Transcriber:
I grew up in Australia's
Tropical North Queensland,
fishing frogs from the toilet
and dodging snakes
that hung from the ceiling.
Wetting down old sea turtles
stranded at low tide outside our house.
I spent more time outside than in,
delighting in the wonders of nature.
By age 11, I wasn't allowed
to watch horror films,
so I turned to documentaries instead.
"The Cove," "Food, Inc,"
"An Inconvenient Truth."
The first time I experienced heartbreak
was when I sat glued
to my computer screen,
staring at mass dolphin hunts
that turned the shoreline red.
Staring as million-year-old forests
were bulldozed to produce Big Macs,
staring as Al Gore projected graphs
that showed how quickly
we were devouring the Earth.
And how good we were
at pretending otherwise.
The second time I experienced heartbreak
was in November of 2019,
as I watched my country go up in flames.
As one billion animals
were incinerated by the inferno.
As friends tried to rescue their homes,
poised on tin roofs,
armed with hoses until the smoke
and embers clung to their clothes.
I felt despair.
Grief.
Frustration.
Fury.
And staring at that wall of fire
higher and more ferocious
than any I'd seen before,
I felt helpless,
small,
powerless to stop the flames,
powerless to protect the place I love.
Australia's black summer was soon followed
by the firestorm in California
as their summer rolled around,
as well as flooding in Jakarta
that displaced 100,000 people.
More violent hurricanes
along the east coast of America
and biblical plagues of locusts
that threaten the food supply
for millions of people in East Africa.
Young people today
have not created this reality.
We've inherited it.
Yet we're told where the last generation
with a chance to save
the fate of humanity.
Is it any wonder that there is an epidemic
of mental health problems?
Eco-anxiety is on the rise
and young people seem to be
some of the worst affected.
Research from 2019 showed that in the UK,
70 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds
were feeling eco-anxious,
feeling helpless, grief, panic, insomnia,
even guilt around climate change.
Environmental disaster is the biggest
mental health issue of our lifetimes
and in our war against nature
young minds are the collateral damage.
At my own organization, Force of Nature,
we've witnessed the same
on a global scale.
We've been talking to students
in over 50 countries
from Tel Aviv through Jakarta,
New York to Managua.
All of them have shared
this existential dread
that keeps them up at night.
Dread not only fueled by doom scrolling,
but by the belief that adults,
especially adults in power, do not care.
When I first discovered documentaries,
I decided the world was run by people
who were selfish and greedy,
that the rest of society didn't care.
That we humans were a plague
on our own planet.
I've since spent the past 10 years
lobbying decision makers across business,
policy and civil society,
working with students in the classroom
and chief executives in the boardroom,
and I can tell you that my bleak outlook,
while in some ways right,
was in more ways very, very wrong.
Picture yourself as a senior executive
at a big multinational.
In the 25 years you've been climbing
that corporate ladder,
you've been told your job is to make money
and maintain the status quo,
to deliver value to shareholders,
to avoid the kind of risks
that could cost you your job.
You recycle.
You share climate change
articles on LinkedIn.
You even went vegetarian two years ago,
after watching a documentary
on mass farming.
Yet when you come home
at the end of the day,
you get the sense that your kids
see you as the problem.
They wish you were
the climate change protester
gluing themselves to the glass tower,
not the person sat inside the building.
When I first started working
with people in power,
I was surprised to realize
that they often felt
the least powerful of all,
and most of these leaders
perform mental gymnastics
to get away from those
uncomfortable feelings.
Young people today
are falling into despair
while the adults in our lives
are making sense of the situation
through denial.
When I ask leaders to describe
the future they envision,
it's something of a techno utopia.
Flying cars in a world
where deadly diseases are eradicated.
Yet when I asked eight and nine-year-olds
in the classroom the same question,
the future they describe
is a dystopian blockbuster.
Empty supermarket shelves.
Cities underwater.
The kind of place no one wants
to find waiting for them
when they grow up.
You might find comfort in denial.
Numbing yourself to our
hyper-consumptive culture, sleepwalking,
even though the science tells us
that we're hurtling toward the cliff.
You might feel despair,
like so many of my generation.
Because while feelings
of anxiety, frustration, anger,
can wake us up to the issues,
they can crush us if we carry the weight
of the world on our shoulders.
Neither despair nor denial help anyone.
They cause us to shut down,
to remove ourselves from the picture.
Denial erases our responsibility.
Despair lumps us with all of it.
The story of denial sounds something like,
"It's not up to me,
because someone else will fix it."
The story of despair sounds like,
"It's not up to me
because it's too big to fix."
Do you hear the similarity?
Despair and denial might appear
to exist on polar ends
of the generational spectrum,
yet they stem from the same place.
How powerless we feel.
All of us.
I believe that the threat,
even greater than climate change,
is how powerless we feel
in the face of it,
concerned moms and dads,
cautious corporate leaders,
anxious 11-year-olds.
And I don't believe
we will solve this crisis
or act on the many opportunities
it presents us with
until we've mobilized mindsets.
So how do we shift out of despair,
out of denial, towards something
radically different?
There's a quote in "Spider-Man":
"With great power
comes great responsibility."
Yet what if the opposite is true?
What if it's really "with great
responsibility comes great power?"
This is something that all
of the world's movers and shakers
have known to be true.
They weren't born leaders.
They simply decided to make themselves
personally responsible.
Now, solving climate change
is not your responsibility
because it's outside of your control.
What you are responsible for
is the thing inside your control,
indeed, the only thing
that has ever been inside your control.
Your mindset.
We all have stories running on repeat,
stories that immobilize us,
stories the world impresses upon us
in boardrooms and classrooms alike.
"I'm just one in 7.8 billion people,
I'm too small to make a difference."
"I'm not smart enough."
"I don't have the experience."
"I'm not the expert."
"The system is too broken,
our leaders too shortsighted,
our society too shackled
to the status quo."
These stories paralyze us.
Rewriting them is the single
most powerful thing anyone of us can do
for the planet and for ourselves.
Now ask yourself.
Which story gets in the way
of you taking action?
Then think of the one thing you could do
to challenge that story.
If your story is
that you're not smart enough,
you could challenge it
by focusing on the skills and talents
and gifts that you bring to the table.
If fashion is your passion,
how do we reimagine our relationship
with clothes to be fully circular?
If you love making food,
how do we stop a third of it
from being wasted every single day?
If you're a talented musician,
how do we communicate
the urgency of climate action
through a universal language?
If your story is
that the system is too broken,
the problem is too big to fix,
visualize what it would look like
for you to focus on a single problem.
The climate crisis is the symptom
of many interconnected problems,
from food waste to fast fashion,
social inequality to how we've divorced
ourselves from nature.
Every problem requires a solution.
A solution delivered by a someone,
like you.
When you look back on your own life,
what do you want to see?
Will you have chosen despair, denial,
or something different?
Will you have been a spectator
to our planet's problems
or the person who did
something to fix them?
What will your story be?