19 Sep A climate change forum you should not miss

It’s easy to get worked up about environmental threats that directly impact your home or family. The news is full of protests against a gravel pit here, a wind farm there, a paper mill that blows noxious fumes through the middle of town.

It’s much harder to sustain protest against an environmental threat like climate change that is geographically dispersed, gradual in impact, and masked by natural swings in weather conditions—even though it presents an existential threat to humankind that dwarfs gravel pits, paper mills, and even fracking.

The environmental movement has constituents to satisfy and operating budgets to raise, so it expends too much effort on issues that are trivial (gravel pits), bogus (wind turbines), overblown (fracking), or serious but strictly local (Northern Pulp), and too little effort on human-induced climate change, the defining issue of our time.

So I’m glad the New Dawn Centre for Social Innovation and its Films for Change program are planning a four-hour People’s Climate Forum Sunday in Sydney to complement the Largest Climate Change March in History, to be staged the same day in New York City. Both events, and many others around the world*, form part of the lead-up to Tuesday’s United Nations Climate Summit** at UN headquarters in New York.

The Sydney forum (noon to 4 p.m., 37 Napean St.) includes the Cape Breton premiere of CBU professor Ashlee Cunsolo Willox’s documentary film, Lament for the Land, which catalogs the impact of climate change on the Inuit people of Labrador.

Part of the four-hour Sydney session (noon to 4 p.m.) will be devoted to “conversation tables,” with such topics as climate change and health, digital media for social change, climate change and local fisheries, Mi’kmaq sustainability and adaptation, community connections, and enviro-learning activities for children. Charlie Dennis, Senior Advisor for the Unma’ki Institute for Natural Resources, and Mi’kmaq elder Albert Marshall will be among the discussion leaders.

I hope I’ll see lots of Contrarian readers there. This is as important as an issue can be.

* Halifax has a march.

** Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not plan to attend the UN summit.