Photo: Eric Schiller at the Palestinian Prisoners’ Day march in Ottawa, April 17, 2026. Photo by Brent Patterson.
The Globe and Mail article “Agents for change” features two activists connected with Peace Brigades International (PBI) who “are spending their twilight years fighting for the environment.”
Eric Schiller
The article reports that Eric Schiller, “who taught civic engineering at the University of Ottawa for 18 years, …traces his activist roots back to April 27, 1965, the day he heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. …Travelling with King through the southern U.S., Dr. Schiller learned that some laws were made to be broken. In Georgia, he spent three days in jail after attending an all-white church with Black friends.”
Schiller says: “If you want to be an agent for change, it’s not enough to talk.” The 90-year-old activist adds: “I want to die peacefully fighting.”
Photo: Eric Schiller holds sign at protest in Ottawa citing the Global Witness figure that 3 land and environmental defenders had been killed in each week of 2018.
The Globe and Mail also notes: “Lyn Adamson, a Pickering, Ont.-born Quaker who had spent much of her adult life up to [September 2012] opposing nuclear arms, supporting Indigenous advocacy and establishing housing co-ops, was spurred to action after Stephen Harper’s majority government withdrew Canada from the Kyoto Protocol and began aggressively pushing oil sands development.”
Photo: Alaine Hawkins, Lyn Adamson and Jennifer Dennison in the PBI Central America Project Office at 345 Adelaide Street West, Suite 606 in Toronto in December 1988.
Additional reading: On2Ottawa activist Eric Schiller arrested at climate justice action on Portage Bridge (PBI-Canada article, September 1, 2023).
Photo: Eric Schiller with Quaker Friends at the Shut Down CANSEC protest, May 2025.
