Recycling

Video Transcript:

Hello, I'm Severin Suzuki speaking for echo, the environmental children's organization. We're a group of 12 and 13 year olds trying to make a difference. We've raised all the money to come here ourselves, to come 5,000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! Coming up here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. And what you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! I am here to speak for all generations to come. Let's be watching you. I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard. People are suffering. People are dying. I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. And tired ecosystems are collapsing. And now we hear of animals and plants going extinct every day, vanishing forever. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. I am only a child and I don't have all the solutions. But I know I want you to realize neither do you. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. You don't know how to bring the salmon back up in a dead stream. You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can't bring back the forest that once grew where there is now a desert. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and tired ecosystems were collapsing. If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe. At school, you are an incendiardly. 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 agreeing. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? You are still not so much short enough to tell it like it is. 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 world you are going up in. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you are doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. By that always says you are what you do, not what you say. Well, what you do looks like Friday night. You are failing us. You grown up saying you love us. But I challenge you. Please make your actions reflect your work. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. Thank you. Thank you. And be sure to recycle. You can recycle anything, even a tired old script for a tired old narrative. But beware, each time you recycle a tired old script for a tired old narrative, it can lose all of its lustre and appeal and substance and come back in angry shadow of its former self. Like that movie, Pet symmetry, you bury a lovely, pretty dramatic and well-packaged script slash narrative. It comes back a twisted, angry, melodramatic mess of a script. Slash narrative is much harder to sell. So you can recycle anything, but just be careful. Some stuff is better off just being fun, right?