Сhapter THIRTEEN
IN 1991, SOON AFTER we had established the David Suzuki Foundation, we heard that the Earth Summit was to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The American zoologist Rachel Carson in 1962 had published her ground-breaking book Silent Spring, about the unexpected consequences of pesticides, and the environmental movement had grown spectacularly through the 1970s and '80s.
The Earth Summit was meant to signal a profound shift, the realization that henceforth humankind couldn't make important political, social, and economic decisions without considering the environmental consequences. But by the time of the meetings, environmental concerns were already giving way to economic priorities.
The period between Silent Spring and Rio reflected the evolution of a remarkable grassroots movement. Greenpeace had been born in 1970 in Vancouver as a result of protest against an American plan to test nuclear weapons underground on Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Islands, off the Alaska Peninsula.
In 1962, there wasn't a single department or ministry of the environment on the planet. Carson's book put the word “environment” on everyone's lips, and the movement had grown so explosively that by 1972 the United Nations was persuaded by Canadian businessman and international environmentalist Maurice Strong to hold a major conference on the environment in Stockholm. The American scientists and educators Paul Ehrlich, Margaret Mead, and Barry Commoner were there, as was the English economist and conservationalist Barbara Ward, along with Greenpeace and thousands of environmentalists concerned about species extinction, pollution, and disappearing habitat.
The United Nations Environment Program was established as an outcome of the Stockholm meetings, and environmentalists took up causes from whales and seals to polluted air and vanishing forests and rivers. The spectacular postwar economic growth had come at a cost that people recognized only after Carson's warning shot. Technology and human activity have consequences for our surroundings, and we had ignored them for too long.
For most of our species' existence, we have been profoundly local and tribal, spending most of our individual lives within a few tens of square miles and coming into contact with perhaps a couple of hundred others in a lifetime. But now we were emerging as a global force. Now we had to consider the collective impact of all of humanity, and it was a difficult perspective to grasp and accept.
When Tara and I had visited the village of Aucre deep in the Amazon rain forest in 1989, we had left a small plastic bag of garbage in our hut, assuming it would be buried after we left. When I returned a decade later, that bag was still there. Throughout their existence, the Kaiapo had lived with materials that were totally biodegradable and so could be left where they were or tossed into the forest to eventually decompose. When plastics and metals began to appear in the Amazon as the Kaiapo made contact with the outside world, those materials were strewn around just like the banana skins of old.
In the twentieth century, human beings had become so numerous and our technological prowess so powerful that we were affecting the biophysical features of the planet on a massive scale. Yet we still thought as local animals. It was almost impossible for the average person to grasp the idea of millions of acres of forest being destroyed, billions of tons of topsoil being lost, toxic pollution of the entire atmosphere, and a massive spasm of extinction. The environmental movement had to come up with catchy ways of representing the bigger picture so people could relate to it—the Amazon as the “lungs of the planet,” cute and cuddly baby seals, charismatic animals like whales or gorillas.
The movement grew as local communities began to grasp the consequences of using air, water, and soil as toxic dumps and belatedly recognized the value of wilderness and of other species. By the late '80s, grassroots concern had pushed the environment to the top of the list of public concerns to such an extent that Margaret Thatcher, the ultra-right-wing Conservative prime minister of Britain, was filmed picking up litter and declaring to the camera, “I'm a greenie too.” In Canada, newly reelected Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney demonstrated a sudden commitment to the environment by appointing his brightest star, the mesmerizing political novice Lucien Bouchard, as minister of the environment and raising the portfolio to the inner cabinet.
In the United States in 1988, Republican political candidate George Bush Sr. promised that, if elected, he would be “an environmental president.” Australia's Labor government was led by Bob Hawke and then by Paul Keating during this period, neither of whom had any record of interest in the environment. But the public was concerned, and Keating was forced to appoint as minister a champion of the environment, Ros Kelly, whom I met and admired over the years.
As their records in office demonstrated, it was public concern about the environment that generated the declared environmental commitments by politicians, not any deeply felt understanding of why the issue was important. When economic difficulties set in, the environment disappeared as a high priority and the environmental movement was forced to struggle to keep matters on the political agenda. To the jaded media, the environment was an old story. Indeed, some revisionists, such as the American writer Gregg Easterbrook, the Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, and former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore, began to argue that the environmental movement was beating a dead horse, that it had been so successful that it was time to move on to other issues such as the economy.
If 1988 was the peak of public concern, interest continued to be high enough in 1991 to make the Earth Summit a highly anticipated event. It would be the largest gathering of heads of state in history, but I was skeptical that such a huge meeting would accomplish much. My daughter, Severn, had other ideas.
When we had returned from our trip to the Amazon in 1989, Severn had been so upset after seeing the rain forest under assault by farmers and gold miners that she had started a club made up of her grade 5 friends who shared her concern about forests. They would gather at our house to have tea and talk about what they might do. They called their club the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO) and soon were giving talks at their school and then at other schools as word of their existence spread. They began to make little salamanders and earrings out of Fimo clay and sold them to raise money.
Somehow Severn heard about the Earth Summit and asked whether Tara and I were going. I answered that we weren't and asked why she was curious. “Because I think all those grown-ups are going to meet and make decisions and they're not even going to think about us kids,” came the answer. “I think ECO should go to remind them to think about us.”
Tara and I had been involved in a number of international issues, but we had not worked with international organizations such as the United Nations, around whose official Conference on Environment and Development the broader Earth Summit had evolved. Without even reflecting on Severn's idea, I rejected it: “Sweetheart, it's going to be a huge circus with lots of people. Rio will be hot and polluted. Besides, it will cost a lot of money.” Then I promptly forgot about Sev's hope.
That summer, we had a visit from Doug Tompkins, an American who had started the clothing company Esprit with his wife, Susie Russell. When the marriage broke up, Susie bought him out and left him with a considerable chunk of money, reputed to be in the hundreds of millions. Flying his own plane, Doug travels the world looking for opportunities to invest in groups fighting to protect large areas of wilderness, and he personally buys large tracts of land to protect.
Somehow he had heard about Tara and me and the newly formed David Suzuki Foundation, so he flew to British Columbia with deep ecologist Bill Duvall and visited us at our cottage on Quadra Island for two days. During that time, unknown to Tara and me, Severn told Doug about her idea of taking ECO to Rio the following year. He was more enthusiastic than we had been and told her, “That's a good idea. Write to me about it.” She did, and one day a couple of months later, she said, “Hey, Dad, look,” and held up a check for US$1,000 from Doug Tompkins.
I was astonished. I was also pleased with her initiative in writing on her own, and for the first time, I reflected seriously about her idea; I realized she could be on to something. I talked it over with Tara, and we decided it might be worth going to the Earth Summit if children could call attention to the long-term implications of what was being decided by grown-ups. So we went back to Sev and told her we realized she had a good idea and that we would support her by matching every dollar ECO could raise. That meant she already had $2,000.
Severn and Sarika and the other ECO girls plunged into projects to raise money, gathering and selling secondhand books, creating and selling their Fimo salamanders, and baking cookies. But all that brought in only small change. Jeff Gibbs of the Environmental Youth Alliance, that young man who had cut his teeth in environmental activism in high school, took ECO under his wing and helped the girls publish a series of ECO newspapers with articles the youngsters wrote about the environment. Jeff also suggested a major fund-raising event at which the kids could tell people what they wanted to do. It was scheduled for March 17, 1992. With a great deal of help from Jeff, Tara, and others, the girls booked the Vancouver Planetarium, made and distributed posters, and called members of the press and urged them to cover the event. Parents, relatives, and friends, of course, were recruited to attend.
The event was packed. Tara had the inspiration of including a blank check in the package of material left on every seat, thereby removing the excuse “I didn't bring a check with me.” The girls had all prepared talks to go along with a slide show about the environment. They said they wanted to go to Rio to be a conscience to adults, and they asked the audience to help them. It was a powerful presentation because the girls spoke from their hearts, and their very innocence and naïveté touched a chord. During the break, an older man leaped onto the stage, held up five checks for $200 each, and announced he was so inspired that he would donate them if others would match them. People began to fill in the blank checks. Dad anted up $200.
The girls ended up with over $4,700 from that one event, which they had hoped might raise $1,000. Raffi Cavoukian, the well-known children's troubadour, had moved to Vancouver; he had become very interested in environmental issues and wrote a check for another $4,000. Somehow a Toronto philanthropist who supports women's issues heard about the girls and sent another check for $4,000.
In all, the girls had raised more than $13,000, which Tara and I had to match—enough money to send five ECO members (including, of course, Severn and Sarika) and three parents (Tara, me, and Patricia Hernandez, the Spanish-speaking mother of one of the other girls) to Rio.
Although I was now planning to go to the summit, I remained skeptical about what the meeting itself would achieve. In December 1991, I interviewed conference coordinator Maurice Strong for The Nature of Things with David Suzuki and expressed my skepticism. He was irrepressibly optimistic, saying the conference couldn't fail because the future of the planet was at stake. When I pressed him, he responded, “If it does fail, it must not be allowed to be a quiet failure and recede unnoticed from memory.”
The Earth Summit was heralded by Carlo Ripa di Meana, environment commissioner of the European Union, as a chance “to make decisions, obtain precise and concrete commitments to counteract tendencies that are endangering life on the planet.” But in order to ensure U.S. president George Bush's participation, the proposed Treaty on Climate was watered down from a target of a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to merely “stabilizing 1990 levels of emissions by 2000.” This caused Ripa di Meana to boycott the meeting because, he said, “by opting for hypocrisy, we will not just fail to save the Earth, but we will fail you.” So things were not looking good.
Once it was known that Tara and I were going to Rio, we were asked to become involved in some of the deliberations leading up to the event. For years, hundreds of groups and thousands of people had been attending Prepcom (Preparatory Committee) meetings in different countries to draft documents to be presented to and signed by leaders at Rio. The signings would be merely formalities and photo ops, because all the wording would have been worked out beforehand.
To persuade all countries to sign on, the wording in the documents had to be fine-tuned to avoid offending signatories—oops, can't talk about overpopulation to the developing countries, don't mention family planning lest it scare off the Catholic countries, mustn't raise the issue of hyperconsumption in the industrialized countries. Documents on forests, water, air, and so on were drafted, passed through many hands, edited and reedited, rewritten many times.
By the time I was called in to one of the meetings in Vancouver to look at a forestry document, people were spending a great deal of time arguing over whether there should be a hyphen here or a comma there or whether it should be “the” or “a.” Maybe I'm being unfair, because I went to only one meeting and abandoned further attendance as a waste of my time. I know lots of people who invested huge amounts of energy in the process, and thank goodness there were people willing to do it.
For me, the important thing was not in all of the picky details but in an overarching vision that would establish the real bottom line: that we are biological beings, completely dependent for our good health and very survival on the health of the biosphere. At the David Suzuki Foundation, we felt one contribution we could make at Rio would be such a statement or vision, so I began to draft a declaration that would express an understanding of our place in the natural world. As I began to work on it with Tara, she suggested it should be like the American Declaration of Independence, a powerful document that would touch people's hearts. “How about calling it the Declaration of Interdependence?” she suggested, and it was instantly obvious that was what we were drafting.
Tara and I went back and forth with our efforts and then recruited Raffi, our Haida friend Guujaaw, and the Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis, to contribute. At one point I kept writing the cumbersome sentence, “We are made up of the air we breathe, we are inflated by water and created by earth through the food we consume.” That was what I wanted to express, but I wanted to do it in a way that was simple and inspiring. As I struggled with the lines, I suddenly cut through it all and wrote, “We are the earth.”
That was the first time I really understood the depth of what I had learned from Guujaaw and other aboriginal people. I knew we incorporate air, water, and earth into our bodies, but simply declaring that's what we are cut through all the boundaries. Now I understood that there is no line or border that separates us from the rest of the world.
There is no boundary—we are the earth and are created by the four sacred elements—earth, air, fire, and water. It follows that whatever we do to the planet Earth, we do directly to ourselves. I had been framing the “environmental” problem improperly—I thought we had to modify our interaction with our surroundings, regulating how much and what we remove from the environment and how much and what waste and toxic material we put back into it. Now I knew that wasn't the right perspective, because if we viewed ourselves as separate from our surroundings, we could always find ways to rationalize our activity (“too expensive to change,” “it's only a minuscule amount,” “that's the way we've always done it,” “it interferes with our competitiveness,” et cetera). But if we are the air, the water, the soil, the sunlight, then how can we rationalize using ourselves as toxic dumps?
This is what our final document was:
Declaration Of Interdependence
THIS WE KNOW
We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.
We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.
We are the breath of the forests of the land and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as
descendants of the firstborn cell.
We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.
We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.
And we share a common future as yet untold.
We humans are but one of thirty million species
weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world.
The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity.
Linked in that web, we are interconnected—
using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing
the fundamental elements of life.
Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its
resources and the energy from the Sun,
and therefore has limits to growth.
For the first time, we have touched those limits.
When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life,
we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.
THIS WE BELIEVE
Humans have become so numerous and our tools so powerful
that we have driven fellow creatures to extinction,
dammed the great rivers,
torn down ancient forests, poisoned the earth, rain
and wind, and ripped holes in the sky.
Our science has brought pain as well as joy;
our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions.
We are learning from our mistakes, we are mourning our vanished kin,
and we now build a new politics of hope.
We respect and uphold the absolute need for clean air, water and soil.
We see that economic activities that benefit the few
while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong.
And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever,
full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development.
We are one brief generation in the long march of time;
the future is not ours to erase.
So where knowledge is limited, we will remember
all those who will walk after us,
and err on the side of caution.
THIS WE RESOLVE
All this that we know and believe must now become
the foundation of the way we live.
At this Turning Point in our relationship with Earth,
we work for an evolution from dominance to partnership,
from fragmentation to connection, from insecurity to interdependence.
I believe the final Declaration of Interdependence is a powerful, moving document that sets forth the principles that should underlie all of our activities. We had the declaration translated into a number of languages including French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, and Spanish, and took copies to give away in Rio, one of the first tangible products of the David Suzuki Foundation.
As we were doing this and setting up the foundation office, Tara was organizing ECO's involvement in Rio and the logistics of hotel, food, travel, shots, and so on. As the time to leave approached, I was increasingly anxious and worried, but the girls saw the trip as an adventure and opportunity. They were so innocent. Despite my concerns, we took off in a state of excitement and hope. I had to fly to Europe at the end of the conference, but Tara had arranged for the children to have a post-Rio reward of a visit to the Amazon.
We landed in Rio, and, as I had feared, it was hot and the air was heavy with pollution from the traffic. I still tended to worry about details—where would we stay, what about food, how would we get around, what about toilets—but Tara is the one who makes those arrangements. My children just ignore me—“Oh, Dad, stop being so anal” is the way they put it. Tara had arranged for an apartment overlooking the fabled Copacabana Beach, but we had too much to do to enjoy the resort.
Tens of thousands of people arrived in Rio de Janeiro to attend the Earth Summit, which included the official un conference, housed at Rio Centro and ringed by armed guards demanding passes to enter; the Global Forum, for hundreds of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from all over the world; and the Earth Parliament, for indigenous peoples. Each conference was many miles away from the others. I don't doubt that this was a deliberate decision to keep the NGOs and indigenous people as far away from the official delegates as possible, if for no other reason than to minimize the contrast between well-heeled representatives staying at fancy hotels and the rabble like us on minimal budgets staying in the cheap parts of town.
With such distances between summit events, the media had to make decisions about what to cover, and usually Rio Centro was where they hung out because telephones, fax machines, and computers were set up there. As it was, the fun and excitement were to be found among the NGOs, whereas the delegates in business attire were trapped in long, serious, and deadly boring deliberations behind closed doors, completing the final wording of documents to be signed later, when the world leaders arrived.
It was a circus. I hated it. The city was uncomfortable and overrun with cars, and everywhere we went, there were crowds of people trying to be seen or heard. If you're not anal like me, Rio is a wonderful place to visit. The beaches are lovely (although the water is polluted and best left alone), the sun always shines (although it has to make its way through the haze) and there are nightclubs and restaurants galore. We went to churrascarias, amazing places where meat is brought out on skewers and one can fill up on enormous servings of food while children outside beg for leftovers. As in all big cities, but especially those in developing countries, the contrast between the world that tourists inhabit and the extreme poverty in slums is difficult to accept. To prepare for the conference, Brazilian authorities had forcibly removed street people from downtown Rio so that the official delegates wouldn't have to confront the contrasts.
The girls had brought three issues of their newspaper and among them spoke English, French, and Spanish. ECO had registered as one of the thousands of NGOs and applied for a booth where they could display their papers, posters, and pictures and meet people. Tara and I had been asked to speak at a number of NGO events, and before the end of our presentations at each session we would say, “I think you should hear from the ones with most at stake in all that's going on here” and bring the girls onstage to make short submissions.
The ECO gang in Rio. Left to right: Michelle Quigg, Severn, Raffi, Sarika, Morgan Geisler, and Vanessa Suttie.
The media began to hear about them by word of mouth and went to their booth for interviews. It was a good story to have these cute girls speaking so seriously and passionately. David Halton from CBC took the girls to a favela, where street people lived, and interviewed them for a long story. Jean Charest, Canada's newest federal environment minister, visited the booth to talk to the girls, but they were frustrated because they felt he was more interested in telling them things than in listening to them. The girls were articulate, passionate, and telegenic, and their plea to be remembered while delegates made big decisions affecting their world was so simple and undeniable that it cut through all the rhetorical flourishes and political posturing.
At one of the events at the Earth Parliament, I gave a short talk and then yielded the stage so that Severn could also make a speech. I didn't know it, but in the audience was James Grant, the American head of UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, and he was so moved by Sev's remarks that he asked her for a copy of them. He told her he was meeting Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney that evening and wanted to give him that speech in person. I never heard whether he did or not, but we learned later that Grant had run into Maurice Strong and told Maurice he should give Severn an opportunity to speak.
The next day, Tara and the girls were scheduled to leave Rio to take their trip to the wilderness camp in the Amazon. But in the morning, we received a call from Strong's office inviting Severn to speak at Rio Centro in a session for children. Three other girls, representing various youth groups, had been selected ahead of time to speak, and now Strong added Sev to this group. One girl was from Germany, another from Guatemala, and two, including Sev, were from Canada. Each was to speak for no more than three or four minutes.
The call from Strong's office was exhilarating. The trip to a camp in the Amazon would have to be postponed, a huge undertaking in Brazil, but Tara went ahead and began to make new arrangements. Severn had had the inspiration more than a year before to go to Rio and make a plea. The girls had worked like demons to raise money, publish papers, and attend the meetings. And now they were to speak to the delegates.
What could she say? I was overwhelmed with the immensity of the opportunity and the challenge of compressing the important issues into a short talk. I began firing off ideas about points I thought she should make in her speech on pollution, wildlife, future generations. Sev said to me, “Dad, I know what I want to say. Mommy will help me write it all down. I want you to tell me how to say it.”
We didn't have much time. Sev wrote out her speech on a piece of paper, adding words and phrases in the margins as all of us offered our critique. I had no idea how she would be able to read the scribbling. We rushed out to grab cabs, and as we careened through the streets of Rio, I made Sev go over her speech several times, trying to help her smooth her delivery and remember which words should be emphasized, just as my father had done for me when I was a boy.
The conference center was air-conditioned, with only a murmur of background noise—a stark contrast to the vibrant colors, smells, and sounds of the Global Forum. We entered the conference room, an immense hall that could have held thousands but contained only a few hundred people; it looked almost empty. Sev was last on the list. The other girls made their presentations well, pleading for better care of resources, wildlife, water, and the poor—the kind of statements adults could feel good about listening to and in response could promise they were doing their best.
Finally, it was Sev's turn. She was twelve years old and had not had time to prepare thoroughly, and I was scared stiff—but I hadn't given her enough credit. She has a mother who is a superb thinker and writer, and Sev herself had been listening to us, absorbing our concerns and solutions, thinking about her life and her surroundings, and she spoke simply, straight from the heart. Here is what she said:
Hello. I'm Severn Suzuki, speaking for eco, the Environmental Children's Organization.
We are a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds trying to make a difference—Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg, and me.
We raised all the money to come five thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways.
Coming up here today I have no hidden agenda, I am fighting for my future.
Severn speaking to the plenary session of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (taken from video)
Losing a 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.
I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone; I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it; I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my home-town, with my dad, until just a few years ago when we found the fish full of cancers; and now we hear about animals and plants going extinct every day—vanishing forever.
In my life, I have dreamed of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rain forests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.
Did you have to worry about 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 realize, neither do you—you don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer; you don't know how to bring the salmon back in a dead stream; you don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct, and you can't bring back the forests that once grew where there is now a desert—if you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!
Here you may be delegates of your governments, business-people, organizers, reporters or politicians, but really you are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and all of you are somebody's child.
I'm only a child yet I know we are part of a family, 5 billion strong; in fact, 30 million species strong, and borders and governments will never change that.
I'm only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world toward one single goal.
In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I'm not afraid to tell the world how I feel.
In my country we make so much waste; we buy and throw away, buy and throw away; and yet northern countries will not share with the needy; even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to let go.
In Canada, we live the privileged life with plenty of food, water and shelter; we have watches, bicycles, computers, and television sets.
Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent time with some children living on the streets, and here is what one child told us: “I wish I was rich, and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter, love, and affection.”
If a child on the street who has nothing is willing to share, why are we who have everything still so greedy?
I can't stop thinking that these are children my own age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born.
I could be one of those children living in the favelas of Rio, I could be a child starving in Somalia, a victim of war in the Middle East, or a beggar in India.
I'm only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty, making treaties and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this Earth would be.
At school, even in kindergarten, 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 be greedy.
Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?
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 a world we will grow up in.
Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying, “Everything's going to be all right,” “We're doing the best we can,” and “It's not the end of the world.”
But I don't think you can say that to us anymore.
Are we even on your list of priorities?
My dad always says, “You are what you do, not what you say.”
Well, what you do makes me cry at night.
You grown-ups say you love us, but I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you.
I was absolutely floored. It was a powerful speech, delivered with eloquence, sincerity, and passion. The audience was electrified. All of the presentations in the convention hall were broadcast on monitors throughout the building, and I am told that when Sev began to speak, people stopped what they were doing and gathered around the television sets to listen to her. Severn received one of only two standing ovations given during the entire conference (the other was for President Fidel Castro of Cuba, who also gave a powerful speech).
When she left the stage to come to us near the middle of the auditorium, her first words to Tara were, “Mommy, could you hear my heart beating?” As she sat down between us, a member of the American delegation rushed over to shake her hand and congratulate her. “That was the best speech anyone has given here,” U.S. senator Al Gore told her.
The speech was filmed and is archived with the United Nations. I have a copy of it and have shown the video dozens of times to audiences attending my talks; each time, I am moved by its simplicity and power. The repercussions of that speech had a huge impact on Sev's life. Canadian journalist and human-rights activist Michelle Landsberg wrote a column about it, and the speech has been printed verbatim in dozens of articles and translated into several languages. John Pierce of Doubleday contacted Severn about writing a book based on it, which she did in 1993; the book is called Tell the World. She was interviewed again and again, offered opportunities to host television programs, and invited to give speeches. She received the United Nations Environment Program's Global 500 award in Beijing in 1993.
It was all pretty heady stuff for a twelve-year-old, and I began to worry about what this would do to her sense of herself. I stopped worrying the next year, when she was invited to appear on The Joan Rivers Show in New York. “Dad,” Sev told me, “I hope it's okay, but I'm not going to do this. I have to study, and I want to make the basketball team.” She had her priorities right.
AGENDA 21 IS THE 700-page tome adopted by 178 governments at Rio; essentially, it was a blueprint for the world to achieve sustainable development. The cost of this massive shift from a focus on the economy above all else to an inclusion of environmental factors was estimated to be $600 billion a year, although the cost of not doing anything was not estimated and would have been many times greater. The developing world was expected to put up $450 billion of it, a sum that represented 8 percent of their collective gross domestic product (GDP), and the industrialized nations were expected to cough up the remainder, a mere 0.7 percent of their GDPs. Before the Earth Summit was over, developed countries were already complaining that their contribution was impractical, and the target of 0.7 percent of GDP has not been reached by any of the major industrial nations such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, even though the goals set in Rio in 1992 were re-affirmed at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002.
Sev and woolly monkey at the Ariau Jungle Towers on the Amazon