Wisdom Beyond Their Years
Source: The Green Business Letter

In September, the Earth Island Institute presented the 2003 Brower Youth Awards, named for the group’s founder. The young people honored offered a moving and inspiring portrait of a new generation of environmental leaders. The following is adapted from the young winners' acceptance speeches, presented at an event in Berkeley, Calif.


Whitney Cushing, 16, Homer, Alaska, founded the first environmental youth group on the Kenai Peninsula, which created the first recycling program in the region, lobbied to stop offshore oil and gas development, and helped impose limits on local chain-store development.

After we have faded, after our specie’s time is over, there will be certain beautiful truths and realizations of humanity that cannot fade. We have summitted so many mountains of achievement; we have created art, music, technology, masterpieces and monuments of architecture, learned to govern ourselves by compassion and intellect. We have recognized our own love. We can knowingly appreciate the gods’ work. We have put faces on god, the great unknown, marvel and try to understand the infinite. We can compare ourselves to the infinity of the universe, decide if we have a meaning, a soul, an afterlife, whether we are immortal or we are just one tick of a great clock. We have learned to appreciate all of god’s creation and we have learned to appreciate our selves.

But perhaps the one aspect that may define our civilization and is ironically seen as a luxury issue, is simply the relationship with which we treat the planet and those that inhabit it with us. Whether we can truly realize the gift of biodiversity and develop a civilization at peace with the planet rather than at war. Perhaps God granted us this one Earth, this one treasure, knowing full well that we would begin a process of destroying it, build a corrupt empire, exploiting and manipulating resources and ourselves, with a disregard for beauty and what sustains us over time.

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Rachel Ackoff, 18, Claremont, Calif., directed a Fair Trade Campaign for the Sierra Student Coalition, organizing a series of trainings around the country for local activists, giving them the tools to work for a global trade system in which the needs of the environment and workers are protected.

In the fall of my sophomore year of high school, I received a brochure announcing a Youth Summit on Globalization sponsored by the Sierra Club and Amnesty International. The summit promised to transform participants into effective grassroots organizers and give them the skills necessary to address the threats corporate globalization poses to human rights and the environment. I convinced my parents to let me travel to Washington, D.C., to find the knowledge and skills I thirsted for.

At the summit, I was introduced to the issue that has become my passion: free trade and its effect on the environment. As momentum in the fair trade movement builds, a new generation of student activists will have the ability to redirect the course of global trade towards a greener, more sustainable future. We can eliminate the right of foreign corporations to sue governments over environmental protections. We can defend our government’s right to protect endangered species, threatened ecosystems, and human health. Together, we can craft a system of global trade that supports, rather than undermines, the health of the planet.

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Thomas Nichols, 14, Corrales, N.M., conceived and implemented a program to preserve the fragile Rio Grande ecosystem by wrapping threatened cottonwood trees in chicken wire to protect them from beavers. The program replaced a policy of killing the animals to save the trees.

“You will find mountains of books in the mountains.” John Muir said that you will not get the best education on the environment from a book but from first-hand experience. There is more to learn from the trees and the mountains than you could ever find in a book. Kids and teenagers can have the biggest impact and effect on their community and environment. We are the coming generation and we have a very important voice. You can use this voice to congregate community and achieve what is most important to you.

The best way to take action and be involved is to be experiencing your surroundings, confront challenging issues, and challenge yourself. Take opportunities to learn about your community that interest you and fit your personality best. You may doubt the importance of your involvement and participation in opportunities, but it will lead to greater and better things. The most important thing is that you have fun with who you are, what you are doing, and you do not underestimate what you can achieve.

We should not wait until there is a problem before we take action. We should evaluate ourselves and our actions and try to improve the extent of our impacts.

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Andrew Hunt, 22, Bethesda, Md., established a statewide network of student environmental activists to lobby for better environmental policy in the state of Maryland. The group successfully worked to save Chapman Forest and prioritize public transit in the state's request for federal transportation funds.

I graduated from college this past spring, and started my first year of grad school. I’m the oldest of the Award winners this year, so I’m kind of moving on from this “student environmentalist” to a real one. Sincerely, student environmentalists do at least as much as “real environmentalists.” I came to a realization on this: You don’t have to be a walking encyclopedia to be an organizer. You don’t need to be this activist at the dinner table who’s rattling off things about how terrible this plate is, and what went into this microphone, and the strange chemicals in this carpet.

And even if I’m trying to get all the chemicals out of this carpet, which would be a really great thing, I don’t need to know all the statistics in my head everyday, because that’s not going to persuade people. Knowing people, getting to talk to them, and then showing them how you care, and telling all these other people, everyone you know, and who they know, and friends’ friends and friends’ friends’ friends that “Look we care and we all share this feeling that something is important, let’s go do something.”

It’s not that hard. Any fool can sign up to testify on a bill, at least in Maryland, and I think in many states. You should see some of these people! So you have well educated, informed students coming in, whether its some cute middle schooler, or some college student, or an old fart like me, you have people coming in, and it changes the whole dynamic in the room. Being able to do that, and being able to get everyone involved, that’s the most important thing.

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Illai Kenney, 14, Jonesboro, Ga., co-founded Georgia Kids Against Pollution in response to the growing number of local children with asthma. The group organizes protests and makes speeches to educate and encourage citizens to work for clean air and water, and to help curb global warming.

David Brower said, there’s a lot to be learned from climbing mountains. Tough mountains build bold leaders, many of whom, in the early days, came down from the mountains to save them. The world now needs these leaders as it has never needed them before.

As I visited the mountains where David Brower walked, I was reminded of another mountaintop leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Today it is Mother Nature that is crying out for justice.

We live in the Land of the Free. Free for what? Free to cut the last tree? Free to change pristine to polluted? Free to become consumer slaves?

I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double-price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption abroad. I speak as a citizen of the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation And I appeal to my generation to rise up, to stand to show everyone out here the people who want to change this planet and change the world, I dare y’all to rise up and show these people who you are! Be bold! Be brave! And stand up!

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Andrew Azman, 21, Owings Mills, Md., founded CU Biodiesel at the University of Colorado, organizing alternative fuels education, developing and building biodiesel processors, and fueling University buses with biodiesel.

In looking for solutions to help with our current environmental problems we often look to new cutting edge technology. The fact is that the solutions exist now! It’s crazy to think that over 100 years ago Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine to run on vegetable oil. He saw a future where family farms supplied cleaner energy for the world. It is time for us to revive his vision and build on it. Its time for us to rekindle our relationship with earth. We must look towards nature for guidance.

If the political leaders of today don’t recognize our intimate connection to nature we must look to the youth. People say the youth are the leaders of tomorrow but as you have seen tonight the youth are the leaders of today.

We all need to recognize our contribution to life. Either you part of the solution or your part of the pollution. As the late Edward Abbey once said, “Passion without action is the death of the soul.”