The Girl Who Silenced The World For 5 Minutes

 
The 20-year-old video predated YouTube, yet it has since gone viral, with 20 million views.

Its picture is grainy but the words are crystal clear.

“We’ve come 5,000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways.”

A 12-year-old Canadian girl stands before world leaders, expressing the fears and despair of a young generation facing at a bleak future for the planet they will inherit.

All listened raptly. Some wept at the starkness of her appeal.

She became known as “the girl who silenced the world for five minutes.”

It was 1992, and representatives of world governments were gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the first United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development — the Earth Summit.

The girl was Severn Cullis-Suzuki, daughter of environmentalist David Suzuki. Two decades later, Cullis-Suzuki, with a child of her own, cares even more passionately about the issues now than she did then.

As the world prepares for another Earth Summit in Rio, we spoke with her about her recollections of that seminal conference and what in her opinion has — and has not — changed in the years since.

Cullis-Suzuki remembers the Earth Summit coming at a time of high environmental concern. Two weeks were allotted for the talks. The heads of state from 108 countries attended, including U.S. president George Bush Sr. and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney. Over 10,000 journalists were on hand.

Back then, Cullis-Suzuki recalls, addressing the depletion of the ozone layer was high on the environmental agenda, as was a growing awareness of a new environmental issue called climate change. A big concern was bringing on side the developing countries who were worried that being forced to comply with environmental measures would hinder their efforts to develop.

The end of the summit saw the signing of legally-binding agreements, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which would pave the way for the Kyoto Protocol. The nations of the world agreed to a global action plan for sustainable development: Agenda 21.

The world emerged from Rio with a sense of hope and promise.

“I look back at those documents that came out of Rio, and they were pretty amazing,” Cullis-Suzuki says. “Great promises were made at Rio, then it kind of fell off people’s agenda.”

The hope and promise were short-lived. Cullis-Suzuki recalls that, in the years following the Earth Summit, the global economy slipped into recession and economic constraints meant the environment was no longer a priority.

Cullis-Suzuki notes the parallels to today, as economic woes again displace the environment as a top concern for world leaders. She cites the fact the 2012 Earth Summit will last only three days. President Barack Obama will not be there, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not indicated if he will attend.

Climate change has risen to a pre-eminent concern.

“We’re in a new reality, living in a time of climate change. We already have climate refugees around the globe and now have to talk about adaptation and mitigation,” says Cullis-Suzuki, who holds a B.Sc. in ecology and evolutionary biology, and a masters of science specializing in ethnoecology.

In an ironic reversal, smaller developing countries like the island nations Grenada and the Maldives, who are already feeling the effects of climate change, are the ones begging industrial nations to address climate change.

However, this time there will be no agreements that legally bind countries to meet environmental targets. Instead countries will be asked to work voluntarily towards targets they set for themselves.

Cullis-Suzuki is now coaching young Canadians to represent the interests of the next generation as delegates at Rio 2012. We asked her if she were to stand before the Rio Summit 20 years after she first held the world’s leaders rapt, what would she say now?

“I’m hearing from a lot of people that the same speech I gave then could be given again today. That is a sobering thought,” she told us.

“Sometimes it’s hard not to feel really negative. I think I would ask why we have not succeeded? Why are we not further along?”

The answer may come from her father. In a recent blog, David Suzuki declared environmentalism a failure. Creating environment ministries and holding environment-focused conferences, he argued, made the environment just “another special interest” like agriculture or education. It was something separate from the economy and so fell to the wayside when recessions struck.

Ironically, Rio’s goal in 1992 was to integrate environmental awareness into global development. As Suzuki put it, “The event was meant to signal that economic activity could not proceed without considering ecological consequences.”

Twenty years later, world leaders once again need a child to stand up and remind them that, for the next generation, the environment is not a special interest, it’s their future.

Nearly One-Tenth of Hemisphere's Mammals Unlikely to Outrun Climate Change

The percentage of mammal species unable to keep pace with climate change in the Americas range from zero and low (blue) to a high of nearly 40 percent (light orange).

A safe haven could be out of reach for 9 percent of the Western Hemisphere's mammals, and as much as 40 percent in certain regions, because the animals just won't move swiftly enough to outpace climate change. For the past decade scientists have outlined new areas suitable for mammals likely to be displaced as climate change first makes their current habitat inhospitable, then unlivable. For the first time a new study considers whether mammals will actually be able to move to those new areas before they are overrun by climate change. Carrie Schloss, University of Washington research analyst in environmental and forest sciences, is lead author of the paper out online the week of May 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We underestimate the vulnerability of mammals to climate change when we look at projections of areas with suitable climate but we don't also include the ability of mammals to move, or disperse, to the new areas," Schloss said.

Indeed, more than half of the species scientists have in the past projected could expand their ranges in the face of climate change will, instead, see their ranges contract because the animals won't be able to expand into new areas fast enough, said co-author Josh Lawler, UW associate professor of environmental and forest sciences.

In particular, many of the hemisphere's species of primates – including tamarins, spider monkeys, marmosets and howler monkeys, some of which are already considered threatened or endangered – will be hard-pressed to outpace climate change, as are the group of species that includes shrews and moles. Winners of the climate change race are likely to come from carnivores like coyotes and wolves, the group that includes deer and caribou, and one that includes armadillos and anteaters.

The analysis looked at 493 mammals in the Western Hemisphere ranging from a moose that weighs 1,800 pounds to a shrew that weighs less than a dime. Only climate change was considered and not other factors that cause animals to disperse, such as competition from other species.

To determine how quickly species must move to new ranges to outpace climate change, UW researchers used previous work by Lawler that reveals areas with climates needed by each species, along with how fast climate change might occur based on 10 global climate models and a mid-high greenhouse gas emission scenario developed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The UW researchers coupled how swiftly a species is able to disperse across the landscape with how often its members make such a move. In this case, the scientists assumed animals dispersed once a generation.

It's understandable, for example, that a mouse might not get too far because of its size. But if there are many generations born each a year, then that mouse is on the move regularly compared to a mammal that stays several years with its parents in one place before being old enough to reproduce and strike out for new territory.

Western Hemisphere primates, for example, take several years before they are sexually mature. That contributes to their low-dispersal rate and is one reason they look especially vulnerable to climate change, Schloss said. Another reason is that the territory with suitable climate is expected to shrink and to reach the new areas animals in the tropics must generally go farther than in mountainous regions, where animals can more quickly move to a different elevation and a climate that suits them.

Those factors mean that nearly all the hemisphere's primates will experience severe reductions in their ranges, Schloss said, on average about 75 percent. At the same time species with high dispersal rates that face slower-paced climate change are expected to expand their ranges.

"Our figures are a fairly conservative – even optimistic – view of what could happen because our approach assumes that animals always go in the direction needed to avoid climate change and at the maximum rate possible for them," Lawler said.

The researchers were also conservative, he said, in taking into account human-made obstacles such as cities and crop lands that animals encounter. For the overall analysis they used a previously developed formula of "average human influence" that highlights regions where animals are likely to encounter intense human development. It doesn't take into account transit time if animals must go completely around human-dominated landscapes.

"I think it's important to point out that in the past when climates have changed – between glacial and interglacial periods when species ranges contracted and expanded – the landscape wasn't covered with agricultural fields, four-lane highways and parking lots, so species could move much more freely across the landscape," Lawler said.

"Conservation planners could help some species keep pace with climate change by focusing on connectivity – on linking together areas that could serve as pathways to new territories, particularly where animals will encounter human-land development," Schloss said. "For species unable to keep pace, reducing non-climate-related stressors could help make populations more resilient, but ultimately reducing emissions, and therefore reducing the pace of climate change, may be the only certain method to make sure species are able to keep pace with climate change." 

EurekAlert.org