GUEST BLOG: Donna Awatere Huata – Secondary Principals Council must not punish climate change striking students
James Morris, the chairman of the NZ Secondary Principals Council has stated that climate change striking students will have their absence marked as ‘unjustified’ if they take part in the global strike on March 15th.
This climate action has quickly spread across Europe, the UK, America, Australia and is now here in Aotearoa.
It would seem to me to be incongruent in the extreme to punish students for having a social conscience on what is the most urgent issue of our times. These brave young New Zealanders are striking to demand adults combat climate change meaningfully and they should be free to embark upon that activism without risk of school retribution.
The youth movement of children striking from school has been led by 16 year old Greta Thunberg from Sweden and 13 year old Alexandria Villasenor in America, their argument that there is no point staying at school if their future is doomed by catastrophic climate change forces a disruption to the frenzy of the immediate and offers a challenge to the present that must be acknowledged.
We are in a collective denial if we don’t understand the fact that we need to prime our culture, economy and society for radical climate change adaptation and these children, our children, the children who will face the most extreme points of a rapidly warming planet will be here facing this challenge long past the point many of us boomers are dead. These children are telling us in our 9-5 complacency of busy apathy that we can not ignore urgent action any longer.
Climate change has a face, and it is the face of your grandchildren, children, nieces, nephews, our mokopuna. It is their future we are robbing by refusing to engage in the change required now.
Another giant iceberg is calving off Antartica this week, last week headlines of the extinction of insects, next week more extreme weather events. When every alarm bell is ringing, telling children not to strike seems conceited in the worst possible arrogance.
We require an immediate re-evaluation of what adaptation efforts deserve Government support and attention because the free market has failed when it comes to climate change. We have a long way to plant 1 billion trees, and we need more. 100% renewable power and a vast expansion of solar are things that can happen now, but we fail to back the courage of our convictions and end up pragmatically paddling to stay afloat rather than forging ahead with leadership.
Our children are begging us to listen to the future we are blindly bequeathing them, a scorned earth too scorched to breath. This is the time to listen, not mark absence as ‘unjustified’.
Any student who gets into trouble with their school for attending the strikes on March 15th should contact my office and I will write letters to the schools and complain to the Ministry of Education, moving heaven and earth to remove any punishment.
Now is the time to celebrate champion and support our Children, not constrict their voice.
Donna Awatere Huata
Māori Climate Commissioner
Māori Climate Commissioner
Ruining the next generation’s future has become so ingrained in the NZ consumer society that anything that challenges it must be seen as positive.
I kind of hope the principals council try to punish the kids – the blowback will be tremendous!
It will provide extra motivation to the families involved and will encourage sympathy amongst other people.
It’s very hard for the establishment to go up against the kids without looking like a bunch of bullies so it’s going to be very hard for them to work out a strategy – I couldn’t be more delighted!
Let’s have a large dose of common sense from the founder of Greenpeace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=AvbU9xuDyC8
Length 3:28
Andrew you’ve already asked this question. Don’t you like the factual responses? There is no point asking it again because the answers will be the same – see Frank’s response, which is spot on.
Anyhow, I do not think you have the ability to debate this issue because you are fixated by your own blind to the truth beliefs.
Donna:
> We require an immediate re-evaluation of what adaptation efforts deserve Government support and attention because the free market has failed when it comes to climate change
When a former ACT MP says that the free market has failed, there’s no question that it has. So what policy are our fearless leaders putting forward to deal with this market failure? What do we know about their policy? Can we improve on it?
Reporting in any way on the climate change strike without including some substantial policy information is sensationalism, not journalism. It makes the public more cynical and partisan, not more informed and empowered to act:
https://www.vox.com/videos/2019/3/12/18261856/green-new-deal-tactical-framing-aoc
I came across this listening to a podcast recently, that seems to address the issues of “the market” with a paper ‘Climate mitigation policy as a system solution: addressing the risk cost of carbon’ by Delton B. Chen, Joel van der Beek & Jonathan Cloud.
It is somewhat over my head but it stuck me as being a worthy concept for consideration by the powers that be?
In the opening paragraph “Climate change poses deep risks to human welfare and ecosystems, and it has been described as a wicked problem for reasons relating to its complex relationships, fragmentation of social responses, and an apparent absence of a policy toolkit for decarbonising the economy to a specific carbon quota. In response to the various challenges of the wicked problem, this exposition confronts the central question of how climate finance could be most effectively mobilised to respond to the 1.5–2°C”
The paper is available here: Chen-Beek-Cloud_SystemSolutionAddressingtheRiskCostofCarbon.pdf
Joanna
The trolls for big Oil and business NZ on this forum pay no heed to information kindly provided to help their understanding.
https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/1-Chen-Beek-Cloud_SystemSolutionAddressingtheRiskCostofCarbon.pdf
Very True John W!! I recognise that it is an utter waste of time to bother with “those types”, their agenda is well fixed! And thanks for posting the url properly, do you think there is validity in the paper for consideration by potentially, our coalition government?
Joanne the paper has so many holes in it that it is not worth reading.
More neo liberal chatter that has no basis for the promised continuing growth they take pains to argue.
Economic models are independent of complex interactions of real world environmental destruction that growth must produce.
The market can be reinvented by tweaking to fix all problems – hardly.
Just another load if diatribe to say BAU is OK if we just do this or that, all will be fine.
The combination of consequences of man kinds exploitation of the environment over the last 200 + years is not mentioned as such nor does it even discus the interactions between the various industrial polluting activities, Resource depletion, wilderness reduction, habitat destruction, species decline nor food production with accelerating loss of fertile soil. let alone ocean acidification, ice melt, population over shoot and growing global inequality and wars.
There is lots of stuff around of this ilk.