Twenty five years before Greta, there was Severn and we ignored her

[G_j]

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/twenty-five-years-before-greta-there-was-severn-and-we-ignored-her-1.4022656?mode=amp


Twenty five years before Greta, there was Severn and we ignored her

‘Coming up 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 . . . We hear of animals and plants going extinct every day, vanishing forever . . . Did you have to worry of these 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. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.”

Reading this you could think it was from any one of the youth climate strikers. Greta Thunberg, or Saoi O’Connor from Cork. Instead, these words were spoken more than 27 years ago, by then 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the plenary session of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

She became known as “the girl who silenced the world for five minutes”. Imagine if the world had listened. Countless lives could have been saved from climate-induced natural disasters. We could have spared some of the 60 per cent of animals that have disappeared since the 1970s and pulled a million more species back from the brink. We may have never needed to coin the term “eco-anxiety”, a word and condition becoming more prevalent as the impacts of our climate and ecological crisis become clearer. Young people would never have had to take to the streets to beg for a chance at a liveable future, with slogans such as “You’ll die of old age, I’ll die of climate change.”

We would have had a relatively easy and achievable chance of addressing global warming and the ecological crisis.

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[G_j]

1. Severn Cullis-Suzuki

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_Cullis-Suzuki

[YOHABLO]

2. The first Earth Day was April 22nd, 1970. Was no one paying any attention?

It's not like we haven't been aware of the consequences of environmental damage for the last 50 years.