Meeting with Severn Cullis-Suzuki

When was the last time you went into your basement or garage to dust off the stuff in your old storage boxes? You know what I’m talking about – the ones that hold your high school memorabilia, your trophies, your first baseball mitt. In my case, many of these boxes are filled with old books and journals. I was recently inspired to venture into my basement to seek out my teen-aged writings. What I found were words fuelled by the angst I felt about certain things that needed change in our society – for me, many of the issues at that time focused around women’s rights, which I felt quite passionate about.

On January 11th, 2009, Billie and I joined forces with Joe Dee from MaRS and Lisa Torjman from Social Innovation Generation (SiG) @MaRS to facilitate a workshop on social technology and environmental activism at the Studio Earth day organized by SiG@Waterloo. Severn Cullis-Suzuki had the keynote speech that followed our workshop and it was the catalyst in my desire to reconnect with my old activist self. Before coming on stage, Severn showed the video of herself as a 12-year old passionately speaking in front of international representatives at the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. She spoke on behalf of an NGO that she started at 9 years-old called Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO) and the purpose of her speech was to highlight the urgency to make environmentally conscious policy choices across the world in order to leave a clean, safe earth for generations to come.

With her father as one of the world leaders in the movement towards a sustainable earth, Severn explained in her speech at The Kitchener City Hall that she was inspired by her family’s quest for justice from an early age. However, although she may have had a foundation for her path as an activist, her kind of passion, anger and fury can only come from somewhere deep within. Somewhere deep inside of you that tells you that something is just not right with a particular situation or, in this case, an international approach to the earth we all live on. That part of us, our essence, never dies; it just gets quieter from time to time.

Reviving the Young Activist

Seeing Severn now, 17 years after that monumental talk, you notice a young woman who is more mature and refined, but still has a great deal of that innocent fire, which shines though her honesty and vulnerability. Severn mentioned that she was surprised to see a revived interest in this speech on the internet over the last few years. Well, for me, there is no surprise there.

It’s almost as if societally we are in our childhood again. It’s not exactly infancy because we are not starting from scratch, but we have had to go back to the early stages of development in order to reassess what went wrong in our societal evolution to bring us to the current state of the world. The present economic crisis, much like the snowstorms and power outages we are experiencing in Toronto, are a time of reflection and re-birth.

Severn’s 12 year-old self says, “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.” I think it’s high time that we reconnect with that passionate 12-year old in each of us and allow that fire to fuel the momentum of change around the issues that inspire us most.