Humanity in Focus recently featured “The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes“:

This was 16 years ago, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Rio Summit, Earth Summit (or, in Portuguese, Eco ’92), a major conference held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to June 14, 1992. the UN international Environmental Conference.

(hat tip: technology health and development)

This is a great speech by Severn Suzuki to the United Nations. More recently she wrote a book called “Notes from Canadian Young Activists: A Generation Stands Up For Change” and spoke out on the issues of responsibility and social change in an interview with the Tyee in Canada:

There are … so many amazing things happening right now…..

I’ve met a couple of people lately who have a very interesting attitude. They [said], “How lucky are we? How exciting is this time? How lucky are we to be alive when the forces of good and evil are just so clear, when we’re undergoing such a massive time of shift and when our actions really, really matter, for good or for bad?”

This is a really unique period in history and it’s a time when an individual can have more impact than ever before in our human history because of the Internet, because of communication, because of how easily we can travel. … We really have to realize how empowered we can be, how much we actually matter.