On 20 September, the Little Sun team will be joining the Global Climate Strike in Berlin and New York, demanding an end to fossil fuels, a global transition to clean energy and of course, solar love for all of us.
Read from Mokia, Business Development Manager at Little Sun, why he will be striking on Friday, in a personal statement below.
… I’m striking because I’m angry.
Why should anyone strike? I can no longer imagine waking up on a beautiful sunny day and taking it simply for what it is. I used to be able to. It was sometime before I learned a couple of different things. Sometime around when I would stare at the sky at sunset and marvel at the different colours on display. Red, orange, blue, purple? Wonderful. Until, like most people, I was told by someone in some place that the very brilliance of that sunset was the direct result of air pollution. I did some research and read some complicated articles that I didn’t really understand that tried to explain the effects of water molecules and other particles at different times of the day. Wavelengths, aerosols, Rayleigh Scattering, and so on. In other words, it was more complicated than I thought.
… Most things are more complicated these days.
Because of the greed of a wealthy few, we now have to ask ourselves existential questions about the future of our planet. That makes me angry. It makes me angry to think that the result of that greed plays a direct role in the poverty and energy poverty of the place where I come from. It wasn’t long ago that I started thinking about a specific part of my childhood in Bamenda, Cameroon. You don’t know the town? It was colonized by the country I now live in. They don’t talk about the Bamenda that I remember here. They talk about a multiplicity; they talk about “Africa”, and our energy poverty is spoken of from a distance that belies the responsibility, better yet, fault of the Global North. “It’s one of those places where they’ve got kids using these little open-flame kerosene lamps to do their homework.” They’re not wrong. Growing up, I often wondered why the neighbors could flick a switch and illuminate their whole house, while we had to get our homework done as quickly as possible. At that age, I thought it was simply because my mother wouldn’t have a chance to make it to the market for more kerosene, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.
“Because of the greed of a wealthy few, we now have to ask ourselves existential questions about the future of our planet. That makes me angry.”
I’m striking because we need climate justice now!
We need it because the greed of the Global North while keeping the Global South dependent on and indebted to their former colonizers, is decimating the very planet we live on. It is versatile enough to drive deeper the ridges of inequality while strengthening the institutional impediments to African growth with complete disregard for the health and habitability of the very planet we live on. It has put me in a position where although I am able to help solve some of the symptoms of energy poverty, I am still operating in a vacuum created entirely by that very greed. We need climate justice now because those at the bottom of the economic ladder cannot live without it. They cannot continue to shoulder the burden disproportionately brought upon us by the wealthy. The Global North has run up the bill on our climate, and the South will have to pay a bigger price for it. It’s really not that complicated, it just makes me angry, and that is why I am striking.
Are you striking?
The FridaysForFuture movement is asking everyone – you, me, us – to walk out of our workplaces and homes to join the young activists in their call for climate action.
The Little Sun team will go on climate strike on September 20th, demanding an end to the age of fossil fuels, a global transition to clean energy and of course, solar love for all of us. We will close our webshop, our office, and our inboxes and we invite you to do the same. Will you be part of the global effort in fighting for a better, climate-friendly future? some info here on how people can join the climate strike or help support what we do.
Want to know how you can join the strike?
Click to find out more about the Global Climate Strike
and
Find out more about what we are doing
Photo credits: Matthew Hinders-Anderson, Little Sun
