Kootenay East MLA Tom Shypitka invited Maylyn Tarves, a grade 10 student at Selkirk Secondary School, to the Legislature to make a presentation to the BC United Caucus on the subject of anxiety related to climate change.
Shypitka said it was a “privilege” to introduce Tarves and her family to the legislature and said her presentation was “real and sincere.”
“I’ve never had the luxury of not worrying about climate change, because climate change has always affected my life,” Tarves said. “When I was five, we were taught to ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ in school, to sort our waste into colourful plastic bins — compost, paper and plastic, — and to care for our environment.”
Tarves said the education about the climate in school was always very hopeful, but when she joined the Climate Club at age 11, and started doing her own research, “that’s when the simplified, sugar-coated lens came off.”
“I was overwhelmed with a flood of information,” she said. “Climate change was no longer an issue of turning the tap off, or riding my bike to school, it was a vast, incomprehensible mess. All of the proposed solutions had something wrong with them; some theoretical flaw that was keeping governments from adopting change.”
She said this made her feel small and powerless against “these huge problems to be solved by politicians and CEOs.”
She touched on issues such as increasingly bad forest fires threatening her home town in the summers, and said when she turned 12 her outlook was that “the future was terrifying.”
“For me this is the face of climate anxiety: pain that rots into weary, bitter apathy,” she said. “It’s incredibly difficult to care about the world around you when everything feels so impermanent.”
Tarves said that she had she had given up on the idea of having children, saying “what ethically minded person would bring a baby into the world, just for it to suffer.”
She touched on some statistics she had about climate anxiety, telling the Caucus that a 2023 survey of 1000 Canadians aged 16 to 25 revealed that 56 per cent “reported feeling afraid, sad, anxious and powerless,” and 78 per cent reported that climate change impacts their overall mental health.
Columbia River Revelstoke MLA Doug Clovechok was unable to attend the meeting himself but he says he sympathizes with Maylyn’s anxiety and applauds her courage in speaking to the caucus.
He says COVID and forest fires and climate change have left young people today with a great deal of anxiety.
“Young people are worried,” he said. ”What is my world going to look like?”
He says he can only recommend that everyone start taking individual actions on their own.
His constituency office in Kimberley, he says, is solar powered, and he works constantly on water issues.
He is also reaching out personally to Maylyn and will have a Zoom meeting with her next month.
“This young woman is not alone (in her anxiety),” he said. “And she had a very valid argument. When students reach out to politicians, they need to know, even though they can’t vote yet, they they’ve been heard. I look forward to our conversation.
“It took a lot of courage for her to come to Victoria and I applaud her for being so public about her anxiety. This is a future leader.”
With files from Carolyn Grant