Friday, April 17, 2009

What does make the difference?*

You may have seen the video on YouTube of a speech given by a 12 year old girl at the Rio Conference in 1982. Severn Suzuki is now 28, and this is what she said recently:

“I had a little bit of an epiphany when I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and it wasn’t necessarily because of the content - I thought the movie was great.

But right at the end, when you’re all  fired up and you’re going to stand up and join the army to  fight climate change, these little suggestions come onto the screen when the credits are rolling and they’re so small.


They’re like, ‘Change a light bulb,’ ‘Car pool,’ ‘Ride your bike,’ ‘Calculate your emissions,’ ‘Buy carbon credits.’

They’re all these little, little things. I was standing by my seat and I thought, come on, I want to know what the solution is.

I want to know where to sign up, where to join. I was really disappointed. I thought, come on Al Gore, you can do better than this.

“And then it suddenly dawned on me: No, those are the solutions; that is how we change the world.

“That is how we are currently dealing with climate change because it was all our little decisions that we didn’t even think about that have created this giant global problem. It’s going to be a distinct shifting of those little, little habits that is going to actually bring us down to some kind of moderate level of greenhouse gas emissions.

And [they’re] not glamorous and [they’re] not sexy but I think that they’re getting more commonplace and we know what they are.

They’re things like, ‘Reuse your waste and reduce your energy consumption,’ and there [are] tons of places you can  find out how to do that.”

*Article for VoiceBox Issue 16 (School Councils UK magazine)

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