Today I marched in the climate strike with millions of people around the world. I marched because I breathe, eat, need water, have increasing love and appreciation for the natural world, and hold the lives of the world’s citizens in the highest regard.

I have been appalled and sickened by the astronomical levels of pollution and contamination plaguing the lives of loved ones and strangers alike, in so many places I have been to. From Mexico City, Lima, Santiago, Rome, Kolkata, New Delhi, Toronto and in the northern reaches of this province, where the abomination of logging and mining has pillaged and plundered from the earth and water and from the indigenous communities that make up so much of the colonized world.

I marched because capitalist development has put profits before people and destroyed the very air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. The ecocide of the industrial revolution and its aftermath is matched only by the countless lives deformed and lost due to the absolute misery of millions that have allowed us to follow a narrative celebrating a linear, exploitative, and developmental progress as the only way forward. The very science being deployed to illuminate us about the climate crisis, has been used to subsume natural and human interests.

Science has been rooted in domination, and not in knowledge for the harmony and benefit of humanity. If this were not the case, we would not be fighting for such social benefits as public and affordable health care and universal drug and dental coverage. Indigenous communities would not be facing incursions from the research and development units of multinational pharmaceutical companies engaged in stealth exploitation of the rainforests. Our food and agricultural and water systems would not be poisoned by corporate interests, biotech and genetically engineered crops while pesticide runoff and fertilizer makes the oceans uninhabitable.

Our arms races and weapons of mass destruction would not devour the large chunk of international trade and governmental budgets that they do today.

I marched because not do so, would be to give in to hopelessness, to lose faith in the young people of this planet and their right to a fair and flourishing world. I marched because not do so, would be to be defeated by the greed and shortsightedness of capitalist patriarchy and its monopoly on our mainstream media, our economies, our thoughts– which flower, in spite all attempts by the rulers that be, to the contrary.