September 20th, 2019

Thank you for showing up for our home, Planet Earth today. My name is Katherine Leswing and I am from Concord, NH – I am a teacher, an activist, and most recently, a new mom. I am here in large part for my 6-month old son. I’m going to need some audience participation. When I say WHY?, you say: WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER…

We need to depend on each other more than ever at this moment in history because WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. In public discourse on the climate emergency, there is often discussion over who is to blame, who is responsible, for our current crisis: Is it self-seeking politicians? Is it greedy corporations? Or is it the insatiable appetite of individual consumers, like you and me? To these questions, I say: It is all of us because: WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

To the politicians – present and future – we need you to be fearless and unwavering in your actions to avoid an environmental breakdown that will make our Earth uninhabitable for plant and animal life. Our earth is already 1 degree Celsius hotter than it was in the preindustrial era and how much hotter it gets in the coming decades is up to us. We must elect politicians who have a strong policy on climate change as the FOUNDATION of their platform. The economy, health care, racial and social justice, gender equality, education; none of these things matter much on a dead planet. Here in New Hampshire, we have work to do. Like the rest of the world, we must work towards net zero carbon emissions by 2050. We must elect politicians who prioritize clean energy and don’t veto it, politicians who oppose building new pipelines for fossil fuels (such as the proposed Granite Bridge Pipeline from the Seacoast to Manchester), and politicians who are behind shutting down the Merrimack Station Power Plant in Bow – the last operating coal plant in New England without a closing date. Politicians and their families will not escape the impacts of the global climate crisis, because WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

To corporations who rely on exploiting the earth’s resources at an unstainable rate: I say, shift your gears. The green economy is inevitable, it is just a question of whether it will be too late. This is an economy where companies are able to thrive without polluting our air, razing our forests, warming the planet, and filling our ocean’s and natural spaces full of plastic. Be an innovator, be ahead of the curve. Make the leaps that humanity and the earth need you to make today. There are no consumers on a dead planet. WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

Which leads me to the individual. As the remarkable Greta Thunberg said “No one is too small to make a difference.” And I do believe she is right. She is the reason I am standing here today with a FlightFree2020 shirt on. After being inspired by her trip across the Atlantic in a zero emissions sailboat, I became the Eastern States Coordinator for Flight Free USA – a movement that is asking people to pledge not to fly for 365 days because of the extraordinarily outsized carbon emissions of air travel. As individuals, we vote with our dollar. We tell corporations what we want. We can push the green economy to happen faster by investing in solar, hybrid and electric cars, refusing single-use plastic in all areas of our lives, and buying local. We can eat less meat, reduce our food waste, and buy fewer things that we don’t need. We can talk to our families and friends about the climate science and things that each person can do to make a difference, because WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

If the world does not reduce it’s carbon emissions by 45% by the year 2030, our world faces a 2 degree Celsius warming, a scenario which will lock in climate impacts so catastrophic our world would be unrecognizable. We have no time left for debating who is to blame. Right now, all we need is action, at all levels, because WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.