October 2025
Kids still need us to show up
Kids still need us to show up
By Lella Blumer
Through sunshine and smoke, long days of kids playing outside and longer days trapped inside by the heat, the taste of fresh fruit and veggies and the sight of crops desperate for rain, this summer unfolded to the tune of David Suzuki’s interview with iPolitics reverberating in my brain.
For decades, Suzuki has been pushing us to think critically about how we interact with our environments and to make those relationships healthy. For me, he’s been part of the conscience that drives me to keep my eyes open, make different choices, ask questions.
His words - the ones most people took away from the interview - were “it’s too late”. Those words pushed a lot of buttons and hit a chord in our collective consciousness. There was angst and anger. Some of us vowed to dig even deeper into the work we’re doing, maybe light the fuse of revolution. Some wondered whether that work had a purpose anymore. Conversations kept coming around to the feeling that it just keeps getting heavier: living with the obvious signs of environmental destruction, realizing what lies ahead for our kids and coming generations, and now, facing the reality that we’ve squandered the chances we had to have any significant impact on that outcome.
As someone hard-wired to trust in possibilities, I found Suzuki’s words leading me in a different, but familiar direction.
“The focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans” he said. “We’ve left out the foundation of our existence, which is nature, clean air, pure water, rich soil, food, and sunlight. That’s the foundation of the way we live and, when we construct legal, economic and political systems, they have to be built around protecting those very things, but they’re not.”
And we’ve failed at making any progress in changing those systems, according to Suzuki. It’s hard not to agree. The political will for systemic change is clearly lacking, influenced and misdirected by the oil and gas industry which, after all, is about profiting as much as possible from extracting as much as possible before running head-on into the rapidly-advancing reality where Canada is stuck with stranded assets, a toxic environment, and economic failure because the rest of the world has moved on to cleaner energy sources.
Suzuki’s advice, in the interview, was to re-think our efforts to influence political change and focus fully on our own local communities where we will – if we haven’t already – be facing a changed reality first-hand.
“Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.”
It’s a reminder that caring for those around us counts – in fact, it’s what counts the most. Making difficult, dangerous situations better, however we can, counts. Fighting every fraction of a degree of warming counts. Showing kids that we’re willing to change, to work, to fight - for them - counts.
I started as an organizer with For Our Kids when it was brand-new, supporting parents who were looking to connect with others who were as terrified as they were. Many said they knew nothing about climate change, most had never taken any political or social action before, and all of them were already over-extended from working and raising families. They had something else in common: their motivation came from thinking about the increasingly fragile future their kids faced and not being willing to sit on the sidelines and watch that happen.
The network was then, and still is now, about people and families looking for ways to engage with their communities and across the country, helping each other to do things differently and focus on what matters. And what matters hasn’t changed.
Each of us can find opportunities to support those around us – a community group, a school, a couple of neighbours, a small business - in building stronger local networks and resources. While we’re at it, we could learn a lot from our kids, since working, playing, and creating together seem to come naturally to them. (For inspiration, you can find stories of families and communities on this journey all over the For Our Kids website.)
It's hard to acknowledge what we’ve lost and what we stand to lose. David Suzuki has never shied away from reflecting reality back to us and challenging us to do what needs to be done. Through the heat and smoke of this unpredictable, uncertain summer, I’m finding his words re-centring me on the path he was part of starting me on years ago: never, ever giving up on working for something better. Not ever.
Lella is is a member of For Our Kids’ national council, Community Engagement Lead at The Energy Mix, and a lifelong supporter of ordinary citizens taking extraordinary actions.
