Perreault Magazine - 69 -
My friends, I leave you with a final thought. As you look around you, remember what the history of the human journey teaches us. The greatest struggle we face is not inventing clean technologies or fundamentally changing the way we produce value or measure growth: these are small challenges compared with how we have changed the world and our own civilization over the course of the few centuries that we've risen up. I refuse to believe that the pace of change for survival will be slower than the pace of change for profit. In times of war, in times of threat to our families or nations we've found unforeseen strength, and we've done impossible things.
But there's an essential ingredient. Without it, the burst of efforts and evidence of change that we see today will remain too little, too late.
That ingredient is hope. It's the belief that change is possible. I saw with my own eyes what happened to the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa once people in large numbers came to believe change was possible. I look around today, and I see more and more evidence that we can beat the worst ravages of climate change. It will take fast action. It will take courage like we have never witnessed on a global scale before – from banks, from corporations, from artists, governments, religious and labour leaders, the charity sector, the billionaires, and from every one of us. Every time the world takes a step forward, be it Apple powering all of its data centers on renewable energy, be it Obama saying no to Arctic oil, be it your university's decision to divest from coal, your neighbor's decision to grow their own vegetables, your parent's decision to volunteer for a cause, or your colleague's decision to eat less meat – whenever anyone makes a contribution to building that better world we know in our hearts it is possible, we have a duty. A duty to share. To tell the world. To make that courage contagious. Make it a norm. Make it an expectation that this is how the world works. Belief requires evidence, and the stories we tell one another evidence our beliefs: some stories propel us forward. Others hold us back. We can believe that change is impossible, or too expensive, or naive, and consign the fate of this earth to death by business as usual. Or we can fight back. We can stand up and say that a better world is not only possible, it's being built right now, by the individual and collective acts of courage of every one of us.
To all of you reading this, to all my colleagues at Greenpeace, to all of us working for a better world, thank you for letting me be a part of your journey. I wish you strength. I wish you happiness. I wish you courage.
Continued from page 43
Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo says goodbye.