Severn Cullis-Suzuki spreads the word on sustainability

At 23, Severn Cullis-Suzuki is one of the world's most remarkable youth activists. Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn has been working on in environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's Rio Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave a powerful speech that deeply affected the leaders who heard it. (Read the text of the speech here)

In the spring of 2002, Severn and some friends founded an internet-based discussion group and website called The Skyfish Project. The daughter of a well-known Canadian scientist/environmentalist/TV host, Severn travels around the world speaking to delegates, students, and corporations about taking steps to a more sustainable, responsible, and just future for the planet.

Severn took some time in December 2003 to chat about The Skyfish Project, George Bush, and what it was like lecturing the Nike Corporation.

Why did you found The Skyfish Project?

I was in my senior year in college, and over the four years I was in the States, I'd made a lot of friends. We had conversations about lots of different things, especially over September 11 and the Bush election. You have all these conversations, and then where does the energy from those conversations go? You stop talking about it, and what happens? Nothing, right? So I thought it would be amazing to try to build on those conversations, not just let them drop. The other thing is, we were going to graduate. And after college, you have to earn a living. It's easy to lose those ideals, so the idea was to have a network to keep fostering the mentality that social change has to happen, that we want to be part of social change.

The website is mainly a discussion group, and a couple of projects have already come out of it.

I'd love to hear about them.

Our main project has been a document called the Recognition of Responsibility. We created it while I was still at Yale with a vision of going to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, the 10-year anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, in 2002. I knew I was going. We were upset because George Bush wasn't going to go--he was just starting to show the world that he didn't care to be part of international negotiations. We wanted to show that he didn't represent all Americans, and we came up with this idea of the Recognition of Responsibility.

Basically it's a one-page pledge. It says, "Today I recognize that I am part of one of the most powerful countries in the world. My population is only a fraction of the globe's population, yet we use far more resources. So today, I pledge to take responsibility for me lifestyle." And it has a bunch of ways to do that. (You can read and sign the Recognition of Responsibility at www.skyfishproject.org/ror.html).

Individual responsibility and accountability seem like big issues for you in your activism.

Since I was pretty young, my family taught me to stand up for what I believe. My dad is a second generation Japanese-Canadian, so I think his racial experience has definitely affected him; I grew up with the knowledge that even though Canada is such a wonderful and just a fair country in a lot of ways, any country is capable of prejudice and you always have to be aware of that. I've had pretty strong role models in taking a stand.

When I was young I formed ECO, the Environmental Children's Organization, because of an experience I had in the Amazon where I witnessed this incredible world and saw that it was being burned. I thought, "Someone has to do something about this!" So eventually we went to the World Summit in Rio. We went there to remind the delegates why they were there and ask them to do the right thing.

We got back, and ten years passed, and what do we really see from that summit? Well, I don't know that we've seen too much.

Over the last few years, after Rio, I was invited to many, many different conferences. Over time I've realized: this is not where we're going to see change. We've seen positive activism happening in the last ten years at the grassroots level, in small communities. It's about the individuals that make up the statistics about consumption and pollution, as well as the people who feel the negative impact, who are actually going to be the change.

That's a powerful revelation.

It is powerful, because you realize that each individual really does count. And the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that each person is a role model to all the people around us. Not only the children, but everybody. That's how cultures evolve and things become cool--the influence of a few individuals that catches on.

Are you choosing now to spend your energy speaking to groups other than politicians?

I speak to very wide range [of people], from adults to elementary school kids. I was speaking to the Nike Corporation a couple months ago and I really didn't know what to do at first--whether to address them as a corporation, or as individuals--but I decided to speak to them as individuals and asked them to think about what was important to them, and shared what was important to me. I think we share a lot of common human values, and they are connected to how we treat our environment and our communities.

Did Nike invite you to speak to them?

Yeah… I think they invite various speakers in. at their headquarters in Portland; they take very good care of their employees. Nike is trying to be seen as cleaning up its act, becoming more socially responsible. They actually have a sustainability department, which is working within Nike to try to change it. It's good--the people I met had worked in NGOs and had decided that the best way they could make change was right in the belly of the beast. I still don't know how I feel about it. They're still Nike, and just by virtue of being so huge, a lot of negative things have come out of that. But they're responding to consumer pressure and changing. At the same time, it's kind of weird because they're only doing it to make sure that their sales aren't hurt.

What do you make of all the speculation over the death of the Kyoto Protocol, and how important are treaties like that for reducing global warming?

I think on the one hand, the actual groundwork for reducing emissions is going to be at such a smaller scale than the treaty. Despite waffling on the Kyoto Protocol, there are many companies and whole cities that have adopted it and are going ahead and reducing emissions. Toronto has apparently reduced emissions by three times of what it would have had to under the Kyoto Protocol. There's a whole roster of corporations in Canada that have met and surpassed the levels in the agreement.

A woman once asked me after a speech, "How can multinationals like Shell and others possibly meet Kyoto?" The fact is that Kyoto is just the tip of what we need to do to deal with global warming. What the Protocol is asking for in terms of emissions is not that big a deal.

But the Kyoto Protocol was the first treaty to recognize that we share an international resource: the atmosphere. We all depend on it. It's very symbolic, which is great, but the actions need to happen at the ground level. For it not to survive is really disappointing.