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Climate change activists hosting ‘die-in’ in downtown Victoria

Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island hopes to draw attention to wildfire smoke season
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Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island is hosting a die-in in downtown Victoria on Friday. (Facebook/Extinction Rebellion)

A Vancouver Island conservation organization is hosting a “wildfire smoke die-in to save life and lungs” in downtown Victoria on Friday in protest of the LNG pipeline and “policies that compounds climate change and its effects.”

Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island is a branch of an international, socio-political organization that uses non-violent resistance to protest climate change, destruction of biodiversity and the resulting risk to human existence.

On its Facebook page, the Island branch says it actively works to “use creative, nonviolent, disruptive civic conflict that invokes moral clarity and unmasks the systemic violence of the status quo.”

READ ALSO: Greater Victoria Mayors, environment minister talk climate change

On Friday, June 28, Extinction Rebellion activists and invited speakers are gathering at the BC Ministry of Health building at 1515 Blanshard Street from 3:30 p.m.-5 p.m. to “draw attention to wildfire smoke season.”

“For a lot of people in Victoria, climate change may still be a relatively abstract concept,” said Climate Emergency Institute spokesperson Dr. Peter Carter, in a media release. “The annual wildfire smoke season shows up in everybody’s life every year, and it will keep getting worse.

“The increasing extraction and distribution of more fossil fuels to burn, causing continued increasing emissions of globally deadly polluting greenhouse gases, is the worst ever crime against humanity and the greatest evil ever,” Carter added. “More natural gas emits more methane as well as CO2.”

Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island notes a warning from the 2018 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are needed if catastrophic changes to the climate and the ecology that support all life on the planet are to be avoided.

“The April 2019 Canada’s Changing Climate Assessment shows that British Columbia is going to be severely impacted by increasing heat waves, drought and wild fires,” said Carter. “This is an emergency now, which the public health departments and governments need to acknowledge.”

READ ALSO:Climate change doubled risk of B.C.’s record-setting 2017 wildfires: study

Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island spokesperson Rob Duncan said people need to know the breathing wildfire smoke will reduce life expediencies.

“That means that as a result of breathing this smoke, people’s children and grandchildren will, on average, live shorter lives than preceding generations.”

On Friday, The organization will be accepting donations Friday for the Paddle Prairie Metis Settlement Wildfire Relief Fund, created to aid a northern Alberta community that recently lost some 15 uninsured houses to wildfire.



nina.grossman@blackpress.ca

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