Severn Cullis-Suzuki speaking in 1992 at the United Nation Earth Summit: Hello,
I’m Severn Suzuki, speaking for ECO, the Environmental Children’s
Organization. We are a group of four twelve and thirteen year-olds from
Canada trying to make a difference. Ö

We raised all the money ourselves to come 6,000 miles to tell you
adults
 you must change your ways. Coming here today I have no hidden
agenda. I’m fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points in the stock market.

I am here to speak for all future generations yet to come. I am
here to
 speak on behalf of the starving children around the world
whose cries go unheard. I am here to speak for the countless animals
dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the
ozone. I 
am afraid to breathe the air because I don’t know what
chemicals are in 
it. I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my hometown,
with my dad, until just
 a few years ago we found the fish full of
cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going extinct every
day — vanishing forever.

In
my life, I have dreamed of seeing the great herds of wild animals,
jungles, and rain forests full of birds and butterflies, but now I
wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.


Did you worry about these things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes, and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions.

I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to

realize, neither do you!

You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. You don’t
know how to bring the salmon back up a dead stream. You don’t know how
to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can’t bring back the
forests that once grew where there is now a
desert.


If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here you may be delegates of your governments, business people,
organizers, reporters, or politicians. But really you are mothers and
fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles. And all of you are
somebody’s child.

I’m only a child, yet I know we are all a part of a family, five
billion
 strong — in fact, 30 million species strong. And borders and
governments will never change that. I’m only a child, yet I know we are
all in this together and should act as one single world toward one
single goal.
 (03/26/09)

more…