Severn Cullis-Suzuki
environmental activist and writer
Severn Cullis-Suzuki (born November 30, 1979, in Vancouver, British Columbia) is a Canadian environmental activist, speaker, television host and author. She has spoken around the world about environmental issues, urging listeners to define their values, act with the future in mind, and take individual responsibility. She is the daughter of Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki.
Quotes
edit- I known I'm only a child, yet I know we're all in the this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal
- If you don’t know how to fix it, please, stop breaking it.
- This aged economic system is out of date!
- The lessons that are currently before us, should we choose to really integrate and learn from them, the lessons we've learned from COVID could directly apply to climate change and how we actually address a real emergency…We've learned that we are all totally interconnected in an extremely profound way, not only with our neighbors, with our communities, but also with people in London, people in China, we are just totally undeniably interconnected.
- If you don't get a vaccine, if you don't wash your hands, if you don't pay attention, your actions could have devastating effects. And this is the same for climate change. So I think right now, there's a huge opportunity for, you know, all of us individuals to take advantage of what we are learning right now, and apply it properly to the climate crisis that no one can deny is happening.
- COVID has changed our conversation about well being. Now what we're talking about in terms of well being, of mental wellness, physical wellness, it's very different from even a year ago. And so I think that we now have a different understanding of how we want to be living, and it's totally congruent to where we need to be living if we're going to address the climate crisis.
- Our current economic system is promoting the car, one car per person, it's promoting highways, it's promoting the fossil fuel industry, it's promoting very individualistic society.
- all the things that are right for the planet are more expensive, or more difficult, take more time. I mean, our whole society is built towards destroying ecosystems, essentially...we need systems change, and we need our governments to help us out here and make being a Canadian not congruent with destroying the climate.
- I always say that we’ve got to do two things. One, we have to look at our personal lives, and how we can reduce our climate emissions, how we can reduce our ecological footprint. That's the stuff that's our homework we all have to do. But we also have to get political...we have seen an increased awareness of Canadians. We do have an election where all parties are at least addressing the climate. That's new. So we are seeing a shift in awareness. And I think we're seeing in the climate strikes and marches that have been happening over the last few years, we're seeing that people are realizing they have to get political.
- We got to make sure we are involved and realize that now is the moment and we have agency, what we do is going to impact all of our lives in our children's lives.
- I find so much inspiration in Indigenous cultures around this planet. Right now, there are so many cultures that can show us different ways of being human. And they have existed for thousands of years. Indigenous people, for them, the extinction event that we are just as a colonial society coming on into awareness about-- for them, it's been happening for 500 years.