Student climate striker still inspiring change

Written By Peter Allan
Shir Gruber and protesters at the September 2019 climate march in Montreal.

Shir Gruber and protesters at the September 2019 climate march in Montreal. Photo by Brandon Tran

 

By Patricia Lane & Shir Gruber

These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.

Wondering what happened to the leaders of the 2019 climate student strikes? Meet Shir Gruber. Now a Masters student at McGill University, Shir helped organize 500,000 people to take to the streets of Montreal (Tiohtià:ke) and call for more action on climate justice. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and she really got busy.

Tell us what you have been doing since March 2020.

In 2019, I was in CEGEP and co-president of Dawson College’s environmental club. Stakeholder engagement combined with community-led scientific research led to the installation of composting facilities for all 10,000 students.

I joined Sustainable Youth Canada/Écosystème Jeunesse Canada (SYC). We learned about a green space near Montreal, Angell Woods, with wetlands and old-growth forest that had been a dumping ground, but the local youth were trying to clean it up. SYC’s “Project Phoenix” added capacity to their efforts. Youth community members identified a particularly polluted area of the park. Together, we assessed the extent of the problem, engaged the broader community, cleaned, sorted and catalogued the origins of the trash, ran scientific tests on the soil, analyzed the growth of invasive species through satellite imagery and reported findings to the municipal government.

READ MORE

 
Peter Allan
Previous

Equipping emotionally resilient climate leaders
Next

Merging good times with climate activism