My pen name is Jona David and I am nine, from King’s College School in Cambridge. My first book, The Epic Eco-Inventions, has just been published. It’s the first adventure of a mad genius eco-inventor boy and his little brother who live on a lake in a very green town. At first, the inventor boy hides his work in a secret lab, worried that others will laugh at him. But after defeating a bully who tries to threaten his little brother and steal his inventions, he gains the courage to share his new eco-technologies to protect the earth.
It is important to be ourselves, and to stand up for each other and our environment. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child celebrated its 25th anniversary last year. It is a global agreement for all children that our rights to a clean environment and to education will be respected. The problem is that we have a really long way to go, all over the world, to keep these promises. Luckily, there is a lot that we can all do. Here are three ideas:
First, our schools and communities can adopt new eco-technologies for more sustainable education. This can spark children to become interested in eco-science for the rest of our lives, and to learn how to use it in our everyday lives. Schools can pilot renewable energy with their own windmills or solar panels. Clubs can use sustainable transport with hybrid buses or bikes. We can all make sure to re-use absolutely everything (and try to avoid stuff that cannot be recycled). We can also form school eco-committees with our own eco-codes, and clubs to restore ecosystems in our communities. We can become global climate justice ambassadors, making pledges to plant billions of trees. Trees absorb CO2 emissions, provide habitat for animals and biodiversity, and also prevent floods and erosion.
Second, we can get together in global movements and encourage our world leaders to make our whole economy greener. This way, when children grow up, our jobs will help instead of hurting the environment. In some countries, kids are already forming youth cooperatives or even our own small companies. We can all work together to fight climate change and to ensure people respect our environment instead of destroying it, like Nobel peace prize-winner Wangari Maathai did with the Green Belt Movement that planted 51m trees in Kenya.
Third, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees our educational and environmental rights. It also promises us the right to a voice, to be heard and to be part of decision-making, like Malala Yousafzai did when she was 11 (she also won the Nobel peace prize). Even as children, we can blog, use new media to network with others, make posters, start our own radio shows or even write our own books.
When it comes to the earth, our own survival, and the survival of all future generations, is at stake. It’s urgent. Children’s voices can tell others about problems. But most importantly, we can also become part of the solution.
Jona David is the author of The Epic Eco-Inventions. It is published by the United Nations and the Voices of Future Generations Children’s Book Series, which is a global project that specifically includes the aim of getting children to think and write about how their entitlement to a clean environment and to spread the word amongst their peers, parents and teachers.
