ss=”size-full wp-image-1522 ” title=”mail.google.com” src=”http://ourplanet.infocentral.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/mail.google.com_.jpg” alt=”The "Flying Monkeys" at the US Center at RIO+20 (Courtesy Photo)” width=”222″ height=”148″ />
The "Flying Monkeys" at the US Center at RIO+20 (Courtesy Photo)
This month, the theme for the blog has highlighted sustainable development in honor of the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20, which took place from June 15-June 22 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference focused on reducing poverty, advancing social issues and ensuring environmental protection.
What you may not know about Rio+20 is that youth actively participated in this event – sharing their ideas, networking with key influencers and taking the opportunity to sit down and learn from one another. Allow me to introduce you to some incredible youth leaders that I meet at Rio+20 and share some of the innovative ways they are already working to create a future that lasts.
Meet the Flying Monkeys, a group of Girl Scouts from Ames, Iowa. These innovative teenagers are the creators of a prosthetic hand device that helped a four-year-old girl without fingers write for the very first time. Their advice to youth interested in engineering a better future is to find an idea you’re passionate about and test it out. They say no idea is too small, because big things have small beginnings.
Lucia Herrmann and Shayanth Sinnarahjah are two high school students who have developed a practical solution to clean energy problems. Together they designed a portable water filtration device that works without electricity and will be fully functional in Haiti this summer. Why is this invention important? 1 in 8 people do not have access to clean, safe drinking water and 1 in 5 deaths in children under 5 is due to waterborne related diseases.
Water Filtration Device showcased at RIO+20 in June, 2012.
Georgetown Energy, the winner of the White House Sustainability Challenge, is making a difference. This student-run organization based in Washington, D.C. designs and executes clean energy projects on their college campus, in their community and abroad. Their most notable accomplishment is the creation of the Green Revolving Loan Fund, which aims to further sustainability projects on campus. One of Georgetown Energy’s flagship projects involves installing photovoltaic panels on university-owned townhouses to show neighborhood residents that using solar energy to power homes is possible and economically viable.
Lisa Curtis, Sammera Savarala and
Lauren Borsa served as youth delegates at Rio+20! As Agents of Change for SustianUs, these women spent the duration of the conference working with government officials, civil society members, and other youth to promote youth-friendly, future-focused policies related to sustainable development. Check out the videos below for some words of wisdom from these fearless pioneers.
These are just some examples of how youth are developing creative solutions to social challenges. As Gary Guzy, Deputy Director and General Council from the White House Council for Environmental Quality said very eloquently, “Youth have inherited incredible economic, social and environmental challenges, but they continue to meet them with innovative solutions that inspire us all.”
How are you making your community more sustainable?
Please examine carefully and skillfully what is willfully ignored and conspicuously unexplored. Many ‘experts’ appear to have sold out to the “one percent” by participating in the widespread denial of science regarding the issue of human population dynamics/overpopulation. On the one hand we are confronted by the deafening silence of reputable scientists and on the other we have pseudo-scientists who broadcast whatever self-serving thought, contrived logic and ideology their benefactors demand. The human community is being deceived with false promises and directed down a primrose path by unsavory, mutually aggrandizing leaders. These so-called leaders are erroneously believed to possess the intellectual honesty, moral courage and will to act boldly that is required to acknowledge, address and overcome the colossal threat posed to future human well being and environmental health by the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers.
Any exploration of what is being consciously avoided and deliberately denied would include, I suppose, an examination of the best available scientific evidence related to the most accurate placement of the human species within the natural order of living things as well as all the seminal research related to the way the world we inhabit actually works. Perhaps rigorous scrutiny of “human creatureliness”, an easily observed aspect within the breadth of humanness, could be a point of investigation. Very little attention and research has been dedicated to this aspect of our all-too-human nature. Another point of inquiry has to do with the nature of the world we inhabit, with particular attention to the shape, make-up and ecology of Earth. Is our planetary home flat or round? Is the Earth like a teat at which the human species (and life as we know it) can forever suckle or is the planet composed of limited resources that are being wantonly dissipated today? Is the ecology of Earth frangible and can its ecosystems be degraded by human pollution to a point at which the Earth could become unfit for human habitation?
Children, why not invite your friends, parents, teachers and other elders like me to speak truthfully with you about what efforts are being made to assure all of you a good enough future by pursuing a path toward sustainability? Despite your elders’ claims of ignorance about what it means to live sustainably, do not be fooled. They are playing stupid. The challenge for you is to call out your elders and insist they immediately acknowledge that no one with wealth and power in the one percent wants to stop what is known today as “business as usual” practices, much less sensibly begin to plan for the right-sizing of ‘too big to fail’ corporations. Open discussions are everywhere eschewed of plans for transitioning away from the pernicious legitimization of transnational corporate ‘persons’. Too-big-to-succeed business empires are being grown ever larger rather than “powered down” into sustainable enterprises, ones that can co-exist with life as we know it on a planet with the size, composition and environs of Earth. To this end, perhaps you can speak loudly, clearly and often about what your elders need to learn fast and well regarding how to live in our planetary home without recklessly dissipating its finite resources, as leviathan-like corporations are doing now; how to adapt outrageous per capita overconsumption patterns and individual hoarding lifestyles in preparation for an end to economic growth (not development); how to sensibly stabilize and then humanely reduce the size of the human population to a level that assures sustainability of the human species and life as we know it; and how to deal effectively with the relentless pollution and environmental degradation that is occurring on our watch.
The Rio 20 Conference occurred last month. Where were the scientists who are ready, willing and able to discuss openly, objectively and honorably the “mother” of all emerging and converging, human-induced global challenges looming before the human family on our watch: human overpopulation? Have first class scientists capitulated to the politically correct agenda of the rich and powerful as well as agreed to speak only of that which the one percent determined is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially suitable, religiously tolerable and culturally prescribed? Children, perhaps I am mistaken about all of this. For your sake, I certainly hope so.
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Yes we have to create our future but the obstacles are very many and the government policy like the ones we have in uganda in youth money saga which is out to be given to youth to develop them selves or to add in there projects but still they want to eat it. we as concerned youth of GLOBAL FRIENDS CLUB AFRICAN CHAPTER ON HIV/AIDS&STDS IN LEARNING INSTITUTION we are fighting to much to help our selves so that money was going to be of much help to us on paying the Rent for our community office and buy stationary plus transport for facilitation of our developmental programmes and projects in both SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES