Severn Suzuki

Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki, speaking for ECO, the Environmental Children's Organization. We're a group of 12 and 13-year-olds trying to make a difference. Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg, and me.

We've raised all the money to come here ourselves, to come five thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming up here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.

Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations 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 our ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it.

I used to go in I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my home, with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear of animals and plants going extinct every day, vanishing forever. In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies.

But now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see. Did you have to worry of 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 know 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 s-the salmon back up an, a dead stream. You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct, and you can't bring back the forest 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 government, business people, organizers, reporters, or politicians, but really, you're mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and all of you are someone's child. I'm only a child, yet I know we are all part of a family five billion strong. In fact, thirty 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 towards one single goal. In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid of telling the world how I feel. In my country, we make so much waste.