These seniors are going to bat for the planet | Canada Voices

On April 9, 2024, a group of self-described old women stood before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and rejoiced. The KlimaSeniorinnen – a Swiss association of 2,500 women, all over the age of 64 – had successfully argued before the court that their federal government’s failure to address climate change contravened their human rights. Their specific claim: that older women suffer disproportionately from extreme heat. It was a landmark victory in the history of climate litigation.

Seniors the world over are going to bat for the planet. Contrary to a common depiction of boomers – as entitled consumers and clueless beneficiaries of postwar economic growth – many are spending their twilight years fighting.

Across Canada, groups such as the Suzuki Elders, Seniors for Climate Action Now and Grandmothers Act to Save the Planet are demonstrating in front of legislatures, deputing before city councils, blocking traffic, even landing in jail.

The members of these movements believe that climate action should not fall to young people. They have time, energy and gratitude for the good run they’ve had. And while the concept of climate change may not have existed in their own childhoods, they recognize it as a defining feature of the world they’re leaving behind.

Eric Schiller says he wakes up most mornings with the same question floating around in his head: “What am I going to do with my privilege today?” The answer, for the Ottawa resident, usually involves taking action on one of two fronts – the climate or peace – which he considers inextricably linked.

A hydraulic engineer by training who spent much of his career working on water distribution projects in Africa, Dr. Schiller traces his activist roots back to April 27, 1965, the day he heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Schiller was a theology student in nearby Pasadena at the time. An hour of King’s soaring rhetoric – including the much-quoted “if democracy is to live, segregation must die” – was enough to turn Dr. Schiller into an activist for life.

Travelling with King through the southern U.S., Dr. Schiller learned that some laws were made to be broken. In Georgia, he spent three days in jail after attending an all-white church with Black friends. “If you want to be an agent for change,” he says, “it’s not enough to talk.”

These days, Dr. Schiller is happy to support any group that is working to combat climate change or promote peace. In the summer of 2023, at 87, he was one of four activists arrested for blocking traffic on the Portage Bridge in Ottawa. Wearing reflective vests and bearing banners that read “Climate Justice Now,” the group – called On2Ottawa at the time, now Last Generation – was demanding more ambitious climate policy from the federal government, specifically the creation of a national firefighting agency to combat forest fires and a citizens’ assembly on climate issues.

Dr. Schiller, who taught civic engineering at the University of Ottawa for 18 years, knows the slow and steady path of advocacy. As co-founder of the Ottawa Water Study Action Group (OWSAG), he spent 15 years lobbying the City of Ottawa to stop selling plastic bottles on city property. The goal was achieved in 2022.

But at 90, 15 years feels like a luxury. “I want to die peacefully fighting,” he says.

When he turned 93, Don Brown decided it was time to move into a retirement home. The widower said goodbye to the energy-efficient house he had built in the village of Waterdown, Ont., and moved into a residence in nearby Hamilton. An Anglican minister in his working life, Mr. Brown had served in parishes across the country. But Hamilton, where he grew up, felt like home.

There, he joined the local chapter of 350.org, the global climate movement established by American environmentalist Bill McKibben. “I have always loved the Earth, not only for its beauty but because it provided me with what I needed,” says Mr. Brown, who has been a gardener all his life. “When I became aware of the cause and effects of the climate crisis, it spurred me to act.”

Mr. Brown and a handful of other Hamilton 350 members formed a subgroup. As Elders for Climate Sanity, they put together a video presentation on climate change and took it on tour – to local seniors’ residences and church and community groups. When the pandemic prevented indoor screenings, they took their educational campaign outside.

These days, Mr. Brown and his fellow Elders gather every second Friday at one of three bank corners: nodal points in Hamilton and the outlying communities of Westdale and Dundas. They hold banners calling out the banks for their fossil fuel investments and distribute leaflets to interested passersby, explaining the merits of credit unions.

“As far as I can remember, we’ve only cancelled once,” says Mr. Brown, who gets around by bus. “It was a snow day.”

In March of 2024, Mr. Brown and three others were arrested at the Royal Bank branch in Dundas. They had been sitting in lounge chairs of the bank’s foyer, discussing their opposition to fossil fuels with customers. The bank manager asked them to leave. When the police came, Mr. Brown was spared handcuffs. “I use a walking stick,” he explains. The Dundas Four, as they were referred to by local media, pled guilty to trespassing. Mr. Brown was fined $250.

“I don’t do this for my future,” says Mr. Brown, who turned 100 last December. “But I have three children, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Their future is at stake. I honestly think this is what keeps me going.”

In the spring of 2021, Victoria resident Amalia Schelhorn decided to drive over to Fairy Creek to see what all the fuss was about. Ms. Schelhorn had been reading about an escalating stand-off between a logging company and protesters seeking to protect the old-growth forest in the Fairy Creek watershed on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

“I was awestruck,” she says of Eden Grove, a mix of towering red cedars and Douglas firs, some of them more than 12 feet in diameter. Eventually, Ms. Schelhorn would become one of the more than 1,100 people to be arrested in the Fairy Creek blockade, now considered the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

Ms. Schelhorn had never thought of herself as a protester. A one-time first soloist with the National Ballet of Canada, she became defined by her work as a dancer, dance instructor and parent. But standing in that ancient forest as the mother of four grown children, she realized she had the energy to fight for its preservation.

Three days after visiting Fairy Creek, Ms. Schelhorn and 40 others – young and old, dancers and amateurs – performed a dance she had choreographed on the lawn in front of the B.C. legislature. Set to Bruce Cockburn’s environmental hit If a Tree Falls, the performance garnered media attention.

“It was validating to realize that dance had a place in a serious issue,” she says.

Since then, Ms. Schelhorn has choreographed dances and staged flash mobs in support of various environmental causes. Some of her most stalwart dancers are members of the senior activist group Elders for Ancient Trees. She and her troupes pop up where least expected, such as in malls across Victoria at the peak of Christmas shopping season.

“It’s fun, and it raises community. And it’s more accessible to audiences than gloomy statistics,” she says. She finds it only logical that most of her fellow activists are older. “Most seniors have their life situation figured out. They have discretionary time and secure housing, and they want to do something significant.”

Last year, Ms. Schelhorn established a Victoria chapter of the Red Rebels Brigade. The movement, which emerged from climate protests in London in 2019, is part street theatre, part political statement; its members make silent appearances at demonstrations, dressed in crimson red, their faces painted white. For Ms. Schelhorn, it represents an emotional response to the climate crisis and a recognition that words sometimes fail.

Michael Polanyi can still picture his 80-year-old grandfather standing on Avenue Road in Toronto with his thumb outstretched, hitching a ride down to a demonstration at Queen’s Park. In his childhood home, the dinner table conversation often revolved around Cold War politics. Dr. Polanyi’s father, John, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who taught at the University of Toronto, was – and remains – an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament.

Civic engagement was bred in the bone. As an undergraduate student of physics at McMaster University, Dr. Polanyi became involved in the peace movement. He was first arrested in Ottawa in 1987, protesting a proposed NATO training facility in Labrador.

But after he became a father, his focus shifted to climate issues. He stepped away from activism to pursue a doctorate in environmental studies and legal avenues of change: establishing a climate group in his Toronto neighbourhood, meeting with politicians, making submissions to standing committees in Ottawa.

Since the 2018 UN climate report, which underscored the importance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, Dr. Polanyi has felt greater urgency. “Scientists have been warning about this for decades,” he says with a heavy sigh. He resumed protesting.

In 2023, Dr. Polanyi, who has studied theology on and off throughout his life, established Faith and Climate Action, a Toronto-based group of activists who lobby banks to divest from fossil fuels, conduct sit-ins and support other environmental groups in their activities.

Over the years, Dr. Polanyi has been arrested eight times and charged with trespassing and mischief. Soft-spoken and articulate, he doesn’t present as your typical rebel. But he’s convinced that non-violent civil disobedience is effective. “The image of people lovingly submitting, making a sacrifice, can be transformative,” he says.

Dr. Polanyi worked in the non-profit sector, holding roles in research, policy and government relations, and led poverty-reduction campaigns at the municipal and provincial levels. But he was aware that his activism could make employers uncomfortable. Last year, at 61, he retired from professional life and moved to Victoria to be closer to his children. There, he has connected with SELEKTEL, an environmental protection group that is opposing the expansion of the Trans-Canada Highway through Goldstream Provincial Park, and the Climate Action Team of Greater Victoria. He knows his choice to retire is a rare privilege, and he intends to make good on it.

“As seniors, we have power,” he says. “Politicians pay attention to us. We have time, resources, experience and connections. We have a responsibility to engage.”

Tim Takaro has been studying the health impacts of climate change since the 1990s. For decades, he approached the subject as a medical doctor, researcher and professor of occupational and environmental health. Then he got frustrated.

In August of 2020, Dr. Takaro packed his tent and rode his bike from his home in New Westminster, B.C., down into the Brunette River Valley. The ravine, which Dr. Takaro describes as the kind of place you go to forest bathe, was slated for clearance to make way for the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline.

“I was at the end of my rope,” says the 69-year-old, calling the Liberal government’s 2018 decision to buy the pipeline the crowning blow. “It was clear that the academic approach was not going to have an impact.”

American-born and educated, Dr. Takaro joined the faculty of Simon Fraser University in 2005. He has studied the correlation between climate change and declining respiratory health, and the impact of emissions from fracking on health outcomes in local communities. He also acted as intervener in two environmental assessments for TMX, submitting reports on the toxicology of potential tanker spills in the Burrard Inlet.

In the Brunette River Valley, Dr. Takaro staked out a very high cottonwood tree. A rock climber all his life, he climbed some 35 metres up the trunk, slung a rope around a nearby tree and built a platform on which to pitch his tent.

Dr. Takaro spent the better part of the next 15 months in various tree sits along the proposed pipeline route. Supported by an army of volunteers, he took turns with other protestors. In November of 2021, he was one of six – four of them over 60 – to be arrested and charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction that Trans Mountain had obtained to clear the woods. The RCMP used a cherry picker to remove Dr. Takaro from his tree.

“It was good,” says Dr. Takaro of the 21 days he served in Fraser Regional Correctional Centre before being released on good behaviour. “I met people I wouldn’t otherwise have. They were incredulous that I was in there for blocking a pipeline.”

“If we were to monetize the health impacts of the fossil fuel industry, we wouldn’t be here,” he says. He’s prepared to go back to jail if he must.

On Sept. 21 – International Peace Day – in 2012, Lyn Adamson and a dozen supporters set up camp on Parliament Hill and began a 12-day fast. Holding a large banner that read “Hungry for Climate Justice,” they listed their requests on a large hand-written Bristol board; they wanted the government to put a price on carbon, stop subsidizing fossil fuels and promote renewable energy. On the margin, they left a large blank space for politicians to sign.

Until Oct. 2 – Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday – the ragtag group milled around the lawn in front of Parliament, sharing their concern with anyone interested: that if the federal government failed to take climate change seriously, they too – or their grandchildren – might one day be going hungry.

Ms. Adamson, a Pickering, Ont.-born Quaker who had spent much of her adult life up to that point opposing nuclear arms, supporting Indigenous advocacy and establishing housing co-ops, was spurred to action after Stephen Harper’s majority government withdrew Canada from the Kyoto Protocol and began aggressively pushing oil sands development.

ClimateFast, as Ms. Adamson named her group, returned to Parliament Hill for four years running. By the end of their 2015 fast, the once-blank space on the poster contained the signatures of 130 members of Parliament and 17 senators.

“Sometimes you have to bring things to a head to get government to respond,” she says, pointing out that the Liberal platform of 2015 included all her group’s requests.

Today, Ms. Adamson’s life is a nonstop grind of deputations, meetings and demonstrations. In addition to ClimateFast, whose 15 core members meet weekly to spawn working groups and train volunteers in the art of citizen lobbying, she co-chairs the City of Toronto’s Climate Advisory Group and the Ontario Climate Emergency Campaign, a collective of 270 organizations that has developed a climate plan for the province – whether the Premier wants it or not.

While mild-mannered, Ms. Adamson is not at ease. She fears that average temperatures on Earth may well reach two degrees above pre-industrial levels, and that her grandchildren may be living in a world on the brink of social and economic collapse.

“The problem with this crisis is that it’s not in our faces,” she says. “And if you’re in the middle of a flood or forest fire, you don’t have the energy to do anything about it. But I want ordinary people to know that they can do something.”