People who know me a little know that one of The speeches I have stuck in my heart are from Severn Suzuki, an environmental activist who at the age of 13 gave a speech at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 which even today and although I practically know it by heart, manages to give me goosebumps.
The first times I heard it, it was emotion that overwhelmed me, that emotion that you feel very rarely when you hear truths that you feel are yours and that you would not have been able to put into words in a clearer and better way.
And with that illusion and innocence, although I was a few years older than her, I decided to dedicate myself to the world of the Environment, study a career that would allow me to enter a little into the guts of the disaster and look for solutions and I started Ecofactory so that practically anyone can learn something new about it and realize that we have the means to turn that discourse into reality.
The most emotional part of the speech, the one that sticks in my stomach now, 18 years later and for which I think it is worth continuing to fight for, is that it is a timeless speech.
This is all happening before our eyes and we continue to act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I’m just a kid and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realize: you don’t either. They don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. They don’t know how to recover salmon from polluted waters. They don’t know how to resurrect an extinct animal. And they cannot recover the forests that used to grow where there are now deserts.
If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.
Juantxo Lopez de Uralde is a person who not only understands this discourse well, but also fights ruthlessly for this discourse to stop being timeless and become a reality. Fight for me and for you, but above all, fight for our children, for our grandchildren, and for all generations to come.
Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 19) we will pay our little tribute to him at the awards ceremony Naider Action and Commitment 2010 , which will be held at 6:00 p.m. in the recently renovated Campos Elíseos Theater in Bilbao.