This speech was by Max Ride, the 98% human 2% avian main character from the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson. You can find the following speech in Book 4: The Final Warning.
“Thank you for inviting me here today. I’m here to testify about things I’ve seen and experienced myself. I’m here because the human race has become more powerful than ever. We’ve gone to the moon. Our crops resist diseases and pests. We can stop and restart a human heart. And we’ve harvested vast amounts of energy for everything from night-lights to
enormous superjets. We’ve even created new kinds of people, like me. But everything mankind - personkind has accomplished has had a price. One that we’re all gonna have to pay.”
“Look. There’s a lot of official stuff I could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know, what the world needs to know, is that we’re really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic way than anyone has ever imagined.
“I mean, I’ve seen a lot of the world, the only world we have. There are so many awesome, beautiful things in it. Waterfalls and mountains, thermal pools surrounded by ice and snow as far as you can see. Beautiful beaches with sand like white sugar. Fields and fields of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside, like it’s done for hundreds of thousands of years.
“I’ve also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are becoming extinct right now, in my lifetime. Just recently, I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge, worldwide climatic changes caused by . . . us. We, the people.”
“A more perfect union? While huge corporations do whatever they want to whoever they want, and other people live in subway tunnels? Where’s the justice of that? Kids right here in America go to bed hungry every night, while other people get four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Promote the general welfare? Where’s the general welfare of strip-mining, toxic pesticides, industrial solvents being dumped into rivers, killing everything? Domestic tranquility? Ever sleep in a forest that’s being clear-cut? You’d be hearing chain saws in your head for weeks. The blessings of liberty? Yes. I’m using one of the blessings of liberty right now, my freedom of speech, to tell you guys, who make the laws, that the very ground you stand on, the house you live in, the children you tuck in at night, are all in immediate, catastrophic danger.”
“Every minute of every day, cars belch exhaust. Factories spew toxins into the air, land, and water. We’ve cleared millions of square miles of forests, rain forests, and plains, which means tons of topsoil is just washing away. Which means loss of animals and plants, and increased fires, floods, and coastal disintegration. Just by stuff people have made, created, we’re raising the overall temperature of the entire atmosphere. Well, we only have the one atmosphere! What do you plan to do when it’s destroyed? Can we all hold our breath until we get a new one?”
“The problem is here, now. Nine of the ten hottest years ever recorded have happened in my lifetime. I’m fourteen. More or less. There have been record-setting weather extremes across the globe— tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, wildfires, tsunamis. We’re warming up the planet, and the planet’s ice is melting. If only fifty percent of the world’s ice melts, countless rivers and streams will overflow and then dry up, killing hundreds of thousands of people from disease and starvation. The ocean water level will rise anywhere from four feet to maybe twenty feet. How many of your favorite vacation spots would be under water? Want to see the Eiffel Tower by canoe? Do any of you own beach houses? Kiss ’em good-bye. And not two hundred years from now. Soon. Maybe within this lifetime.”
“We can’t reverse this disaster, even if we all pitched in now and did everything we could, which, face it, we’re not going to do. A small percentage of us will do stuff, and other people will ignore the problem and hope they’ll be dead before it gets really bad. But there are things we can do that would at least help. It would make a difference."
“The US could ratify the Kyoto treaty. Pretty much every country in the world, except us and Australia, has ratified it. How can we be so pigheaded? Wait— don’t answer that. I know our time here is limited.
“In general, we need to pay more attention to what we do, what we buy, who we buy it from. Use compact fluorescent bulbs. If every house in America replaced just one of its regular lightbulbs with a compact fluorescent, it would be like taking a million cars off the road. I mean, how hard is that? I can do the math, and I’ve never even gone to school!
“Look into other kinds of power. Windmills, water mills, solar power— every year corporations pay a jillion dollars in legal fees to avoid getting fined for pollution violations. What if they took a tiny percentage of that money and put it toward coming up with better energy sources?
“Right now America looks like a fatheaded, shortsighted, gas-guzzling, arrogant blowhard to the rest of the world. And Sweden looks all clean and tidy and progressive. I mean, where’s our sense of pride?
“Why can’t we be the progressive leaders, showing the rest of the world how to clean up its act? Why can’t we, the people, get more involved and push through legislation that will help clean up our air, land, and water? Why can’t we take government funds from stupid things like war and use them for programs that will develop better fuel sources?
“I’m just one kid, and not even a regular kid. But if I can come up with all this, why can’t you? Will you wait until the water is lapping at your feet?” - Max's speech to Congress
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