by David Suzuki
As we were doing this and setting up the foundation office, Tara was organizing ECO's involvement in Rio and the logistics of hotel, food, travel, shots, and so on. As the time to leave approached, I was increasingly anxious and worried, but the girls saw the trip as an adventure and opportunity. They were so innocent. Despite my concerns, we took off in a state of excitement and hope. I had to fly to Europe at the end of the conference, but Tara had arranged for the children to have a post-Rio reward of a visit to the Amazon.
We landed in Rio, and, as I had feared, it was hot and the air was heavy with pollution from the traffic. I still tended to worry about details—where would we stay, what about food, how would we get around, what about toilets—but Tara is the one who makes those arrangements. My children just ignore me—“Oh, Dad, stop being so anal” is the way they put it. Tara had arranged for an apartment overlooking the fabled Copacabana Beach, but we had too much to do to enjoy the resort.
Tens of thousands of people arrived in Rio de Janeiro to attend the Earth Summit, which included the official un conference, housed at Rio Centro and ringed by armed guards demanding passes to enter; the Global Forum, for hundreds of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from all over the world; and the Earth Parliament, for indigenous peoples. Each conference was many miles away from the others. I don't doubt that this was a deliberate decision to keep the NGOs and indigenous people as far away from the official delegates as possible, if for no other reason than to minimize the contrast between well-heeled representatives staying at fancy hotels and the rabble like us on minimal budgets staying in the cheap parts of town.
With such distances between summit events, the media had to make decisions about what to cover, and usually Rio Centro was where they hung out because telephones, fax machines, and computers were set up there. As it was, the fun and excitement were to be found among the NGOs, whereas the delegates in business attire were trapped in long, serious, and deadly boring deliberations behind closed doors, completing the final wording of documents to be signed later, when the world leaders arrived.
It was a circus. I hated it. The city was uncomfortable and overrun with cars, and everywhere we went, there were crowds of people trying to be seen or heard. If you're not anal like me, Rio is a wonderful place to visit. The beaches are lovely (although the water is polluted and best left alone), the sun always shines (although it has to make its way through the haze) and there are nightclubs and restaurants galore. We went to churrascarias, amazing places where meat is brought out on skewers and one can fill up on enormous servings of food while children outside beg for leftovers. As in all big cities, but especially those in developing countries, the contrast between the world that tourists inhabit and the extreme poverty in slums is difficult to accept. To prepare for the conference, Brazilian authorities had forcibly removed street people from downtown Rio so that the official delegates wouldn't have to confront the contrasts.
The girls had brought three issues of their newspaper and among them spoke English, French, and Spanish. ECO had registered as one of the thousands of NGOs and applied for a booth where they could display their papers, posters, and pictures and meet people. Tara and I had been asked to speak at a number of NGO events, and before the end of our presentations at each session we would say, “I think you should hear from the ones with most at stake in all that's going on here” and bring the girls onstage to make short submissions.
The ECO gang in Rio. Left to right: Michelle Quigg, Severn, Raffi, Sarika, Morgan Geisler, and Vanessa Suttie.
The media began to hear about them by word of mouth and went to their booth for interviews. It was a good story to have these cute girls speaking so seriously and passionately. David Halton from CBC took the girls to a favela, where street people lived, and interviewed them for a long story. Jean Charest, Canada's newest federal environment minister, visited the booth to talk to the girls, but they were frustrated because they felt he was more interested in telling them things than in listening to them. The girls were articulate, passionate, and telegenic, and their plea to be remembered while delegates made big decisions affecting their world was so simple and undeniable that it cut through all the rhetorical flourishes and political posturing.
At one of the events at the Earth Parliament, I gave a short talk and then yielded the stage so that Severn could also make a speech. I didn't know it, but in the audience was James Grant, the American head of UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, and he was so moved by Sev's remarks that he asked her for a copy of them. He told her he was meeting Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney that evening and wanted to give him that speech in person. I never heard whether he did or not, but we learned later that Grant had run into Maurice Strong and told Maurice he should give Severn an opportunity to speak.
The next day, Tara and the girls were scheduled to leave Rio to take their trip to the wilderness camp in the Amazon. But in the morning, we received a call from Strong's office inviting Severn to speak at Rio Centro in a session for children. Three other girls, representing various youth groups, had been selected ahead of time to speak, and now Strong added Sev to this group. One girl was from Germany, another from Guatemala, and two, including Sev, were from Canada. Each was to speak for no more than three or four minutes.
The call from Strong's office was exhilarating. The trip to a camp in the Amazon would have to be postponed, a huge undertaking in Brazil, but Tara went ahead and began to make new arrangements. Severn had had the inspiration more than a year before to go to Rio and make a plea. The girls had worked like demons to raise money, publish papers, and attend the meetings. And now they were to speak to the delegates.
What could she say? I was overwhelmed with the immensity of the opportunity and the challenge of compressing the important issues into a short talk. I began firing off ideas about points I thought she should make in her speech on pollution, wildlife, future generations. Sev said to me, “Dad, I know what I want to say. Mommy will help me write it all down. I want you to tell me how to say it.”
We didn't have much time. Sev wrote out her speech on a piece of paper, adding words and phrases in the margins as all of us offered our critique. I had no idea how she would be able to read the scribbling. We rushed out to grab cabs, and as we careened through the streets of Rio, I made Sev go over her speech several times, trying to help her smooth her delivery and remember which words should be emphasized, just as my father had done for me when I was a boy.
The conference center was air-conditioned, with only a murmur of background noise—a stark contrast to the vibrant colors, smells, and sounds of the Global Forum. We entered the conference room, an immense hall that could have held thousands but contained only a few hundred people; it looked almost empty. Sev was last on the list. The other girls made their presentations well, pleading for better care of resources, wildlife, water, and the poor—the kind of statements adults could feel good about listening to and in response could promise they were doing their best.
Finally, it was Sev's turn. She was twelve years old and had not had time to prepare thoroughly, and I was scared stiff—but I hadn't given her enough credit. She has a mother who is a superb thinker and writer, and Sev herself had been listening to us, absorbing our concerns and solutions, thinking about her life and her surroundings, and she spoke simply, straight from the heart. Here is what she said:
Hello. I'm Severn Suzuki, speaking for eco, the Environmental Children's Organization.
We are a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds trying to make a difference—Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg, and me.
We raised all the money 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.
Severn speaking to the plenary session of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (taken from video)
Losing a future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market.
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sp; 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 the ozone; I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it; I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my home-town, with my dad, until just a few years ago when we found the fish full of cancers; and now we hear about animals and plants going extinct every day—vanishing forever.
In my life, I have dreamed of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rain forests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.
Did you have to worry about 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 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 the salmon back in 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!
Here you may be delegates of your governments, business-people, organizers, reporters or politicians, but really you are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and all of you are somebody's child.
I'm only a child yet I know we are part of a family, 5 billion strong; in fact, 30 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 toward one single goal.
In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I'm not afraid to tell the world how I feel.
In my country we make so much waste; we buy and throw away, buy and throw away; and yet northern countries will not share with the needy; even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to let go.
In Canada, we live the privileged life with plenty of food, water and shelter; we have watches, bicycles, computers, and television sets.
Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent time with some children living on the streets, and here is what one child told us: “I wish I was rich, and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter, love, and affection.”
If a child on the street who has nothing is willing to share, why are we who have everything still so greedy?
I can't stop thinking that these are children my own age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born.
I could be one of those children living in the favelas of Rio, I could be a child starving in Somalia, a victim of war in the Middle East, or a beggar in India.
I'm only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty, making treaties and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this Earth would be.
At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world—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?
Do not forget why you are attending these conferences, who you are doing this for—we are your own children.
You are deciding what kind of a world we will grow up in.
Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying, “Everything's going to be all right,” “We're doing the best we can,” and “It's not the end of the world.”
But I don't think you can say that to us anymore.
Are we even on your list of priorities?
My dad always says, “You are what you do, not what you say.”
Well, what you do makes me cry at night.
You grown-ups say you love us, but I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you.
I was absolutely floored. It was a powerful speech, delivered with eloquence, sincerity, and passion. The audience was electrified. All of the presentations in the convention hall were broadcast on monitors throughout the building, and I am told that when Sev began to speak, people stopped what they were doing and gathered around the television sets to listen to her. Severn received one of only two standing ovations given during the entire conference (the other was for President Fidel Castro of Cuba, who also gave a powerful speech).
When she left the stage to come to us near the middle of the auditorium, her first words to Tara were, “Mommy, could you hear my heart beating?” As she sat down between us, a member of the American delegation rushed over to shake her hand and congratulate her. “That was the best speech anyone has given here,” U.S. senator Al Gore told her.
The speech was filmed and is archived with the United Nations. I have a copy of it and have shown the video dozens of times to audiences attending my talks; each time, I am moved by its simplicity and power. The repercussions of that speech had a huge impact on Sev's life. Canadian journalist and human-rights activist Michelle Landsberg wrote a column about it, and the speech has been printed verbatim in dozens of articles and translated into several languages. John Pierce of Doubleday contacted Severn about writing a book based on it, which she did in 1993; the book is called Tell the World. She was interviewed again and again, offered opportunities to host television programs, and invited to give speeches. She received the United Nations Environment Program's Global 500 award in Beijing in 1993.
It was all pretty heady stuff for a twelve-year-old, and I began to worry about what this would do to her sense of herself. I stopped worrying the next year, when she was invited to appear on The Joan Rivers Show in New York. “Dad,” Sev told me, “I hope it's okay, but I'm not going to do this. I have to study, and I want to make the basketball team.” She had her priorities right.
AGENDA 21 IS THE 700-page tome adopted by 178 governments at Rio; essentially, it was a blueprint for the world to achieve sustainable development. The cost of this massive shift from a focus on the economy above all else to an inclusion of environmental factors was estimated to be $600 billion a year, although the cost of not doing anything was not estimated and would have been many times greater. The developing world was expected to put up $450 billion of it, a sum that represented 8 percent of their collective gross domestic product (GDP), and the industrialized nations were expected to cough up the remainder, a mere 0.7 percent of their GDPs. Before the Earth Summit was over, developed countries were already complaining that their contribution was impractical, and the target of 0.7 percent of GDP has not been reached by any of the major industrial nations such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, even though the goals set in Rio in 1992 were re-affirmed at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002.
Sev and woolly monkey at the Ariau Jungle Towers on the Amazon
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PAPUA NEW GUINEA
IN 1992, A MAN who was working in Papua New Guinea asked if he could drop by my house in Vancouver. Shortly after he arrived, Nick Fogg asked to go to the bathroom and stayed there for an inordinately long time, audibly ill. When he emerged, gray and weak, he told me he was having a malarial flare-up. Nevertheless, he managed to ask me whether I'd be interested in visiting the South Pacific country.
Nick worked for CUSO (formerly Canadian University Services Overseas and still known by the old acronym), a nongovernmental international developmental organization, and despite his alarming condition, I was immediately interested because I'd heard so much about the island nation from Richard Longley, the main researcher for the television series Science Magazine.
Richard was trained in England as a botanist and had taught for a number of years in Papua New Guinea. Long before I became involved in the TV program The Nature of Things, he was
the contact person for CBC producer Nancy Archibald when she made a film there for that series. Richard eventually moved to Toronto, where he was hired to do research for the new series Science Magazine. In that capacity, he visited the University of British Columbia, where he interviewed me, and later I ended up being asked to host the show.
I had seen Nancy's program on Papua New Guinea, which showed some of the incredible variety of people and animals living on the island of New Guinea north of Australia. To bird-watchers, Papua New Guinea is famous for its fabled birds of paradise. I was thrilled with Nick's invitation, and I made the visit to Papua New Guinea in 1993. It is an awesome place, more than 80 percent of it covered with high mountains and deep valleys. At one point we flew into a large valley, where I could see five airstrips carved into the hills within a six-mile radius; the villages they serve are only a few minutes apart by air, but the valleys and dense forest between them take days to cover on foot. The isolation imposed by the rugged terrain has resulted in a profusion of cultures and over seven hundred languages, about 45 percent of the world's total.
Not long ago, neighboring tribes raided each other and practiced cannibalism, which perpetuated a terrible disease called kuru, for years thought to be hereditary. Famed population geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote a paper in Science magazine describing kuru as a disease caused by a dominant gene. However, Stanley Prusiner had earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 by showing that kuru was caused by a “slow virus” related to the prions causing BSE (mad cow disease) and the human counterpart, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Kuru, or “laughing disease,” was so named because its victims suffered facial muscle contractions that gave the appearance of a grotesque smile.
