Severn Cullis-Suzuki back on speaking tour
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Severn Cullis-Suzuki, daughter of environmental guru David Suzuki, speaks for the first time at an eco-consumer show. |
Daughter of the famous broadcaster/scientist David Suzuki, Severn Cullis-Suzuki is back speaking before audiences across Canada interested in environmental issues.
She spoke recently at the Ottawa Go Green Expo where she praised local and national companies for responding to the rising demand for green products.
“This is my first green tradeshow. It’s been incredibly inspiring to talk with people who couldn’t find products they wanted so they started a business,” Cullis-Suzuki said. “So congrats to the exhibitors."It was odd to see more than a dozen vehicles at the show, albeit each was claiming high efficiency. It was even more odd to hear her talk about a “green economy”.
“I’m realizing this economic crisis is an opportunity for the green ecomony,” she said, moving to the middle with most environmentalists to champion “reuse” and “recycle” over what is probably the most important – “reduce”.
Still, a pregnant Cullis-Suzuki made a number of interesting points about the intergenerational tensions around global climate change issues. She seemed to be voicing her psychological-emotional development when talking about the “huge inter-generational injustice” that shows her generation will be the first NOT to live as long as her parents’.
Boomers grew up and lived under the comfort of knowing that they live better than their parents.
“But they’ve left a massive economic and social debt,” she said, listing numerous environmental disasters in recent years. Katrina. The pine beetle. Flash flooding and forest fires and more.
Again she appealed to the “fiscally prudent” thing to do is to “act now rather than later” when it comes to climate change. Does a mainstream speaker have another option?
The woman who as a little girl gave a stirring speech a the Rio Summit came back round to the inter-generational thing, offering a solution for all people.
“Inter-generational love is why people care about that speech that happened so long ago,” she said. “Parents are affected by their kids profoundly.”
She said she hears it all the time, parents who agree to recycle because their children have asked them to do so. She hopes her generation will go much further.
“We need to ask what we want our legacy to be.”
ABOUT
Severn Cullis-Suzuki has been active in environmental and social justice work since kindergarten. At age 9, after witnessing burning in the Brazilian Amazon on a trip with her family, she started the Environmental Children’s Organization with her grade 5 friends. ECO was committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. Eventually they were successful in raising enough money to appear at 1992’s Rio Earth Summit, when 12-year-old Severn delivered a powerful speech at a plenary session that gained worldwide attention. For this, she received the UN Environment Program’s Global 500 Award in 1993. Since then, Severn has spoken worldwide on social and ecological issues, on climate change, and intergenerational injustice.
Severn is proud of her work on the UN’s Earth Charter Commission, and participation on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Special Advisory Panel for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa. At this Summit Severn brought a pledge called the Recognition of Responsibility, a declaration from students in Canada and the US. The trip also was the subject of a documentary film that aired on CBC’s long-running documentary series The Nature of Things, hosted by her father David Suzuki.
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