Northwestern Climate Gathering in Thunder Bay, Ont., brings forward urgent calls to action

When it comes to the environment, eight-year-old Rosie Hogan of Thunder Bay, Ont., has got a plan.

"I've been trying to stop climate change and do as much as I can to try to help people understand more about climate change, so I can help stop most of the problems in the world," said the third-grade student.

To start with, her class has been learning how to compost food using worms. And in the warmer months, students planted milkweed to help support pollinators, such as monarch butterflies.

Rosie may have been the youngest person at this weekend's Northwestern Climate Gathering, but it's her generation that will carry the climate activism movement forward, explained her mother, Amanda Sauermann.

"I've really always talked to Rosie and my other daughter Lucy all the time about the little things that we can do at our home to make a difference," Sauermann said. "I really wanted to bring her today because she's part of this community, and engaging kids at a very young age to be involved and make a difference is important."

The two-day event drew dozens of people to Roots to Harvest, both in person and through video-conferencing, to share ideas and expertise on everything from halting greenhouse gas emissions to holding effective community rallies. Rosie and her mother were busy in the kitchen learning how to prepare locally-grown food.

The CBC's Superior Morning has been interviewing activists and educators leading up to the gathering, including Madison Dyck and Summer Stevenson, Keira Essex and Kevin Brooks, and Paul Berger.

Berger said he was impressed with this weekend's turnout – but as participants shared, more needs to be done to make sure their ideas turn into actions.

Longtime architect John Stephenson said one of his key takeaways from the weekend was the importance of promoting community wellness, and the role the health of the environment plays in that.

While Thunder Bay declared a climate emergency in 2020, and has a strategy to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, Stephenson says that plan lacks urgency.

"I think one thing we should all be thinking about is how to convince our city councillors to accelerate that timeline. The science tells us we have a very short window of opportunity here to fix the problem and/or to try and reverse the trend," Stephenson said.

"It's in a way embarrassing to me that our city can, out of one side of its mouth, declare a climate emergency, but on the other side of its mouth say 'it's OK, we don't have to rush.'"

As the city looks to build more than 2,100 homes in the next three years, Stephenson says that there are two strategies he would like to see the city use to meet its housing goals in a sustainable way: densification and building on existing infrastructure.

"There are tracks of vacant land that are already in proximity to services. We should be developing those opportunities first before we open up new areas of development on the fringe of the city that require the extension of infrastructure," he said.