Clover Hogan: What to do when climate change feels unstoppable | TED

90,736 views ・ 2021-07-19

TED


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