Iman Mannathukkaren has been an organizer with the student-led group School Strike 4 Climate Halifax since she was in Grade 10.
Now in her first year at the University of King’s College, Mannathukkaren was testing megaphones at noon on Friday Oct. 25 ahead of her third climate rally beginning that day at Victoria Park, in downtown Halifax. A crowd of just under a hundred people gathered at the park before marching down to Lower Water Street to stop in front of Nova Scotia Power before marching back up Spring Garden Road.
Friday’s rally is part of the international youth-led movement demanding immediate and sustained policy action on climate change and ensuring climate justice for all. The school strike movement gained mass recognition as Fridays for Future begun by Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg in August 2018.In 2019, Halifax student organizers with School Strike 4 Climate marched with over 10,000 people, calling for sustained action to fight climate change. Many Halifax student organizers were just beginning high school then.
Now, many of them, like Mannathukkaren, are starting university. She says she’s “still not tired of striking—because it’s such an incredible way to hope in the movement—but I’m getting close. This past year, especially, has been really stressful for me as the effects of climate change are becoming so clear right in front of our faces.”
The wildfires in Jasper this summer. The recent hurricanes in the southern US partially caused by warming waters in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to floods, deaths and devastation across communities.
“Even this weirdly warm fall that we’ve been having in Nova Scotia so far,” says Mannathukkaren. “All of this is really anxiety-causing and stressful and adding to the fatigue that I already had from the government not doing enough—it’s just criminal negligence.”
Mannathukkaren says she’s been “hearing a lot of stress and pissed-off feelings” from her fellow organizers and colleagues.
“It’s a tense time because we’re seeing so many climate catastrophes happening one after another, and we can really see that our future’s in such critical danger—there’s a lot of disenchantment and disillusionment with the people in power.”
For one, the province has failed to implement the Coastal Protection Act.
“This is one of the urgent issues right now, and I really would like it to be implemented as soon as possible.”
Recent polling done by Narrative Research on behalf of the Ecology Action Centre found that 86% of those surveyed “consider the issue of coastal protection as ‘important.’”
Another issue Mannathukkaren says is causing strife among strikers is the politicization of climate change issues, like the federal carbon tax.
“They tend to do this with everything,” says Mannathukkaren. “Turning things into political issues while failing to consider the fact that people’s lives are at stake when climate change is already claiming lives.
“We’ve seen that in our own country last year and around the world.”
With the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP29, just over two weeks away, Mannathukkaren says, “we’ve been over this a lot. The people in power know what they have to do; they’re just not doing it.”
For her, striking for the climate is about sending a message of urgency: “Wake up. We have to act now. We’re running out of time.”
This article appears in Oct 1 – Nov 6, 2024.