Quotes

This section consists - we think - of great quotes, mostly relating to resistance, oil and climate change, that we have come across. We’ll keep posting them up and once there are quite a few we may even figure out a way to categorise them. Let us have any you think might look good up here...

'In the world as it is, the looking-glass world, the countries that guard the peace also make and sell the most weapons. The most prestigious banks launder the most drug money and harbour the most stolen cash. The most successful industries are the most poisonous for the planet. And saving the environment is the brilliant endeavour of the very companies that profit from annihilating it. Those who kill the most people in the shortest time win immunity and praise, as do those who destroy the most nature at the lowest cost.'

Eduardo Galeano

‘In the final analysis, accepting and living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to what is, culturally speaking, the human home: to the ancient order of family, community, good work; to a reverence for skill, creativity and creation; to a daily cadence slow enough to let us watch the sunset and stroll by the water's edge; to communities worth spending a lifetime in; and to local places pregnant with the memories of generations’.

Durning, 1992, 'How much is enough?'

'The Kyoto Protocol has put its faith in markets. How can we as indigenous people put our faith in these approaches when it is the market's unquenchable thirst for consuming resources that has caused the problem in the first place.'

Clayton Muller-Thomas of Indigenous Environment Network (ENI - www.ienearth.org)

‘9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1990’ and as a result of this global warming and ensuing climate chaos, ‘a quarter of the world’s mammal species and 12% of bird species are in danger of extinction’

New Economics Foundation (2002).

'In the world as it is, the looking-glass world, the countries that guard the peace also make and sell the most weapons. The most prestigious banks launder the most drug money and harbour the most stolen cash. The most successful industries are the most poisonous for the planet. And saving the environment is the brilliant endeavour of the very companies that profit from annihilating it. Those who kill the most people in the shortest time win immunity and praise, as do those who destroy the most nature at the lowest cost.'

Eduardo Galeano

‘In the final analysis, accepting and living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to what is, culturally speaking, the human home: to the ancient order of family, community, good work; to a reverence for skill, creativity and creation; to a daily cadence slow enough to let us watch the sunset and stroll by the water's edge; to communities worth spending a lifetime in; and to local places pregnant with the memories of generations’.

Durning, 1992, 'How much is enough?'

‘9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1990’ and as a result of this global warming and ensuing climate chaos, ‘a quarter of the world’s mammal species and 12% of bird species are in danger of extinction’

New Economics Foundation (2002).

‘We know that the white man has put a price on all that is alive…He trades with his own blood and he wants us to do the same with our sacred territory, with the blood of the earth which they call petroleum…In former times, the dark path of plunder, genocide and injustice against our people was lit by a candle in the name of God and His Majesty. Now it is lit by oil in the name of progress and money…The white man has declared war on everything, except his own inner poverty. He has declared war on time and he has even declared war on himself…We are children of the earth, help us defend her’.

Berito Kubara U’wa, of the U’wa indigenous community (Colombia)

'Studies show that the lives of the poor have not significantly improved since the arrival of the oil industry as measured by the provision of basic services … the same time the poor have suffered disproportionately from the increase in political violence, and from environmental problems, as they are more dependent on their immediate surroundings than their richer neighbours.'

CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam GB & Save the Children Fund, July 1999.

'Putting a price on the environment will not save it.'

Sharon Beder, The Environment Goes to Market, 1996.

‘By 2050 a million species could face extinction’.

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2004.

‘We will not sacrifice the birthright of our future generations for short-term economic gain that will have long-term devastation on our peoples. Our Indigenous peoples have a direct spiritual, cultural, intimate relationship to the natural world, and we suffer most immediately and directly from any adverse effects of imposed or existing unsustainable development projects.’

Faith Gemmill, Gwich'in indigenous leader and REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Devastation On Indigenous Lands) member on plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR)

‘The business-as-usual way of dealing with the Earth’s system is not an option’

Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, 2001.

'Environmental economics represents (the) adjustment of cranks and levers of the old machine by economists working on behalf of business leaders. This will only subvert any real hope for change.'

Sharon Beder, The Environment Goes to Market, 1996.

‘The Financial Initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) recently calculated that the economic costs of global warming are doubling every decade. The cumulative number of people affected by disasters rose to two billion in the 1990s … virtually all are concentrated in poorer countries.’

New Economics Foundation, 2004.

'Global warming, more than war or political upheaval, stands to displace many millions of people. And climate change is being driven by the fossil-fuel-intensive lifestyles that we enjoy so much.'

New Economics Foundation, 2004.

‘How can we continue to let oil companies be parallel states in the countries where they are producing oil? They label all locals as guerrillas and demand increased security. I don’t believe we (Colombians) are genetically disposed towards violence. Nor do I think that people from rich countries are genetically disposed towards peace or have the right to impose on us their concept of peace or development.’

Claudia Sampedro, a lawyer coordinating human rights cases against BP in Colombia.

'Between 1950 and 1990, the world’s human population more than doubled … water use nearly tripled, fish consumption grew 4.4-fold, and energy use quintupled … The use of chemical fertilisers increased roughly tenfold … and global air travel, which causes significant atmospheric pollution, soared nearly 70-fold. On average, resource use per person nearly tripled between 1950 and 1990.'

Corson, 2003.

‘There have been five mass extinctions, but this is the first time a species risks generating its own demise’.

Labour’s Ex-Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, February 2003.

"The money king is only an illusion. Capitalism is blind and barbaric. It buys consciences, governments, peoples, and nations. It poisons the water and the air. It destroys everything. And to the U'wa, it says that we are crazy, but we want to continue being crazy if it means we can continue to exist on our dear mother EARTH. Brother and sisters of the world, the U'wa will continue defending mother earth. We invite you to continue accompanying us. Thank you for believing in us. "

U'wa Victory Communiqué May 7th 2002

“In [Britain]...writers write to entertain. They raise questions of individual existence - the angst of the individual. But for a Nigerian writer in my position you can’t go into this. My literature has to be combative...You cannot have ‘art for art’s sake’, this art must do something...

What is of interest to me is that my art should be able to alter the lives of a large number of people, a whole community, of the entire country...So the stories that I tell must have a different sort of purpose from the artist in the western world.

It’s not an ego trip, it’s serious, it’s politics, it’s economics, it’s everything. And art in that instance becomes so meaningful both to the artist and to the consumers of that art.”

Ken Saro-Wiwa, 1994 interview

“I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last.

Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.”

John Berger (from essay “Miners” about the Miners’ Strike)

'In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me invincible summer'

Albert Camus

“The announcement of an oil discovery in any territory is comparable to the declaration of war against the territory. Oil destroys the environment, contaminates water and air, and it also contaminates the social structure, destroys forests, destroys life and livelihoods and holds nothing sacred.”

Nnimmo Bassey, of Environmental Rights Action Nigeria & chair of Oilwatch Africa.

"The carbon market doesn't care about sustainable development. All it cares about is the carbon price. . . the carbon market is not going to be able to put sustainable development and everything else into one price."
Jack Cogen, President of Natsource, a carbon asset manager and the biggest private sector buyer of carbon credits in the market, speaking Monday 5 December 2005 in Montreal at an International Emissions Trading Association/World Bank side event at the international climate negotiations.

From http://www.climatejustice.blogspot.com

In the Name of The Wars, the Oil, and the Climate Chaos - Hell's Trinity

Dreamt up during climate camp preparations, June '06

‘As individuals, we have to do something more transcendent than just taking up space living on the planet.’

Doug Tompkins

"We've made a lot of mistakes over the centuries as we've struggled to
understand the nature of coal and its smoke. Some thought coal grew
underground from seeds or in mines guarded by deamons or dragons. Some saw
in the mines scientific proof of biblical flood. Some credited coal with
protecting people from the bubonic plague; others accused it of promoting
baldness, tooth decay, sordid murders, caustic speech and fuzzy thinking.
More recently many of us believed we could burn vast amounts of coal
without disrupting the natural balance of the planet. No doubt we have
still much to learn about coal, but at least we've been able to dispel
many of the old myths."

'Coal: A Human History' by Barbara Freese

'Change your life not the climate!'

'Cruising to chaos on a ship of fools'

'Oi Noah! best get building!'

'Switch on, take back the power.'

'Climate change is as real as it gets, let's take our heads out of the sand get together and do something about it.'

'Inaction is not an option.'

'Staggering blindford along the clifftop of climate chaos.'

"Most notable as a major issue of concern is the nexus between climate change and the widespread prevalence of poverty in the world. The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor persons within all countries, thereby exacerbating inequities in health status and access to adequate food, clean water and other resources."

R. K. Pachauri, Ph.D, Chairman of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

'Perhaps we cannot raise the wind. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.'

EF Schumacher

"It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us,
but if that is so then let us set up a last agonising, bloodcurdling
howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away
with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and
libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones
dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!"

Henry Miller, 'Tropic of Cancer', 1934

“We’re always pushing the limits, always pushing the frontiers,” says Mickey Driver of Chevron. With unprecedented demand forcing energy prices into record territory this year, international oil and gas companies are going deeper, in increasingly untested areas on both land and in water, to scour the earth for more resources. The most easily accessible fields are fast running out, and growing nationalism over natural resources is blocking international companies’ efforts to replace them in the traditional manner. This forces companies such as Chevron, BP and Shell to turn to innovation, technology and forward-looking management to survive.

Part of the challenge is to get the latest equipment and the right skills in place. Chevron is the largest leaseholder in the deep water section of the Gulf but, like everyone else, it is dependent on the oil services industry to get its findings to market. That means competing with the global oil and gas industry for experienced workers and cutting-edge technology.

“We need more of everything,” says Larry Nichols, chief executive of Devon Energy, a US oil and gas company, referring to both experienced workers and the latest drilling and production equipment. “We’re all raiding each other for geologists and other staff because we’re all trying to drill.”

Quoted in the Financial Times, 006

“Whatever Stern says, this isn’t an abstract argument about economics, it’s
about the reality that our current consumption and production patterns are
killing people – and it can only get worse. The price of inaction will be
measured in lives lost, not pounds spent.

Many thousands around the world are paying the price for our lifestyles in
the affluent West: men, women and children in Africa are dying, right now,
from famines and droughts driven by climate change.

Dr Caroline Lucas MEP, US Embassy, London, 4.11.06

"We are a part of everything that is beneath us, above us, and around us. Our past is our present, our present is our future, and our future is seven generations past and present."

Haudenosaunee teaching

'There's a lot that's bad. But there's a lot to smile about. There's a lot to do. Oh won't you say you'll come too?'

Oscar, from the band 65 Days of Static