A Letter to our Leaders

Dear Leader,

Namaste. We are the Indian Youth Delegation representing the concerns of Indian Youth and many more to the United Nations COP-15 in December. Our group, selected from all over India by the Indian Youth Climate Network consists of a 20 members team. We come to you in the interests of over 1.3 billion people in our country, 35% of whom are under age 15, and well over 500,000,000 are under 30.

We feel that India can lead the planet, setting an international example, as She simultaneously pursues meaningful development.

To this end, as the youth and for the unborn who are forced to live with the economic and environmental decisions that are made at Copenhagen in December, and by individuals every day, we would like to present our urgent concerns to you for presentation to the world community at the COP-15.

1. Leader-ji, our Mother India is literally covered in plastic wastes from Himachal, Arunachal and Kashmir to Kanya Kumari; from head to toe. Even in places where the use of disposable plastic bags at the check-out counter is banned, as in Himachal, the use of disposable plastic in nearly every facet of consumer products means an astronomical amount of waste. Plastic breaks down into toxic molecules whose chemical effects are devastating the human body and have been found everywhere, even in mother’s breast milk throughout the planet. 40% of all imported oil is used to make toxic plastic.

We want to see India leading the world in a strict policy preventing the use and production of disposable plastics.

We encourage you to demand this simple right for future generations, the right not to live in and with the plastic waste created by the last 6 generations; we encourage you to make a call for a national and planetary moratorium on disposable plastic usage.

2. Leader-ji, the lungs of the Earth are found in Her Trees and Forests. We want to see India leading the planet in halting deforestation and creating jobs in reforestation. Without healthy lungs, clean water, soils and clean air cannot take place or be found on the planet.

We encourage you to demand this right of all future generations to have the clean air and water that Nature intended for us, by calling for a national and planetary moratorium of any and all deforestation of existent forests and promoting reforestation and jobs in forest care and management.

3. Leader-ji, we need education that will enable us to meaningfully live in an over-populated world with tremendous human suffering at our doorsteps. We need education that will teach us how to clean up the planet, how to create and use technology that is applicable to our inheritance: the travesty of the natural creation and natural systems. We want to see India leading the world in using Her skilled scientists, Her engineers applying their education to find means to solve the toxic mess our planet is in. At the same time, out of the whole planet, our India has a unique culture, born of ethical thought and living. We do not see any other country having the high level of ethical human philosophy that India espouses.

We encourage you to call for education that takes these two facets, of living in our environmentally stressed world, and of making the right decisions for the good of all, no matter how difficult, into one curriculum.

4. Leader-ji, India has demonstrated that She has the capacity to engage in massive cooperation with righteous action. We want to see India leading the world in a one day a week moratorium on all polluting vehicles and industries, until industry and political agreements are able to bring down carbon emissions to well below pre-1990 levels.

We encourage you to call for our country and all countries to agree to participate in this world-wide moratorium on air pollution one blessed day a week.

5. Leader-ji, we want to see India’s development guided by ethics, Earth ethics. We want industry that takes into account environmental and ecological sustainability, human necessity and justification.  The earth is running out of ‘raw resources’ to produce items to feed a consumer based mentality and media. Please demand the use of the Precautionary Principle of Development to guide India.

We encourage you to call for industrial development and production that is based upon ecological realities and actual need, not individual greed.

6. Leader-ji, we want adults to take control of media to ensure that it promotes ethical values, not immoral ones. Values that will promote and encourage ecologically ethical and sustainable life and human relations. Adults feel it is their right to enjoy immoral values, and currently thrust them into our faces against our will, by newspapers, billboards, movies, television and advertisements. Our childhoods are short, we want to make the best use of them to gain noble character qualities to lead us through life. We demand our right not to be exposed to their thinking unless and until we seek it of our own.

7. Leader-ji, India does not need to be in the tragic mess She is in, with 50% of the world’s malnourished, the hungry and the poor. India has the resources herself to change things, the greatest resource is each and every Indian.

Leader-ji, without the participation of each individual, the destruction going on in the planet cannot be stopped. We urge you to demand democratic decision making power for all citizens begining at the community level. We want to see our families and communities having power and control over the environments we are in and resources to create, and make political and economic decisions that effect us. We can do this through an ever widening circle of participatory democracy beginning at the level of neighbourhood parliaments.

Leader-ji, these are the calls for action by India’s Youth today for ourselves and the unborn for generations to come. We ask you to carry our concerns into every activity that your position causes you to undertake. Please, help us to help the Earth, and restore the balance of Nature through intelligent and sane decisions, respect for one another and humane ethics.