Gordon Campbell Teams Up With Environmental Activists...Instead of Just Arresting Them

From Westcoaster.ca and the Canadian Press

" What a difference 20 years have made for B.C.'s environmentalists.

Less than two decades ago, they were being arrested for protesting in the woods.

Now Premier Gordon Campbell's government is investing $3 million to encourage young people to become environmental activists.

“I am asking you to help us,” the premier told dozens of young people meeting in a Climate Action Youth Dialogue conference Monday.

The plan is to fight climate change through the Youth Climate Leadership Alliance, a program that gives young people between 17 and 28 a chance to be ambassadors in fighting climate change.

Campbell, 60, said youth will have far more ideas about battling global warming that someone his age.

“I think this is the biggest single generational challenge that my generation is facing,” the premier told the crowd. “We've got to move from being a `me generation', a selfish generation, to a selfless generation.”

A long-time environmentalist agrees relations with the provincial government have come a long way since 1996, when then-premier Glen Clark was calling environmentalists “the enemies of B.C.”

In the early 1990s hundreds of protesters were arrested while trying to save massive trees in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

“But are you asking me. `Is the war over?”' Andrea Reimer, the executive director of the Wilderness Committee, asked in an interview.

“Certainly the relationship of the environmental movement has gotten much better,” she said. “It is more cognizant of the fact that governments don't have a magic wand in their hand.”

Reimer said activists had a lot of expectations in the infant stage of the B.C. environmental movement.

But she said the Wilderness Committee believes there are still many issues the government needs to work on, including the decline of the spotted owl, coal-bed methane proposals in northern B.C., and fish farms on the coast that some scientists say contribute to the decline of wild salmon stocks.

She is hopeful the youth program could point out how contradictory the government has been in its climate and environmental programs and policies.

“The younger you are, the more aware you are of the problem and the higher your fairness radar is – you haven't gotten bitter and cynical yet,” she laughed.

The program will get $1 million a year over the next three years.

The money will be spent on government-sponsored jobs for youth in research, mitigation work, tree planting and climate outreach work. "

http://www.westcoaster.ca/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=4136