The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes

Severn Cullis-Suzuki

She was only 12 years old at the time, today she is 29, but Severn Cullis-Suzuki brought a room of international diplomats and bigwigs to a humbled silence and tears with her heartfelt address at The United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. We offer her remarks at Media Voices as a challenge to all. Listen to this young woman and ask yourself this question, ‘What, if anything, has changed”?

This week at Media Voices we are highlighting two important international events.  November 20th is the 20th Anniversary of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and December 4th is the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen- both have a great deal to do with the world we live in NOW and leave to our children.

The CRC is the most universally ratified treaty in the world’s history. Why then should the United States be one of only two countries unable to ratify it, Somalia, home to genocide, being the other. Jessica Lenz, from the United States Campaign to Ratify the CRC, offers a guest commentary about why the United States needs to throw our considerable strength behind the needs of children.

This week brought us a US Department of Agriculture Report showing that 17 million American families struggle to put food on the table and a half million American children experience hunger multiple times during the year. Sobering news for a wealthy country. That’s nearly 15% of our population unable to count on where their next meal is coming from.The fact is, our children are experiencing more poverty and hunger today than at any time since USDA surveys were first conducted in 1995. This trend is amplified on a global scale where hunger and malnourishment affects 1.2 billion people, killing nearly 16 thousand children a day.

The irony is that much of our nation’s food supply is picked by migrant families and children who lack protection under Federal law, while violating international laws we have ratified, such as UN Convention 182. These same poor families, living below the poverty line, are among the most at risk for hunger and food insecurity to be found in every state of the union. They just also happen to harvest our fresh food doing the lowest paying work at the bottom of our economy. They are the statistics tucked inside the USDOA report.

Currently, legislation has been prepared to address these issues. The CARE bill, as it is called, was the subject of Reid Maki’s Viewpoint last week at MVC. This week, we direct your attention to a Department of Labor Roundtable on child labor in agriculture where the abuses discussed are made visible by the work of MVC Board member and filmmaker Robin Romano whose feature documentary, HARVEST, had footage shown as part of the event.  Like the best of documentary, HARVEST  takes you to places you’d never visit and lets the images and people you’ll meet speak for themselves. What I find heartening in all this is that our own Department of Labor, under the direction of Secretary Hilda Solis, organized this Roundtable out of clear concern for the issues HARVEST graphically portrays.  Now we wait for action on the CARE bill and enforcement of fair labor standards and working conditions for migrant families and we watch to see if funding levels for programs to educate migrant kids will expand to meet the needs of a school population with a near 60% dropout rate. If these American children don’t complete their educations, they will end up feeding the grinding cycle of poverty.

Today, Severn Cullis-Suzuki works locally in her native Canada on grassroots initiatives to help prevent global warming.

The example she set 17 years ago in Rio has inspired a generation of young activists and from November 28 to December 4th, they will gather in Copenhagen at the Children’s Climate Forum. 160 children from 44 developing and industrialized countries will gather to discuss, debate, share, resolve and act. They will seek their own strategies for cutting greenhouse emissions and living a low-carbon lifestyle. This conference is on the eve of another landmark event, The United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009,  a do-or-die moment for the world community to take action to avert climate catastrophe.

If the past is prologue, the delegates at COP15 would do well to listen to the young men and women who gather in the same city, with the same objectives, just one week before. Severn led the way for the 160 youth who are converging on Copenhagen. This is not a fun school field trip. These youth delegates intend to make a difference. Out of silence, a strong voice is emerging for action and if you look, you’ll notice it’s our children chafing at the bit.