THE RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARDS 2005
Speech by
Jakob von Uexkull
December 9th, 2005
Mr Speaker,
Dear Award Recipients,
Your Excellencies,
Members of Parliament,
Dear Friends,
Twenty-five years ago tonight, I presented the first Right Livelihood Awards to Prof. Hassan Fathy and Stephen Gaskin and the aid organisation he created, Plenty International. I learnt afterwards that there had been a serious debate among the editors of a leading Swedish newspaper about whether this was a CIA or a KGB plot to discredit the Nobel prizes... During the following years it became clear that there was no hidden agenda behind this initiative. The then Director of Nobel Foundation, Stig Ramel, wrote to me that despite our different perspectives, he recognized that the Right Livelihood Awards are presented for "very important purposes and that the recipients are of very high quality". And Birgitta Hambraeus, then a member of this Parliament, convinced her colleagues to host this event in this beautiful parliamentary chamber - which we have done now for 20 years.
On behalf of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, I want to express my appreciation for the trust that Members of this Parliament have shown us by this honour, which has been of great value for the recipients. It has given them protection, opened many doors - including prison doors - and helped their work grow and spread.
In recent years our Foundation faced a challenge to its charitable status, caused by Sweden's outdated charity legislation. I am delighted that this has now been solved through the passing of a special law confirming our 'highly charitable' status and designating the Right Livelihood Award as 'a key national issue'.
I want to thank our supporters in Government and Parliament who have worked hard to make this possible and thus secured the future of these awards in Sweden.
This would not have been possible without the strong support we have in the Swedish public and media. Every year numerous editorials highlight the unique importance for our future - both in Sweden and globally - of honouring and supporting the "projects of hope" which these awards recognize.
At a conference in Stockholm commemorating Dag Hammarskjöld earlier this year, Government Ministers spoke of the need to "mainstream" the agenda for a fair and sustainable global order. Right Livelihood Award recipients are increasingly seen as representing this new mainstream, as shown by the huge public and media interest in our 25th Anniversary events earlier this year, held in Salzburg and Munich.
We are now on a collision course with the future. If we globalize consumerism without globalizing citizenship, then we will globalize social and environmental collapse! But we have the ability to create a fair and flourishing world order, based on co-operation for the best instead of competition for the cheapest - and therefore we have the duty to do so.
We must change the national and global rules which currently make this so difficult. Human rights, the environmental security of future generations, cultural diversity - everything is now subjected to a short-term cost-benefit- analysis and deemed too expensive. Much urgent work remains undone while hundreds of millions are unemployed or under-employed. We watch the Chinese ruin their health and environment, working for slave wages to make toys emitting dangerous chemicals for the children of unemployed Westerners and are told that this is the best world order imaginable, for which we should all be grateful!
In the 1930's naive Westerners travelled to the Soviet Union and returned claiming that they had seen the future. Today, naive Westerners travel to China and return with similar fairy tales. But in the population centres of S. China, pollution has already reached a state where - to quote one observer - "the air is dying". In the North, global warming is turning the agricultural heart-land into dust. Water shortages are so serious that the Minister for Water Resources warned last week: " To fight for every drop of water or die - that is the challenge for China!". The Vice-Minister for the Environment stated recently that China's economic miracle is already hitting its environmental limits.... Where will hundreds of millions of Chinese environmental refugees go?
A key common human value has always been the deeply-felt obligation to hand over a better world to our children. All previous human societies tried to live accordingly. The Chinese, for example, in order to prevent further damage to their environment, were for centuries prepared to give up many of their favourite pursuits...
But today we promote a global culture of consumerism which is increasingly a declaration of war against future generations. It commodifies all our relationships, dreams and desires. Life is redefined and the citizen is disconnected and shrunk into the consumer. This indoctrination begins with young children, shortening their childhoods, while the old are no longer honoured as holders of wisdom but pressured to stay young by consuming. All ages are thus compressed into immature, easily impressionable, developmentally delayed young adults.
In this culture, the answer to ANY crisis is to shop more. After September 11th, President Bush's mother asked her son what she could do to "support America". She reports his answer: "Mom, if you really want to help, buy, buy, buy!"...
Not surprisingly, in a recent BBC/Gallup poll in 68 countries, only
13 % trusted politicians. Asked which types of people they would like to give more power to, most favoured intellectuals (writers and academics) or religious leaders. In Germany, a recent poll found that only 7 % trusted the Government, while almost 50 % trusted Aldi, a cut-price supermarket chain. A dangerous development, but to be expected when politicians fail to offer leadership even on an issue as vital as climate change.
Climate change and our reaction to it is in many ways the defining issue of our time. As one Indian business leader said to me "What is the use of all my business and philanthropic activities, if the monsoon stops coming?"
Causing and allowing climate change is intergenerational terrorism and genocide. It is the greatest crisis humanity has ever encountered. The British writer Mark Lynas, who has documented the increasing speed of some of the changes occurring, calls it "a threat so large as to almost defy comprehension."
The melting of large glaciers, some of which provide drinking water for hundreds of millions of people, is accelerating much faster than predicted even a few years ago. The giant ice columns off Greenland, which help sustain the Gulf Stream currents, are disappearing so fast that British scientists concluded earlier this year that the film "The Day After Tomorrow" could well become reality within "a few years", necessitating the evacuation of whole countries...
We need a political policy, economic, legal and institutional framework for the rapid re-construction of our energy production, our industrial system and our way of life in order to halt and reverse climate change as far as possible. The necessary emergency measures, like a much speeded-up renewal of our buildings, using optimal energy-saving technologies, and a massive construction programme of mass transport systems and fast train services, would provide millions of new jobs. To claim that this is now unaffordable means that the richest generations who have ever lived declare that they cannot afford to live on this planet! Whatever we can do, we can finance. A change of IMF rules, to provide interest-free Special Drawing Rights issues, would be one way to provide the necessary funding.
There are other huge challenges. It is estimated that in 2020, 40 % of the world's population will not have enough water to grow their own food! And there is growing evidence that global oil reserves will very soon reach their peak, triggering ever-increasing prices. The editor of "Petroleum Review" sees reserves as "close to peak" and concludes: "We are facing a tsunami. It is moving so fast. We have no idea about what a quickly growing lack of oil will mean."
Last February even the US Energy Department declared that "The world is fast approaching the inevitable peaking of conventional oil production... (a problem) unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society." The former UK Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, has described this threat as "nothing short of apocalyptic", likely to cause unprecedented mass refugee movements.
The measures he advocates to postpone and reduce this danger, e.g. ecological tax reforms and massive conservation programmes, are very small in comparison. But they are not happening because the costs of inaction have been externalized by our economic ideologues who have as little understanding of the real world as their former Soviet counterparts.
It is time to ask by what authority they impose their perverted calculations on us? And by what authority do giant corporations pollute our minds, bodies, air, soil and water? By what authority have private interests been given control over our airwaves to wage cultural warfare against our higher human values? By what authority is it possible for even the human genetic code to become the property of private "limited liability" companies?
If political leaders want to regain public trust they need to reverse this usurpation of authority. As President F.D. Roosevelt said in 1938, "The liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism."
It is high time that we revolt against what Pope Paul VI called "a special form of tyranny: the international imperialism of money." When I hear EU governments declaring that the new stricter safety rules for chemicals must not make these more expensive, then I wonder if our children, faced with growing epidemics of chemically - induced allergies, will look back on us as criminal or mad. We are told that jobs are at stake - as if the research into and production of healthy alternatives would not create jobs!
It is claimed that the current globalisation model is "the result of the choices of individuals" (Prime Minister Tony Blair). But why would people choose a path which - according to many studies - does not increase their happiness but, on the contrary, is associated with escalating human social and environmental costs? Have the 73 % of Indians who can no longer afford the escalating costs of health care and education really chosen this path? Of course not! The current global order is the result of a co-ordinated ideological attack on our cultures, values and commons, co-ordinated by a greedy minority anxious to increase and protect their privileges. "The value system is finishing now. We are gradually increasing 'everyone for himself.' " (B.C. Kanduri, Indian Minister of Roads 2000-2004, quoted in the International Herald Tribune this week.)
The wealth gap between rich and poor both in and between nations is today larger than ever before - and growing. The social contract has been broken. Some of the profiteers of the current system are aware of the risks. Thus, Leo Hindery, the multimillionaire Chairman of the UK company HL Capital, told the BBC last year: "You're setting up a class system the likes of which we've never seen in the world. The most obvious precedent is the French revolution..."
There are other precedents, especially in the history of the nation now presenting itself as the global model. Thus, in 1816 US President Thomas Jefferson expressed the "hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." Fifty years later Abraham Lincoln lamented that "Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
And in 1876, another US President, Rutherford Hayes, concluded that
"This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations."
Today we face a similar challenge but for the first time it is global and requires a global response. The Right Livelihood Awards are a key part of this response and it is very appropriate that our Honorary Award goes to a country where the clash between neoliberalism and the culture of citizenship, diversity and mutuality is particularly acute.
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The Right Livelihood Awards jury honours the outstanding Mexican artist Francisco Toledo "for devoting himself and his art to the protection, enhancement and renewal of the architectural and cultural heritage, natural environment and community life of his native Oaxaca."
Toledo's art is imbued with his Mexican heritage of history and mythology. For more than twenty years he has been an untiring promoter, sponsor and disseminator of the cultural values of his native region. He has founded several important artistic and cultural institutions. Raising popular civic awareness, he has been instrumental in preventing damaging development projects and in the exemplary transformation of Oaxaca into one of Mexico's major cultural, artistic and political hubs.
It is with great pleasure that I present the 2005 Right Livelihood Honorary Award to Francisco Toledo, who unfortunately is unable to be here with us tonight. I ask his daughter Natalia to accept the award on his behalf.
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The jury honours Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke "for their exemplary and longstanding work for trade justice and the recognition of the fundamental human right to water."
Barlow and Clarke have worked closely together over many years and are today two of the most respected citizen leaders in Canada and in the global justice movement generally. They have authored numerous books on all aspects of globalisation, the privatisation of the "Global Commons" and the unaccountable power of big business, focusing on trade issues and water rights. Their work spans the globe. A recent victory was the inclusion of a new article in the Uruguayan Constitution asserting the fundamental right to water and that social concerns must take precedence over economic considerations in formulating water policies. They are now deeply involved with an international campaign for a UN Convention on the Right to Water, building on the Uruguayan Legislation.
Co-creating and chairing numerous organizations and networks, devoting themselves to building a transparent and accountable global order, Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke represent active world citizenship at its best.
It is with great pleasure that I present the 2005 Right Livelihood Award to Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke.
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The jury honours Irene Fernandez "for her outstanding and courageous work to stop violence against women and abuses of migrant and poor workers."
Despite the threat of prison for "maliciously publishing false news", she courageously continues to campaign for the rights of the poorest: migrant workers, farm and domestic workers, prostitutes and AIDS sufferers. She has initiated programmes to create trade unions in the free trade zones and focused on the development of women leaders in the labour movement.
She has revealed the abuse of migrant workers and initiated high-profile campaigns for their rights. Her work to stop violence against women has led to legal changes and the creation of several strong organisations in Malaysia focusing on women's rights. She has worked to promote consumer education for women and school children and led campaigns for environmental health, a sustainable agriculture and the elimination of pesticides.
It is impossible not to be over-whelmed by the scope of Irene Fernandez' many activities and successes. She works in a country which has often stood up for its rights in the international arena and demanded a democratic world order, where might is not right. These demands need to be reflected internally if they are to be credible! We hope that this award will contribute to Malaysia realizing that a citizen like Irene Fernandez is to be treasured, not feared!
It is with great pleasure that I present the 2005 Right Livelihood Award to Irene Fernandez.
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The award jury honours the First People of the Kalahari and Roy Sesana "for resolute resistance against eviction from their ancestral lands, and for upholding the right to their traditional way of life."
Roy Sesana is one of the founders of First People of the Kalahari (FPK), which was set up in 1991 to campaign for their human rights and especially their land rights. He is a leader of the Gana, Gwi and Bakgalagadi, amongst the last 'Bushmen' to live on and from their own land in a largely self-sufficient way until -- after years of harassment - they were forcibly evicted from 1997 onwards. There is strong evidence that the evictions were motivated by the desire to mine diamonds on their lands. FPK have, despite huge difficulties, started a legal test case to assert their rights which is now symbolic of the struggles of indigenous people everywhere. They have also organised a mapping project of traditional territories and communities in order to be registered as official residents on their ancestral lands.
Sesana has carried on his work despite ongoing government intimidation and violence. He is a man of courage and vision, asserting the right to diversity and culture which is increasingly threatened by a 'development' model which claims that replacing self-sufficiency with modernised poverty equals progress.
We recognize the progress made in Botswana in improving the quality of life for many of its citizens in the past decades, which stands in stark contrast to the reality in many other African countries. We also recognise the huge global pressures which a country like Botswana faces from what Michael Sachs, Head of Policy and Research for the ANC in S. Africa, recently called "finance capital's ideological victory...which narrows political choices."
This conflict goes to the core of the global clash of cultures. We trust that this award will help bring about a solution which recognizes the rights and diversity of the First People of the Kalahari. Other countries have faced similar conflicts between indigenous rights and the pressure to exploit natural resources and managed to find the wisdom to agree mutually acceptable solutions...
It is with great pleasure that I present the 2005 Right Livelihood Award to the First People of the Kalahari, represented here by Roy Sesana and Jumanda Gakelebone.
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"Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him", says the Grand Inquisitor in "The Brothers Karamazov"
Today, we are urged to be satisfied with the "bread all around us" and forget about the "firm idea" of what we live for. There are no more firm ideas, we are told. We are now free....
"Free, free, free - like empty
Sailboats lost at sea"
(Richard Sennett)
For those who want to be more, these awards show ways ahead. They belong to all of us and depend on your support and on your nominations for their relevance, continuation and growth.
On the back of the most recent (German) book about the Right Livelihood Awards is this quote by one of last year's recipients, Raúl Montenegro:
"The Right Livelihood Award transforms our small words into big headlines. According to Martin Luther King, the tragedy of today is not only the shouts of the oppressors but also the silence of good people. Since its creation the Right Livelihood Award has contributed to breaking this silence. Today we have 25 years of broken silences."
I want to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude to all who have made it possible for my vision of 25 years ago to be born and grow, especially to the successive Parliamentary Speakers who have welcomed us here, to SÄRLA, the Society For The Right Livelihood Award in Parliament, to the donors, staff, board and jury of the Right Livelihood Awards Foundation and to my family.
I have no doubt that the next 25 years will be even more exciting!
Thank you very much!
