Rosalyn Roy was driving home from the Gulf News office, where she used to work as a local reporter, when she noticed a young girl alone and holding a handwritten protest sign, perched on the wall in front of the Channel-Port aux Basques town hall.
Roy immediately drove home to get her dog – “I find having a dog in a small town is an easy icebreaker; he’s three years old and looks like a puppy” – before heading back to the town hall. The lone protester turned out to be 14-year-old Emma Osmond, the only student in Channel-Port aux Basques, Newfoundland and Labrador, to participate in Canada’s countrywide student climate strike on May 3. (Thousands of Canadian kids walked out of schools across the country with Emma, and the global student strike on May 24 drew an estimated 1.4 million people across 118 countries.)
“She was shy at first,” Roy recalls, “but once we got into talking about something that clearly mattered to her, she opened up and shared.”
The next day, Roy – who was born in Channel-Port aux Basques and whose mother was named after the founder of the Gulf News – submitted her article about Emma and the climate strike for publication.
Emma may have been the only climate striker on May 3, but Channel-Port aux Basques, like many Maritime communities, has undoubtedly begun to feel the impact of the climate crisis. And when it comes to reporting on these climate issues, Roy believes her style of hyperlocal reporting is imperative: “You need to be boots on the ground.”
“Climate change is a particularly important issue in Newfoundland and Labrador because of our geography, social layout, and population distribution,” says Conor Curtis, an activist, writer, and resident of Corner Brook, a city on the west coast of Newfoundland. “And it deserves more attention than it gets.”
This story is from the September/October 2019 edition of Briarpatch.
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This story is from the September/October 2019 edition of Briarpatch.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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