Should we all be climate activists?
Long before Greta Thunberg skipped school to take her “Skolstrejk för klimate” banner and sit outside the Riksdag every day in the run up to the 2018 Swedish general election, there was 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki, and her rousing speech to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
With friends back home in Canada, Cullis-Suzuki founded ECO, the Environmental Children’s Organization. They’d raised money to travel to the UN environment conference in the summer of 1992, or, as she put it bluntly to the assembled world dignitaries at the conference: “travel 5,000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways”. She was “fighting for my future,” she told them. “Losing my future is not like losing an election, or a few points on the stock market.” Talking about the environmental worries she and others in her generation held, she asked the delegates:
