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Hello. We are students from the Joseph Rowntree School in city of York in the UK. We are talking
to you today from the Jo Rio Earth Summit at our school.
We timed our event to coincide with Rio+20 because, even though ours is a mini summit,
we want it to have a major impact. We don't just want to reach out to people
in our school, or people in York. We want to reach out to everyone, all around the world,
and to tell you what we children want for our future.
When you're a young person, like most of us, lots of people, mainly adults, talk to you
about your future. They usually talk about exams and grades and getting into college
or university, or getting a job – the sort of things that they had to worry about when
they were our age. But the word ‘future' holds a heavier meaning
for me. I don't only have to worry about those things, all of which are harder now than ever
before. I also have to worry about the very air I breathe.
At this conference, you ask us to describe the future we want.
In my life, in my future, I want to breathe in and smell flowers and plants, not pollution
and the stench of traffic fumes. I want to look at the countryside and take in its beauty,
not silently calculate how long it's got left. I want to lie down on green grass and stare
up into a sheer blue sky with white clouds, not the dark grey ones of power stations,
spewing their greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Do those dreams sound familiar? In 1992, a girl called Severn Suzuki, who was the same
age as we are now, stood up and told the Rio conference her fears about the poisoning of
the natural environment that she was witnessing even then.
She spoke with passion and anger about poverty and injustice, conflict and inequality. She
pleaded with you adults to change your ways. I thought you would have wanted to prove her
wrong, that you would have tried to improve things.
And, yes, some things are better. The hole in the ozone layer is going because
laws were passed to stop CFCs. The Fairtrade movement means some small farmers, at least,
are getting decent pay. So we know we can fix things.
But mostly, all that has happened since then has proved Severn right.
Our world is still being destroyed, at an astonishing rate.
Scientists have shown that we are now changing the way the Earth develops more than Nature
is. That means we are in charge of what happens: if we make a wrong decision, it will change
the way generations live and how many species we have left.
Ten years ago, animal species were becoming extinct at the rate of three an hour. Now
I dread to think of the figures. As species are made extinct, it changes the food chains.
For example, in our oceans, sharks are suffering due to the destructive practice of ‘shark
finning'. Because sharks are at the apex of the food chain, the entire ocean eco-system
is being affected.
My purpose, my reason for speaking to you today, is to say that the one thing that is
the cause of the world's current distress is human arrogance.
We throw away resources we cannot replace, we destroy things we could never hope to bring
back, and we cause wounds that might never heal.
More than 20 per cent of our oxygen comes from trees in the Amazon. Tropical rainforests
are home to more than half of the world's plant species, and many rainforest plants
produce life-saving medicines. And yet we cast this natural wealth aside for the cheap
value of timber and land for cattle to graze. We have to stop, before it's too late.
People throw around terms like ‘eco-friendly' and ‘sustainable', but do they really mean
that? It's one thing to say something, but another entirely to do it. They say, ‘Waste
not, want not' but we waste so much, and we still want more.
What's done is done to the world and we will not be able to mend it. But what people do
not realise is that it is not too late to help the Earth. It may be soon, though.
I feel so sorry for the people around the globe who have to sit and watch their families
starve to death. Imagine that: watching your own children dying from lack of food and not
being able to do anything about it. They need our help – now! They can't wait
much longer.
If those children could have the same opportunities as I've had – not just the honour of speaking
to you, but having a good roof to sleep under and clean water to drink and an education
– they would take it with open arms. But they have had it taken away from them
by droughts and their crops dying as a result of climate change.
Some people don't like their children knowing about global warming and just say, ‘Everything's
going to be alright'. Well, if we don't take drastic action, and fast, it will not be ‘alright'.
So please, when you go home, ask yourself, ‘What can I do to make my grandchildren
proud of me?' After all, what environment do you want them
to live in?
Children and Youth make up one of the nine Major Groups identified in the last Rio Earth
Summit in the global action that emerged called Local Agenda 21.
Local Agenda 21 recognised that youth comprise nearly 30 per cent of the world's population
and that the involvement of young people in environment and decision-making is critical
to the long-term success of its goals. Your conference this week is encouraging children
to join you in working out a sustainable future for us all, and we are here to do just that.
We've told you what we want for our future, and what we want you adults ‘in charge'
to do about it. But we are not just leaving it to you.
This is my future and I want to be part of its development and make it my own. That's
why I'm doing this and it is why we – the ‘Jo Rios' as we call ourselves – are organising
our own Earth Summit, here in York, challenging our local leaders and politicians in debate
and issuing our own Jo Rio Declaration, in the form of a Sustainability Agenda for The
Joseph Rowntree School. Most importantly, we will be asking every
single person that attends to make personal pledges to change their lives in some small
ways. We've calculated that if everyone who comes
to our summit sticks to their pledges for a whole year, we could save enough oil to
fill 432 car engines, enough electricity to power one UK family home, enough CO2 to fly
more than halfway to Rio and enough water to fill one and a half Olympic swimming pools.
A common theme, when we wrote our speeches for this, was how unthinkably scary the future
is for children. When people are scared, they shut down, they
give up, they don't act. But, by doing this, we are facing our fears. We are doing something;
something that will make a difference.
If all schools, and colleges and towns and cities and villages and parishes around the
world did the same, just think what we could do! But it needs businesses and organisations
and governments and countries to do it, too. We can have the future we want, instead of
the nightmares that stalk us.
It's OK to be wrong. We are all human, we make mistakes. It takes brave, strong leaders
to admit their mistakes and to sort them out. Will you be those leaders for us now? We have
the will. You have the power. We can't get it wrong again, not this time.
>>We are:
Hannah
Aaron
Molly
Rebecca
Dana
Henry James
Phoebe
Georgie
Emily
This speech has been delivered with the help of the Stockholm Environment Institute.
Thank you for listening.