Hey, this is Penn Badgley. I'm doing some guest hosting today. If you want to learn how to take real lasting climate action like I do, I want to invite you to join Countdown, Ted's new global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. Here is a talk from the Countdown Global Launch event given by environmental educators

Severn Cullis Suzuki.

You're going to hear some footage from her speech

at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit

where she first spoke as a 12-year-old climate activist.

To hear more of these ideas and get involved,

check out countdown.tad.com

and subscribe to the Countdown podcast wherever you're listening to this

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 I am here to speak for the countless animals

dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. I am afraid to go out in the

sun now because of the holes in our ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it. I used to go

fishing in Vancouver, my home, with my dad, until just a few years ago we found the fish

full of cancers. A generation ago, I was that 12-year-old child.

In 1992, I had five minutes to speak to the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

My friends and I had started an environmental club,

and we'd traveled to this huge international meeting

about environment and development to tell the adults they

had to change their ways. That same year, 1,700 scientists would issue the world scientists warning

to humanity to tell us that humans and the natural world were on a collision course.

Much like Greta Tunberg and her peers today, we believe that decision makers should be acting

on science and facts, and the facts were telling us that we were headed for ecological collapse.

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