University student wins award for climate action.

By Patricia Lane & Anna Erickson | November 27th, 2023

Anna Erickson and her sister Lucy lead a march through downtown Victoria, B.C., in September 2021

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

Anna Erickson has been organizing real action on climate change since she was eight years old. Now 18, this Victoria, B.C., green, civil engineering student won a Youth Climate Activism Award from the Institute for Sustainability Education and Action (I-SEA) for getting her Grade 3 class to collaborate with her and a friend in writing, illustrating and publishing a book for other elementary school students, organizing effective resistance to developing a park in her neighbourhood when she was in Grade 7, and her leadership in the student strikes in 2019 and 2021.

Tell us about some of your organizing efforts.

In Grade 3, I felt very sad when I learned that so few coastal Douglas firs are left. With mentoring from the Ancient Forest Alliance, I and my 10-year-old friend Abby McCluskey persuaded our parents to drive us and my classmates to Royal Roads University where there is a stand of the big trees. We had a musician play while we all created the art right there. We wrote the text, which included some facts and some inspirational thoughts and used software to produce it. Ten years later, We Heart Doug is still in the libraries of a number of schools in our city.