On Thursday, Norwich School Green Group welcomed Old Norvicensian, Green Councillor and former Mayor of Norwich, Martin Schmierer, to lead an assembly about the environment. You can read his address below:

"Good morning, by way of introductions, my name is Martin Schmierer and I am a councillor here in Norwich and also an ON. 20 years or so ago I was sat on the pews where you are sitting listening to the school announcements, which rugby team had won or lost – if it involved me it was invariably the latter – and then whichever teacher wanted to say a few words about a subject close to their heart. I'm not going to lie, of the approximately 1000 assemblies I listened to, two decades on, only a handful have stuck in my mind.

Yet one such was in the build up to the Iraq war in 2003, where a call was made to demonstrate against the invasion – eerie echoes too today I fear. It helped start a political journey which has dominated my life and has led to me being asked back here to talk to you about the climate and ecological crises that the world faces. These are existential crises and arguably the two biggest issues facing our planet. Yet they have been knocked down the priority order over the last couple of years by Covid-19 and most recently the invasion of Ukraine. Indeed in a world that has experienced the upheavals of a pandemic the like of which has been not been seen for a century and more recently the re-emergence of the spectre of nuclear armageddon, it is perhaps easier to metaphorically put the kettle on, have a cup of cocoa and hope for all this to blow over.

Furthermore when we read the dire warnings from UN reports about rapidly rising global temperatures due to the burning of hydrocarbons; when we see pictures of rainforests being cut down and polar ice caps melting; when we hear that we are in the midst of a mass extinction event – what power and agency do we sat here today in Norwich have to affect a problem that by its very nature is global and thus requires a global response. After all, we are not the people who hold the levers of power. We are not in the cabinet rooms of Whitehall or Washington, we are not in the boardrooms of BP or Shell, nor are we in the labs and research faculties developing new technologies that could perhaps avert the climate and ecological crisis.

Instead we are sat here today in this amazing building that has stood here for over  900 years – a building that has seen revolutions and reformations that were caused by people who stood up to change the prevailing socio-economic orthodoxy. There is that lovely, oft-cited and now almost cliched phrase that “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.” That certainly rings true here.

But people are doing something. When you see the impact that one Swedish teenager can have in changing the global narrative on these matters. When you see how the school strikes for climate are forcing politicians to act or how in society over the last few decades, energy-saving lightbulbs or recycling have become the norm, or how many more people are walking and cycling to school, compared to during my time, or how many people are evaluating their dietary choices for the sake of the planet. In all these things I see that a positive change to tackle the climate and environmental crisis is clearly afoot.

And this has spilled over into popular culture. I didn't envisage a day Netflix would commission films satirising governmental inaction on climate change. I never expected to hear the likes of Jeremy Clarkson talking about the biodiversity crisis and the need for rewilding. Here I realise that we have come a long way since I sat in those pews 20 years ago. But the inconvenient truth is that we are still not doing all we could or should. Locally, this is where your school's Green Group comes in. My ask to all pupils here is to use this forum to tap into the idealism of youth and come up with ideas to make your school more sustainable for the next generation that will sit in those pews. My ask to all teachers here is not to stifle it.

I'm going to end by citing a favourite quote of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the words of the French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

“As for the future, it is not a question of foreseeing it, but of making it possible”. This is where we all come in"