Severn Suzuki 1992, 2002, 2003, 2007, NOW

In 1992 at the ripe age of 12 Severn Suzuki made this amazing eye opening speech at a UN Convention.


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In 2002, at the age of 22,she made these comments about the world then and now.
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" When you are little, it's not hard to believe you can change the world. I remember my enthusiasm when, at the age of 12, I addressed the delegates at the Rio Earth Summit. "I am only a child," I told them. "Yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this would be. In school you teach us not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, to make your actions reflect your words."

I spoke for six minutes and received a standing ovation. Some of the delegates even cried. I thought that maybe I had reached some of them, that my speech might actually spur action. Now, a decade from Rio, after I've sat through many more conferences, I'm not sure what has been accomplished. My confidence in the people in power and in the power of an individual's voice to reach them has been deeply shaken.

Sure, I've seen some improvements since Rio. In my home city of Vancouver, most people put out their recycling boxes. The organic grocery and café on Fourth Avenue is flourishing. Bikes are popular, and there are a few gas-electric hybrid cars gliding around. But as this new century begins, my twentysomething generation is becoming increasingly disconnected from the natural world. We buy our drinking water in bottles. We eat genetically modified organisms. We drive the biggest cars ever. At the same time, we are a generation aware of the world—of poverty and social imbalance, the loss of biodiversity, climate change and the consequences of globalization—but many of us feel we have inherited problems too great to do anything about.

When I was little, the world was simple. But as a young adult, I'm learning that as we have to make choices—education, career, lifestyle—life gets more and more complicated. We are beginning to feel pressure to produce and be successful. We are learning a shortsighted way of looking at the future, focusing on four-year government terms and quarterly business reports. We are taught that economic growth is progress, but we aren't taught how to pursue a happy, healthy or sustainable way of living. And we are learning that what we wanted for our future when we were 12 was idealistic and naive.

Today I'm no longer a child, but I'm worried about what kind of environment my children will grow up in. In Johannesburg the delegates will discuss the adoption and implementation of documents by governments. Yes, important stuff. But they did that at Rio. What this meeting must really be about is responsibility—not only government responsibility but personal responsibility. We are not cleaning up our own mess. We are not facing up to the price of our lifestyles. In Canada we know we are wiping out the salmon of the West Coast, just as we wiped out cod from the East Coast, but we continue overfishing. We keep driving our SUVs in the city, even though we are starting to feel the effects of climate change—a direct result of burning too much fossil fuel.

Real environmental change depends on us. We can't wait for our leaders. We have to focus on what our own responsibilities are and how we can make the change happen.

Before graduating from college last spring I worked with the Yale Student Environmental Coalition to draft a pledge for young people to sign. Called the Recognition of Responsibility, the pledge is a commitment from our generation to be accountable and a challenge to our elders to help us achieve this goal and to lead by example. It includes a list of ways to live more sustainably—simple but fundamental things like reducing household garbage, consuming less, not relying on cars so much, eating locally grown food, carrying a reusable cup and, most important, getting out into nature. (For the full text, go to www.skyfishproject.org.) Three friends and I will take the Recognition of Responsibility to Johannesburg, where we will meet with South African students and then present the pledge to the World Summit as a demonstration of personal commitment.

But in the 10 years since Rio, I have learned that addressing our leaders is not enough. As Gandhi said many years ago, "We must become the change we want to see." I know change is possible, because I am changing, still figuring out what I think. I am still deciding how to live my life. The challenges are great, but if we accept individual responsibility and make sustainable choices, we will rise to the challenges, and we will become part of the positive tide of change."

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In 2003, at age 23, Severn did an interview about The Skyfish Project, George Bush, and her lecture to the Nike Corporation

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Why did you found The Skyfish Project?

I was in my senior year in college, and over the four years I was in the States, I'd made a lot of friends. We had conversations about lots of different things, especially over September 11 and the Bush election. You have all these conversations, and then where does the energy from those conversations go? You stop talking about it, and what happens? Nothing, right? So I thought it would be amazing to try to build on those conversations, not just let them drop. The other thing is, we were going to graduate. And after college, you have to earn a living. It's easy to lose those ideals, so the idea was to have a network to keep fostering the mentality that social change has to happen, that we want to be part of social change.

The website is mainly a discussion group, and a couple of projects have already come out of it.

I'd love to hear about them.

Our main project has been a document called the Recognition of Responsibility. We created it while I was still at Yale with a vision of going to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, the 10-year anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, in 2002. I knew I was going. We were upset because George Bush wasn't going to go--he was just starting to show the world that he didn't care to be part of international negotiations. We wanted to show that he didn't represent all Americans, and we came up with this idea of the Recognition of Responsibility.

Basically it's a one-page pledge. It says, "Today I recognize that I am part of one of the most powerful countries in the world. My population is only a fraction of the globe's population, yet we use far more resources. So today, I pledge to take responsibility for me lifestyle." And it has a bunch of ways to do that. (You can read and sign the Recognition of Responsibility at www.skyfishproject.org/ror.html).

Individual responsibility and accountability seem like big issues for you in your activism.

Since I was pretty young, my family taught me to stand up for what I believe. My dad is a second generation Japanese-Canadian, so I think his racial experience has definitely affected him; I grew up with the knowledge that even though Canada is such a wonderful and just a fair country in a lot of ways, any country is capable of prejudice and you always have to be aware of that. I've had pretty strong role models in taking a stand.

When I was young I formed ECO, the Environmental Children's Organization, because of an experience I had in the Amazon where I witnessed this incredible world and saw that it was being burned. I thought, "Someone has to do something about this!" So eventually we went to the World Summit in Rio. We went there to remind the delegates why they were there and ask them to do the right thing.

We got back, and ten years passed, and what do we really see from that summit? Well, I don't know that we've seen too much.

Over the last few years, after Rio, I was invited to many, many different conferences. Over time I've realized: this is not where we're going to see change. We've seen positive activism happening in the last ten years at the grassroots level, in small communities. It's about the individuals that make up the statistics about consumption and pollution, as well as the people who feel the negative impact, who are actually going to be the change.

That's a powerful revelation.

It is powerful, because you realize that each individual really does count. And the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that each person is a role model to all the people around us. Not only the children, but everybody. That's how cultures evolve and things become cool--the influence of a few individuals that catches on.

Are you choosing now to spend your energy speaking to groups other than politicians?

I speak to very wide range [of people], from adults to elementary school kids. I was speaking to the Nike Corporation a couple months ago and I really didn't know what to do at first--whether to address them as a corporation, or as individuals--but I decided to speak to them as individuals and asked them to think about what was important to them, and shared what was important to me. I think we share a lot of common human values, and they are connected to how we treat our environment and our communities.

Did Nike invite you to speak to them?

Yeah… I think they invite various speakers in. at their headquarters in Portland; they take very good care of their employees. Nike is trying to be seen as cleaning up its act, becoming more socially responsible. They actually have a sustainability department, which is working within Nike to try to change it. It's good--the people I met had worked in NGOs and had decided that the best way they could make change was right in the belly of the beast. I still don't know how I feel about it. They're still Nike, and just by virtue of being so huge, a lot of negative things have come out of that. But they're responding to consumer pressure and changing. At the same time, it's kind of weird because they're only doing it to make sure that their sales aren't hurt.

What do you make of all the speculation over the death of the Kyoto Protocol, and how important are treaties like that for reducing global warming?

I think on the one hand, the actual groundwork for reducing emissions is going to be at such a smaller scale than the treaty. Despite waffling on the Kyoto Protocol, there are many companies and whole cities that have adopted it and are going ahead and reducing emissions. Toronto has apparently reduced emissions by three times of what it would have had to under the Kyoto Protocol. There's a whole roster of corporations in Canada that have met and surpassed the levels in the agreement.

A woman once asked me after a speech, "How can multinationals like Shell and others possibly meet Kyoto?" The fact is that Kyoto is just the tip of what we need to do to deal with global warming. What the Protocol is asking for in terms of emissions is not that big a deal.

But the Kyoto Protocol was the first treaty to recognize that we share an international resource: the atmosphere. We all depend on it. It's very symbolic, which is great, but the actions need to happen at the ground level. For it not to survive is really disappointing."

More 2007: Click here

Where is she today,2008?

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Severn continues to be active about raising awareness of the environment, but rather than boldly trying to shame people into seeing sense, she has learned that slow, quiet solutions may be more realistic. The University of Alberta reports that Severn, one of the speakers in its “Revolutionary Speaker Series,” is currently pursuing a master’s degree in ethnoecology, a discipline “… which draws on perspectives from the natural world, traditional beliefs, science, social trends and the politics of interests on Canada’s West Coast.” As part of her studies, Severn is analyzing how some communities have successfully survived for thousands of years by using their natural resources sustainably. She looks to ancient traditions as models for those in Western society making shortsighted decisions that will deplete the Earth for future generations.

Still urging the grown-ups to act more responsibly, Severn is part of the group of Generation Y grassroots activists who wait in the wings while the people who created the current environmental mess talk in greenwash terms about how to sustain economic growth. Will her generation be the one that actually walks the walk and talks the talk?"

Sadly the domain Skyfishproject.org has expired and non of the preexisting work from Suzuki is featured. :(

But....................I found the old page!!!! You can access it by Click Here!