You can give today's youth a fighting chance just by talking about it

Touchy, funny, quirky or cogent, it's the Quote of the Week:

I walked around and asked a number of young people what they expect of Copenhagen. What strikes me when I do it is how important young people are. It is we who will take over the world afterwards. Those that I talk to really cares about what happens here on our planet, and that also must be done soon. As soon as possible. When the world has its eyes focused on the Copenhagen, it is far too good an opportunity to let it slip out of one’s hands. It is now we must act for ourselves in old age, for our children and our grandchildren. For all farmers, all women, all of which have already been bad for water, for all who live below sea level.

We must not only act, we can act and do so, we can make a big success!
[Google translation]

Jonathan Sundqvist
adopt a negotiator tracker at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen

Here is what the young people he interviewed had to say.



Talk at my high school graduation forty-plus years ago was whether college mattered, given the threat that our leaders would push the button and annihilate us all before we graduated four years later. Thankfully, that did not happen and our boomer generation prospered more, bought itself more trips, toys and homes, and contributed more pollution and more waste than any generation the planet has ever seen.

Not only do the youth of today face an increasing threat from nuclear proliferation, they face the multi-barreled threats of ever rising seas, increasingly violent weather patterns, starvation-inducing droughts, exposure to higher and higher levels of sun rays on the cancer-causing end of the spectrum, and the accompanying fear-induced violence, all due to unmitigated global warming.

We have about five seconds left to slow global warming enough to give us time to discover ways we might halt and reverse it. If we waste them, chances are good the Earth will look more like Mars in a couple hundred years than the beautiful Blue Marble space flight brought to us in the 70s.

The world's young people are paying attention. They're doing something about it this week and next in Copenhagen.

This may be one of the most important questions I will ever ask. What do you think we need to do here at home during this two weeks to help them?

At the very least, we can spread the word about their concerns. If you're a blogger, help me do that will you? Post links to this page or to the links on this page on your blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, wherever you hang out. Let's give these kids a fighting chance.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.