JADEN SMITH’S BEAUTY OF BECOMING FILM TRANSCRIPT

JADEN SMITH: What lead me to become a leading voice in global climate activism, I want to say that it starts around the time of me being 10 years old, learning how to surf, my surfing coach is telling me that the ocean is alive, and I think that is the coolest thing that I’ve ever heard. My environmental teacher told me that that it was true that it was alive, but that it was actually dying. When they explained to me that it was because of things that humans were doing that was you know putting co2 in the atmosphere and acid into the ocean, it really hurt me. Then my whole life became dedicated to trying to figure out this huge massive problem, and I wanted to try to find the lowest hanging fruit of something that I could impact within the environment, and then that just set me onto a journey through JUST Water and then now into 501CTHREE, and the work that I’m doing in Flint, Skid Row, and Newark. It launched me into this place where I’m just learning and educating myself and then I’ve now gotten to a place where I’m growing even more and more to where I’ve learned about not only the environment and what’s going on with the crisis with the environment and not only racism and the problems that are happening with racism but environmental racism and how those two things intersect. People are not getting the help that they need, people are not getting the infrastructure that they need, the education that they need, even how pure the water is, you know how deadly it is, there are so many young black children that are just taking this is in. Environmental racism needs to be spoken about more, it’s something that that we need to change in the world because it’s just it’s not okay, it’s heartbreaking. That’s what really set me onto my journey of becoming an environmental activist.