By Mark Campbell

The first time Zoë Caron (BSc’07) took a stand for the environment, she was six years old. Excited about the prospect of having pizza buns for lunch at her Procter, BC elementary school, her mood began to sour as she watched her fellow students toss their greasy plates into the garbage.

“We had just had a presentation on landfills and how big they would be by the end of the decade,” Caron recalls. “I asked my teacher why we weren’t recycling these plates and she told me no one would want to wash them. So I said, ‘I will.’”

Gathering them from the garbage, Caron carefully washed and stacked the plates neatly on her befuddled teacher’s desk. “That was the first time that I remember thinking: why aren’t we doing something that is so simple to solve?”

That’s a question Caron has spent the last decade trying to answer. Although she’s come to realize not all environmental issues are so easily resolved as recycling pizza plates, she’s managed to make some impressive headway. As a founding member of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, and past president of Sierra Club Canada, she advanced environmental education and activism with organizations and student groups from coast to coast. She coordinated successful international strategies involving climate change and renewable energy investments as a member of WWF’s (World Wide Fund for Nature) global campaign team. And she partnered with Dalhousie alumna and mentor Elizabeth May (LLB’83) to write Global Warming for Dummies, motivating and equipping thousands with the knowledge to take action on environmental sustainability.

Yet Caron seems slightly uncomfortable being cast as a leader on this pressing issue. She likens herself to an intensive cheerleader, continually encouraging others to push for change. “I think many people underestimate how much power they have as an individual, or how much influence we can have on people around us,” she says.

An early start

Caron knows a thing or two about influence. From an early age, she was instigating campaigns and committees at school, determined to create a safer, more equitable learning environment for everyone, and advocating for youth to have a say in politics and the community. But it took the influence of Dalhousie University and Dr. Sue Sherwin to turn the spirited stance she took that fateful day at elementary school into her life’s passion.

“It was the last day of my first year in the Dalhousie Integrated Science Program, and Dr. Sherwin was leading a module on environmental ethics,” she recalls. “I could feel my heart racing as she talked about legal cases and their outcomes. I kept thinking: “How is that fair? How is that legal? How are people allowed to do what you’re telling us?’”

Equally aggravated and inspired, Caron approached Dr. Sherwin after class. “I said ‘If this resonates with me so much, what should I study?’ She offered me some options, and when she started talking about environmental science, that was the first time I truly knew what I wanted to do.”

Caron subsequently took every class she could on the subject of climate change, building courses on the topic in each of her declared majors – International Development and Environmental Sciences – where they didn’t exist.

“That was the biggest thing about Dalhousie for me – that flexibility to learn what I wanted to learn,” says Caron.

“The university was incredibly open to what I wanted to do in that field. Today, Dalhousie has the College of Sustainability, and professors have done an amazing job of crossing silos and working together on this issue. I’d almost like to go back to school again to do those courses.”

Changes at Dalhousie

As it turns out, the university was equally open to Caron’s influence as well. After securing a part-time job as Atlantic Coordinator, Sustainable Campuses, with the Sierra Youth Coalition, Caron and a multi-stakeholder campus group called SustainDal encouraged Dalhousie to hire its first director of sustainability. She also used her honours thesis as an opportunity to motivate the university to switch to Forest Stewardship Certified paper.

“I was interviewing the people who did the ordering and found misconceptions that recycled paper was brown, and that it would clog printers. But one staff member told me I had convinced him to do it to see if anyone would notice. No one did. That whole process demonstrated the importance of relationship and trust building in bringing about change.”

Global impact

Having made her mark on her alma mater, Caron saw that she could have an impact on the world by continuing to build relationships and trust. After two years of training university students to advocate for institutionalizing sustainability on campus through Sierra Club Canada, she transitioned to WWF, where she engaged groups around the world to keep climate change on the agenda when Canada hosted the G8 and G20 conferences. She later joined WWF’s global campaign team that encouraged investors to move their funds into renewable energy and out of coal, oil and gas. Last June, the team and partners scored a major breakthrough, when the USD$900B Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund announced it would end its investments in coal power.

“They are the largest fund to ever do that in the world,” says Caron, who spent 29 months in Norway supporting and coordinating globally for the campaign, including work with over a dozen WWF campaign teams around the world.

“It was front-page news in the New York Times, in The Financial Times – you name it. It sent a powerful signal to institutional investors across the globe.” Other investors have also made moves, she notes. “The World Bank has committed to phase out coal investments, and so has the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank. It was really huge.”

Her next challenge

Now, Caron is taking on what may be her biggest challenge yet: to make Alberta a world leader in clean energy and climate solutions in her new role as a senior policy advisor with Clean Energy Canada. She knows it sounds impossible, but Caron is an optimist. She has to be. The alternative is too dire to consider.

“When I started in this work, we had a 100 per cent chance of being able to stay below a two-degree rise in temperature, which is a dangerous threshold of global warming. Now, we have a 50 per cent chance. It becomes more urgent until we sufficiently act.

“I believe,” she continues, “we have the knowledge, political strength and resources in place where Canada can have a just transition to a clean energy economy, and show the world how it’s done. It’s a matter of courage and working out the right solutions to make it happen. The world’s energy systems are already shifting. We can choose to be a part of that. ”

Ultimately, Caron would like to work herself out of a job, but the challenges she sees remain far more formidable than pizza-stained paper plates. She’s intrigued at the idea of getting involved in politics as a way to make further progress, but her focus is not on career trajectory so much as how effective she can be in effecting change.

“To me, that would be knowing that, when I die, two-thirds of coal, oil and gas has not been burned. There will be a trillion dollars a year going into sustainable, efficient energy systems. And we will not be locked into a two-degree temperature rise. This will enable our living systems to persevere. Whatever I can do that helps us achieve that, that’s what I will do.”