Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Hello, I’m Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. – The Environmental Children’s Organization.

We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference:
Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We raised all the money ourselves to come five thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming 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. We cannot afford to not be heard.

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 with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going exinct 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 butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry about these little 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 realise, neither do you!

• You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.
• You don’t know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.
• You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
• And you can’t bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or poiticians – but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles – and all of you are somebody’s child.

I’m only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil — 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 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 share.

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 some time with some children living on the streets. And this 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 and love and affection.”

If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everyting still so greedy?

I can’t stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas 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 and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us 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’re attending these conferences, who you’re doing this for — we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying “everyting’s going to be alright” , “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 father 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. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“At some point we also need to get beyond these economic and even practical arguments and get back in touch with the deepest truth of all: Green is a value that needs to be preserved in and of itself, not because it is going to make your bank account richer but because it makes life richer and always has.  At the end of the day, that is what an ‘ethic of conservation’ is also about.  An ethic of conservation declares that maintaining our natural world is a value that is impossible to quantify but also impossible to ignore, because of the sheer beauty, wonder, joy, and magic that nature brings to being alive.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“As Lester Brown put it, we as a society, ‘have been behaving just like Enron, the rogue energy giant, at the height of its folly.’  We rack up stunning profits and GDP numbers every year, and they look great on paper ‘because we’ve been hiding some of the costs off the books.’  Mother Nature has not been fooled.  That is why we are having climate change.  That which is not priced is not valued, and if our open lands, clean air, clean water, and healthy forests are not valued, the earth, when it is this flat and this crowded, will become a very hot, no-cost landfill very fast.  When markets underprice goods and services by failing to price their externalities, and the impact of that underpricing has highly negative economic, health, and national security implications, it’s the job of government to step in and shape the market to correct that failure.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“The total investment in research and development by electric utilities in the United States in 2007 was about .15% of total revenues.  In most competitive industries, the figure is 8 to 10 percent.  In fact, the American pet food industry spends more each year on R & D than the American utilities industry does.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“I cannot stress this point enough.  If you take only one thing away from this book, please take this: We are not going to regulate our way out of the problems of the Energy-Climate Era.  We can only innovate our way out, and the only way to do that is to mobilize the most effective and prolific system for transformational innovation and commercialization of new products ever created on the face of the earth – the U.S. marketplace.  There is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature and that is Father Profit, and we have not even begun to enlist him in this struggle.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“So if the first rule of systems is that everything is connected to everything else, the second rule is: You can optimize individual pieces only up to a point.  If you don’t scrap the old system and put a new system in place, ultimately everything you do will be constrained.  But if you put together a new system, and you do it right, everything starts to get better.  The new system ends up benefiting many individual pieces, as well as the whole.  As Rose puts it: ‘Optimizing individual components can only lead to incremental change; optimizing the system can lead to a transformational ecology.’”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“‘How can we afford to transform our whole economy in order to prevent climate change, when climate change could turn out to be a hoax or a fad and we could misallocate all that capital?,’  my answer is always the same: If climate change is a hoax, it is the most wonderful hoax ever perpetrated on the United States of America.  Because transforming our economy to clean power and energy efficiency to mitigate global warming and the other challenges of the Energy-Climate Era is the equivalent of training for the Olympic triathlon: If you make it to the Olympics, you have a much better chance of winning, because you’ve developed every muscle.  If you don’t make it to the Olympics, you’re still healthier, stronger, fitter, and more likely to live longer and win every other race in life.  And as with the triathlon, you don’t just improve one muscle or skill, but many, which become mutually reinforcing and improve the health of your whole system.”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“Mother Nature ‘is just chemistry, biology, and physics,’ Watson likes to say.  ’Everything she does is just the sum of those three things.  She’s completely amoral.  She doesn’t care about poetry or art or whether you go to church.  You can’t negotiate with her, and you can’t spin her and you can’t evade her rules.  All you can do is fit in as a species.  And when a species doesn’t learn to fit in with Mother Nature, it gets kicked out.’  It’s that simple, says Watson, and that’s why ‘every day you look in the mirror now, you’re seeing an endangered species.’”

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

“I believe the best post-Iraq strategy for driving reform in the Persian Gulf is to bring down the global price of oil – by developing clean power alternatives – and then to count on the forces of globalization from outside, and economic pressures inside, to push the leaders of these countries to change.  That’s the combination of forces that stoked the reform process in Bahrain.  If the price of oil were half of what it is today, these regimes would not be able to resist political and religious modernization so easily.  As the John Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum observes: ‘People don’t change when we tell them they should.  They change when they tell themselves they must.’”