Global environmental movement arrives in Abbotsford If humans sustain emission-causing activities at the current rate, this decade might be one of the last before Earth’s temperatures rise to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, according to a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hundreds of international and regional governments have declared climate emergencies, and many activists continue to fight for more intensive change. In January, Angela Zimmerling and Eric Chong set-up the first meeting of the Fraser Valley chapter of Extinction Rebellion (XR) in Abbotsford’s Clearbrook Library. XR is an international organization engages in willful, but peaceful, civil disobedience to spur government action on climate change. XR activists in Vancouver continue to welcome arrests at their numerous demonstrations. In the Valley, Zimmerling mentioned two road blockades that XR once set up in front of Abbotsford City Hall. Chong said that motorists “assaulted them.”
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Activists have perpetrated acts of civil disobedience for decades.
Greenpeace, which Zimmerling joined in the ‘70s as a 10-year-old in Vancouver, was an early adopter of such methods. Ecologist Rex Weyler wrote that merely explaining ecological science isn’t enough, and that issues like climate change need to resonate with people’s emotions. Zimmerling said that conventional approaches like writing letters to MPs “just don’t work,” and that “inconvenience is necessary.”
The global Extinction Rebellion movement saw its genesis atop London’s Parliament Square in October 2018. There, protestors 1,500 strong declared rebellion against the U.K. Government. XR demands that governments take radical action to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) to net-zero by 2025. For comparison, IPCC states that limiting a temperature increase to 2.0C will require achieving a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.
