Robert Stowe: I am in awe of Greta Thunberg and her young colleagues

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Fifty years ago, when I was a 16-year-old high school student from Vancouver, I was sitting with my fellow student activist Peter Lando at the Canadian UN Mission in New York, thinking about how to stop nuclear testing with George Ignatieff, a diplomat. Senior Canadian and Canadian. representative at the strategic arms limitation talks in Geneva, and our ambassador to the UN, Yvon Beaulne. We were representing our Student Action Committee Against Nuclear Tests and had just met with the Deputy Foreign Minister in Ottawa.

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The prelude to our trip was a series of student demonstrations pushing for the Canadian government to take action against an impending US underground nuclear test on Amchitka Island in the Aleutians, peaking with a school strike on October 6, 1971. That Wednesday afternoon, 10,000 of us marched from Lower Mainland high schools to the US Consulate in downtown Vancouver. Amchitka is in an earthquake hotspot, and seismologists have warned that a five-megaton hydrogen bomb detonated 5,000 feet below the earth’s crust could trigger an earthquake and tsunami. Elsewhere in Canada, students from many cities and people from other Pacific Rim nations took to the streets, as Greenpeace sent ships to the nuclear test area in their first direct action.

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Several months later, the impossible happened: This wave of protests forced the US Atomic Energy Commission to announce the cancellation of more planned nuclear tests at Amchitka.

Earlier that year, I marched seven miles with more than 4,000 fellow protesters (mostly students) to the United States border, in an action organized by my father, Irving Stowe, and other Greenpeace founders, to demonstrate the distance of braking of a supertanker. That protest helped secure a moratorium on the trafficking of supertankers in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

History repeats itself. In 2018, my sister Barbara and I were arrested at the TMX Tank Farm on Burnaby Mountain, in a peaceful protest organized by indigenous activists to protect their land and the Salish Sea. When TMX is completed, tanker truck traffic will increase nearly seven times to more than one tanker truck per day, each carrying up to 550,000 barrels of diluted bitumen (dilbit) from Alberta’s tar sands, accounting for 11% of emissions. greenhouse gas emissions from Canada.

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Dilbit spills are often impossible to clean completely. In the open, the dilbit can break even in salty water. Tar (bitumen) can sink, while the volatile chemicals in the liquefied natural gas used to dissolve it quickly pollute groundwater, rivers, and oceans. Dilbit contains significant concentrations of carcinogenic and neurotoxic compounds such as benzene, n-hexane, and toluene, and hydrogen sulfide, a respiratory toxin. As in the case of radioactive isotopes like plutonium and strontium-90, some of these compounds can also cause genetic damage in minute amounts. As a neurologist specializing in neuropsychiatric genetics caring for patients with autism, intellectual disability, and schizophrenia (where rare mutations arising in sperm or ovaries are significant risk factors), such exposures are of great concern.

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Additionally, Burnaby’s deputy fire chief has testified that a tank farm fire would likely burn on Burnaby Mountain, isolating Simon Fraser University, while clouds of toxic smoke will require evacuation of large areas of Burnaby.

Similar concerns about health, safety and greenhouse gas emissions apply to the Coastal GasLink LNG pipeline, while the fracking used to extract natural gas has caused earthquakes in the US states. Both TMX and LNG traverse areas populated, where the risk of rupture in our earthquake-prone region is substantial. The existing TMX pipeline had to be closed in November for several weeks due to damage from landslides and catastrophic flooding.

I am in awe of activist Greta Thunberg and her young colleagues, whose student strikes for climate action are even bigger than ours. Why? While the reach of social media is undoubtedly a factor (we only had phone trees, brochures, and posters for recruitment), our actions in the 1970s were primarily motivated by risks of catastrophic consequences (earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear Armageddon, spills oil). While now, students see the certainty that the inaction of climate change will have disastrous consequences for health, the environment and the economy; certainty will provide a stronger stimulus for activism.

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The BC chief coroner attributed 595 deaths during the recent BC heat wave to extreme temperatures. And a recent editorial in 231 of the world’s leading medical journals stated: “The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius and restore nature”. He emphasized the need for urgent action and our responsibility to educate others about the health risks of the crisis and hold our leaders to account.

That is why I applaud young climate activists and why I joined Doctors for Planetary Health, a local group that educates the public about the health impacts of climate change and advocates for more aggressive and socially just actions in the emergency. climate that we all face.

The health of the Earth and of current and future generations is at stake.

Dr. Robert Stowe is a member of BC-based Physicians for Planetary Health. He is a behavioral neurologist and clinical professor of Psychiatry and Neurology (Medicine) at UBC.