Severn Suzuki speech at UN Earth Summit 1992 Tell the World

Description: They obviously didn't listen well enough, or maybe they all forgot. So, here is a reminder .... Severn Cullis-Suzuki is a very active environmentalist. "In 1992, when she was only 12, she brought world leaders to tears with a speech at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in which she chastised them for failing to protect her and her friends from the looming environmental catastrophe. "I'm afraid to go out in the sun now because of holes in the ozone. I'm afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it," Cullis-Suzuki said in a six-minute speech heard around the world. "I used to go fishing with my dad in Vancouver until just a few years ago. We found the fish full of cancers." Then she read out a checklist of the things the adults had failed to do to protect and preserve the health of the planet and urged them to get on with the task of making it fit for 5 billion people, or get out of the way. "I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realize neither do you...if you don't now how to fix it then please stop breaking it," she pleaded with the delegates. "All parents should be able to comfort their children at night by assuring them that everything's going to be all right. But I don't think you can say that to us any more." She is Dr. David Suzuki's daughter, Severn Cullis-Suzuki. His wife started the David Suzuki Foundation, his daughter Severn CO-founded a separate organization called ECO, the Environmental