Allie Rougeot recounts her route to climate activism and shares her vision of a just transition

Allie Rougeot is a climate justice activist and program manager at Environmental Defence Canada where she advocates for a just energy transition. As a speaker and facilitator, Allie talks to people about the escalating climate crisis and the solutions we can use to fight the emergency. In this conversation, we discuss the path she took to doing this work. Allie says it really started with working in support of refugees and in defense of human rights. The way this influences her approach to climate action is fascinating. It has given her unique insights on the challenge of crafting popular climate policies, ensuring that they’re equitable and fair, and a powerful sense that, because “climate change will create a threat to everything that makes our lives possible,” we are called to resuscitate our struggling democracies in the interest of forcing the system to actually support social life. I resonated most with her feelings of anger as she searches for climate justice. The way Allie puts it is that she is “driven by anger, more even than hope,” and this is because of the “knowing” destruction and suffering being perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry. In her words: “mass suffering was [and is] enabled by… a handful of people that will not bear the consequences.” There’s an emphasis throughout this conversation on how we can incorporate knowledge of the way the project of colonization sought to extract resources and annex Indigenous land. We see the continuation of this plunder today with the environmental obscenity of the Alberta tar sands and the tailings ponds, which represent the largest impoundment of toxic waste on the planet. This sprawling sea of poison is unequivocally an act of environmental racism. Rather than allowing these realities to overwhelm us, though, Allie says that we need to take our feelings of anger and urgency and use them as a turning point. Unfettered energy consumption is creating planet-wrecking carbon bombs and adverse health effects. This needs to be linked, now, with a rejection of extractivism as a worldview.