Once you feel the desire to engage, think about what you're good at and what you can contribute. It's about breaking down the idea that there are activists and ordinary people.

We're dealing with a crisis of inequality, of joblessness, of underemployment.

One of the things that could be exciting about this next phase of Canadian politics is if we could maybe have co-leaders.

I think that kind of urgency is what makes this stage of the climate movement really different from what it was even a few years ago when it was much more of the professionalized NGOs lobbying behind closed doors and maybe having a march now and then.

The United States had eight years of Barack Obama. He made it incredibly clear that he was a right-wing Democrat. He cited Ronald Reagan lovingly in every stump speech for the last six months of the presidential 2008 campaign. And he made it clear that he was going to be a business-friendly Democratic president, and that he was not going to rock the neoliberal boat. And he didn't.

If you have a culture based on hunting and fishing and all the animals are disappearing and the fish are sick, then you can't live traditionally. Then your treaty is being violated. Obviously there are degrees of choice in terms of that decision to fight.

So many people are on the front lines of this fossil fuel frenzy. It is infused with a sense of urgency.