City seniors speaking out about climate change

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on September 27, 2024.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Senior citizens have experienced their share of extreme weather in their lifetimes and on Tuesday a group of them are staging a two-hour rally in front of City Hall.
The Seniors for Climate rally starting at 3 p.m. will feature numerous speakers talking about climate change, solutions and the impact of it.
Barb Phillips of the organizing committee said the chosen date also happens to be National Seniors Day in Canada and International Day for Older Persons.
“It was started this spring in different parts of Canada. It’s mostly volunteers,” said Phillips.
“It’s seniors across Canada that are wanting to bring attention to the current climate crisis that we’re all experiencing from southern Alberta to around the world. In Lethbridge, we have chosen to do a rally at City Hall,” said Phillips, who noted about 70 communities across the country are hosting rallies on the same day.
“Seniors are really concerned about these unnatural disasters,” noted Phillips, saying that while forest fires have occurred for generations, there have never been natural wildfires such as experienced in July at Jasper and previously at Lytton, B.C. and Fort McMurray.
“We all know climate changes are happening because we’re living them day to day. They are affecting our air, our water, our earth and maybe more importantly for seniors, our health,” added Phillips.
The motto for the rally is “Later is too late.”
“We want the action now, we want action from our political figures, locally, provincially, federally, around the world. We need action to really take seriously climate change there is a problem, there are solutions but we need bold action,” added Phillips.
Seniors are a good group “to rattle the chains,” Phillips said, with that demographic making up 25 per cent of Canada’s population.
“We’ve got the time, in most cases we’ve got the energy, we’ve got the knowledge.” So seniors bring a lot of life experience to the table and have a good perspective on what’s happening in their communities and the world.
Organizers are hoping to see people of all ages at the rally “because this is not a senior issue at all. It’s everyone’s issue.”
Phillips says she sees the world different from a climate perspective than when she was a child and her parents were eking out a living on a homestead in Alberta.
“It’s different now and I think we just have to admit that it needs pretty bold action. It needs committed action.”
The program features numerous speakers and the Raging Grannies who will perform twice.

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