Editor's note: The following is the transcript of the speech that Severn Suzuki gave to the Plenary Session at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio Centro, Brazil. Severn was twelve years old. SASS feels there is no better example of a young person standing up and speaking on behalf of something in which they truly believe, for the betterment of themselves and the world around them.
Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. - The Environmental Children's Organisation.
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 six 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 be not heard.
The only possible outcome of the purely categorizing compart-mentality, thrust upon us at school, is the loss of our creativity. People are losing their individuality, their ability to see things as they really are and thereby their connection
with Nature. They are fast approaching a state of equilibrium impossible in Nature, which must force them into a total economic collapse, for no stable system of equilibrium exists. Therefore the principles upon which our actions are founded are invalid, because they operate within parameters that do not exist.
Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is done properly, it brings happiness, but when carried out incorrectly, it
assuredly brings misery.
"They call me deranged. The hope is that they are right! It is of no greater or lesser import for yet another fool to wander this Earth. But if I am right and science is wrong, then may the Lord God have mercy on mankind!" ... ""How else should it be done then?", was always the immediate question. The answer is simple: "Exactly in the opposite way that it is done today!""
More quotes to follow...
From: Sharon [dot] Seier [at] bbraun [dot] com
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 13:34:19 -0500
I grew up in the forties and fifties with a practical parent, my mother, God love her, who ironed Christmas wrapping paper and reused it and who washed aluminum foil after she cooked in it, then reused it. She was the original recycle queen, before they had a name for it. http://i.am/jah/greeneco.htm
It was the time for fixing things...a curtain rod, the kitchen radio, the screen door, the oven door, the hem in a dress. Things we keep.
When Paul was a boy growing up in Utah, he happened to live near an old copper smelter, and the sulfur dioxide that poured out of the refinery had made a desolate wasteland out of what used to be a beautiful forest.
When a young visitor one day looked at this wasteland and saw that there was nothing living there — no animals, no trees, no grass, no bushes, no birds ... nothing but fourteen thousand acres of black and barren land that even smelled bad — well, this kid looked at the land and said, “This place is crummy.” Little Paul knocked him down. He felt insulted. But he looked around him and something happened inside him. He made a decision: Paul Rokich vowed that some day he would bring back the life to this land.
Black Elk (Lakota, 1863-1950), a
holy man famous for his book Black Elk Speaks, was one of many
Native Americans who shared his cultural heritage. Photo by W. Ben
Hunt, Black Hills, South Dakota, ca. 1939. Marquette University
Libraries, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records, Negative No.
0860. (http://www.marquette.edu/library/neh/thiel/Indian.htm)
I can remember that winter of the hundred slain [1866] as a man may
remember some bad dream he dreamed when he was little, but I can not
tell just how much I heard when I was bigger and how much I understood
when I was little. It is like some fearful thing in a fog, for it was a
time when everything seemed troubled and afraid. I had never seen a Wasichu [white
man] then, and did not know what one looked like; but everyone was
saying that the Wasichus were coming and that they were going to take
our country and rub us all out and that we should all have to die
fighting. Once we were happy in our own country
and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-Ieggeds and the
four-Ieggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for
them and for us, but the Wasichus were coming and, they have made
little islands for us and other little islands for the four-Ieggeds,
and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges
the gnawing flood of the Wasichu; and it is dirty with lies and greed. I was ten years old that winter, and
that was the first time I ever saw a Wasichu. At first I thought they
all looked sick, and I was afraid they might just begin to fight us any
time, but I got used to them. I can remember when the bison were so
many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to
kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they
used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for
the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell.
Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; and I
have heard that fire-boats came down the Missouri River loaded with
dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were
crazy. Sometimes they did not
even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they liked
to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed.
The Native American people lived The Right Way in harmony with nature,
as explained in The book The Way
Home or face The Fire
As I've explained in my introduction the main purpose of 100777.com is to lead seekers to JAH's site.
The JAH Home-Page is an expanse of Articles; E-books; Truth Literature and Multi-Media, Revealing the Long-Awaited Truth of All Things on Planet Earth. Learn to see things from a Certain* Point of View and anoint your Spiritual eyes with JAH's eye-salve, so you can then see clearly who is friend and who is foe in this world full of trickery and deceit.
JAH is the source of all of the information that every single Living Soul on this Planet needs, in order to survive into the new Millennium. This site covers everything, from proof of our TRUE and, until now, hidden identity (who and what we really are), to the complete explanation of why the world is in the incredible mess that it is currently in....
...The question is, what would you like to find-out about first?
When reviewing the material please keep an open mindset but cross-check the details, as inaccuracies may not just exist but are sometimes quite obvious.
Black Elk (Lakota, 1863-1950), a
holy man famous for his book Black Elk Speaks, was one of many
Native Americans who shared his cultural heritage. Photo by W. Ben
Hunt, Black Hills, South Dakota, ca. 1939. Marquette University
Libraries, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records, Negative No.
0860. (
