In this excerpt from "The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes", Suzuki most likely asks this question to make her audience feel b. ashamed.
In 1992, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, a Canadian twelve-year-old, addressed the United Nations assembly in Brazil. After her speech, all leaders were silent for almost five minutes. She spoke of pollution, the hole in the ozone layer, species extinction and the devastation of forests. When she asks if leaders were worried about these things at her age, she is trying to make them feel ashamed, and she says afterward “If you don’t know how to fix it, stop breaking it."
