THE RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARDS 2008

Speech by
Jakob von Uexkull
Dec 8th, 2008

 

Madam Speaker, Hon. Members of Parliament, dear Recipients of the Right Livelihood Award, Excellencies, dear Friends,

One of our senior Award Recipients left us early this year at the age of 94. Baba Amte was a man of great wisdom and courage, receiving a Right Livelihood Award for his activities to prevent the construction of environmentally disastrous giant dams, which have made millions homeless. Please join me in a moment of silence to celebrate the life and work of Baba Amte!

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It is tempting to think that we live at the crossroads of history, in uniquely important times, and that our choices, decisions and actions will have very long-term consequences – tempting because it gives our lives great historical importance. But it is also a worrying thought, because of the responsibilities which follow. So many may prefer to live in more normal times. After all, in China, the expression “May you live in interesting times!” is used as a curse.

But we don’t have the choice! We live in a time in which our decisions and non-decisions, our actions and non-actions will have consequences, positive or negative, more far-reaching both in time and space than our ancestors could ever have imagined. Our individual responses to challenges like climate chaos, water, oil and food shortages will influence and may destroy lives and livelihoods all over the world. We also have the power to make decisions influencing the lives and livelihoods of thousands of future generations, even for geological time periods – making these morally relevant to us. Whether or not we master this challenge will depend on each one of us deciding every day to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem in the choices we make as citizens, consumers, producers, parents etc. The German philosopher of hope Ernst Bloch said that the price of human freedom is the risk that the great historical moment may encounter too small a human race – one which is not up to the challenge.

Unfortunately, our current decision-makers and opinion-leaders in politics, business and the media have shown themselves to be far too small for the challenges now facing us all! They have ignored and ridiculed the evidence of the coming crises for over 30 years. They have refused to adopt the many solutions offered. Since 1980 these Awards highlight exemplary solutions to our most urgent problems. So our decision-makers cannot claim ignorance! But they have preferred to believe in their comfortable ideology, according to which markets, economic growth and technological fixes will magically take care of everything! Events have now caught up with them and the current global political and economic order is rapidly losing its credibility and the trust of the people. According to the ‘London Financial Times’, even the recent past is today a foreign country. Recent articles in this mouthpiece of the global elite recognize the reality of limits to growth and dismiss the key excuse of the supporters of economic globalisation, namely that it is an unstoppable natural process: “Globalisation was made possible by political change. But what politics made, politics can take away“ (FT, 8.4.08).

“USA Today”, the mass circulation paper of the US middle classes, last April published a cartoon on the editorial page showing two fat lions walking away from a field covered with the remains of animals they had devoured. One lion says to the other: “For the record, I still believe in unregulated markets!” When established belief systems are ridiculed like this, then there are openings for drastic change, if we are ready to grasp this window of opportunity.

We are often told that there is a conflict between human development and preserving a healthy planet, but one is not possible without the other!

I became aware of the manipulated cost-benefit analysis used to promote ‘development’ mega-projects, when I researched the history of large dams in India in the year we gave the Right Livelihood Award to Medha Patkar, Baba Amte and the movement to stop the Narmada dam. I had assumed that (as we have often been told) those who had been forced to give up their land for large dams, had been resettled elsewhere on similar land. There would then still be the huge cultural and spiritual cost of relocation. But the reality was even worse. Only in one single case since India’s independence had those evacuated been resettled on equivalent land. All the others – a huge humanity of the dispossessed – had been tricked and cheated, living in camps, on much poorer land – or just dispersed.

This is unfortunately all too often the case with such mega-projects: the human and other costs are much larger than claimed, while the gains have almost invariably been exaggerated, if not invented.

E. F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, thought that the rational goal for markets should be the ‘creation of maximum well-being with the minimum of consumption’. He foresaw that the economic growth model would self-destruct, as environmental limits would halt and reverse rising living standards.

At some stage – now reached – the competitive win-win growth economy is automatically replaced by a ‘spaceship’ economy requiring co-operation within limits set by natural laws. We have no sane alternative but to accept this reality, for every delay will make the necessary reforms harder, and eventually no longer possible.

We need to reframe our reality by creating a new understanding of what is possible and acceptable. This has been done in the past: we no longer accept slavery or the divine right of kings. Today anyone supporting such systems would be regarded not just as wrong but as mad or criminal.

We all have at least one common value: our deeply felt obligation to hand over a better world to our children. This is a political and moral issue. Natural laws come before economic laws because they determine the framework conditions of our existence. You can negotiate with creditors and enemies – but not with melting glaciers.

A stable climate is part of the foundation of our lives and livelihoods. The freedom, security and rights of all future generations are now under threat. But solutions are everywhere! We can decide today to create an earth community built on sharing (e.g. of best technologies), reciprocity and co-operation. We can transform our production and consumption systems, based on the circular loop “cradle-to-cradle” models already developed.

We can expand and protect biodiversity and cultural diversity by challenging the monocultures of the mind of current decision-makers. We can implement the basic human right to water, which the constitution of Uruguay now affirms, based on the work of Right Livelihood Award recipient Maude Barlow. We can legislate for the basic human right to food, as several Brazilian cities have done.

We will need to ration scarce resources, including energy, fairly and globally, until we have tapped the daily abundance which the sun (and other renewables) can provide. Earlier this year, the Royal United Services Institute, a leading UK defence think tank, warned that the effects of climate change, unless countered with much greater urgency, could overwhelm governments and “cause global conflicts as large as the two world wars, lasting for centuries”. (The Daily Telegraph, 3.5.08)

Without a speedy and massive increase in renewable energies, proposals for rapidly reducing fossil fuel use – which is an ecological imperative – will cause mass starvation because our agricultural production requires a lot of energy. The belief that solar energy must first become price-competitive represents economic fundamentalism gone mad! What is missing in these perverted cost-benefit equations is not just the growing cost of climate chaos, wars for oil etc. – while solar wars are unimaginable! Also missing is the enormous daily natural wealth destruction caused by not utilizing solar and other renewable energies to the maximum extent technologically and humanly possible! Money is not the issue here, for, as the British economist John Maynard Keynes said, whatever a society can do, it can finance!

We should try to calculate the value of this huge daily loss – for the sun and wind of today all over the world cannot be used tomorrow! Compared with this waste, the higher extraction costs of renewables and the costs of leaving coal and oil in the ground become insignificant. To this calculation we need to add the growing certainty that the peak of global oil supplies is imminent. The latest ‘peak oil’ convert is the International Energy Agency whose chief economist recently announced this “new conclusion”, urging that “we should leave oil before oil leaves us.”

New hierarchies of risk and danger require new moral and legal responses. Climate change, water and food shortages are not, as often in the past, random events beyond our control. There are victims and perpetrators, whether active or passive. Moral pressure (‘naming and shaming’) will be useful, but we also need to look at how activities foreclosing the future, and damaging the rights of future generations, can be sanctioned by new or existing legislation and courts…
Let us do our best to help build this new world – now more urgent than ever – for ourselves as well as for all generations living now and in the future! 

In the end, it is not only our vision, but also our courage that decides where we will go. And courage is not a matter of origin, education or age! Courage is to never stop starting – these words have been used to describe one of our 2008 Right Livelihood Award Laureates, but they are certainly true for all of them.

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The Jury honours Monika Hauser, founder of medica mondiale, “... for her tireless commitment to working with women who have experienced the most horrific sexual violence in some of the most dangerous countries in the world, and campaigning for them to receive social recognition and compensation".

At the end of 1992, Monika Hauser was shocked by the media reports about the tragedy of the Bosnian women. She felt that these women and their suffering got sensationalized through the reports that focused on detailed descriptions of rape. Later, many women told her that after the interviews they had felt violated a second time. What followed after the rape and the physical abuse did not seem to be of interest to anyone.

With these experiences in mind, Monika Hauser composed a team of 20 Bosnian experts, collected the funding needed, brought medical material through the frontlines to Central Bosnia, and built up a medical centre, Medica Zenica, in the middle of war-torn Bosnia. Building up a multi-disciplinary centre in a war situation, while insisting on a multi-ethnic team, was difficult and truly pioneering work.

Out of these activities medica mondiale evolved. The organisation supports and assists women in conflict regions, whose physical, psychological, social and political integrity has been violated. Projects and partner organisations are based in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania, Afghanistan, Liberia, Cambodia, DR Congo, East Timor, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Uganda and Israel.

Monika Hauser’s work also has a pronounced human rights dimension: the advocacy for women’s rights, for the recognition of sexual violence in wartime as a war crime, for the legal prosecution of perpetrators of sexualized violence, and against social stigma and the marginalisation of the survivors.
medica mondiale supported the investigations of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, campaigned for the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and contributed to the fact that grave sexual violence became explicitly recognised as a war crime and crime against humanity in the ICC's statutes.

It is therefore with very great pleasure that I present the 2008 Right Livelihood Award to Monika Hauser.

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Asha Hagi has dedicated her life to gaining a peaceful future for her home country, Somalia. The Jury honours Asha Hagi "... for continuing to lead at great personal risk the female participation in the peace and reconciliation process in her war-ravaged country".

In 1992, Asha Hagi founded Save Somali Women and Children to help women overcome marginalisation, violence and poverty in their communities. Eight years later, Asha Hagi’s approach of female participation and empowerment reached a crossroads, when the President of Djibouti organised a conference, which was, for the first time, clan-based. Due to the traditional patriarchal clan structure this conference was supposed to be attended by men only. But Asha Hagi did not accept this. During the Arta peace talks, under her leadership, Save Somali Women and Children began to organise women beyond clan boundaries and brought them together to form their own clan, the Sixth Clan, as a complement to the five other Somali clans, which are all dominated by men. Suddenly, women became part of the peace process and sat down at negotiation tables formerly reserved to men.

Asha Hagi played a similar role in the Mbagathi Conference in Nairobi (2002-2004), which gave birth to the Transitional Federal Government and the Transitional Federal Parliament. The impact of the Sixth Clan, the clan of women, was crucial, and when the Transitional Federal Parliament came into power, a quota for women was installed, as was a Ministry for Gender and Family Affairs.

The last two years have seen a tremendous turn for the worse in Somalia. Asha Hagi has been very outspoken in her criticism of the warring factions’ actions, and she had to flee Mogadishu. Since May this year, Asha Hagi's focus is on the UN sponsored peace dialogue between the Transitional Federal Government and the Alliance Re-liberation of Somalia in Djibouti, where she is a member of the High Level Political Committee in the Djibouti Peace and Reconciliation Talks.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, Special Representative for the UN Secretary-General for Somalia, and Jury member of the Right Livelihood Award, writes: "Asha Hagi has been working tirelessly to help restore peace and stability to her homeland. (…) I would like to recognise her important role which also sends the key message that Somalis can truly help their country best by working to end the killing rather than having blood on their hands."

It is with very great pleasure that I present the 2008 Right Livelihood Award to Asha Hagi.

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The media is sometimes called the fourth power in a democracy. With Amy Goodman, host and presenter of the daily news programme Democracy Now!, the Jury honours one tireless ambassador of this power "... for developing an innovative model of truly independent political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by mainstream media."

Democracy Now! stands for an alternative to “embedded journalism”, where journalists get the pictures the military and the politicians want people to see.

Embedded journalism is a dangerous trend as it robs us of unbiased news. Opposing the superficiality which is often presented in the mainstream media Amy Goodman goes “where the silence is”, as she puts it. Like many other journalists who have risked their lives trying to get stories out and published, she knows the hazards a good journalist can face. One incident almost cost her life: In 1991, she survived a massacre in East Timor, when Indonesian soldiers gunned down 270 Timorese. The story earned her the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize.

This year, Amy Goodman was arrested during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, when she tried to cover street protests. Anti-War activism, investigative reports and interviews with controversial guests, or just asking people in power critical questions instead of simply letting them have their say – Bill Clinton once accused her of asking questions " in a hostile, combative, and even disrespectful tone" –, all this separates Democracy Now! from conventional news programmes. The large number of viewers and listeners all over the U.S. and in many countries worldwide shows that many are longing for in-depth reporting and coverage of those issues that are often ignored by other media.

The show is now syndicated to more than 700 radio and TV, satellite and cable TV networks in North America, bringing Democracy Now! to millions of people. This makes the show the fastest growing independent news programme in the United States. Stations abroad airing the show range from Japan, Australia, and South America to Sweden.

It is with very great pleasure that I present the 2008 Right Livelihood Award to Amy Goodman.

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Krishnammal and Sankaralingam Jagannathan have spent their lives working with those who are at the lowest rung of the social ladder – Dalits and the landless. The Jury honours Krishnammal and Sankaralingam Jagannathan "... for two long lifetimes of work dedicated to realising in practice the Gandhian vision of social justice and sustainable human development, for which they have been referred to as 'India's soul'."

Krishnammal is with us today, but, unfortunately, Sankaralingam Jagannathan could not accompany her on this journey to Stockholm. Amma, please send your husband our best and most respectful regards. 

Krishnammal was born a Dalit. Her husband came from a rich family but gave up his college studies in 1930 in response to Gandhi's call for non-cooperation and disobedience. He joined the Quit India Movement and spent three and a half years in prison before India gained its independence in 1947.

The Jagannathans have always aimed at building a Gandhian society by empowering the rural poor. During the 1950s and 60s, they worked successfully for land redistribution through land gift movements and non-violent resistance. For this peaceful opposition, Sankaralingam Jagannathan was repeatedly sent to jail.

In 1982, the couple started LAFTI (Land for the Tillers’ Freedom). The aim was, again, to transfer land from the landlords to the landless poor. The landless should be given the opportunity to buy land at a reasonable price and to work it cooperatively, so that the loans could be repaid. Initially, progress was slow: banks were unwilling to lend and the stamp duty on the registration of small lots was exorbitant. But the Jagannathans overcame these obstacles. Now, there are thousands of families who work their own land thanks to LAFTI.

Since 1992, the couple have faced another challenge: the establishment of prawn farms along the coast. This corporate aquaculture results in the desertification of fertile land, local unemployment of landless farmers, and seepage of seawater into the groundwater. Sankaralingam Jagannathan challenged the prawn farms up to India’s Supreme Court. In 1996, the Court issued a ruling against intensive shrimp farming. The Jagannathans are still fighting for the implementation of the ruling, which is strongly opposed by the prawn farmers.

The resistance against the prawn farms and their devastating effects on the land, environment and livelihoods of the people is another struggle which has lasted for more than a quarter of a century – a time span, during which many would have given up. Not so the Jagannathans! And so it is with very great pleasure that I present the 2008 Right Livelihood Award to Krishnammal Jagannathan, her husband Sankaralingam Jagannathan, and their organisation Land for the Tillers’ Freedom.

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Before I conclude I want to express my gratitude to a generous supporter who is among us here tonight for paying the costs of this year's ceremony.

It is also my pleasure to announce a new institution that we are currently setting up in order to better support our Laureates and to spread their knowledge. There are now 133 Right Livelihood Award Laureates from 57 countries. We have discussed with many of them how we can support them in passing on their knowledge to a new generation. The result is a global educational initiative called the Right Livelihood College, which will organise lectures and seminars given by our Recipients at a number of partner universities and which will provide scholarships to talented students and researchers to study the work of our Laureates. This is made possible thanks to a cooperation with the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Penang, which has kindly and generously offered to host the secretariat of the Right Livelihood College. The Universiti Sains Malaysia has the distinction of being the first APEX (Accelerated Programme for Excellence) university in Malaysia especially charged to implement a pioneering programme for "Transforming Higher Education for a Sustainable Tomorrow. The Director of the Right Livelihood College will be our Jury Member and 1982 Right Livelihood Award Recipient Anwar Fazal from Malaysia. The College will take up its work in January 2009.