✉️ An Epistle for the Environment

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Hello and welcome! For this Humanities 9 project, we wrote a letter about an environmental issue to promote change to people who can make those changes (like a premier or minister). I wrote to Katrine Conroy, the Minister of Forests, Natural Lands and Resources to demand an immediate protection of old growth forests, specifically the unprotected forests in the Fairy Creek Watershed on Vancouver Island.

Our driving question for this project was: 

How do people and the environment affect one another?
People affect the environment every day by driving, throwing out trash, polluting, planting trees, cleaning up beaches and protecting natural areas. The environment affects us everyday as well, it provides all we need, air, water, food and creates challenges like storms, floods and earthquakes. One of the first activities we did in this project that I think will do a great job at helping to answer the driving question, was to write an essay on whether people are destroyers or protectors of nature. Here’s my essay:Although it may seem that the general population is destroying nature, I think that the majority of people, given the option between protecting or destroying nature would choose to protect nature. Many people have no intention of destroying nature, but help contribute to its destruction ignorantly. There are however, several groups and people, like Indigenous people around the world, the land defenders at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek) and Greta Thunberg, and all their supporters, that are doing everything in their power to defend and protect nature. According to several reports, there is evidence that indigenous peoples are vital to protecting and conserving the Earth’s biodiversity and forests. A study conducted in the Amazon Basin shows that the forests managed by indigenous people only lost less than 0.3% of their carbon, whereas non-indigenous managed forest lost 3.6% of their carbon between 2003 and 2016. Brazil’s indigenous territories have more species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, than other protected areas in the country. 60% of Bolivia’s plants and two-thirds of vertebrates are found in only two indigenous territories. These reports prove that turning land management over to indigenous peoples may be a strong way to combat deforestation and climate change. Indigenous and non-indigenous people are coming together on Pacheedaht land to take a Last Stand to defend the old growth forests of Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek). They are blocking the roads to the forests with various tripods, trenches and tree sits to prevent Teal Jones from logging the last 2% of unprotected old growth forests on Vancouver Island. There are thousands of people like me around the world that are supporting The Last Stand remotely through donations and social media (@fairycreekblocade has over 83 followers). There are several news and social media reports that RCMP have brutalized the land defenders using pepper spray and other unnecessary violence as well as breaking the law, which they are supposed to uphold. Despite this, the land defenders remain strong and continue to protect Ada’itsx from being clearcut by Teal Jones. Greta Thunberg is one of the world’s most well known youth climate activists. In August 2018 Greta began sitting outside the Swedish parliament with a sign that read “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (school strike for climate) which quickly gained global attention. Soon youth all over the world participated in climate strikes with millions of students like myself attending. All with the same wish: governments to take immediate action on climate change. Greta has spoken at many conferences and events with world leaders to ask them to start doing more to stop climate change. Greta and many more students continue to strike for climate action. There are millions of people of all races and ages all over the world who are taking a stand to stop the destruction of nature. From the Indigenous people protecting and maintaining the land, to the land defenders at Ada’itsx and Greta Thunberg and thousands of others around the globe all taking a stand for nature… and our futures.

The first step of writing our letters was to find evidence from credible sources to support our argument. I had a lot of information about Fairy Creek from various instagram accounts like @rainforestflyingsqad and @fairycreekblocade but I realized that these sources might have a set perspective and the information might be biased. So I found a bunch of articles from CBC and The Narwhal, as well as some reports on old growth. I made notes of the main points and recorded the information about the sources in a pages document. We also did two vocabulary quizzes and practiced writing with context. These activities helped me to understand the skills in the curricular competency “how to recognize the role of context and perspective in texts.”

We did several CommonLit activities over the course of this project to strengthen our abilities to find themes and how to use evidence in our writing.

My favourite text we read was a story called He-y, come on ou-t about a village that discovers a mysterious hole because it had a great moral about making sure to think about long term consequences. For all the activities we did, we answered multiple choice questions and paragraph responses. These helped me recognize how texts use literary devices to enhance meaning. I feel that my reading and writing abilities have greatly improved after completing the CommonLit activities and I enjoyed getting to read all the texts!

We also did a 60 minute writing activity to connect the ideas and themes in the CommonLit activities with the ones in our letters. I found it a bit challenging to choose which stories to write about and which parts of my letter to connect them to. Overall though, I’m proud of how my multi-paragraph response turned out! I think I did a great job using the strategies to analyze texts to find themes in my letter to connect to the ones in the texts that we learned from the CommonLit activities. You may read my multi-paragraph response below:

The actual letter took several drafts (five in total) to complete and with very helpful constructive feedback from peers, a PLP 11 student (Holly) and teachers, my letter went from this:

To this (Click here to open PDF version):

 

Then we all walked down to the cove and sent our letters off in the mail!

Photos: Ms. Maxwell & Fraser W

I enjoyed learning about the environmental issues our world is facing and how to promote change! I will of course continue to learn about climate issues and keep up-to-date about the Fairy Creek blockades. Writing letters is a very important life skill and based on the way governments are dealing with climate change, I think I might be writing more letters sooner than I would have thought… 

Until next time!✌️

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