Walking Within Wisdom #19 Greta Thunberg and Severn Cullis-Suzuki
September 7, 2019
Although I spent most of my Walking Within Wisdom speaking to my extraordinary other mother Marilyn (who has promised to “walk with me” again) I still had another mile + in my 4.5 mile walk to go so I turned on the TED Radio hour to listen to the extraordinary Greta Thunberg’s talk…
If you haven’t heard about this extraordinary young women, here is a bit of her bio… Greta Thunberg (born January 2003) is a Swedish student who is credited with raising global awareness of the risks posed by climate change, and with holding politicians to account for their lack of action on what Thunberg calls the “climate crisis”.
In August 2018, at the age of 15, Thunberg took time off school to demonstrate outside the Swedish parliament holding up a sign calling for bold climate action. Her “school strike for the climate” began attracting media attention and other students then engaged in similar protests in their own communities. Together they organized a school climate strike movement, under the name Fridays for Future. After Thunberg addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, student strikes took place every week somewhere in the world. In 2019, there were at least two coordinated multi-city protests involving over one million pupils each.
Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and was featured on the cover of and named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by TIME magazine.
She begins her TED Talk with…“My name is Greta Thunberg, I am 16 years old , I come from Sweden and I want you to panic.”
Guy Raz goes on to say “And Greta wants us to panic because our time on this planet is running out. Back in August 2018, Greta sat outside the steps of the Swedish Parliament during school hours, holding a sign that read, school strike for the climate.”
A reporter went on to describe her… “Thunberg has become a bonafide climate change rock star with constant media requests. She’s reprimanded world leaders and started a movement of hundreds of thousands of students”
In her TED talk she goes on to say… “We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, and the extinction rate is up to 10,000 times faster than what is considered normal, with up to 200 species becoming extinct every single day. Erosion of fertile topsoil, deforestation of our great forests, toxic air pollution, loss of insects and wildlife, the acidification of our oceans — these are all disastrous trends being accelerated by a way of life that we, here in our financially fortunate part of the world, see as our right to simply carry on.”
Guy Raz goes explain, “There is no greater threat to our species than the climate crisis. In 2018, we emitted more carbon into the air than in any single year in all of human history. The consequences are real, and they’re happening right now. So can we save our planet from total disaster, or is it already too late? Well, for Greta Thunberg, unless we do something drastic and do it right now, that answer is yes.”
Thunberg… “If I live to be 100, I will be alive in the year 2103. When you think about the future today, you don’t think beyond the year 2050. By then, I will, in the best case, not even have lived half of my life. What happens next? In the year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children or grandchildren, maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you, the people who were around back in 2018. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act. What we do or don’t do right now will affect my entire life and the lives of my children and grandchildren. What we do or don’t do right now, me and my generation can’t undo in the future.”
Greta concludes her 11:12 talk with this… “And this is where people usually start talking about hope, solar panels, wind power, circular economy and so on. But I’m not going to do that. We’ve had 30 years of pep talking and selling positive ideas. And I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work because if it would have, the emissions would have gone down by now. They haven’t. And, yes, we do need hope. Of course we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action.
Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then and only then, hope will come. Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There aren’t rules to keep that oil in the ground, so we can’t save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change. And it has to start today. Thank you.
Here is her full TED talk — https://www.ted.com/talks/greta_thunberg_the_disarming_case_to_act_right_now_on_climate/transcript?language=en
As I was listening to this extraordinary talk, I realized that Greta Thunberg reminds me of a voice I was hearing from in my 20’s and again about 10 years ago… “The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes” In 1992, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, aged 12, addressed the delegates present at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). She was the founder of the Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO).
Severn and the other ECO members raised money to attend the UNCED at Rio de Janeiro, where they participated in workshops and where she gave her famous speech, asking adults to put children and the Earth they will inherit “on their priority list”. In 2008, a recording went viral on YouTube. “The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes” touched people from all over the world.
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdK0uYjy85o
“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 get the carbon out of the atmosphere. 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!”
I again watched Suzuki’s profound speech and thought she could EASILY be talking right now and then found this:
“Inspired by 12-yr old Severn Cullis-Suzuki’s speech to the UN in 1992, today’s youth give the ECO speech again in this video compilation, 25 years later!” JUST AMAZING!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpu-PP-8YP8&t=36s
From the mouths of babes… When are we going to listen and actually hear these voices?
Thank you walking with me today, I am grateful!
