Severn Suzuki

Severn Cullis-Suzuki has been doing her best to save her planet from environmental catastrophe since she was knee-high to a grasshopper.

At age six when most girls would be playing with their Barbie dolls Cullis-Suzuki was selling her father's hardcover books at lawn sales for 25 cents each to raise money for native land claims in British Columbia.

By age 10 she had co-founded ECO, the Environmental Children's Organization, with a group of like-minded grade six girlfriends at Lord Tennyson Elementary School in Vancouver.

Their first project was to buy a water filter for natives in the Malaysian tropical rain forest whose water supply was threatened by over logging and the effluence of an ever-encroaching population.

In 1992, when she was only 12, she brought world leaders to tears with a speech at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in which she chastised them for failing to protect her and her friends from the looming environmental catastrophe.

"I'm afraid to go out in the sun now because of holes in the ozone. I'm afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it," Cullis-Suzuki said in a six-minute speech heard around the world. "I used to go fishing with my dad in Vancouver until just a few years ago. We found the fish full of cancers."

Then she read out a checklist of the things the adults had failed to do to protect and preserve the health of the planet and urged them to get on with the task of making it fit for 5 billion people, or get out of the way.

"I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realize neither do you...if you don't now how to fix it then please stop breaking it," she pleaded with the delegates.