WOLFVILLE, N.S. — Coltrane Hughes says he was asked to stop handing out leaflets to his Wolfville School classmates to get them to join his strike for climate change.
He calls the treatment unfair, since he says what he’s learned about climate change in school hasn’t conveyed how real it has become.
And so, he decided to go on strike.
“I don’t think it was right for my school to ask me to stop doing that. We need our schools to teach us that this is happening, and that time is running out,” he says.
The 10-year-old budding climate activist stayed home from school alongside his sister, Ellington Hughes, 12, on May 3. The siblings were joined by their mother, Celine Hambling, and grandparents Brenda and Skip Hambling, who all protested in solidarity with youth-led climate strikes across Nova Scotia and Canada.
The Hughes siblings have two messages – stop saying climate change is not a crisis and start listening to students who want to learn more about it.
“People aren’t even listening to scientists. So why should we go to school when we’ll just grow up and people won’t listen to us, you know?” says Ellington Hughes.
Celine Hambling says she pulled her kids out of school because she felt it important to let them have their voices heard on climate change.
She says people should not feel concerned, as many students often miss school for sport trips or vacations and she feels her kids will learn a valuable lesson from their strike.
“You learn in a lot of ways, and school is just one of them,” says Hambling.
Another protest was organized in Kentville by parents and grandparents demonstrating in solidarity with the youth-led Fridays for Future movement and other climate strike groups.
Jillian Oderkirk says the movement has largely drawn inspiration from Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, who began striking outside Sweden’s parliament each Friday in 2018.
Oderkirk, who has recently acted as spokesperson for a Valley Extinction Rebellion group, wants students to know there are adults who hear them, and who want to help them effect change.
“We just don’t see governments putting any urgency on that,” she says.
“And so there’s no place I’d rather be than here, or anything that is more important than this,” says Oderkirk.
As Coltrane and Ellington Hughes walk around Wolfville carrying large signs with their family, loud honks and hollers come from cars and passersby alike.
They are a small group, but their voices are still heard.
“Even just a small group like us can make a change,” says Coltrane Hughes.
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