António Guterres: 'To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken', Columbia University speech - 2020

3 December 2020, Columbia University, New York City, USA

President Bollinger,

Dear Friends,

I thank Columbia University for hosting this gathering — and I welcome those joining online around the world.

We meet in this unusual way as we enter the last month of this most unusual year.

We are facing a devastating pandemic, new heights of global heating, new lows of ecological degradation and new setbacks in our work towards global goals for more equitable, inclusive and sustainable development.

To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken.

Dear friends,

Humanity is waging war on nature.

This is suicidal.

Nature always strikes back — and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.

Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction.

Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes.

Deserts are spreading.

Wetlands are being lost.

Every year, we lose 10 million hectares of forests.

Oceans are overfished — and choking with plastic waste. The carbon dioxide they absorb is acidifying the seas.

Coral reefs are bleached and dying.

Air and water pollution are killing 9 million people annually – more than six times the current toll of the pandemic.

And with people and livestock encroaching further into animal habitats and disrupting wild spaces, we could see more viruses and other disease-causing agents jump from animals to humans.

Let’s not forget that 75 per cent of new and emerging human infectious diseases are zoonotic.

Today, two new authoritative reports from the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme spell out how close we are to climate catastrophe.

2020 is on track to be one of the three warmest years on record globally – even with the cooling effect of this year’s La Nina.

The past decade was the hottest in human history.

Ocean heat is at record levels.

This year, more than 80 per cent of the world’s oceans experienced marine heatwaves.

In the Arctic, 2020 has seen exceptional warmth, with temperatures more than 3 degrees Celsius above average – and more than 5 degrees in northern Siberia.

Arctic sea ice in October was the lowest on record – and now re-freezing has been the slowest on record.

Greenland ice has continued its long-term decline, losing an average of 278 gigatons a year.

Permafrost is melting and so releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Apocalyptic fires and floods, cyclones and hurricanes are increasingly the new normal.

The North Atlantic hurricane season has seen 30 storms, more than double the long-term average and breaking the record for a full season.

Central America is still reeling from two back-to-back hurricanes, part of the most intense period for such storms in recent years.

Last year such disasters cost the world $150 billion.

COVID-19 lockdowns have temporarily reduced emissions and pollution.

But carbon dioxide levels are still at record highs – and rising.

In 2019, carbon dioxide levels reached 148 per cent of pre-industrial levels.

In 2020, the upward trend has continued despite the pandemic.

Methane soared even higher – to 260 per cent.

Nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas but also a gas that harms the ozone layer, has escalated by 123 per cent.

Meanwhile, climate policies have yet to rise to the challenge.

Emissions are 62 per cent higher now than when international climate negotiations began in 1990.

Every tenth of a degree of warming matters.

Today, we are at 1.2 degrees of warming and already witnessing unprecedented climate extremes and volatility in every region and on every continent.

We are headed for a thundering temperature rise of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius this century.

The science is crystal clear: to limit temperature rise to 1.5-degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the world needs to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6 per cent every year between now and 2030.

Instead, the world is going in the opposite direction — planning an annual increase of 2 per cent.

The fallout of the assault on our planet is impeding our efforts to eliminate poverty and imperiling food security.

And it is making our work for peace even more difficult, as the disruptions drive instability, displacement and conflict.

It is no coincidence that seventy per cent of the most climate vulnerable countries are also among the most politically and economically fragile.

It is not happenstance that of the 15 countries most susceptible to climate risks, eight host a United Nations peacekeeping or special political mission.

As always, the impacts fall most heavily on the world’s most vulnerable people.

Those who have done the least to cause the problem are suffering the most.

Even in the developed world, the marginalized are the first victims of disasters and the last to recover.

Dear friends,

Let’s be clear: human activities are at the root of our descent towards chaos.

But that means human action can help solve it.

Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century. It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere.

In this context, the recovery from the pandemic is an opportunity.

We can see rays of hope in the form of a vaccine.

But there is no vaccine for the planet.

Nature needs a bailout.

In overcoming the pandemic, we can also avert climate cataclysm and restore our planet.

This is an epic policy test. But ultimately this is a moral test.

The trillions of dollars needed for COVID recovery is money that we are borrowing from future generations. Every last penny.

We cannot use those resources to lock in policies that burden them with a mountain of debt on a broken planet.

It is time to flick the “green switch”. We have a chance to not simply reset the world economy but to transform it.

A sustainable economy driven by renewable energies will create new jobs, cleaner infrastructure and a resilient future.

An inclusive world will help ensure that people can enjoy better health and the full respect of their human rights, and live with dignity on a healthy planet.

COVID recovery and our planet’s repair must be the two sides of the same coin.

Dear friends,

Let me start with the climate emergency. We face three imperatives in addressing the climate crisis:

First, we need to achieve global carbon neutrality within the next three decades.

Second, we have to align global finance behind the Paris Agreement, the world’s blueprint for climate action.

Third, we must deliver a breakthrough on adaptation to protect the world – and especially the most vulnerable people and countries — from climate impacts.

Let me take these in turn.

First, carbon neutrality – net zero emissions of greenhouse gases.

In recent weeks, we have seen important positive developments.

The European Union has committed to become first climate neutral continent by 2050 – and I expect it will decide to reduce its emissions to at least 55 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030.

The United Kingdom, Japan, the Republic of Korea and more than 110 countries have committed to carbon neutrality by 2050.

The incoming United States administration has announced exactly the same goal.

China has committed to get there before 2060.

This means that by early next year, countries representing more than 65 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions and more than 70 per cent of the world economy will have made ambitious commitments to carbon neutrality.

We must turn this momentum into a movement.

The central objective of the United Nations for 2021 is to build a truly Global Coalition for Carbon Neutrality.

I firmly believe that 2021 can be a new kind of leap year — the year of a quantum leap towards carbon neutrality.

Every country, city, financial institution and company should adopt plans for transitioning to net zero emissions by 2050 — and I encourage the main emitters to lead the way in taking decisive action now to get on the right path and to achieve this vision, which means cutting global emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. And this must be clear in the Nationally Determined Contributions.

Every individual must also do their part — as consumers, as producers, as investors.

Technology is on our side.

Sound economic analysis is our ally.

More than half the coal plants operating today cost more to run than building new renewables from scratch.

The coal business is going up in smoke.

The International Labour Organization estimates that, despite inevitable job losses, the clean energy transition will result in the creation of 18 million jobs by 2030.

But a just transition is absolutely critical.

We must recognize the human costs of the energy shift.

Social protection, temporary basic income, re-skilling and up-skilling can support workers and ease the changes caused by decarbonization.

Dear friends,

Renewable energy is now the first choice not just for the environment, but for the economy.

But there are worrying signs.

Some countries have used the crisis to roll back environmental protections.

Others are expanding natural resource exploitation and retreating from climate ambition.

The G20 members, in their rescue packages, are now spending 50 per cent more on sectors linked to fossil fuel production and consumption, than on low-carbon energy.

And beyond announcements, all must pass a credibility test.

Let me take one example, the example of shipping.

If the shipping sector was a country, it would be the world’s sixth biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

At last year’s Climate Action Summit, we launched the Getting to Zero Shipping Coalition to push for zero emissions deep sea vessels by 2030.

Yet current policies are not in line with those pledges.

We need to see enforceable regulatory and fiscal steps so that the shipping industry can deliver its commitments.

Otherwise, the net zero ship will have sailed.

Exactly the same applies to aviation.

Dear friends,

The Paris signatories are obligated to submit their revised and enhanced Nationally Determined Contributions with their 2030 emissions cut targets.

Ten days from now, along with France and the United Kingdom, I am convening a Climate Ambition Summit to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement.

Less than a year from now, we will meet in Glasgow for COP26.

These moments are opportunities we cannot miss for nations to detail how they will build forward and build better, acknowledging the common but differentiated responsibilities in the light of national circumstances – as said in the Paris Agreement – but with the common goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

Second, let me now turn to key question of finance.

The commitments to net zero emissions are sending a clear signal to investors, markets and finance ministers.

But we need to go further.

We need all governments to translate these pledges into policies, plans and targets with specific timelines. This will provide certainty and confidence for businesses and the financial sector to invest for net zero.

It is time:

To put a price on carbon.

To phase out fossil fuel finance and end fossil fuel subsidies.

To stop building new coal power plants — and halt coal power financing domestically and overseas.

To shift the tax burden from income to carbon, and from taxpayers to polluters.

To integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal policies and decisions.

And to make climate-related financial risk disclosures mandatory.

Funding should flow to the green economy, resilience, adaptation and just transition programmes.

We need to align all public and private financial flows behind the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Multilateral, regional and national development institutions, and private banks, must all commit to align their lending to the global net zero objective.

I call on all asset owners and managers to decarbonize their portfolios and to join key initiatives and partnerships launched by the United Nations, including the Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance and the Net-Zero Asset Owners Alliance today with $5.1 trillion dollars of assets.

Companies need to adjust their business models – and investors need to demand information from companies on the resilience of those models.

The world’s pension funds manage $32 trillion dollars in assets, putting them in a unique position to move the needle must move the needle and lead the way.

I appeal to developed countries to fulfill their long-standing promise to provide $100 billion dollars annually to support developing countries in reaching our shared climate goals.

We are not there yet.

This is a matter of equity, fairness, solidarity and enlightened self-interest.

And I ask all countries to reach a compromise on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, as they prepare for COP26, to get us the clear, fair and environmentally sound rules carbon markets need to fully function.

I welcome the work of the task force launched in September, with members representing 20 sectors and 6 continents, to develop a blueprint for large-scale private carbon offset markets.

Third, we need a breakthrough on adaptation and resilience.

We are in a race against time to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

Adaptation must not be the forgotten component of climate action.

Until now, adaptation represents only 20 per cent of climate finance, reaching $30 billion on average in 2017 and 2018.

This hinders our essential work for disaster risk reduction.

It also isn’t smart.

The Global Commission on Adaptation found that every $1 invested in adaptation could yield almost $4 in benefits.

We have both a moral imperative and a clear economic case for supporting developing countries to adapt and build resilience to current and future climate impacts.

Before COP 26, all donors and the Multilateral and National Development Banks should commit to increase the share of adaptation and resilience finance to at least 50 per cent of their climate finance support.

Early warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, improved dry land agriculture, mangrove protection and other steps can give the world a double dividend: avoiding future losses and generating economic gains and other benefits.

We need to move to large-scale, preventive and systematic adaptation support.

This is especially urgent for small island developing states, which face an existential threat.

The race to resilience is as important as the race to net zero.

Dear friends,

But we must remember: there can be no separating climate action from the larger planetary picture. Everything is interlinked – the global commons and global well-being.

That means we must act more broadly, more holistically, across many fronts, to secure the health of our planet on which all life depends.

Nature feeds us, clothes us, quenches our thirst, generates our oxygen, shapes our culture and our faiths and forges our very identity.

2020 was supposed to have been a “super year” for nature but the pandemic has had other plans for us.

Now we must use 2021 to address our planetary emergency.

Next year, countries will meet in Kunming to forge a post-2020 biodiversity framework to halt the extinction crisis and put the world on a pathway to living in harmony with nature.

The world has not met any of the global biodiversity targets set for 2020. And so we need much more ambition and greater commitment to deliver on measurable targets and means of implementation, particularly finance and monitoring mechanisms.

This means:

– More and bigger effectively managed conservation areas, so that our assault on species and ecosystems can be halted;

– Biodiversity-positive agriculture and fisheries, reducing our overexploitation and destruction of the natural world,

– Phasing out negative subsidies — the subsidies that destroy healthy soils, pollute our waterways and lead us to fish our oceans empty.

– Shift from unsustainable and nature-negative extractive resource mining, and to broader sustainable consumption patterns.

Biodiversity is not just cute and charismatic wildlife; it is the living, breathing web of life.

Also in 2021, countries will hold the Ocean Conference to protect and advance the health of the world’s marine environments.

Overfishing must stop; chemical and solid waste pollution – plastics in particular — must be reduced drastically; marine reserves must increase significantly; and coastal areas need greater protection.

The blue economy offers remarkable potential. Already, goods and services from the ocean generate $2.5 trillion each year and contribute over 31 million direct full-time jobs – at least until the pandemic struck.

We need urgent action on a global scale to reap these benefits but protect the world’s seas and oceans from the many pressures they face.

Next year’s global conference on sustainable transport in Beijing must also strengthen this vital sector while addressing its negative environmental footprint.

The Food Systems Summit must aim to transform global food production and consumption. Food systems are one of the main reasons we are failing to stay within our planet’s ecological boundaries.

At the beginning of 2021, we will launch the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration focused on preventing, halting and reversing the degradation of forests, land and other ecosystems worldwide. The Decade is a rallying cry for all who want to tackle the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change with practical and hands-on action.

The International Conference on Chemicals Management will establish a post-2020 framework on chemicals and waste. According to the World Health Organization, sound chemicals management could prevent at least 1.6 million deaths per year.

2021 will also be critical in advancing the New Urban Agenda. The world’s cities are fundamental frontlines on sustainable development – vulnerable to disaster yet vectors of innovation and dynamism. Let us not forget that more than 50 per cent of humankind already lives in cities – and this number will reach almost 70 per cent in 2050.

Next year, in short, gives us a wealth of opportunities to stop the plunder and start the healing.

One of our best allies is nature itself.

Drastically reducing deforestation and systemically restoring forests and other ecosystems is the single largest nature-based opportunity for climate mitigation.

Indeed, nature-based solutions could provide one third of the net reductions in greenhouse gas emissions required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

The World Economic Forum has estimated that business opportunities across nature could create 191 million jobs by 2030.

Africa’s Great Green Wall alone has created 335,000 jobs.

Indigenous knowledge, distilled over millennia of close and direct contact with nature, can help to point the way.

Indigenous peoples make up less than 6 per cent of the world’s population yet are stewards of 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity on land.

Already, we know that nature managed by indigenous peoples is declining less rapidly than elsewhere.

With indigenous peoples living on land that is among the most vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation, it is time to heed their voices, reward their knowledge and respect their rights.

Let’s also recognize the central role of women.

The impacts of climate change and environmental degradation fall most heavily on women. They are 80 per cent of those displaced by climate change.

But women are also the backbone of agriculture and key stewards of natural resources. They are among the world’s leading environmental human rights defenders.

And women’s representation in national parliaments has been linked directly to the signing of climate action agreements.

As humankind devises strategies for natural resource governance, environmental preservation and building a green economy, we need more women decision-makers at the table.

Dear friends,

I have detailed an emergency, but I also see hope.

I see a history of advances that show what can be done – from rescuing the ozone layer to reducing extinction rates to expanding protected areas.

Many cities are becoming greener.

The circular economy is reducing waste.

Environmental laws have growing reach.

At least 155 United Nations Member States now legally recognize that a healthy environment is a basic human right.

And the knowledge base is greater than ever.

I was very pleased to learn by President Bollinger that Columbia University has launched a Climate School, the first new school here in a quarter of a century – congratulations. This is a wonderful demonstration of scholarship and leadership.

I am delighted to know that so many members of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network are with us today as special guests – university presidents, chancellors, deans, faculty and other scholars.

The United Nations Academic Impact initiative is working with institutions of higher education across the globe. The contributions of universities are essential to our success.

Dear friends,

A new world is taking shape.

More and more people are recognizing the limits of conventional yardsticks such as Gross Domestic Product, in which environmentally damaging activities count as economic positives.

Mindsets are shifting.

More and more people are understanding the need for their own daily choices to reduce their carbon footprint and respect planetary boundaries.

And we see inspiring waves of social mobilization by young people.

From protests in the streets to advocacy on-line…

From classroom education to community engagement…

From voting booths to places of work…

Young people are pushing their elders to do what is right. And we are in an university.

This is a moment of truth for people and planet alike.

COVID and climate have brought us to a threshold.

We cannot go back to the old normal of inequality, injustice and heedless dominion over the Earth.

Instead we must step towards a safer, more sustainable and equitable path.

We have a blueprint: the 2030 Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The door is open; the solutions are there.

Now is the time to transform humankind’s relationship with the natural world – and with each other.

And we must do so together.

Solidarity is humanity. Solidarity is survival.

That is the lesson of 2020.

With the world in disunity and disarray trying to contain the pandemic, let’s learn the lesson and change course for the pivotal period ahead.

Thank you.

David Suzuki: 'Our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions', WOMAdelaide Planet Talks - 2016

12 March 2016, Adelaide, Australia

Thank you Robyn, thank you for that, it's so great to see you, and still up and running and kicking arse, good for you. It's always such a joy to return to Australia, but especially to Adelaide. I first want to say it's a privilege to stand on the traditional land of the Kaurna people who lived and cared for it over thousands of years. And I'm so overjoyed that Uncle Lewis O'Brien is here to welcome us this day.

Uncle Lewis conferred on me one of the greatest honours I've received which was a name, a Kaurna name, and I have carried it with a tremendous sense of honour but also responsibility to live up to that name, so thank you Lewis O'Brien.

I was also delighted to visit yesterday the Suzuki Forest. Do you know about that, Robyn? It's…I don't know, somewhere up in the hills, I don't know where in the heck we went, but it was degraded land that Mike Rann when he was Premier set aside to be restored and designated as a forest in the future. I was thrilled to see that it's flourishing, and to learn that it is right next to Schwarzenegger Forest, so I'm sure the terminator is going to be looking out after my little trees too.

These days I always begin my talks by saying that I'm not here to speak on behalf of any group or organisation, I don't speak for any political party or corporation, I'm here speaking as a grandfather and as an elder. And I believe this is the most important part of my life. You see, I don't have to play games anymore to get a job, a promotion or a raise, I can speak the truth from my heart. If that offends people, that's their problem, not mine.

Elders have that credibility, I believe, because we are no longer driven by the need for more money or power or celebrity or sex. Well, there are a few elders, they need help, they've got problems. But most elders are like me, those are long past in our lives, so we can speak with a great deal of credibility. And elders have something no other group in society has; we've lived an entire life. We've learned a lot. We've made mistakes, we've suffered failures, we've had a few successes. Those are hard-won life lessons. And I believe it's our job, it's our responsibility now to trawl through that life of experience for those nuggets that are lessons that are worth passing on to the generations to come. So I urge my fellow elders everywhere: Get the hell off the golf course or the couch and get on with the most important part of your life.

Now, before I begin, I must admit that ever since I arrived in Australia last Sunday I've been peppered by the press with questions about nuclear waste. I've only been in Australia for five days, the heavens sakes, I'm supposed to tell you what to do with nuclear waste? My family has only been in Canada for 120 years and Canada as a country has only existed for 150 years. I have lived all my life and my culture has never had to worry about something like sustainability. The only group with any credibility on sustainability over thousands of years are the indigenous people everywhere. So to South Australians, to all Australians, I say if you want to deal seriously with the issue of nuclear waste, let the Kaurna and the other Indigenous groups make the decisions, they are the only ones that provide the viewpoint and the perspective to do it.

You see, we stand at a unique moment in all of the history of life on this planet. That's 4 billion years of life. 99.9999% of all species that have ever existed in the 4 billion years are extinct. Extinction is the norm. But for the first time in those 4 billion years, one species that created the conditions for its own demise (that's us) recognises the possibility of extinction and has the tools to avoid a catastrophic end.

You know what we face. Human activity—burning fossil fuels, machines, agricultural practices, especially raising cattle, warfare—are altering the chemistry of the atmosphere that in turn is trapping heat on the planet. I first realised that we have to take climate change seriously when I came to your country. In 1988 I was a guest in Melbourne of the Commission for the Future, and at that time scientists showed me the evidence that they were gathering in climatology. And I went back to Canada saying this is no longer a slow-motion catastrophe, we've got to get going on it right away. Your leading scientists and the reality of life—drought, massive fires, reef degradation—show that you have a serious problem and that there are also solutions here for clean energy in abundance.

Australia should be leading the world. And I must say I've been so proud of South Australia, that Mike Rann set in motion a path towards a future of clean energy, you're at 40% renewable energy now, on the way to 50% and possibly 60%. South Australians should be boasting to the world about what you are doing here. I certainly intend to when I go home.

The failure of the federal governments of Canada and Australia to act in the face of the evidence and the enormous alternative opportunities to climate change is why many scientists and experts now declare the futility of simply eliminating the use of fossil fuels, and call for megaprojects like geo-engineering and the massive implementation of nuclear energy. It's crazy but we are at a desperate position.

Australia with vast deserts and sunlight Canadians would kill for, and you can't develop alternative solutions? Disgraceful! Japan, the most earthquake prone country on the planet brings nuclear plants to…what? To boil water. And this in a country that has boiling water in over 6,000 hot springs. We boast as a species that we are intelligent.

In Canada, First Nations, environmentalists, climatologists have now been labelled 'the forces of no' and 'eco-terrorists'. Of course climate is just one of the issues, there's a whole suite of ecological issues that are confronting us now. Oceans cover 70% of the planet's surface, and they are a mess. Overfishing, islands of plastic, dead zones from agricultural run-off, sea level rise by warming and expansion of water, and acidification from the dissolving of carbon dioxide in the ocean as carbonic acid.

80% of the forests on the land are gone. Hydrologic cycles are changing. We dread the disappearance of the monsoon reliability. Species are going extinct at a rate unparalleled since the last great extinction episode 65 million years ago. Toxic pollutants now have been poured into air, water and soil. I'm sorry, however well you live, every one of us here carries dozens of toxic chemicals because of what we've done to the rest of the planet.

We are species out of control. We are expanding our ecological footprint. The amount of air, water and land we require to live as we do is simply expanding. Climate change is just the most obviously pressing issue we confront now. But I have to say it has taken a hell of a long time before it's come to the level that it's at now.

The first international conference on climate was held in Toronto in 1988, and at that time the scientists were convinced the evidence was in, and were so alarmed by what they were seeing that they issued a call for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 15 years. That was the call, but we didn't take it seriously. And the record of political and corporate denial and monkeywrenching is why many scientists and experts despair and declare now openly that it's too late to turn things around.

When Sir Martin Rees, one of the eminent astronomers in Britain, was asked, 'What are the chances that there will be any human beings left by the year 2100?' His answer sent a chill up my spine: 50/50. James Lovelock, the inventor of the concept of Gaia, has written a book that declares 90% of humanity will be gone by the end of the century. And you all know Australia's eco-philosopher Clive Hamilton has written a book, Requiem for a Species. And guess what species it's a requiem for? It's for us. And now an American ecologist, Guy McPherson, is declaring human beings will be gone within decades in this century.

My response to all of that is why are you saying that it's too late? There's no point. Surely we're going to struggle and fight right to the end. Yes, it's urgent, and that's the message I get. But to say no, it's too late, that's ridiculous, that's simply too soul-destroying to hear that. But I think that the urgency is what we have to listen to. We have very little time to act. So I would suggest in your country and mine, do not offer your vote to a single candidate at any level of government unless they declare that climate change is an issue that they will devote a great deal of their lives to.

And it mustn't be a political football. It's not just the Green party that will say this, we must demand it of every candidate for political office. The signs are depressing, it's true, but I cling to hope, and that hope is based on more than just a Pollyanna-ish idea; ‘Oh, don't worry, good things will happen.’ My hope is based on the faith, one that love…and please, don't think I have suddenly become a dippy hippy…I believe that love is the driving force of our species, and it is love of our children and grandchildren that must override all of the economic, political and social pressures.

But more than that, we don't know enough to say it's too late. And let me give you an example of why I say that. The most prized species of salmon in the world is called the sockeye salmon. It's the salmon with the bright red flesh and lots of fat in it, it tastes great, especially when it's raw. Sockeye salmon are…the biggest run in the world is in British Columbia in the Fraser River. And ever since pre-contact levels of sockeye salmon, the runs were between 100- and 120 million fish each year, but after contact, when we damned rivers and had landslides that blocked the Fraser, we got a catastrophic decline. But the Fraser River in British Columbia has the largest sockeye run in the world, and we like to get 30–35 million animals coming back.

In 2009 we barely got a million sockeye returning to the Fraser. And I remember looking at Tara my wife and saying, that's it, there just isn't the biomass to get them to their spawning grounds, they're toast, they're gone. One year later in 2010 we got the biggest run of sockeye salmon in 100 years. I use that story not to show how stupid I am. Nobody knows what the hell happened. But nature shocked us with surprise. And I believe nature has got a lot more surprises up her sleeve. We just have to pull back and give her room and she will be far more generous than we deserve. That's my hope.

I was in the United States, I studied there for eight years, getting an education in the 1950s that we couldn't get in Canada at that time. And I was starting the last year in college in Massachusetts in 1957, and on October 4 the Soviet Union shocked the world by announcing they had launched Sputnik. And that was really a frightening time. The Soviet Union was a very powerful force at that time and every hour and a half we could hear the 'beep beep' of Sputnik thumbing its nose at us. The Americans immediately tried to launch their own satellites and every one blew up on the launch pad.

Meanwhile the Russians launched the first animal in space, a dog, Laika. The first man, Yuri Gagarin. The first team of cosmonauts, the first space walk, the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova. Americans didn't flinch. They didn't say, oh my God, they're so far ahead we can't afford to catch up, they said we've got to catch these guys. And it was a glorious time. Here I was, a Canadian living in the States, all you had to do was say 'I like science' and they threw money at us. It was glorious.

And in 1961 President Kennedy announced that Americans would get humans to the Moon and back within a decade. When he announced his plan he didn't have a clue how the hell he was going to do it. He just knew that they had to get to the Moon and beat the Russians. And look what happened. Not only are they the only country to land people on the Moon and get them back, but all of the unexpected benefits that have come out of making that commitment. Even today, 60 years later, when Nobel prizes are announced, believe me, Americans cop a huge number of those science Nobel prizes. Why? Because in 1958 Americans said we've got to beat the Russians in the space program. Every year NASA publishes a magazine called Spinoff. Hundreds of unanticipated spin-offs have come out of the space program, from laptop computers to GPS to cell phones to space blankets and ear thermometers, hundreds of these things have come simply by seizing the moment and the challenge and saying we've got to beat it. And I believe that's the moment we're at here. Climate change represents the ultimate crisis for our species that becomes a huge opportunity if we seize the moment and commit ourselves to beating it.

I returned to Canada in 1962 and had I studied for eight years in the States. I was a hotshot geneticist, I was going to make my name as a big scientist, and I got completely side-tracked by a woman. Not Tara, she is too young for that, but this has happened all through my life, usually with disastrous consequences, but in this case I've been ever grateful to her, and the great regret I have is that I never met her. But in 1962 a woman named Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring and it changed my life. We have to remember, in 1962 there wasn't a Department of the Environment in any government on Earth. The word 'environment' didn't mean in 1962 what it has come to mean today.

The discovery that DDT kills insects by Paul Müller won a Nobel Prize for him in 1947. We thought DDT pesticides were fantastic until Rachel Carson's book came out. And for me as a scientist what stunned me was the realisation that science can be very powerful, but we don't know enough to anticipate all of the unknown things in nature that we can't expect to be affected. When DDT began to be used on a wide scale, it was only when eagles in the United States began to disappear that scientists tracked it down and discovered a phenomenon called biomagnification. Up the food chain you concentrate DDT hundreds of thousands of times until you get to the shell glands of birds or the breasts of women. How could we have managed DDT properly when we only discovered biomagnification after eagles began to disappear? And that has happened over and over again.

When CFCs began to be used on a wide scale, we had no idea that high up in the atmosphere ultraviolet light would break chlorine free radicals off CFC that would scavenge ozone. When nuclear bombs were dropped over Japan we didn't know there was a phenomenon called radioactive fallout. And now we have such conceit we want to genetically engineer plants and animals for our use. We want to indeed engineer the planet with geo-engineering to deal with the issue of climate change. I believe it's a form of madness to have the hubris to think that we are capable of doing that.

For me, again as a scientist, the most profound message I got from Silent Spring was that in nature everything is connected to everything else. And I realised scientists look at things in bits and pieces, all on the assumption if we look at enough bits and pieces we will fit them back together to get a picture of the whole system. But we spray chemicals on farmers' fields to kill insects and end up discovering that fish and birds and human beings are affected. Everything is connected, and we can't determine all of those interconnections through science.

I just want to tell you a story that one of the programs that the David Suzuki Foundation undertook that I am so proud about was to try to illustrate this issue of inter-connectivity. One of the rarest ecosystems on the planet is called temperate rainforest, and in North America we have the largest temperate rainforest extending from Alaska down to the northern part of California, and it's that thin band pinched between the Pacific Ocean and the coastal mountain range, and it has the highest biomass, the weight of living things, of any ecosystem on Earth. And the reason for that is we've got big trees. But the dilemma for scientists was how can we have such big trees when the soil is nitrogen deficient? It rains a lot, that's why it's a rainforest. That rain washes nutrients, but especially nitrogen, out of the soil. So it was a real paradox for us. You've got these big trees and you've got not enough nitrogen in the soil to raise them. And it turned out the solution was the salmon.

You see, the salmon are born in thousands of rivers and creeks all up and down through the temperate rainforest, and they are born in fresh water. They go out to sea, there are five species of salmon that live, depending on the species, 2 to 5 years at sea, then they come back to spawn in the original rivers and waters where they were born.

Now, it turns out that almost all of the nitrogen you find on land is the normal isotope of nitrogen called nitrogen-14. But in the oceans there is a very large proportion…well, small, but still a very significant proportion of the nitrogen in the oceans is nitrogen-15. It's a slightly heavier atom isotope that we can detect the difference between N-15 and N-14. So the salmon go to sea for 2 to 5 years, they load up in nitrogen-15, and then they return to their spawning rivers and creeks by the tens of millions up and down the coast. So they are loaded with nitrogen now, and everyone celebrates. If you've ever gone to a spawning experience on the coast, you know the birds and the seals and the whales, everybody is making noise because now this mass of creatures is coming back. And they get to the river, and the major predators of the salmon are eagles, bears and wolves. So they will eat the salmon as they are coming up to spawn, and then of course they poop and pee nitrogen-15-loaded urine and faeces throughout the forest. So they are literally fertilising the forest.

Now, the bears are normally solitary animals, but during the salmon season they will fish in the same pool with literally dozens of others. But when they grab a salmon they take off into the forest up to 150 metres on either side of the river because they want to eat it by themselves. I mean, I understand that. They want to eat the best parts which, as you all know, are the brains, the belly and the eggs, and then they will dump the carcasses, lots more, they go back for another one. On average, a bear will take about 600 salmon in a season. So they are spreading the carcasses again through the forest. The carcasses left are eaten by ravens and salamanders and slugs. But the major exploiters of the carcasses are flies. So flies lay their eggs. Within a few days that carcass is a seething mass of maggots loading up with nitrogen-15 from the salmon, dropped to the forest floor over winter, and in the spring flies hatch by the trillions at the very time the birds from South America are coming through on their way to their nesting grounds in the Arctic. So, you see, those birds have been genetically programmed to come through at the very time those salmon, through the flies, are feeding them on their way to the Arctic.

If the salmon are not taken out of the river and sink to the bottom, within a week or so they are covered with a thick mat of fungus and bacteria, and the fungus and bacteria are eaten by copepods and insects and other invertebrates, so when the baby salmon emerge from the gravel four months later, the rivers are filled with nitrogen-15 containing invertebrates, so that the salmon can feast on their way down to the ocean. So in dying, the salmon prepare a feast for their offspring.

And then what we funded was scientists to go in and actually take the cores of trees in salmon bearing areas and non salmon bearing areas, and we showed that when you pull out the core and look at the fat rings, they are loaded with nitrogen-15. And the skinny rings when they've hardly grown, you find very little nitrogen-15. So the salmon are literally feeding the forest with their carcasses. So it's a magnificent story of the interconnection of the north and southern hemisphere and the oceans and land and the air.

Modern humans come along: oh, those indigenous people, they don't know anything, we're going to manage these resources. And so we say, well, we've got all these salmon there, that's the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, for the commercial fishery. Oh, but then there are all those indigenous people, that's the Ministry of Indian Affairs. Oh, what about the sports fishermen? Well, that the Department of Tourism.

So we divide the salmon into three areas. The trees, that's the Minister of Forests. And the rivers, well, that's the Minister of Energy and the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Urban Affairs. And then we have all the rocks and the mountains, that's the Minister of Mining. And oh yeah, what about the eagles, the wolves and bears? That's the Ministry of the Environment. Now let's manage everything.

I mean, it's absolutely absurd because the way we look at the world has shattered it into pieces that have no connection to each other, and we ensure we will never manage those incredible systems. So that was Rachel Carson's great contribution, to me at least, was that everything is interconnected.

Impelled by Rachel Carson's book, I joined millions of people around the world in what we now see was a modern environmental movement. And the action, activity, was enormous. In only 10 years we got the United Nations forming UNEP, the United Nations Environment Program, calling its first international conference on the environment in Stockholm. And we began to get committees on the environment at every level of governments, from domestic, municipal, to the provincial, to the national level. And we've got laws to protect air, we've got laws to protect water, endangered species, and millions of hectares of land were set aside as parks and reserves.

In British Columbia, Tara and I were part of that huge movement, and we celebrated successes that we'd been involved in as well in our areas. There was a proposal to build a dam at Site C on the Peace River and we stopped it. Another proposal that Tara was very active in raising money to stop a dam to be built at Altamira on the Xingu River in Brazil, and we stopped that. We stopped the American proposal to bring oil supertankers off the north slopes of Alaska through British Columbian waters to be refined in Seattle. We stopped drilling proposals in the Arctic and in Hecate Strait.

And those are great victories. But now 30 to 35 years later, guess what? We are fighting the same battles all over again. What we thought were victories were not victories. And as environmentalists we failed fundamentally to use those battles as a means of informing people and educating people to see our relationship with the world in a different way. We have to shift the paradigm.

Years ago I visited a small village in the Andes Mountains in Brazil, and I learned that children in the village are taught that that mountain is an apu. In their language, apu means God. And as long as that apu casts its shadow on their village, it will determine the destiny of everyone in that village. Now, imagine how those kids when they grow up will treat that mountain, compared to a Canadian kid growing up in the Rockies who is taught all their lives those mountains are full of gold and silver. You see, the way we see the world and our place in it shapes and determines the way we will act towards it. We humans are predators. We have to eat plants and animals in order to live. We alter ecosystems in order to serve our needs, thinking of the burning program that you have with your Indigenous people in Australia. We modify habitats so that we can survive in them. But the way that we do it and the sense of values that we hold determine how we are going to actually behave.

When a forest is a sacred grove, then lumber and pulp will be taken with great reverence. When the river is the circulatory system of the land, we will extract energy, fresh water and fish very carefully. When soil is seen as a complex community of life, we will no longer treat it just as dirt. When another species is our biological kin, sharing with us thousands of genes identical with each other, then it seems to me we treat our kin with greater gratitude and love. When a house is our home, that's very different from a piece of real estate or a starter house or a tear-down. When the planet is our mother, then who would treat our biological mother the way we treat the Earth? The way we see the world shapes and constrains the way that we act towards it.

Three years ago I received a call…you know that the big battle in Canada right now is over the future of the tar sands in Alberta. Three years ago I got a call from the CEO of one of the largest companies in the Alberta tar sands. I was shocked. But he said would it be possible for me to come and talk to you. I said absolutely, I would be thrilled. I said I'm not into fighting, I'm no longer fighting because we can't afford losers. We've all got to be winners.

So he came down to my office the next morning and he came to the door and I thanked him profusely, I told him what an honour it was to have him come to me, and I said, but please do me one favour, before you walk in the door, please leave your identity as a CEO of an oil company outside the door. I want to meet you as a human being to human being, because I don't want to talk about the tar sands or its future, I don't want to talk about the economy until you and I as human beings agree on what the most fundamental needs are for human beings on the planet.

I'll tell you, he was not very happy about leaving his identity. But to his credit, he walked through the door. So I took him to my office, I sat him down, I said, I know how difficult this is for you. But let me tell you where I'm starting from. I said, our world…you and I live in a world that is defined, that is shaped and constrained by laws of nature. Those are laws that we can't do anything about, we have to live within them.

I can see right away I was in danger of losing him. I said, you know, in physics they tell us you can't build a rocket that will travel faster than the speed of light. And nobody denies that or gets mad about it, that's a limit on what we can do. The laws of gravity tell us you can't build an antigravity machine here on Earth, we accept that. And the first and second laws of thermodynamics tell us you can't build a perpetual motion machine. And, except for a few hucksters, most of us agree that that is true and we live with that.

In chemistry it's the same. The atomic properties of the elements, diffusion constants and reaction rates all inform us of the kind of reactions that we can perform in a test tube and the types of molecules that we can or cannot synthesise, and we live with that, those are dictated by what nature, what chemistry tells us. And in biology it's the same. Every species has a maximum number that can live indefinitely that are defined by the carrying capacity of ecosystems or habitats. And you exceed that number, the ability of an ecosystem or habitat to support more, and that population will crash.

Humans, because of our brains, we are not confined to a specific habitat or ecosystem, we can live from the Arctic to the deserts to temperate and tropical rainforest to wetlands to mountains…I mean, we are a very adaptive organism. But our home is still the biosphere, the zone of air, water and land where all life exists, that's our home, and it's finite, it can grow. So guess what? It has a carrying capacity for our species. Of course the number of our species that can be supported is based on two things, that is our numbers but also our consumption per capita. When you add that together, Australia, Canada, the US, Europe are very overpopulated because of our high consumption. But most scientists I talk to agree, we've exceeded the carrying capacity of the biosphere for our species. Man, do people get mad at me when I say that! How dare you say that! Look at the beautiful city of Adelaide, look how we're living, we're healthier, we're happier. Yeah, we're creating the illusion of great success by using up what should be the rightful legacy of our children and grandchildren. Ask any elder.

And biology dictates that you and I are animals. I gave a talk in Austin Texas many years ago, and it was a big audience with lots of children in the front and I said, now kids, if you remember one thing from my lecture, remember we are animals. Man, did their parents get pissed off at me! 'Don't call my daughter an animal, we're human beings.' And my response was, listen madam, if you don't think we're animals…are you a plant? We are animals, and as animals, biology dictates our fundamental needs.

And so I said to Mr CEO, I said what do you think is the most important thing every human being on Earth needs? And I could see he was thinking money, a job. I said, look, if you don't have a breath of air for three minutes, you're dead. If you have to breathe polluted air, you're sick. So can you as a human being agree with me that one of the highest priorities of our species is to protect clean air? And then I said, you and I are 70% water by weight, we're just a big blob of water with enough thickener added we don't dribble away on the floor. But, you know, our bodies leak water, right, it comes out of our skin and our eyes and our mouth and our crotch and we lose water all the time. I said, Mr CEO, if you don't have water for 4 to 6 days, you're dead. If you have to drink contaminated water, you're sick. So can you agree with me that clean water, like clean air, has got to be the highest priority of our species?

And then I said, you and I could go maybe 4 to 6 weeks without food but then we would die. If we have to eat contaminated food we get sick, and most of our food is coming from the Earth. So will you agree with me that clean food and clean soil has got to be up there with clean air and clean water? And then I said, all of the energy in your body is provided to us through photosynthesis. That energy is captured by plants, converted into chemical energy and we get it by eating the plants or the animals that eat the plants, we store that energy in our bodies, and when we need it, when we have to move or whatever, we burn those molecules of energy and liberate the energy of the Sun back into our bodies. So photosynthesis should be up there with clean water, clean air and clean soil.

And finally I said, Mr CEO, the miraculous aspect for me of life on this Earth is that those four things that indigenous people call the four sacred elements—earth, air, fire and water—those things are cleansed, replenished, created by life. It's the web of living things that give us the four sacred elements. Before there were plants in the oceans and on land, the air was absolutely toxic for animals like us. Oxygen is a very reactive element. When you liberate oxygen it immediately oxidises things, it rusts iron, and it disappears. It was plants that converted carbon dioxide into oxygen and over millions of years, until the present time, it's all of the green things in the ocean and on land that are keeping our atmosphere at 19% oxygen.

And in Vancouver we get all of our water from three watersheds surrounded by old-growth rainforest, the tree roots, the other plant roots, soil, fungi and bacteria filter that water so that we can drink it. And it's life that creates the very soil that we grow our food on. All of our food, as you well know, was once alive. But in order to grow our food in soil, as anyone who read The Martian or saw the movie The Martian when Matt Damon gets stranded on Mars and he has to stretch his potatoes out to four years instead of one so he can be rescued, there is lots of sand and gravel and dust on Mars, there is absolutely no soil. And so in order to grow his potatoes he had to dig a hole in the sand, poop in it and then get more life. We need soil and that is created by life itself. And people that talk about terraforming the planet…my god! Anyway, don't let me get into that, it's the nuttiest idea I've ever heard.

Anyway, so those are the things that to me define our most fundamental needs that should be the foundation of the way we create an economy and get our jobs and live. I said, Mr CEO, earth, air, fire and water and other living things that are our relatives, can you agree with me, these are the basis on which we live and flourish? Will you shake hands with me and agree that we both believe that that must be protected before anything else? And I'm sorry to say that he couldn't bring himself to shake my hand. He left and I never heard from him again.

Now, it was an unfair situation, I sprung it on him. He didn't know that's what he was in for, and it was unfair because he had come down as a CEO of a company to negotiate with me. If he were to go back to his shareholders and say, 'Well, I had a discussion with Suzuki, I have to agree, anything that we do must not compromise the air, the water, the soil, photosynthesis or biodiversity,' he'd be fired in a flash. And so the system that we've created can't accept that as the foundation on which it operates.

There are other things I told the CEO. There are other things we call boundaries. We draw borders around our property and, boy, people will kill and die to protect those borders. We draw boundaries around our cities and our provinces, our states and our countries. We go to war and murder and kill to protect those boundaries. Those boundaries are absolutely meaningless to nature. I mean, you just had to see it at the COP meetings in Paris. 196 countries dealing with the atmosphere that belongs to no one through the lenses of 196 political boundaries. It's crazy because you can't do it.

And then there are other things—capitalism, communism, the economy, markets, corporations—these are not forces or laws of nature, we invented them, for Gods sake. But if you listen to the news about the economy every morning, my God, you'd swear they were a thing out there. Oh, the market is not looking too healthy today. And you think of this poor market sitting there with an ice pack on its head going, 'I feel really lousy today.' What the hell! We invented the damn thing! And yet we are constantly trying to shoehorn nature to fit our economic or corporate agenda. It can't work that way. We have to do it the other way and shoehorn our inventions into nature's needs.

So this is a challenge, and I'd like to end it by suggesting something the David Suzuki Foundation did for the Earth Summit meetings in 1992, to provide perhaps a different perspective on our place in nature. We call it a 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 that first born 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 30 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 the Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership, from fragmentation to connection, from insecurity to interdependence.

Thank you.

Greta Thunberg: 'How dare you', UN Climate Action Summit - 2019

23 September 2019, New York City, USA

Thunberg responds to a question about the message she has for world leaders.
My message is that we'll be watching you.

This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

Thank you.

Richard Flanagan: 'Will you stand with me, will you go to jail with me', Adani mine rally - 2019

5 May 2019, Canberra, Australia

I grew up in a remote mining town. I know the hardship. I saw the tragedy. One of my earliest memories is a whole town stopped for a miner’s funeral, family after family lining the main street, one people joined in grief.

And when politicians talk of caring about miners I don’t believe a word they say.

If they cared wouldn’t they be advocating to end black lung disease, a 19th century industrial disease now returned, because of unsafe working conditions, to kill Australian coalminers in the 21st century?

If they cared wouldn’t they be speaking out about the increasing casualisation and pay stripping of coalminers, supported by the Morrison government?

And if they cared wouldn’t they question whether Adani is an appropriate business to employ Australian miners? Adani, such a friend of the working man that, when building its giant Shantigram luxury estate in India, it housed workers in conditions so appalling that there were 15 recorded outbreaks of cholera.

Put a hi-vis jacket on that corpse and say you’re still for the working miners of Queensland, Scott.

But then Adani’s long-term aim isn’t to employ miners under whatever pitiful conditions and awards its paid-up political mates might legislate.

As Adani Mining’s CEO said in 2016, “When we ramp up the mine, everything will be autonomous from mine to port. In our eyes, this is the mine of the future.” That’s right: Adani’s ambition is ultimately that its mine is all robots. Not a miner, not a driller, not a driver in sight.

So the promised 10,000 jobs that turned out to be 1,462 jobs will in turn vanish like the mist as Adani buys in ever more robots.

But that’s not all. Modelling by Wood Mackenzie shows that if coalmining in the Galilee Basin, led by Adani, goes ahead, coal production in older, less efficient Australian coalmines will drop significantly and many coalmining jobs will vanish. Adani’s new mine will simply steal the jobs off the old mines.

Jabbering jobs, jobs, jobs, in a hard hat doesn’t change these truths. It doesn’t make a politician fair dinkum. It makes him or her a lying clown who sells every coalminer down the drain for another backhander from the bosses of the fossil fuel industry.

Have we, Australia, become a country that breeds mass murderers with our words?

The coalmining communities of Australia deserve better. They deserve the truth. They need a responsible transition plan, not lies and deceit.

Because Adani’s mine is not happening to help miners. It’s not happening to help Clermont or Mackay or far-north Queensland. It’s certainly not happening to help the poor of India.

It’s happening because of one thing: greed.

And that greed controls our politics. How can Scott Morrison claim to care about climate change when his political survival now hinges on a deal with Clive Palmer, a man whose own massive Galilee Basin coalmine is dependent on Adani getting up? What exactly did Scott Morrison promise Palmer? The Liberals’ platform is nothing more than a smoking coal heap.

Forty-one years ago, I had just kayaked through a beautiful gorge on the Franklin River called Irenabyss. The Franklin was to be dammed and though there was opposition to the damming, no one I knew believed it was possible to defeat the all-powerful state and federal governments that were at the time hell-bent on building it.

The gorge opened out into small basin. At its rainforested edge there was a beach. I kayaked over to it and a lanky man appeared out of the rainforest. And there, on the banks of that beautiful, doomed river, I met Bob Brown.

I asked Bob did he really think the river could be saved. His answer was revealing. I think, he said, that there is hope.

“There is no power on this earth that can resist an idea whose time has come.”

And this is what I learned from Bob Brown. The battle for that river raged for another four years. Governments came and went. At every step it looked like we had lost, and yet, what we could not see was that at every stop we were growing stronger. Thousands of people went to prison in the biggest act of civil disobedience in Australian history.

In the end the government was spending countless millions to get heavy machinery into that remote rainforest to destroy as much a possible to make that dam inevitable. And at the very last moment, the high court ruled the dam could not go ahead.

I am here today to say that there is hope. That the Franklin flows free and Adani will be stopped. These things happen because at a certain point enough people say there are things that matter more than politics or money. There is no power on this earth that can resist an idea whose time has come.

I am not going to waste your time today repeating the many facts with which you are already familiar, suffice to say one thing: the IPCC last October said we had 12 years to contain climate change – that is, decarbonise our economy so that the temperature rises no more than another half a degree on what it is today. If large-scale action is not taken now the IPCC warned that we will face a global warming catastrophe.

More than half a year of that 12 years has already passed without any meaningful national or international action. Our emissions are still rising. And that is why this is a crisis unlike any we have ever faced. On present trends much of Australia will become, quite simply, uninhabitable. And what remains liveable will be small bands of our country.

We will not have the means to generate the food we need, the wealth we are accustomed to. The most recent science suggests that around the world up to one million species on which we depend for food and clean water face annihilation, that the planet’s very life support systems are entering a danger zone. This is not science fiction. This is not a Netflix series. It is what the world’s leading scientists tell us.

The moment for believing this is a matter that can be solved by flying less or not eating meat has long passed. The solution will not be about personal choices. It will be about – and can only be about – political change.

And that change will not come about because of a messianic leader. It will not come about because of this party or that party. It will only happen if we wish it to happen and if we make it happen. We have only ourselves to blame and we have only ourselves to turn to save ourselves.

It matters very much who you vote for this election. And after May 18 it matters even more to press whoever wins to recognise this crisis is not an issue. It is the issue.

The fight against Adani is a fight for the soul of our country

The drying out of Australia is the issue. The collapse of our fisheries is the issue. The likelihood of not having enough water to sustain our population is the issue. The threat greater and greater mega-fires pose is the issue. The decline of our agriculture is the issue. The inability of our infrastructure to cope with ever-larger floods and more frequent cyclones is the issue. Sea rises are the issue. The death of our rivers, the death of the Great Barrier Reef, the death of the Tasmanian rainforests is the issue. The drying wheatbelt is the issue. If our very fate as a species is not the issue, then what is?

And that is why Adani has become the symbol of why our country is broken. That is why the fight against Adani is a fight for the soul of our country.

I know many of you may feel that you have no power, or lack the skills or abilities needed. Faced with the crisis that is climate change it is too easy to feel powerless, to feel the problem is beyond your powers or perhaps anyone’s to influence.

Perhaps the greatest problem we face is not climate change, but the myth of our own powerlessness. We believe only the most powerful – the politicians, the corporations – can change our world. Accordingly, we feel a great despair about our future because we can see no hope in any politician or any corporation.

But it is not so.

Because the only thing that will save us is us. Half of the carbon in the atmosphere was put there by us in the last 30 years. And now we have 11 and a half years to reverse that disastrous act.

It is a time to act and it is for us to act. Because there is no one else and there is no other time.

And if our politicians continue to deceive themselves and deceive us, if after May 18 we end up with a government that will not act, and if we are only left with only our bodies to oppose this mine, if it takes putting our flesh between the past and the future, between the bulldozers and the earth, if it means a blockade of the Adani site, then I, for one, will be there. And if that means being arrested and going to jail then I will go to jail.

And my question to you today is this: will you?

Will you stand with me, will you go to jail with me, to stop this mine and save our future? Because if you will, I ask you to raise your hand.

I tell you this: we will win.

The Franklin was more than a river. Adani is more than a mine. This rally, you people, are part of the river of hope that flows through this country, our beloved country, and it is a river that cannot be bought, that cannot be dammed, that cannot be poisoned, that cannot be bought and sold. And every day that river grows larger and stronger.

And I am hopeful. Why? Because 41 years ago I met a man who refused to abandon hope and led a movement with such moral clarity that the river still flows. And 41 years later I stand here before you, with that same man, to say that hope is never lost

Never. Never. Never.

Greta Thunberg: 'Our house is falling apart, and we are rapidly running out of time', speech to EU Parliament - 2019

16 April 2019 , Strasbourg, Germany

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I want you to panic. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. I have said those words before, and a lot of people have explained why that is a bad idea. A great number of politicians have told me that panic never leads to anything good, and I agree. To panic unless you have to, is a terrible idea. But when your house is on fire and you want to keep your house from burning to the ground, then that does require some level of panic.

Our civilization is so fragile, it is almost like a castle built in the sand. The facade is so beautiful, but the foundations are far from solid. We have been cutting so many corners.

Yesterday, the world watched with despair and enormous sorrow how the Notre Dame burnt in Paris. Some buildings are more than just buildings. But the Notre Dame will be rebuilt. I hope that its foundations are strong. I hope that our foundations are even stronger, but I fear they are not.

Around the year 2030, 10 years 259 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. That is, unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%. And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear our atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost. Nor do they include already locked in warming hidden by air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity, or climate justice, clearly stated throughout the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale. We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations, estimations. That means that these "points of no return" may occur a bit sooner or later than that. No one can know for sure. We can, however, be certain that they will occur approximately in these timeframes, because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses. These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.

We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, and the extinction rate is up to 10,000 times faster than what is considered normal, with up to 200 species becoming extinct every single day. Erosion of fertile topsoil, deforestation of our great forests, toxic air pollution, loss of insects and wildlife, the acidification of our oceans. These are all disastrous trends being accelerated by a way of life that we, here in our financially-fortunate part of the world, see as our right to simply carry on. But hardly anyone knows about these catastrophes or understand how they are just the first few symptoms of climate and ecological breakdown. Because how could they? They have not been told. Or more importantly: they have not been told by the right people and in the right way.

Our house is falling apart, and our leaders need to start acting accordingly, because at the moment they are not. If our house was falling apart, our leaders wouldn't go on like you do today. You would change almost every part of your behaviour, as you do in an emergency. If our house was falling apart, you wouldn't fly around the world in business class chatting about how the market will solve everything with clever small solution to specific isolated problems. You wouldn't talk about buying and building your way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things.

If our house was falling apart, you wouldn't hold three emergency Brexit summits and no emergency summit regarding the breakdown of the climate and environment. You wouldn't be arguing about phasing out coal in 15 or 11 years. If our house was falling apart, you wouldn't be celebrating that one single nation like Ireland may soon divest from fossil fuels. You wouldn't celebrate that Norway has decided to stop drilling for oil outside the scenic resort of Lofoten Island, but will continue to drill for oil everywhere else for decades. It's 30 years too late for that kind of celebrations.

If our house was falling apart, the media wouldn't be writing about anything else. The ongoing climate and ecological crisis would make up all the headlines. If our house was falling apart, you wouldn't say that you have the situation under control and place the future living conditions for all species in the hands of inventions that are yet to be invented. And you would not spend all your time as a politician arguing about taxes or Brexit. If the walls of our house truly came tumbling down, surely you would set your differences aside and start cooperating.

Well, our house is falling apart, and we are rapidly running out of time. And yet, basically nothing is happening. Everyone and everything needs to change. So, why waste precious time arguing about what and who needs to change first? Everyone and everything has to change. But the bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty.

When I tell politicians to act now, the most common answer is that they can't do anything drastic, because that would be too unpopular among the voters. And they are right of course, since most people are not even aware of why those changes are required. That is why I keep telling you to unite behind the science, make the best available science the heart of politics and democracy.

The EU elections are coming up soon, and many of us who will be affected the most by this crisis, people like me, are not allowed to vote. Nor are we in a position to shape the decisions of business, politics, engineering, media, education, or science. Because the time takes for us to educate ourselves to do that simply does no longer exists, and that is why millions of children are taking it to the streets, school striking for the climate to create attention for the climate crisis.

You need to listen to us, we who cannot vote. You need to vote for us, for your children and grandchildren. What we are doing now can soon no longer be undone. In this election, you vote for the future living conditions of human kind. And though the politics needed do not exist today, some alternatives are certainly less worse than others. And I have read that some parties do not even want me standing here today because they so desperately do not want to talk about climate breakdown.

Our house is falling apart. The future, as well as what we have achieved in the past, is literally in your hands now. But it's still not too late to act. It will take a far-reaching vision. It will take courage. It will take a fierce determination to act now to lay the foundations where we may not know all the details about how to shape the ceiling. In other words, it will take "cathedral thinking."

I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible. To do your best is no longer good enough. We must all do the seemingly impossible. And it's okay if you refuse to listen to me. I am, after all, just a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sweden. But you cannot ignore the scientists, or the science, or the millions of school-striking children who are school-striking for the right to a future. I beg you: please do not fail on this. Thank you.

David Attenborough: 'Nature once determined how we survive. Now, we determine how nature survives', Launch HBO's 'Our Planet' - 2019

Your Royal Highnesses, ladies and gentleman. There can surely be no more fitting location than this for the premiere of Our Planet. Directly behind me, behind this enormous screen, is a statue of Charles Darwin whose astonishing understanding of the natural world led to what has been called, "the greatest idea in human history", the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Darwin revealed that all species have evolved over time to best exploit the conditions in which they live. He further realised that these conditions are not simply those of geography and climate, but also their relationship to other lives that live alongside. From the delicate co-dependencies of bees and orchids, to the dramatic connection between cheetah and gazelle, all life on Earth is both product and contributor to its place in space and time. This complex web of life of which we are a part has been millennia in the making.

Whilst Darwin's insights explain how this web came about, over 200 years later, we are still only beginning to understand its interconnections and which of these connections are the most vital. Yet, we do know for certain is that these connections can break from the dinosaurs to my right, to other spectacular fossils on my left. We have all tonight been within touching distance of astonishing fragments of ecosystems long gone.

As far as we know, there have been five major extinction events on our planet. Events caused by changes so severe that many species simply can't adapt and, as such, die out. Right now, we are in the midst of the Earth's sixth mass extinction. One every bit as profound and far-reaching as that which wiped out the dinosaurs. It's almost impossible to grasp as we go about our lives that the rest of life on Earth is experiencing destruction on the scale of that wrought by a colossal asteroid collision.

But, consider these facts: 96% of the mass of mammals on our planet today are us and the livestock that we've domesticated. Only 4% is everything else, from elephants to badgers, tigers to bats. 70% of all birds are now domesticated poultry, mostly chickens. Nature once determined how we survive. Now, we determine how nature survives.

One of the things Darwin's work has taught us is that we break nature's connections at our peril. Yet, break them we do at ever-greater speed. The impacts of our growing population and our consumption now directly threaten our own future. That magnificent creature up there whose skeleton hangs up there above us, the blue whale, can give inspiration.

Just 30 years ago, most whales species including the blue whale were heading towards extinction. A public outcry led to a global agreement to protect whales, and now most populations are recovering. We've subsequently learned how important whales are to the entire ocean system, including the fish that we eat. So, saving these majestic creatures actually benefits us as well. What we did to save the whales, we must now do for all nature, and that is a communications challenge as much as it is a scientific one.

The eight-part Our Planet series aims to reach a billion people around the world. It celebrates the species and habitats that still remain and reveals what must be protected to ensure both people and nature thrive.

I've always believed that few people will protect the natural world if they don't first love and understand it. Many sequences in the Our Planet series reveal nature at its most fascinating and delightful. Others prove that good things do indeed come to those who wait often for a very long time, as the many talented cameramen and women who've recorded all kinds of wonders for us know only too well. But, what really makes Our Planet stand out is the clear, driving story that runs through the entire series and the wider communications project.

The natural world is not just nice to have. It fundamentally matters to each and every one of us. This has been a true labour of love for hundreds of filmmakers, cinematographers, conservationists, editors, musicians, production teams, all of whom have brought their best work to the most important story that there is, a story that could not be more universal or more timely.

The ability to tell that story in almost every country on Earth at the same time via Netflix brings the possibility of an unprecedented global understanding of the one place that we all call home.

Greta Thunberg: 'We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis', Address to UK parliament - 2019

23 April 2019, Westminster, London, United Kingdom

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.

I know many of you don’t want to listen to us – you say we are just children. But we’re only repeating the message of the united climate science.

Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?

In the year 2030 I will be 26 years old. My little sister Beata will be 23. Just like many of your own children or grandchildren. That is a great age, we have been told. When you have all of your life ahead of you. But I am not so sure it will be that great for us.

I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big; I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more. Things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing.

Now we probably don’t even have a future any more.

Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.

Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.

And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear the atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost.

Nor do these scientific calculations include already locked-in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity – or climate justice – clearly stated throughout the Paris agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale.

We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations. Estimations. That means that these “points of no return” may occur a bit sooner or later than 2030. No one can know for sure. We can, however, be certain that they will occur approximately in these timeframes, because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.

These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every single major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.

Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.

During the last six months I have travelled around Europe for hundreds of hours in trains, electric cars and buses, repeating these life-changing words over and over again. But no one seems to be talking about it, and nothing has changed. In fact, the emissions are still rising.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere. And the basic problem is that basically nothing is being done to halt – or even slow – climate and ecological breakdown, despite all the beautiful words and promises.

The UK is, however, very special. Not only for its mind-blowing historical carbon debt, but also for its current, very creative, carbon accounting.

Since 1990 the UK has achieved a 37% reduction of its territorial CO2 emissions, according to the Global Carbon Project. And that does sound very impressive. But these numbers do not include emissions from aviation, shipping and those associated with imports and exports. If these numbers are included the reduction is around 10% since 1990 – or an an average of 0.4% a year, according to Tyndall Manchester.

And the main reason for this reduction is not a consequence of climate policies, but rather a 2001 EU directive on air quality that essentially forced the UK to close down its very old and extremely dirty coal power plants and replace them with less dirty gas power stations. And switching from one disastrous energy source to a slightly less disastrous one will of course result in a lowering of emissions.

But perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough. Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1.5-2C of warming. The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades, or less. And by “stop” I mean net zero – and then quickly on to negative figures. That rules out most of today’s politics.

The fact that we are speaking of “lowering” instead of “stopping” emissions is perhaps the greatest force behind the continuing business as usual. The UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels – for example, the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine – is beyond absurd.

This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.

People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.

Every time we make a decision we should ask ourselves; how will this decision affect that curve? We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases. We should no longer only ask: “Have we got enough money to go through with this?” but also: “Have we got enough of the carbon budget to spare to go through with this?” That should and must become the centre of our new currency.

Many people say that we don’t have any solutions to the climate crisis. And they are right. Because how could we? How do you “solve” the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced? How do you “solve” a war? How do you “solve” going to the moon for the first time? How do you “solve” inventing new inventions?

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

“So, exactly how do we solve that?” you ask us – the schoolchildren striking for the climate.

And we say: “No one knows for sure. But we have to stop burning fossil fuels and restore nature and many other things that we may not have quite figured out yet.”

Then you say: “That’s not an answer!”

So we say: “We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis – and act even if we don’t have all the solutions.”

“That’s still not an answer,” you say.

Then we start talking about circular economy and rewilding nature and the need for a just transition. Then you don’t understand what we are talking about.

We say that all those solutions needed are not known to anyone and therefore we must unite behind the science and find them together along the way. But you do not listen to that. Because those answers are for solving a crisis that most of you don’t even fully understand. Or don’t want to understand.

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.

We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

I hope my microphone was on. I hope you could all hear me.

David Attenborough: 'The garden of Eden is no more', Word Economic Forum, Crystal Award - 2019

21 January 2019, Davos, Switzerland

Thank you, Professor Klaus Schwab, Hilde Schwab and the World Economic Forum for this generous award and inviting me to Davos.

I am quite literally from another age.

I was born during the Holocene- the name given to the 12,000-year period of climatic stability that allowed humans to settle, farm and create civilisations.

Those conditions fostered our unique minds, giving rise to international trade in ideas as well as goods making us the globally-connected species we are today.

Much of what will be discussed here is the consequence of that stability.

Global businesses, international co-operation and the striving for higher ideals these are all possible because for millennia, on a global scale, nature has largely been predictable and stable.

Now in the space of one human lifetime - indeed in the space of my lifetime all that has changed.

The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more.

We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are now in a new geological age - The Anthropocene - The Age of Humans.

When you think about it, there is perhaps no more unsettling thought. The only conditions modern humans have ever known are changing and changing fast.

It is tempting and understandable to ignore the evidence and carry on as usual or to be filled with doom and gloom.

But there is also a vast potential for what we might do.

We need to move beyond guilt or blame and get on with the practical tasks at hand.

We did not get to this point deliberately – and it has happened astonishingly quickly.

When I made my first television programmes most of audiences had never even seen a pangolin - indeed few pangolin had ever seen a TV camera!

When in 1979 I made a series tracing the history of life on earth, I was aware of environmental problems but I didn’t imagine we were fundamentally changing nature.

In 1999, whilst making the Blue Planet series about marine life, we filmed coral-bleaching, but I still didn’t appreciate the magnitude of the damage that had already started.

Now however we have evidence, knowledge and the ability to share it on a scale unimaginable even just a few years ago.

Movements and ideas can spread at astonishing speed.

The audience for that first series, 60 years ago, was restricted to a few million viewers in southern England.

My next series - Our Planet- which is about to be launched, will go instantly to hundreds of millions of people in almost every country on Earth via Netflix.

And the evidence supporting the series will be free to view by everyone with an internet connection via WWF.

If people can truly understand what is at stake, I believe they will give permission to business and governments to get on with the practical solutions.

And as a species we are expert problem-solvers. But we haven’t yet applied ourselves to this problem with the focus it requires.

We can create a world with clean air and water, unlimited energy, and fish stocks that will sustain us well into the future.

But to do that we need a plan.

Over the next 2 years there will be United Nations decisions on Climate Change, Sustainable Development and a New Deal for Nature. Together these will form our species’ plan for a route through the Anthropocene.

What we do in the next few years will profoundly affect the next few thousand years.

I look forward very much to the discussions and insights this week

Thank you again for this great honour.

Greta Thunberg: 'You are not mature enough to tell it like it is', COP Katowice - 2018

14 December 2018, Katowice, Poland

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old. I am from Sweden.

I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now.

Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn't matter what we do. But I've learned you are never too small to make a difference. And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to.

But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.

You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular.

You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.

You are not mature enough to tell it like is.

Even that burden you leave to us children

But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.

Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury.

It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.

The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn't do anything while there still was time to act.

You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.

Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope.

We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis.

We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.

We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again.

We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.

We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people. Thank you.

Al Gore: 'It is right to save the future, for humanity', An Inconvenient Sequel - 2017

This movement is in the tradition of every great moral movement that has advanced the cause of humankind.

And every single one of them has met with resistance, to the point where many of the advocates wondered how long is this going to take.,

Martin Luther King famously,  when somebody asked ‘how long is this gong to take’ he said, ‘How long, not long!’. Because no lie can live forever.

How long, not long. Because the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.

We are close in this movement to the tipping point beyond which this movement, like the abolition movement, like the women’s suffrage movement, like the civil rights movement, like the anti apartheid movement, like the movement for gay rights, is resolved into a choice between right and wrong.

And because of who we are as human beings, the outcome is foreordained.

And it is right to save the future for humanity. It is wrong to pollute this earth, and destroy the climate balance.

It is right to give hope to the future generations.

It will not be easy, and we too will encounter a series of nos.

But after the last no comes a yes.

And on that yes, the future world depends.

Al Gore: 'We could lose these conditions. We could lose what is most precious to us' Climate Reality Training - 2018

28 June 2018, Berlin, Germnay

The most painful experience that I have ever been through. We had been to a baseball game. It was a wonderful day and my child was holding my hand. One of his friends took out running across the street. I didn’t realize it because I was so busy. I looked back not fully aware of the moment then the hand… slipped… free… from mine. And then the tragedy unfolded ––The story has a happy ending — it was a full recovery despite everything. But it was a long experience of worries, dark and fearful thoughts. “One of my children were dying.” I was praying over what appeared to be a lifeless body. Suddenly two nurses showed up with their bags. They had been to the baseball game and they took their bags with them just in case there might be an accident. And there was. The ambulance came immediately.

The next 30 days and nights I spent in the hospital in the intensive care unit not knowing for much of that time what the outcome would be. And during those days and nights I remember so vividly going over my schedule and I looked at all these events that were scheduled for the next days, the next week, the week after that and the month after that. I remembered how many of those events that felt extremely important when I wrote them in my schedule, how much preparation I would be asked to do. How serious these matters were. They just blew off the pages as they were lighter than a feather — they no longer mattered at all… and I remember thinking about the agenda of action that I had mapped out for myself, issues that I was engaged in. There were so many of them. The only one that did not blow off that list was the climate crisis, because in some place it was connected in my heart to the main challenge of my life scoring the good health of my child.

And when I went back, finally, the healing continued outside the hospital, and full recovery began long after that. When I went back dealing with the climate crisis, it felt different to me, and I could not put into words what it was that felt so different.

Some 15 years passed after the incident, and during the making of the first movie “Inconvenient Truth,” the director David Guggenheim, during a very long day, interviewed me without a camera but continued to ask deeply personal questions. The conversation was so intense it was almost like a psychiatrist conversation. In other ways he was like a child that replied to every question with a “Yes, but why?”. During our conversation the day turned into night, and nobody moved or turned on the light because it was so intense. It was during that conversation I finally found the way to put words to describe what it was that felt different to me about the climate crisis after the event of this terrible tragedy that had happened and the aftermath of that terrible incident.

And here is what I learned.

We as human beings naturally protect ourselves against imagining or thinking deeply about the most terrible thing that could happen or the most unimaginable loss. If we did not protect ourselves against such thoughts life would be drained of a good deal of its joy. So it’s a natural phenomena. But I was confronted face to face brutally with the prospect of losing someone especially precious to me and it left a raw place in my heart. I learned so much from those who came up to me from all walks of life, sharing elevators with strangers, servers in restaurants, people I did not know who had read about this and told me of experiences they had had and reached out to me.

I figured out that one of the secrets about human condition of people that have suffered is that it binds people together and people that had suffered instinctively reach out to those they feel that is going through some difficult experience that really changed my life.

But it’s something else that was made clear to me. When I went back to really thinking deeply about the climate crisis it touched that one place in my heart and gave me a feeling that I was not capable of having before the pain that I had previously experienced. It caused me to feel for the first time this beautiful nature that we live in. This beautiful planet that’s ideal for living. The conditions that lead to the flourishing of humanity. We could lose these conditions. We could lose what is most precious to us.

I actually think that one of the many reasons for climate deniers is that human instinctively push away such thoughts.But we could lose it! We have not lost. It is still here. Damage has been done to which we must adapt. But the great loss that would be the most tragedy in the history of human species and many other species as well is still retreated, it could still be protected.

So go along with the knowledge that you been through. Go along with all the new relationships that you have established here. Go along with the feeling of passion why you were here in the first place that you must keep in your heart. The most valuable resource you have.

I want you to… I wanna share with you… this feeling that this precious earth of ours is…. beginning to slip…….. from our grasp. It has not slipped away. Now is the time to make sure it does not. So I close by asking you to hold on. We are going to win. With your help we will win. God bless you and thank you!

Al Gore: 'Our children will ask, what were you thinking?', Bali Climate Change Conference - 2007

14 December 2007, UN Bali Climate Change Conference, Bali, Indonesia

We, the human species, face a planetary emergency. That phrase still sounds shrill to some ears but it is deadly accurate as a description of the situation that we now confront, and as Dr. Pachauri and his three thousand colleagues in the IPCC have freshly reminded us, the accumulation of greenhouse gases continues to trap more and more heat from the sun in our atmosphere, threatening the stable climate balance that has been an unappreciated by crucial assumption for the development of human civilization.

Just this week new evidence has been presented. I remember years ago listening to the scientists who specialise in the study of ice and snow express concern that some time towards the end of the 21st century we might even face the possibility of losing the entire north polar ice cap. I remember only three years ago when they revised their estimates to say it could happen halfway through the 21st century, by 2050.

I remember at the beginning of this year when I was shocked to hear them say along with others that it could happen in as little as 34 years and now, this week, they tell us it could completely disappear in as little as five to seven years.

One of the victims of the horrors of the Third Reich in Europe during World War II wrote a famous passage about the beginnings of the killings, and he said, "First I came for the Jews, and I was not a Jew, so I said nothing. Then, they came for the Gypsies, and I was not a Gypsy, so I said nothing," and he listed several other groups, and with each one he said nothing. Then, he said, they came for me.

For those who believed that this climate crisis was going to affect their grandchildren, and still said nothing, and were shaken a bit to hear that it would affect their children, and still said and did nothing, it is affecting us in the present generation, and it is up to us in this generation to solve this crisis.

A sense of urgency that is appropriate for this challenge is itself a challenge to our own moral imagination. It is up to us in this generation to see clearly and vividly exactly what is going on. Twenty of the 21 hottest years ever measured in atmospheric record have come in the last 25 years Ð the hottest of all in 2005, this year on track to be the second hottest of all. This is not natural variation. It is far beyond the bounds of natural variation and the scientists have told us so over and over again with increasing alarm.

But because our new relationship to the earth is unprecedented we have been slow to act. And because CO2 is invisible, it is easy for us to put the climate crisis out of sight and out of mind until we see the consequences beginning to unfold.

Despite a growing number of honourable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill used in 1938 when he described those who were ignoring the threat posed by Adolf Hitler. He said, and I quote: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only be undecided, resolved only to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that, but my country is not the only one that can take steps to ensure that we move forward from Bali with progress and with hope.

Those of you who applauded when I spoke openly about the diplomatic truth here have a choice to make. You can do one of two things here. You can feel anger and frustration and direct it at the United States of America, or you can make a second choice. You can decide to move forward and do all of the difficult work that needs to be done and save an open, large, blank space in your document, and put a footnote by it, and when you look at the footnote, write the description of the footnote: This document is incomplete, but we are going to move forward anyway, on the hope, and I'm going to describe for you why I think you can also have the realistic expectation, that that blank will be filled in.

This is the beginning of a process that is designed to culminate in Copenhagen two years from now. Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now. You must anticipate that.

Targets must be part of the treaty that is adopted in Cophenhagen, and the treaty, by the way, should not only be adopted in 2009. I urge you, in this mandate, to move the target for full implementation of this treaty to a point two years sooner than contemplated. Let's have it take effect in 2010 and not 2012. We can't afford to wait another five years to replace the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol.

So, we must leave here with a strong mandate. This is not the time for business as usual. Somehow we have to summon, and each of you must summon a sense of urgency here in Bali...

...I don't know how to tell you how you can find the grace to navigate around this enormous obstacle, this elephant in the room that I've just been undiplomatic enough to name, but I'm asking you to do it...

Just in the last few days, on the eve of this meeting, I have received more than 350,000 emails from Americans asking me to say to you: "We're going to change in the United States of America."

During this upcoming two-year period there will be a national election in the United States. One year and 40 days from today there will be a new inauguration in the United States.

I must tell you candidly that I cannot promise that the person who is elected will have the position I expect they will have. But I can tell you that I believe it is quite likely.

If you decide to continue the progress that has already been made here on all of the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions; on the hope (and with the expectation) that, before this process is concluded in Copenhagen, you will be able to fill in that blank (with the help of a different position from the United States) then you can make great progress here.

For starters, that means a plan that fully funds an ambitious adaptation fund, to build an adaptive capacity in the most vulnerable countries to confront the climate crisis. It means creating truly innovative means for technology transfer, to allow for mobilising technology and capital throughout the world.

We need a deforestation prevention plan. Deforestation accounts for 20 percent of global carbon emissions - the equivalent to the total emissions of the US or China. It is difficult to forge such an agreement here.

Believe me if I could snap my fingers and change the position of the United States of America, and change the position of some other countries, and make it instantly much easier to move forward with targets and timetables, I would do so in an instant. But if we look realistically at the situation that confronts us, then wisdom would call for moving forward in spite of that obstacle.

I can tell you that there is a growing realisation all over the world - including in my country - beyond these actions that have already been taken that I've described to you. Mothers and fathers, grandparents, community leaders, business leaders, all around the world, are beginning to look much more clearly at what is involved here.

...These are not a political problems. They are moral imperatives, but our capacity to strip away the disguise, and see them for what they really are, and then find the basis to act together, to successfully address them, is what is missing.

The greatest opportunity inherent in this climate crisis is not only to quickly deploy the new technologies that will facilitate sustainable development, and create the new jobs and to lift standards of living. The greatest opportunity is that in rising to meet the climate crisis, we in our generation will find the moral authority and capacity for long term vision to get our act together in this world and to take on these other crises, not political problems, and solve them.

We are one people on one planet. We have one future, one destiny We must pursue it together, and we can.

The great Spanish poet from Sevilla, Antonio Machado, wrote, "Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk." There is no path from Bali to Copenhagen unless you make it. It's impossible given the positions of the powerful countries, including my own, and the instructions from which they are not going to depart, but you can make new path. You can make a path that goes around that blank spot, and you can go forward.

There are two paths you can choose. They lead to two different futures. Not too long from now, when our children assess what you did here in Bali, what we and our generation did here in this world, as they look backward at 2007, they will ask one of two questions. I don't which one they will ask. I know which one I prefer that they ask, but trust me, they will ask one of these two questions.

They'll look back, and either they will ask "What were you thinking? Didn't you hear the IPCC four times unanimously warning the world to act? Didn't you see the glaciers melting? Didn't you see the North Polar ice cap disappearing? Didn't you see the deserts growing, and the droughts deepening, and the crops drying up? Didn't you see the sea level rising? Didn't you see the floods? Didn't you pay attention to what was going on? Didn't you care? What were you thinking?"

Or they will ask a second question, one that I'd much prefer them to ask. I want them to look back on this time, and ask: "How did you find the moral courage to successfully address a crisis that so many said was impossible to address? How were you able to start the process that unleashed the moral imagination of humankind to see ourselves as a single, global civilization?" And when they ask that question, I want you to tell them that you saw it as a privilege to be alive at a moment when a relatively small group of people could control the destiny of all generations to come.

Instead of shaking our heads at the difficulty of this task, and saying "Woe is us. This is impossible. How can we do this? We're so mad at the ones that are making it impossible," we ought to feel a sense of joy that we have work that is worth doing that is so important to the future of all humankind. We ought to feel a sense of exhilaration that we are the people alive at a moment in history when we can make all the difference.

That's who you are. You have everything that you need. We have everything we need, save political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

Rachel Carson: "When the scientific organization speaks, whose voice do we hear – that of science or of the sustaining industry?", A New Chapter in Silent Spring, Garden Club of America - 1963

January 1963, New York City, New York, USA

Rachel Carson was a pioneer, a marine biologist who was one of the first activist scientists in American history. Silent Spring is her most famous book. She died in 1964,. Many regard her as the inspiration for the modern environmental movement.

I am particularly glad to have this opportunity to speak to you. Ever since, ten years ago, you honored me with your Frances Hutchinson medal, I have felt very close to The Garden Club of America. And I should like to pay tribute to you for the quality of your work and for the aims and aspirations of your organization. Through your interest in plant life, your fostering of beauty, your alignment with constructive conservation causes, you promote that onward flow of life that is the essence of our world.

This is a time when forces of a very different nature too often prevail – forces careless of life or deliberately destructive of it and of the essential web of living relationships.

My particular concern, as you know, is with the reckless use of chemicals so unselective in their action that they should more appropriately be called biocides rather than pesticides. Not even their most partisan defenders can claim that their toxic effect is limited to insects or rodents or weeds or whatever the target may be.

The battle for a sane policy for controlling unwanted species will be a long and difficult one. The publication of Silent Spring was neither the beginning nor the end of that struggle. I think, however, that it is moving into a new phase, and I would like to assess with you some of the progress that has been made and take a look at the nature of the struggle that lies before us.

We should be very clear about what our cause is. What do we oppose? What do we stand for? If you read some of my industry-oriented reviewers you will think that I am opposed to any efforts to control insects or other organisms. This, of course, is not my position and I am sure it is not that of The Garden Club of America. We differ from the promoters of biocides chiefly in the means we advocate, rather than the end to be attained.

It is my conviction that if we automatically call in the spray planes or reach for the aerosol bomb when we have an insect problem we are resorting to crude methods of a rather low scientific order. We are being particularly unscientific when we fail to press forward with research that will give us the new kind of weapons we need. Some such weapons now exist – brilliant and imaginative prototypes of what I trust will be the insect control methods of the future. But we need many more, and we need to make better use of those we have. Research men of the Department of Agriculture have told me privately that some of the measures they have developed and tested and turned over to the insect control branch have been quietly put on the shelf.

I criticize the present heavy reliance upon biocides on several grounds: First, on the grounds of their inefficiency. I have here some comparative figures on the toll taken of our crops by insects before and after the DDT era. During the first half of this century, crop loss due to insect attack has been estimated by a leading entomologist at 10 percent a year. It is startling to find, then, that the National Academy of Science last year placed the present crop loss at 25 percent a year. If the percentage of crop loss is increasing at this rate, even as the use of modern insecticides increases, surely something is wrong with the methods used! I would remind you that a non-chemical method gave 100 percent control of the screwworm fly – a degree of success no chemical has ever achieved.

Chemical controls are inefficient also because as now used they promote resistance among insects. The number of insect species resistant to one or more groups of insecticides has risen from about a dozen in pre-DDT days to nearly 150 today. This is a very serious problem, threatening, as it does, greatly impaired control.

Another measure of inefficiency is the fact that chemicals often provoke resurgences of the very insect they seek to control, because they have killed off its natural controls. Or they cause some other organism suddenly to rise to nuisance status: spider mites, once relatively innocuous, have become a worldwide pest since the advent of DDT.

My other reasons for believing we must turn to other methods of controlling insects have been set forth in detail in Silent Spring and I shall not take time to discuss them now. Obviously, it will take time to revolutionize our methods of insect and weed control to the point where dangerous chemicals are minimized. Meanwhile, there is much that can be done to bring about some immediate improvement in the situation through better procedures and controls.

In looking at the pesticide situation today, the most hopeful sign is an awakening of strong public interest and concern. People are beginning to ask questions and to insist upon proper answers instead of meekly acquiescing in whatever spraying programs are proposed. This in itself is a wholesome thing.

There is increasing demand for better legislative control of pesticides. The state of Massachusetts has already set up a Pesticide Board with actual authority. This Board has taken a very necessary step by requiring the licensing of anyone proposing to carry out aerial spraying. Incredible though it may seem, before this was done anyone who had money to hire an airplane could spray where and when he pleased. I am told that the state of Connecticut is now planning an official investigation of spraying practices. And of course on a national scale, the President last summer directed his science advisor to set up a committee of scientists to review the whole matter of the government’s activities in this field.

Citizens groups, too, are becoming active. For example, the Pennsylvania Federation of Women’s Clubs recently set up a program to protect the public from the menace of poisons in the environment – a program based on education and promotion of legislation. The National Audubon Society has advocated a 5-point action program involving both state and federal agencies. The North American Wildlife Conference this year will devote an important part of its program to the problem of pesticides. All these developments will serve to keep public attention focused on the problem.

I was amused recently to read a bit of wishful thinking in one of the trade magazines. Industry “can take heart,” it said, “from the fact that the main impact of the book (i.e., Silent Spring) will occur in the late fall and winter – seasons when consumers are not normally active buyers of insecticides [ … ] it is fairly safe to hope that by March or April Silent Spring no longer will be an interesting conversational subject.”

If the tone of my mail from readers is any guide, and if the movements that have already been launched gain the expected momentum, this is one prediction that will not come true.

This is not to say that we can afford to be complacent. Although the attitude of the public is showing a refreshing change, there is very little evidence of any reform in spraying practices. Very toxic materials are being applied with solemn official assurances that they will harm neither man nor beast. When wildlife losses are later reported, the same officials deny the evidence or declare the animals must have died from “something else.”

Exactly this pattern of events is occurring in a number of areas now. For example, a newspaper in East St. Louis, Illinois, describes the death of several hundred rabbits, quail and songbirds in areas treated with pellets of the insecticide, dieldrin. One area involved was, ironically, a “game preserve.” This was part of a program of Japanese beetle control.

The procedures seem to be the same as those I described in Silent Spring, referring to another Illinois community, Sheldon. At Sheldon the destruction of many birds and small mammals amounted almost to annihilation. Yet an Illinois Agriculture official is now quoted as saying dieldrin has no serious effect on animal life.

A significant case history is shaping up now in Norfolk, Virginia. The chemical is the very toxic dieldrin, the target the white fringed beetle, which attacks some farm crops. This situation has several especially interesting features. One is the evident desire of the state agriculture officials to carry out the program with as little advance discussion as possible. When the Outdoor Edition of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot “broke” the story, he reported that officials refused comment on their plans. The Norfolk health officer offered reassuring statements to the public on the grounds that the method of application guaranteed safety: The poison would be injected into the ground by a machine that drills holes in the soil. “A child would have to eat the roots of the grass to get the poison” he is quoted as saying.

However, alert reporters soon proved these assurances to be without foundation. The actual method of application was to be by seeders, blowers and helicopters: the same type of procedure that in Illinois wiped out robins, brown thrashers and meadowlarks, killed sheep in the pastures, and contaminated the forage so that cows gave milk containing poison.

Yet at a hearing of sorts concerned Norfolk citizens were told merely that the State’s Department of Agriculture was committed to the program and that it would therefore be carried out.

The fundamental wrong is the authoritarian control that has been vested in the agricultural agencies. There are, after all, many different interests involved: there are problems of water pollution, of soil pollution, of wildlife protection, of public health. Yet the matter is approached as if the agricultural interest were the supreme, or indeed the only one.

It seems to me clear that all such problems should be resolved by a conference of representatives of all the interests involved.

I wonder whether citizens would not do well to be guided by the strong hint given by the Court of Appeals reviewing the so-called DDT case of the Long Island citizens a few years ago.

This group sought an injunction to protect them from a repetition of the gypsy moth spraying. The lower court refused the injunction and the United States Court of Appeals sustained this ruling on the grounds that the spraying had already taken place and could not be enjoined. However, the court made a very significant comment that seems to have been largely overlooked. Regarding the possibility of a repetition of the Long Island spraying, the judges made this significant general comment: “… out would seem well to point out the advisability for a district court, faced with a claim concerning aerial spraying or any other program which may cause inconvenience and damage as widespread as this 1957 spraying appears to have caused, to inquire closely into the methods and safeguards of any proposed procedures so that incidents of the seemingly unnecessary and unfortunate nature here disclosed, may be reduced to a minimum, assuming, of course, that the government will have shown such a program to be required in the public interest.”

Here the United States Court of Appeals spelled out a procedure whereby citizens may seek relief in the courts from unnecessary, unwise or carelessly executed programs. I hope it will be put to the test in as many situations as possible.

If we are ever to find our way out of the present deplorable situation, we must remain vigilant, we must continue to challenge and to question, we must insist that the burden of proof is on those who would use these chemicals to prove the procedures are safe.

Above all, we must not be deceived by the enormous stream of propaganda that is issuing from the pesticide manufacturers and from industry-related – although ostensibly independent – organizations. There is already a large volume of handouts openly sponsored by the manufacturers. There are other packets of material being issued by some of the state agricultural colleges, as well as by certain organizations whose industry connections are concealed behind a scientific front. This material is going to writers, editors, professional people, and other leaders of opinion.

It is characteristic of this material that it deals in generalities, unsupported by documentation. In its claims for safety to human beings, it ignores the fact that we are engaged in a grim experiment never before attempted. We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and in many cases cumulative in their effect. These exposures now begin at or before birth. No one knows what the result will be, because we have no previous experience to guide us.

Let us hope it will not take the equivalent of another thalidomide tragedy to shock us into full awareness of the hazard. Indeed, something almost as shocking has already occurred – a few months ago we were all shocked by newspaper accounts of the tragedy of the Turkish children who have developed a horrid disease through use of an agricultural chemical. To be sure, the use was unintended. The poisoning had been continuing over a period of some seven years, unknown to most of us. What made it newsworthy in 1962 was the fact that a scientist gave a public report on it.

A disease known as toxic porphyria has turned some 5,000 Turkish children into hairy, monkey-faced beings. The skin becomes sensitive to light and is blotched and blistered. Thick hair covers much of the face and arms. The victims have also suffered severe liver damage. Several hundred such cases were noticed in 1955. Five years later, when a South African physician visited Turkey to study the disease, he found 5,000 victims. The cause was traced to seed wheat which had been treated with a chemical fungicide called hexachlorobenzene. The seed, intended for planting, had instead been ground into flour for bread by the hungry people. Recovery of the victims is slow, and indeed worse may be in store for them. Dr. W. C. Hueper, a specialist on environmental cancer, tells me there is a strong likelihood these unfortunate children may ultimately develop liver cancer.

“This could not happen here,” you might easily think.

It would surprise you, then, to know that the use of poisoned seed in our own country is a matter of present concern by the Food and Drug Administration. In recent years there has been a sharp increase in the treatment of seed with chemical fungicides and insecticides of a highly poisonous nature. Two years ago an official of the Food and Drug Administration told me of that agency’s fear that treated grain left over at the end of a growing season was finding its way into food channels.

Now, on last October 27, the Food and Drug Administration proposed that all treated food grain seeds be brightly colored so as to be easily distinguishable from untreated seeds or grain intended as food for human beings or livestock. The Food and Drug Administration reported: “FDA has encountered many shipments of wheat, corn, oats, rye, barley, sorghum, and alfalfa seed in which stocks of treated seed left over after the planting seasons have been mixed with grains and sent to market for food or feed use. Injury to livestock is known to have occurred.

“Numerous federal court seizure actions have been taken against lots of such mixed grains on charges they were adulterated with a poisonous substance. Criminal cases have been brought against some of the shipping firms and individuals.

“Most buyers and users of grains do not have the facilities or scientific equipment to detect the presence of small amounts of treated seed grains if the treated seed is not colored. The FDA proposal would require that all treated seed be colored in sharp contrast to the natural color of the seed, and that the color be so applied that it could not readily be removed. The buyer could then easily detect a mixture containing treated seed grain, and reject the lot.”

I understood, however, that objection has been made by some segments of the industry and that this very desirable and necessary requirement may be delayed. This is a specific example of the kind of situation requiring public vigilance and public demand for correction of abuses.

The way is not made easy for those who would defend the public interest. In fact, a new obstacle has recently been created, and a new advantage has been given to those who seek to block remedial legislation. I refer to the income tax bill which becomes effective this year. The bill contains a little known provision which permits certain lobbying expenses to be considered a business expense deduction. It means, to cite a specific example, that the chemical industry may now work at bargain rates to thwart future attempts at regulation.

But what of the nonprofit organizations such as the Garden Clubs, the Audubon Societies and all other such tax-exempt groups? Under existing laws they stand to lose their tax-exempt status if they devote any “substantial” part of their activities to attempts to influence legislation. The word “substantial” needs to be defined. In practice, even an effort involving less than 5 percent of an organization’s activity has been ruled sufficient to cause loss of the tax-exempt status.

What happens, then, when the public interest is pitted against large commercial interests? Those organizations wishing to plead for protection of the public interest do so under the peril of losing the tax-exempt status so necessary to their existence. The industry wishing to pursue its course without legal restraint is now actually subsidized in its efforts.

This is a situation which the Garden Club, and similar organizations, within their legal limitations, might well attempt to remedy.

There are other disturbing factors which I can only suggest. One is the growing interrelations between professional organizations and industry, and between science and industry. For example, the American Medical Association, through its newspaper, has just referred physicians to a pesticide trade association for information to help them answer patients’ questions about the effects of pesticides on man. I would like to see physicians referred to authoritative scientific or medical literature – not to a trade organization whose business it is to promote the sale of pesticides.

We see scientific societies acknowledging as “sustaining associates” a dozen or more giants of a related industry. When the scientific organization speaks, whose voice do we hear – that of science or of the sustaining industry? The public assumes it is hearing the voice of science.

Another cause of concern is the increasing size and number of industry grants to the universities. On first thought, such support of education seems desirable, but on reflection we see that this does not make for unbiased research – it does not promote a truly scientific spirit. To an increasing extent, the man who brings the largest grants to his university becomes an untouchable, with whom even the University president and trustees do not argue.

These are large problems and there is no easy solution. But the problem must be faced.

As you listen to the present controversy about pesticides, I recommend that you ask yourself – Who speaks? – And Why?

Emmanuel Macron: 'Make Our Planet Great Again', Response to USA withdrawal Paris Cliamte Deal - 2017

1 June 2017, Paris, France

Climate change is one of the greatest issues of our time.

It is already changing our future lives, but it is global.

Everyone is impacted, and if we do nothing, our children will know a world of migrations, of wars, of shortage.

A dangerous world.

It is not the future we want for ourselves.

It is not the future we want for our children.

It is not the future we want for our world.

Today, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced his decision to withdrawal the United States from the Paris agreement.

I do respect this decision,but I do think it is an actual mistake. Both for the US, and for our planet.

I just say it to President Trump, in a few words, a few minutes ago, this assessment:

Tonight, I wish to tell the United States, France believes in you. The world believes in you. I know that you are a great nation. I know your history, our common history.

To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the President of the United States, I want to say that they will find in France, a comrade.

I summon them, come and work here with us.

To work together on concrete solutions for our climate, our environment.

I can assure you, France will not give up the fight.

I reaffirm clearly, that the Paris agreement remains irreversible, and will be implemented.

Not just by France, but by all the other nations.

Over the coming hours, I will have the opportunity to speak with our main partners, to define a common strategy, and to launch new initiatives.

I already know, that I can count on them.

I call you to remain confident. We will succeed, because we are fully committed.

Because wherever we live, wherever we are, we all share the same responsibilities.

Make our planet great again.

Severn Cullis-Suzuki: 'If you don't know how to fix it, please, stop breaking it', UN Earth Summit - 1992

1992, United Nations, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ms Suzuki is the daughter of noted environmentalist and academic, David Suzuki.

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.

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 with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going exinct every day - vanishing forever.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry about these little 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!

You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.
You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.
You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or poiticians - but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles - and all of you are somebody's child.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil - 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 towards one single goal.

In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid to tell the world how I feel.

In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and htrow 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 share.

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 some time with some children living on the streets.

And this 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 and love and affection."

If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everyting still so greedy?

I can't stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas 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 and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us 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're attending these conferences, who you're doing this for - we are your own children.

You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying "everyting's going to be alright', "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 father 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. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening.

Carl Sagan: 'The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena', Pale Blue Dot speech - 1994

1994, audiobook, Pale Blue Dot, A Vision of the Human Future in Space, USA

Look again at that dot.

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, everny "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

This animation by the ORDER studio is excellent.

Bill Clinton: 'But the birds of that land decided that if they worked together they could raise the sky', Remarks on the International Coral Reef Initiative - 1996

22 November 1996, Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia

Thank you very much. Premier and Mrs. Borbidge, Mayor Berwick, Minister Hill and Mrs. Hill, members of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and to Minister Moore and Mrs. Moore, especially to Alicia Stevens for reminding us what this is all about today.

Hillary and I and our party have had a wonderful visit to Australia. We understand now why it is called the Lucky Country. But we believe that there is more than luck involved here. Today we celebrate the commitment of the people of this country, of the United States, and people all over the world to the proposition that we must preserve the natural resources that God has given us. We are here near the biggest, best managed protected marine and coastal area in the world for a clear reason: Australia has made a national commitment to be good stewards of the land with which God blessed you.

I am especially pleased today, as has already been said, that the Government of Australia is honoring the United States by naming a section of the Great Barrier Reef after Rachel Carson. Rachel Carson was the great American environmentalist; she was a marine biologist. Vice President Gore wrote about Rachel Carson: She brought us back to a fundamental idea lost to an amazing degree in modern civilization, the interconnection of human beings and the natural environment. That interconnection clearly imposes upon all of us a shared responsibility. To preserve a future for our children and grandchildren, we must care for our shared environment. It is a practical and a moral imperative.

We are citizens not only of individual nations but of this small and fragile planet. We know that pollution has contempt for borders, that what comes out of a smokestack in one nation can wind up on the shores of another an ocean away. We know, too, that recovery and preservation also benefits people beyond the borders of the nation in which it occurs. We know that protecting the environment can affect not only our health and our quality of life, it can even affect the peace. In too many places, including those about which we read too often now on the troubled continent of Africa, abuses like deforestation breed scarcity, and scarcity aggravates the turmoil which exists all over the world.

I am very proud of the work our two nations have done to preserve our natural heritage. Just as we have been allies for peace and freedom, we must be allies in the 21st century to protect the Earth's environment. Our work together on the International Coral Reef Initiative is a shining example of what we can achieve. Founded in 1994 by Australia, the United States, and six other governments, this initiative helps nations and regions to conserve, manage, and monitor coral reefs.

Pollution, overfishing, and overuse have put many of our unique reefs at risk. Their disappearance would destroy the habitat of countless species. It would unravel the web of marine life that holds the potential for new chemicals, new medicines, unlocking new mysteries. It would have a devastating effect on the coastal communities from Cairns to Key West, Florida, communities whose livelihood depends upon the reefs.

Steadily we are making progress. In this part of the world, the ICRI has played a crucial role in slowing the use of cyanide to harvest coral reef fish. Around the world, more than 75 nations and scores of organizations have participated in ICRI programs. Today, with your knowledge and leadership, we are seeing to it that the world's reefs make it into the next century safe and secure. And I thank you for that.

Let me say that our effort to save the world's reefs is a model for the work that we can do together in other environmental areas, and there is a lot of work to do. Deforestation is claiming an area the size of South Korea every year. Let us, together with the United Nations, develop a strategy for the sustainable management of all our forests.

Toxic chemicals and pesticides banned here and in the United States can still find their way into our lives, endangering our land, our water, and our children. Rachel Carson, whom we honor here today, helped alert us in the United States to these dangers. Let us now forge a global agreement to stop these toxic substances from being released into the world around us.

Today, thanks to the Montreal Protocol, we are slowing the production and the consumption of chlorofluorocarbons, the chemicals that have been eating a hole in the Earth's ozone layer. We're on our way to closing the ozone hole that threatens Antarctica and Australia. Now we must see to it that this landmark treaty is enforced from one corner of the Earth to another. We need no more new holes in the ozone.

Finally, we must work to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions. These gases released by cars and power plants and burning forests affect our health and our climate. They are literally warming our planet. If they continue unabated, the consequences will be nothing short of devastating for the children here in this audience and their children.

New weather patterns, lost species, the spread of infectious diseases, damaged economies, rising sea levels: if present trends continue, there is a real risk that sometime in the next century, parts of this very park we are here in today could disappear, submerged by a rising ocean. That is why today, from this remarkable place, I call upon the community of nations to agree to legally binding commitments to fight climate change.

We must stand together against the threat of global warming. A greenhouse may be a good place to raise plants; it is no place to nurture our children. And we can avoid dangerous global warming if we begin today and if we begin together.

If we meet all these challenges, we can make 1997 a milestone year in protecting the global environment. We can do it in a way that encourages sustainable development. One thing we've learned in recent years is that protecting the environment and promoting human progress are not incompatible goals; they go hand in hand. I am very pleased that the United Nations General Assembly will have a special session in New York next year to review our progress in advancing sustainable development since the Earth summit in Rio.

An Australian folktale has it that in the beginning the sky was so close to the Earth that it blocked out all the light. Everyone was forced to crawl in the darkness, collecting with their hands whatever they could find to eat. But the birds of that land decided that if they worked together they could raise the sky and make more room to move about. Slowly, with long sticks, they lifted the sky. The darkness passed, and everyone stood upright.

If we work together as those birds did, we can preserve our environment for our children, for their children, for generations beyond. Let us lift our sights and ourselves to that great challenge.

Thank you very much.

Al Gore: 'After the last no comes a yes, and on that yes the future world depends' COP 21, Paris Climate Conference - 2015

Video by Envirobeat

8 December 2015, COP 21 Conference, Paris, France

Last year was the first time in world history that CO2 levels did not go up when there was not a major recession or an event like the break up of the former Soviet Union.

This year it is too early to confirm this statistic but you have all seen the news stories that have come out yesterday. CO2 levels went down this year.

If that is confirmed we will look back on last year and this year as the time when we did reach the turning point. We are winning this. We must win it faster.  We must accelerate the pace.

A lot of damage has already been done.

More damage will occur because of the global warming pollution that is already in the atmosphere.

So we must speed up.

The march that took place on November 29th, of course there was due to be in one Paris and I myself understand completely the thinking of the French authorities, as I said at the beginning, we understand what they have gone through.

But I don’t want anyone here in Paris who didn’t see a march here, not to miss the fact that in cities all over hte world, there were mass marches to save the climate.

So the NGO community, the civil society and activists worldwide have done a fantastic job in mobilising people to demand action.

This was in Melbourne, November 27th, just before, the climate, there were marches all over the place. And it’s not just on the eve of the conference. Quebec City, Quebec is just a hero in my opinion, god bless Canada for all it has done here. This was a great march in April in Quebec.

Of course one year ago, on the eve of the special session of the United Nations, as amny as four hundred thousand people filled the streets of Manhattan.

And you may have heard how many of the leaders who spoke here on Monday, refer to the marches in the street.

So the best chance to address this climate crisis is here.

Now.

We have a few days left.

Whatever delegation you are following or are a part of, use these next 72 hours to double down on your commitment to DO THE RIGHT THING.

There are people who have been to previous conferences, and they look back on the long string of them, and they’re tempted to conclude, it’s not going to make any difference.

There was a poet in the United States in the last century called Wallace Stevens, who wrote the following line:

‘After the last no, comes a yes’

And on that yes the future world depends.

Every great moral cause that humanity has been faced with has met with a series of nos, addend fierce resistance. The abolition movement, the struggle for women’s suffrage and gender equity, which is ongoing, the civil rights movement, the struggle against apartheid, the struggle for the end of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation – all of these moral causes have met nos and fierce opposition.

But they all eventually came down to a single choice between one of two options: what is right, and what is wrong.

In this case, what is right is to save the future of our planet, and to say to future generations that we’ve done the right thing here.

Make no mistake, the next generation will inherit the Earth we bequeath to them, and depending upon their circumstances, they will ask one of two questions.

If they live in a world in which we have not addressed this crisis. In which we have not taken advantage of the opportunities to create jobs with renewables, and sustainable agriculture and fishing and forestries, and more efficiency.

If they suffer even worse floods and mudslides and droughts and the spreading of diseases into regions where they were unknown previously –the melting of the ice and the sea level rise, and the flows of millions of climate refugees – if they live in such a world, they would be justified in looking back at us, this group of us gathered here in Paris in December of 2015 and asking, ‘what were you thinking?! Why did you not act?!

But if they live in a world where there is a renewal of hope, where there are millions of jobs being created, where the carbon concentrations and greenhouse gas concentrations are declining, and where people are living and flourishing in communities with renewable systems and sustainable economies and if they look at their own children and feel secure in saying to them, ‘your world is going to be even better’, I want them to look back at us here, in this place, in this hour, on this day, and ask, ‘how did you find the moral courage? To break through the impasses  To rise above the differences. To see beyond the difficulties, across them to the bright future that was possible? And see the larger moral question that was at stake.

How did you do it? And part of the answer, will be that the men and women who came here to Paris from 195 countries around the world came together in support of a higher purpose.

To protect our home.

To protect our planet Earth.

We will say to them in answer, ‘we found out that political will was itself a renewable resource’.

Thank you very much, merci beaucoup.