on the challenge of climate change.

This year we realized – it is not enough to carry this concern for 12 days and then put it down and do nothing for the rest of the year.  But how can we raise enough political will to make change happen?  We are only a dozen people with jobs and many volunteer commitments.  The answer to that question is two-fold.  First, we must make adjustments for our size and our energy.  Then we need faith that if we communicate the urgency, speak truth and put our concerns out there, the resources will come. 

There is a world-wide movement out there of hundreds, even thousands of groups who all want to see the problem of climate change tackled, with commitment and innovation, using the knowledge, experience, and technologies of every human discipline.  We must learn to work together, each contributing something special to the movement as a whole. 

ClimateFast promotes the value of the spiritual fast as a way of giving our actions more thought.  If we ground our work in deep values, and if we can find the spiritual resources to stay the course when the way is hard, we believe we can make a difference in people’s hearts.

There is no one answer to the problem of climate change.  Yes, humans caused this problem and must change their behaviour, but nature’s ways are contributing too.  We have a huge job to learn to live in harmony with nature.

My recent journey with First Nations people from the Algonquin nation is teaching me how big our challenge is.  I have come to understand that our whole society is based on false philosophical principles and that we will likely never learn to live in harmony with nature as long as we keep this broken foundation.  We believe we can own land and do what ever we want with it.  From this belief we determined we could own life itself, and control it.  This is a philsophy of death, not life.  These beliefs have made it possible for us to destroy whole tracks of land so that they can no longer support life – and think nothing of it.

The way of indigenous peoples is to live on the land and to share, --always respecting the capacity of the land to regenerate itself.  When more than one group wants to use the same resources – the same water, the same air, the same forests – then they must talk to one another and consider the well-being of the land and make a plan to share with respect.

Climate change is a global problem and all over the world we must get together and talk with one another about how to preserve the land so it will continue to be fruitful for our children and our grandchildren.  Together we must make a plan for how to reduce our damaging behaviour and how to share the benefits and the consequences of the changes we must make. 

Transition is difficult and sometimes painful.  We can easily see the losses in front of us and it is sometimes more difficult to see the potential benefits and possible increases in well-being.  Proverbs 28:18 – “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  We all need a vision of what such harmony with nature would look like.  And we all need to act in faith that others will cooperate and that we can find the ideas and the means to make this transition and build a new world for generations to come.

With this vision in mind, I commit myself to join ClimateFast in its Climate First on the First of the Month campaign.  We are inviting the people of Canada, and the people of the world, to fast or take action or both on the first of every month until our collective leaders come to the table with respect and create a plan that:

·      Sets aggressive targets for greenhouse gas reductions.

·      Ends all subsidies to carbon fuels

·      Puts a price on carbon designed to decrease consumption

·      Focusses planning and resources on a transition to largely renewable energy

By participating in this fast, I stand in solidarity with Yeb Saño, from the Philippines, and with vulnerable people around the world who are most affected by dangerous climate events.  I will be doing a dawn to dusk fast, and will focus my social action efforts around the first of every month.  I join with a growing movement of fasters including youth groups, environmentalists, and faith communities who are calling world leaders to responsible climate action now.  We want Action for Climate—Fast! 

The wonderful group that is coordinating the International Fast is the Climate Action Network.  You can keep up with their news at: http://www.climatenetwork.org.  Join the fast at : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1n85ZMaTJC4vF9jvOmsSmVJ2ZelGP87pkN_huW9S8X_4/viewform.  And Climate Action Network Canada

ClimateFast will be conducting the Canadian Climate First on the First of the Month campaign.  Sign up with us to fast too.  Help us keep track of all the Canadian inititatives.  Take the pledge as a person or as an  organization. 

And Canadian Unitarians For Social Justice will be working with both ClimateFast and the Climate Action Network – Canada to spread the word, communicate to the politicians and the media, and to talk with our neighbours and our families about the importance of making this an election issue that all parties must respond to in 2014 or 2015.  

You Can't Sink a Rainbow, You Can't Seize a Sunrise

Reflections of a Greenpeace Climate Activist -- Alex

I trembled as I walked through the grounds of Murmansk prison on 26 September.

Inmates watched me and the arrival of the other 29 notorious new prisoners through their cell windows. It was pitch black outside, but the prison was alive. Alive with the sound of barking dogs, prison alarms and prisoners shouting through their barred windows.

A guard handed me a plastic mug, a tin steel bowl, a spoon, a folded up mattress and a sheet. That’s all I had, that and a toothbrush and a book in my pocket, when the guards closed the steel green door on me. The sound of the slamming door echoed throughout the corridor. I was alone and afraid.

As days in prison passed I became stronger.  As weeks passed I became hopeful. In prison they take away your freedom, your dignity and your family but they can’t take away hope. That’s the one thing they couldn’t touch and I wouldn’t let them.

I saw my lawyer twice a week. During those visits he would pass on news, news that helped me understand how big our case was. He may have been pretty bleak about the Russian legal system but he was always positive about the international attention and support we were receiving. After our visits I would have a skip to my step and I looked forward to passing these bits of gold dust onto my friends. It felt good to pass on hope. It also felt good that we were not alone.

I couldn’t sleep the night before my bail hearing. I was too excited. I had spent the previous night feeling incredibly sad after hearing Colin had been sentenced to an extra three months in prison. Now I was in awe and dumbstruck as I watched the recent turn of events, my friends, one by one, receiving bail on the news.

I went to court feeling pretty hopeful that morning and I waited impatiently as the verdict was finally translated: I had received bail. I laughed in delight and the court room full of reporters and Greenpeace volunteers erupted in applause. Moments later I was jumping up and down hugging my friends Faiza and Anne inside a dark, smokey holding cell.

Since leaving Russia I have been reunited with my family. Seeing them for the first time since prison at St Pancras was very emotional. We hugged, laughed, cried and hugged some more. I have enjoyed the simple but incredibly precious pleasures in life such as taking a walk in the countryside, having a drink with friends and seeing the stars twinkle at night. Now life feels quite strange. It’s definitely quieter as we’re not the focus of so much media attention and the stress of facing seven years in prison has been alleviated.

Thirty of us were locked up following a peaceful protest against the world’s first oil platform to drill in the icy waters of the Arctic. Those 64 days in a prison cell were undoubtedly the hardest days of my life but I have never felt as proud as I did then.

I took action on the Arctic Sunrise because I don’t want a melting Arctic, oil spills in ice and an unlivable planet to be my legacy for my children. I felt the luckiest person on Earth when I stepped on board the Arctic Sunrise back in September because I had been given an opportunity to do something that mattered.

Now, I feel even luckier. Your support means my 29 friends and I are free, your support also means my time in prison wasn’t spent in vain.

Thank you for standing up for me and for the Arctic.

Alex – one of the Arctic 30