Kia ora koutou
My name is George and I’m blogging as part of my role as a New Zealand Youth Delegate to COP 15 in Copenhagen in December.
My main area of interest is Representation… and this is the theme underpinning my blogs. Youth are an essential part of Climate Change discussions – we are the ones who will inherit the legacy to do the best we can or to pick up the threads of humanity if those in power now fail. Yet youth are hardly represented in Parliament and worse have a historically terrible turnout at the polls. So I will try to focus on the job government are doing and aim to be unbiased, but I’ll be calling it like I see it otherwise it wouldn’t be a blog!
Why I’m involved in the delegation:
Guilt: I come, body and soul, from the sector of our country that is integral to climate change debate in NZ, the farming community. My eyes were opened to the damage inflicted on our planet in order to gain financially. I am part of the industrial world that has created this and responsible because I benefit from it. While Climate Change will affect NZ in the future it’s already claiming lives throughout the world.
Gift: I have been given the gift of having empathy and the only thing that is bigger than my heart is my mouth. And whatever fear I sometimes feel about public speaking or sticking my neck out in my community this is quelled by an overwhelming sense of individual responsibility.
Responsibility: From this comes social responsibility – the need to empower youth. Because they are the way out of this catastrophe, and they aren’t set in their ways enough not to change. Change is against our human nature and hard for older people which is why we need to educate the youth now. And a sense of moral and ethical responsibility – to all the people who aren’t benefitting from this capitalist world, yet are the innocent and reasonably defenceless cultures that face the worst fatalities. An economic responsibility – if we don’t show business that they need to act now, it will impact more highly on our citizens in the future and again hit the poorest and more undeserving first and foremost.
And doing a fabulous job too