For millions of years human beings and the versions of us that weren't quite human beings
have existed in a relationship with the world around them, with the natural environment.
We learned how to eat in it, we learned how to survive in it, we learned how to
protect ourselves from the elements, we learned how to travel through it,
and that's something that never changes. People evolved, people learned. People
came about in the natural environment. Right now I'm in New Zealand a place that human beings had
changed enormously by coming in by doing foolish short-sighted things. They brought in rabbits
to a place that really only had birds, and then were getting overrun by rabbits
so decided to bring in stoats and weasels, and rapidly discovered that the stoats and
weasels might have been eating the occasional rabbit but they were also doing incredible harm
to wonderful native birds. I'm in a place where they're trying really hard to put things right,
and in which they're very close to whatever happens with climate. All the climate changes
are affecting people here. Young people have
been the catalyst of a lot of important movements over history partly because they're not tired and
because they know that things can be different. They understand that a few determined people,
a few loud people, a few people who are prepared to take risks prepared to stand up and be counted,
can change the world can change the way that things are. It doesn't always have to be this way
and right now I'm so enormously impressed by all of the activism, all of the noises young people
are making, and the actions they're taking to support those noises. They are talking the talk
and a lot of them are walking the walk as well and that makes us reconsider. I as a writer
used to travel an incredible amount around the world. Now I look at the
travel practices that I had even up to a couple of years ago and I go that's not sustainable.
It's not sustainable for the world, I need to rethink this, I need to do stuff that's different.
I'm a storyteller. It's my job to tell people stories very often,
to tell them stories that aren't true in order to illuminate greater truths in order to
tell them things that maybe they already know, maybe they haven't quite let themselves face,
haven't quite let themselves confront, and right now we're facing disaster.
The news is not good. Every statistic everything we run into shows us that there are big,
big problems that are happening now and those big problems will cause more problems
and we should have acted 30 years ago. We should have acted 20 years ago but
if we weren't acting 30 years ago and we weren't acting 20 years ago the best time to act is now.
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