The inspirational woman I chose to talk about for my oral presentation is Catherine McKenna, the current Canadian Minister of Infrastructure & Communities. She actually became the first female Member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre in 2015, where she was honoured Minister of Environment and Climate Change. She was born on August 5th, 1971, in Hamilton, Ontario, and attended many prestigious Canadian Universities such as Toronto University, McGill University & the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has worked as a lawyer for years as well as a professor at the Munk Global School of Affairs and Public Policy, and she has also played a significant role as a negotiator for the United Nations. Currently, she is working on keeping the city of Ottawa clean by deploying clean energy and solutions, but also on reducing plastics in our oceans, and expanding our national parks. She loves interacting with people from the community and making sure that the local economy keeps on growing.

McKenna is like me in the sense that I, too, am aspiring to become a human rights and social justice lawyer and would like to make an impact on the world. However, she is different than me because she dares to stand up and talk about environmental issues that are currently subject to conflicts, even with the label of “Climate Barbie” stuck to her back. McKenna is determined and has no fear of speaking her truth, and that is something I would never have the guts to do. First of all, I am far from being as great as a speaker as she is. Secondly, I would never gather enough courage to do it as well as she does while knowing some individuals take fun in turning my words into jokes. And those things are actually the reasons why I chose her. When I first looked at her description, I saw parts of what I aspire to be in her. McKenna is inspirational because you can see that she loves what she does and that she has worked really hard to get to that important position of power. She owns her place with such pride that, even if she has not done a lot to change the world as a whole, seeing that she could eventually, her, a woman, change important features of the Canadian world is already impressing. An inspirational person to me is someone who is driven by their goals and by what they love. Someone who, just like Catherine McKenna, is determined to bring changes to the world.

https://www.globeseries.com/forum/speaker/the-honourable-catherine-mckenna

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_McKenna

Severn Cullis-Suzuki, born on November 30th 1979, is best known for her amazing achievements as an environmental activist, speaker, television host and author. She’s spoken very freely about the environmental issues that press urgency for the world as well as urged viewers to act on it and define their values. Few know this, but she was the original Great Thunberg. In 1992, only 12 years old, Severn Cullis-Suzuki spoke openly about possibilities of averting future ecological disaster right after the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit occurred. After this, she was named “the girl who silenced the world for five minutes.”

In some ways, I identify with her since I’ve always had strong opinions about certain subjects like how mental illness should be taken more seriously and how toxic masculinity can stem from the unreasonable gender role that men should be “strong” and “rational”. I’ve openly talked about this in highschool and even did a full project on it that ended with a presentation of my research. I would also say that we’re quite different in certain ways; I’ve never been able to make much change or at least I don’t know if I’ve ever changed anyone’s perception of reality. This is why I find her so important and inspirational. To think that a child was brilliant and exceptional enough to silence the world for 5 minutes and make everyone think. I actually decided to write about her after watching a documentary she hosted about sea life and how spectacular it is. I find it amazing that she followed in her father’s steps to make this world better.

“Coming up here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election, or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come,” she said in the famous speech. “In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.” These will forever be words we will hear with new activists warning us about where we’re going. It’s time we listen to them and I think that’s why I admire Severn Cullis-Suzuki so much. She has nothing to hide, fights for what she believes in and fights for the world.

Quote from her original speech: https://youtu.be/oJJGuIZVfLM

Berta Cáceres, may she rest in peace, was born on March 4th, 1973, in La Esperanza, Honduras. Before I learned anything about her, I never knew environmental martyrs, people who are tortured or even killed because they fight for the well being of our planet, could exist.

Berta was an amazing woman and I am proud to share similar traits with her. Like Cáceres , I am from Central America. My country, El Salvador, and hers are neighbors and both are homes to descendants of the Lenca people, an ethnic group from the Pre-Columbian era she was part of! I also recognize myself in her concern about climate change but I unfortunately do not have the same courage as her to speak up and take action for what I stand for, I guess that’s a huge difference between her and I. Also, even if my origins are Salvadorian, I was born in Canada, a country extremely different from Honduras. When I was born, I had the guarantee that my rights would always be protected by The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Unlike her, I have the right to protest against the government or corporations without having to fear for my own safety because I have the protection of the Constitution. Her, on the other hand could not rely on the State, the police or the army to grant her protection because they are corrupt. Countries in Central America are runned by rich people who manipulate authorities with money to have them do what they want.

Berta is the co-founder of the organism COPINH which is the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. During ten years she campaigned against the construction of the Agua Zerca Dam which was to be constructed on a territory occupied by the indigenous Lenca people, her people. She also formed a human blockage that stayed in place for more than a year on a route leading to an illegal construction site! Her works on the campaign were recognized with the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, about one year before she was murdered. The reason why I chose her to be my inspirational woman is because her fight made me think of a subject of actuality: The Wet’suwet’en’s fight against the Coastal GasLink’s project to build pipelines on their territory. I chose to talk about her to make us reflect on the importance of the fight that is being held right now in Canada to go against a similar problem! Learning about Berta Caceres made me realise that indigenous people’s rights are almost always neglected by Governments at any time, in any place and that today is a perfect moment to follow Caceres’ example and to protest against those inequalities, especially here, in Canada, where protesting is allowed!

March 2nd, 2016, Caceres was murdered in her house in La Esperanza. It has been said that a few months before this sad event, special forces of the Honduran military trained by U.S., received a hitlist with her name on it. She also had already received a total of about 33 death threats, and she claimed that 10 members of her organization had already been murdered. I chose her to be my inspirational woman because she did not give up. She was a female environmental activist in a dangerous and corrupt country, she had a four children, she was constantly threatened of being killed, she fought for an Indigenous community, some of her partners had already been murdered before her and she did not give up. She had all the reasons to let go, silent her voice and suffer the injustices, but she decided to go on, she decided that it was worth it. That is my definition of ‘inspiring’; someone who decides to persevere in what they believe at all cost. Someone who, unlike me, takes action for what they stand for and do not give up.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berta_Cáceres

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Berta-Caceres

https://copinh.org/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-death-of-berta-caceres

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/21/berta-caceres-name-honduran-military-hitlist-former-soldier

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/03/americas/honduras-activist-berta-caceres-killed/index.html

The inspirational women that I have chosen to present is Emma Thompson, also known as Nanny McPhee. Emma Thompson was born April 15 in 1959 in London, England. Aside from being a very successful actress, she has also shown herself to be a very engaged activist. Emma Thompson is very dedicated to helping humanity and making the world a better place. Thompson is a longtime environmental supporter of Greenpeace UK and the Food Foundation. She is also the president of the Helen Bamber Foundation, which provides specialized care for refugees who have experienced extreme cruelty, such as torture and human trafficking. She has also spent many years campaigning for immigrants’ rights.

The way I define someone inspirational is a person who sets an example for others and encourages others to do what they do by leading them and showing them that it is possible to make a difference. This leads to people looking up to the person and being inspired by them to conquer any obstacle they are facing. I believe that Emma Thompson is an inspiration because of how she has demonstrated how much of an impact one individual can have in our world. The important similarity between Emma Thompson and I is the strive to make the world a better place. I want to help people around me and save the planet just as her. I would like to make an impact and fight for what is right just as she is doing. However, the important difference between us is that she has a bigger platform than I do, and she is more courageous. I continue to look up to her and hopefully one day I will work up enough courage to make a difference.

Emma Thompson joined the Extinction Rebellion (XR) group to protest in a non-violent mass protest. Thousands of people blocked the city’s major traffic routes. This gathering was put in place by the grassroots movement and they have three main goals: to get governments to declare a “climate emergency;” to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions by 2025; and to have citizens’ assemblies lead the government on climate and ecological justice. She also wrote a letter directing the State on climate change and what the government should be doing to help the environment.

Video:

References:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/19/uk/emma-thompson-climate-protests-london-gbr-intl/index.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7761065/Dame-Emma-Thompson-gives-gloomy-forecast-Extinction-Rebellion-protest.html

Jamie Margolin is a young climate activist born on December 10, 2001, in Seattle Washington. She is doing a lot to make people aware of the climate crisis. She is in fact a very inspirational women that inspired me to do the minimum that I can to fight for the future of the environment.

Margolin and I have some important similarities. For instance, she is almost the same age as me. She cares about climate change just like me. She is an organized teenager who knows about her goals and ambitions that would lead her to success in the fight for climate crisis awareness. Like me, she makes a list of her goals for the whole year and checks off when she accomplished them. She is perseverant and wants her goals to be accomplished. She will do the most that she can to achieve them like me who will never give up when I face a challenge. 

Jamie Margolin have similarities, but we are also have some important differences Before I mentioned that I care about the environment like her, but I don’t do as much as her to fight for it. Jamie Margolin does not only vision for a better climate but also, she is doing everything in her power to make awareness of the current situation of the world. Furthermore, despite going to high school she has done a lot of the things that many of us including me cannot achieve. For instance, she became the co-founder of Zero Hour at the age of 15. She even organized the Youth Climate March in Washington and 25 other cities in America. 

I chose this woman because I can relate to her. She is a teenager like myself and I can connect with her in many ways. In addition, she is only a young woman. She is not an authority figure or a scientist, she is just strong individual fighting for a good cause Climate change will affect our generations. We will see the disasters that it will bring unless we can do something about it. This is what Jamie is trying to say. Seeing a young activist inspires me to change some of my habits for a healthier future.

What I find inspirational about her is that she is encouraging people around the world to take action for the environment. As I said before, she has done many great things at a very young age. For instance, at the age of 15, she co-founded a non-profit international organization called “Zero Hour”. This organization was created to have the voices of a young activist around the globe be heard. People in this organization are concerned that leaders and politicians are not serious about the climate crisis. Zero Hour teaches the youth and people around the world how the climate crisis is important and immediate actions should be taken to solve this problem. In brief, she is inspiring others to the same as her and spread knowledge about the world’s environmental situation.

In my opinion, an inspirational person is an individual that can motivate others to do something that they care about. They are much more than role models because they can captivate others by explaining their journey, their challenges or the difficult challenges that they had faced. It often brings strong emotions which influence us to do the same as them. For instance, Jamie Margolin is inspirational because she influences me and made me want to follow her path. I respect her because she brought into me the hope for a change of our way of thinking about the climate crisis. Also, because of that I can talk about her to my friends and family and inspire them as well. 

Here are some links that have more information about her:

http://thisiszerohour.org/

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/seattles-jamie-margolin-is-17-and-a-climate-activist-on-wednesday-she-testifies-before-congress/

  Elin Wägner was born on May 16, 1882 in Lund, Sweden and died on January 16, 1949. Her mother died when she was only three years old and her father worked as the director of a school in the town of Nyköping, so she didn’t grow up in a very rich family. Social issues such as women rights and ecology became her priority and she started to get interested by these subjects at a very young age. She also takes part in a movement for the vote of women and she is a true pacifist. She simultaneously develops the same themes in her literature, tackling the problems of real life in her works of fiction. She was also very implicated in journalism and wrote several articles criticizing some social injustices, she equally wrote a lot about ecology and was very concerned by this serious issue. This woman has some things in common with me, one of these things is the fact that she is concerned by social issues since she was young, she even started writing articles in her school journal at a relatively young age, even if it wasn’t something very appropriate for a young lady like her at that time. But she is also very special and unique as a personality, her life wasn’t easy at all and her childhood was very different from mine. Also, I don’t agree with some of her pacific ideas because I find them a little bit too Utopian, but I do support most of her opinions and ideas. What made me chose this woman is the fact that even if she had a difficult life and suffered the lost of very close people, she remained a good person and pushed through all the difficulties and really fought to prove her vision of how our society should evolve. I find her very inspirational in many ways, but if I had to chose one main reason, it has to be her determination and strong character. She was truly a unique person with a great charisma and with very modern ideas for her time. If I had to give a definition of “inspirational”, I would simply say Elin Wägner, but on a more serious note, I would say that someone inspirational is someone who motivates people around them and gives them hope and will to make a change.

Makoma Lekalakala is a South African activist who is the director of the Johannesburg branch of Earthlife Africa, she was awarded the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize for the African region for their work on using the courts to stop a Russian-South African nuclear deal in 2017.Lekalakala is no stranger to standing up to those in power. The activist grew up in Soweto under apartheid and joined the liberation struggle as a young woman. In 2008, she turned her attention to environmental justice. The NGO’s work has never been more urgent. The effects of climate change are increasingly being felt across the world and, according to a huge UN report last year, there are only 12 years left to avoid a catastrophe.Lekalakala therefore advocates on widespread issues in South Africa, from pollution to water scarcity. The achievement for which she is best known, however, was stopping the construction of eight to ten nuclear power stations in 2017.

Nuclear energy has been promoted as green energy, but the negative environmental impacts of the nuclear industry are substantial. For every pound of enriched uranium that goes into a nuclear reactor, more than 25,000 pounds of radioactive waste are produced in the mining and processing of uranium. Used reactor fuel remains extremely hot for hundreds of years and radioactive for thousands of years. Since South Africa currently has one nuclear power station, a deal would have been a dream for countries like the US and Russia due to their high dependency over nuclear power. South Africa is also known for being a dumping ground for nuclear waste according to an article written in Goldmanproze: Countries have been burying nuclear waste in the Namaqualand desert since the 80s. This sort of event is what prompted South Africa to make a deal with Russia to create 10 nuclear power stations throughout the country. In consequence, the nuclear waste dumped around the country would have affected various biomes for example raising the temperature of marine ecosystems. Other consequences include seismic activity similar to the one that occurred in Japan’s plant in 2011. Thanks to Makoma Lekalakala advice and consultations during the process of agreement, the South African high court decided to pull out of the contract due to how “unlawful” and “unconstitutional” the idea was.

What I found the most courageous about Makoma Lekalakala is how she managed go against high position people and managed to provide better solutions and alternatives to providing more electricity to the country than most politicians in the high court who only managed to see the easy and money route rather than the cleaner direction.

References:

– https://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/makoma-lekalakala-liz-mcdaid/

– https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43869060

Blog 4: Miranda Wang Climate Actions

Miranda Wang is an entrepreneur, inventor and CEO of the company Biocellection. She works with her best friend Jeanny Yao. Her company aims to turn PL plastics waste into valuable chemicals. Miranda was in senior year of high school when she was first inspired to help contribute in the climate crisis of plastics. She went on a fieldtrip to a land field and was appalled by the massive amount of waste there was, and she noticed how the remains were primarily plastics. The plastics break down but never fully chemically disintegrate. At that time, she was studying science and wanted to figure out if there was a possible way to fully break down these plastics. She was given an opportunity to take on this challenge during a science fair; Miranda, her best friend and their professor worked on a research project for to find a solution for plastic biodegradation; since then they’ve continued their research and created their business BioCellection. They’ve invented a chemical process that breaks down the polyethylene plastics and turn it into valuable chemicals that can then be used to make numerous items, such as paint, nylons, performance materials used in cars, clothes, electronics and so on. Their goal is to further their research and get everyone aligned with their mission to solve the plastic problem. As of now their work is mainly laboratory but their goal for 2020 is to have a demonstration unit. Miranda said: “The next step– creating the demonstration unit– is a critical one in which we’re essentially taking science out of the lab and putting it into the realm of engineering.” Their first challenge is to solve the plastic film situation. Since most plastics aren’t recycled, they end up piling up in the land fields and floating in the oceans. Soon they say their will be more plastics in the ocean then fish. Their goal throughout their discoveries is also to diminish this issue in order to save marine life. On the Biocellection site, here is a video they demonstrated of an ocean filled with plastics. https://youtu.be/ArYLGNe-jCA

Miranda said in an interview on march 9^th 2016: “We are half way finished building a genetically modified bacterium that can break down plastics about 80 times faster then the best known organism and we currently hold two provisional patens for this technology and like you said one of the downstream products of this science is that after the bacterium breaks down the plastic waste, because of the chemistry that happens in the cell, the cell is able to do this in a complete non toxic way, so the cell protein can actually be used to feed the fish and we`ve demonstrated 73 mortality rate.”

Here are some awards Miranda Wang innovation was recognized for.            

1. Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate
2. UNEP Young Champion of the Earth
3. Wharton Business Plan Competition Perlman Grand Prize Winner
4. Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Prize, etc.….

-Briana Panaccione