This is the second of the two speeches I have written as an assignment while attending the Art of Persuasive Writing and Speech at HarvardX.
It is time to see the world through the eyes of a child who will someday ask for the future. As I speak today, in the climax of our civilization’s golden age, and as you listen to my speech in rightfully deserved leisure and convenience, you forget that the face of our planet is a subject of great change. A drastic change. A change that will forever mark the coming generations.
No, I am not emphasizing the post-effects of climate change. Although undeniable–as every person with a minimal degree of education would come to understand–the climate changes are a process that occurs naturally on our planet. The sea levels rise and then they fall, the atmosphere pollutes and then they cleanse, the temperatures grow and then they stabilize to keep sustaining a diverse flora and fauna. In other words, nature breathes and life breathes with it at a steady pace.
I am, however, to greatly emphasize how much mankind influences that inevitable process and that to its own detriment.
Let us first take a look at the staggering numbers. Every single year, we emit thirty-five billion metric tons of uncaptured CO2. That number varies and may reduce, but not more than an annual 0.5%, which is nowhere near enough to make a positive factor. Every single year, we deforest an area of anywhere between eighty and a hundred thousand square kilometers, which amounts to the size of countries like Portugal, Hungary, South Korea, or Austria. Every single year, we toss twelve million tonnes of plastic waste into our oceans, where it stays as a permanent source of hazardous pollution. Every single year, we industrialize and irrigate new territories, allowing a worldwide decline of groundwater, and only in the last eleven years, it has fallen by thirty-five percent, resulting thus in worldwide droughts and depletion of vital water wells. Every single year, the heatwave index rises, making the heatwaves more frequent and longer, with a growth rate of 0.4 times and a length of two days per decade. Every single year, the storms are getting stronger and their post-effects are implicating broad communities and the already-suffering wildlife. Every single year, we neglect completely the aforementioned indicators of our demise, treating the limited resources of our nature as if drunk millionaires in the spark of reckless gambling.
But what we are gambling here, my good people, is not the money we can print in the quantities that our hearts desire, and not the gold we can dig out from the depths of Earth’s crust or sieve from the banks of sandy rivers. We are indeed gambling our children’s prerogative to a decent and normal livelihood we are ignorantly taking for granted, with our ears deaf to so many warnings of the renowned environmental and ecological experts.
By signing the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, we have placed our joined efforts into making important decisions. We have vowed to reduce global warming. We have vowed to build resilience and decrease vulnerability to the adverse effects of climate change; to uphold and promote regional and international cooperation. That was our oath to our daughters and sons, who have no voice we can hear so that they could stand up for their basic human rights: air to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat.
We have had dreams and so we dreamt of wealth, fame, and vast abundance of all kinds. And will our children have the luxury of dreaming such lush dreams?
Ask yourselves, when you believe that your action or inaction does not matter; what is it that we are leaving behind? Is it fruitful or barren lands? Is it clean or oily seas? Is it snow-capped mountains or melting glaciers? Is it trees that reach into the skies or the rotting stomps in the erosive soils that take away our safest homes? Who is it that we really are – the caretakers or the destroyers of our own existence in this beautiful world? Are we not yet aware of how rare our world is in the boundless universe? Do we not know that we should guard it with all our might, even if we have to guard it against ourselves?
We have strayed from our agreements and our oaths. We have gone under amnesia to the promise we had made of our inheritance, and God knows we have promised only so little… And you can hear from the silent lips of the one hundred and thirty-seven species that go extinct every single day due to merciless and heartless clearcutting of the ancient rainforests, that we have done so far right next to nothing.
But I have faith. I have hope. I see it in the eyes of many, who desperately need clear guidance and persistent leadership. They need role models; humble icons and noble heroes without capes. I believe all of us have the fortitude and modesty to offer our descendants at least a taste of the sweet fruit of opulence we eat today in careless mouthfuls.
We can’t rewind the clock and turn back time but we can sit together and brainstorm long-term solutions, to be enacted on an everyday basis. If we start today and keep on it tomorrow, we can change the tragic trajectory of the drastic change awaiting right behind the corner of this one-way street.
Let us hear the scientists of fusion energy, who have finally achieved success in making clean and highly potent, green energy. Let us hear the architects and the millers who see a way to build and make paper without obliterating forests. Let us hear the engineers of transportation who envision traffic free of internal combustion engines. Let us hear the adversaries of wars and patrons of peace, who understand how violence created only incurable suffering; because they know how modern warfare scars the lands and not only the human minds and hearts. Let us hear the astronomers and space enthusiasts, aspiring to touch the soil of Mars and distant moons. Let us hear the ones proposing global unity; the harbingers of a better tomorrow. The visionaries. Those greater than greed and vanity; immune to corruption. The makers of everyday miracles so small we call them good deeds. Let us hear our own inner voice that knows what is the right thing to do because the world depends on no one else but us.
It is time to see the world through the eyes of a child who will someday ask for the future, and the change ahead will indeed forever mark the coming generations.
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