Making a difference
Transcriber: Riya S
Reviewer: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka
(English and Welsh)
Good morning, everyone.
My name is Seren Dovey Evans,
and I’m a student
at the Alun School, in Mold.
Now, as a young child,
I was very inquisitive and very curious,
always asking big, big questions
that would take me days
to find an answer to.
“What’s in the sky?”
“How do light switches work?”
Everything and anything
to the point where I would annoy
my parents, my teachers, my family,
because I just wouldn’t shut up
with these questions.
There was one question however
that I couldn’t answer,
and that is, “What do we all share?”
or “What do we all have in common?”
Now, take a look around.
Can you think of anything
that every single person
in this room has in common?
Now, last year, in lockdown,
it came to me.
So during all the news
of the COVID and the pandemic,
there was one headline
that really made me smile.
And it was the dolphins
that had returned to the Venice Canals
because the waterways were clear.
And also, you could see
the Eiffel Tower from London
because of all the reduced air pollution.
It made me realize the negative impact
that humans have had on the environment.
As humans went into hibernation,
nature was allowed to thrive again,
and it was just amazing to see that,
but also really, really -
shocking to see how badly
that we’ve damaged the environment.
So this helped me answer that question
“What do we all share or have in common?”
We share the Earth,
our Earth, our home.
It’s really -
you know, we’ve inherited the planet
from our ancestors,
and with that,
we’d inherited its problems.
We have a choice.
We can either pass on the problems
or we can try to fix them.
If we don’t try to fix them,
then we may lose the chance
to become ancestors.
We may not have a generation
to pass the planet onto.
We need to stop passing the blame.
And we need to accept
that this is a shared responsibility.
It’s our responsibility,
our planet, our home.
We need to change the way of thinking
that “Oh, it’s their fault.
It’s not my responsibility.
I can’t do anything about it.”
We can all make changes.
And if there’s anything
that you remember from today,
the biggest thing that you can change
is your mindset.
Thank you.
(Applause)