The 2009 Right Livelihood Awards

Speech by
Jakob von Uexkull
Dec 4th, 2009

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

The Copenhagen Climate Conference next week is, according to the UN Secretary General, the most important international gathering since the Second World War. Others describe it as the most important human gathering ever. Its decisions (or non-decisions) will impact lives and livelihoods for thousands of years.

We are not dealing with “global warming”. To quote the American educationalist David Orr, “whoever called this ‘warming’ must have worked for ... the Northern Siberian Bureau of Economic Development”. We are facing a global climate destabilization, risking the lives and livelihoods of millions – if not billions – of people as well as all achievements of human civilisation: our culture, cities, institutions, etc. Even our best efforts will no longer prevent the global emergency ahead – but can still reduce it considerably. What needs to be done is obvious and solutions are available. This Award points the way, now for the 30th time!

The religion of the market – until recently supposedly all-knowing and always right – has spectacularly failed its faithful. To quote our Award recipient Amory Lovins: “Markets are only tools. They make a good servant but a bad master and a worse religion ... That theology (i.e. economic fundamentalism) treats living things as dead, nature as a nuisance, several billion years’ design experience as casually discardable, and the future as worthless.” (Hawken, Lovins, Lovins, ‘Natural Capitalism’, 1999, p.261)

After 20 years of so-called ‘sustainable development’, virtually no indicator of planetary health has improved – and many have deteriorated drastically! In addition, according to the Cambridge University economist Partha Dasgupta, the actual wealth of every country except China declined between 1965 and 1993, once the degradation of ecosystems was accounted for. And what was gained? - “A sampling of Forbes magazine’s ‘richest Americans’ has happiness scores ... only a whisker above those of Swedes, not to mention Masai tribesmen.” (Bill McKibben, ‘Deep Ecology’, 2007, p.47)

How has this come about? Jared Diamond, in his history of failed civilisations, points to the failure of elites to anticipate, perceive and solve problems. Today we live in an increasingly democratic world where – we are told – “the people lead and the leaders follow”. But civil society still lacks the necessary cohesion and strength of commitment and support. For, as Winston Churchill said: “It is no use saying ‘we are doing our best’. You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.” Comforted by weak leaders, the majority prefers to believe that there are still “50 easy ways to save the Earth”. (David Orr)

We need to reset our progress compass. Continued GDP growth may lead to most people becoming worse off, according to former World Bank chief economist Prof. Joseph Stiglitz. Today, “we are stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it gross domestic product”. (Paul Hawken, University of Portland Commencement Address, 2009)

As the Katrina Hurricane showed, we are woefully unprepared to handle the looming social, economic and political disruptions. Despite repeated warnings, we failed to restructure our energy use when this transition would have been much easier and cheaper. We are insured for small risks, but have ignored the biggest. We have allowed ‘experts’ to discount away the birth-right of future generations to a healthy planet on the increasingly doubtful assumption that they will be rich enough to repair any damage we do.

To reverse course we need to rehabilitate leadership. We are all potential leaders and need to empower ourselves as citizens taking responsibility and participating in public life. Much has been written about the practical skills we need to acquire in order to be prepared for the coming disruptions. One key skill is often forgotten: public speaking!

We need to revive the public space of political action. We can no longer afford the anti-political and anti-government cynicism, which impedes our ability to do what is necessary to build resilience, climate security and climate justice, to reverse nuclear proliferation, reduce conflict and relieve avoidable human suffering.

We know this, and different sectors of society call on each other to act – yet “rhetoric ... does not turn back rising waters”. (Dr. Rowan Williams, Head of the Church of England) Only political engagement can overcome the blockages built by the coal and oil lobbies, the profiteers of deforestation and the arms race. National and international mandates, standards, targets, caps, incentives and disincentives do not magically appear but are born by political action. Technical and financial blockages can be overcome by political will. Thus, we need to identify best policies and work to spread and implement them, e.g.

• Feed-In-Tariffs to rapidly upscale renewable energy use wherever there is grid connection, and Solar Home Systems where there is not – both honoured with Right Livelihood Awards.
• New Zealand’s nuclear-weapons-free policy, for which its former Prime Minister David Lange received this Award.
• Nuclear-weapon-free zones, which already cover large parts of the planet today and which have been promoted successfully by this year’s Laureate Alyn Ware.
• Concrete national action programmes like the “Sustainability within a generation” plan, put forward to the Canadian government by the David Suzuki Foundation.

We live by stories. The ruling story tells us that we cannot survive without economic growth, yet we know that such growth in rich countries cannot continue. Our global order is based on the theory of wealth ‘trickling down’ from the rich to the poor. The writer Margaret Atwood comments: “Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals.” (‘Payback’, 2008, p.102)

Our challenge is to develop a new human story, which keeps our societies stable and democratic when growth stops.

Asia reveals how quickly societies can be radically transformed. Yet it also highlights the threats we face, for the new Asian dream is still the old American dream: “China in overdrive to hit record 12 million car sales.” (‘South China Morning Post’, 31.7.09) “Can China’s shoppers save the world?” (‘The National’, Abu Dhabi 7.9.09) “Chinese consumers hold future world prosperity in their purses, says Brown.” (‘The Guardian’, UK)

On the other hand, a recent UK study by the Rowntree Trust found that “almost nobody ... opted for a society that made economic growth and standards of living a priority ... People were happy to work and consume less, and pay more tax, if it meant they had less pressure in their lives and better public services. They ... wanted to ‘reduce social dysfunction and move away from market values’, [and] live in a less divided society ...”

So there is ample scope for visionary leadership. If we continue to be led by those who believe that more consumerism is necessary for both rich and poor, then climate and societal collapse are certain. But thirty years of Right Livelihood Awards show that there exists another very practical global vision of citizenship and co-operation. And we know from 1989, when the time is ripe, radical changes can come very quickly – in months, not years.

The financial crisis last year also revealed how quickly and radically governments can take charge and change course when the pressure is sufficient. The emergency now facing us all is broader, more long-term and thus even more challenging. But, to quote the title of a book about recipients of this Award, “the solutions are here”. It is up to every one of us to increase the pressure until these solutions burst out into the mainstream of our societies and become politically irresistible. We all have various and different ways of assisting in this great transformation, including one we can practise daily: to make their story our story and re-tell it until it becomes the story by which our civilisation resets its compass.

This year, Edward Goldsmith, Right Livelihood Award Laureate and one of Britain’s foremost environmental activists and visionaries, passed away. In 1991, in this parliament, he concluded his Award acceptance speech with the words: “…political and economic activities that are today completely out of control, can once more be systematically subordinated to social, ecological and moral imperatives, as indeed they must be if humanity is to have any future on this planet. Ladies and gentlemen, we need to create such a society. We need to create it quickly while there is yet time and it is not our politicians, industrialists or international bureaucrats whom we can count on to do so for us  - only we can do it.“
This year we received a brutal reminder of the dangers of such work: In July, Natalya Estemirova, from the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which received the Right Livelihood Award in 2004, was murdered, to stop her exposing human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Please join me in a minute of silence honouring the life and work of Teddy Goldsmith and Natalya Estemirova.

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Last year, I announced that the Right Livelihood Award Foundation was launching a new initiative, The Right Livelihood College. I am pleased to say that not only has the College been established and actively operating out of the University of Science in Penang, Malaysia, we have also seen the establishment of our first European Campus at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS). The College is also actively discussing partnerships in Africa, North and Latin America.
I want to take this opportunity to thank both Professor Dzulkifli Razak, the Vice Chancellor of the University Sains Malaysia (who is also the incoming President of the International Association of Universities) and Professor Lennart Olsson, Director of LUCSUS, for making so much happen in such a short time.

The aim of the College  is to make the skills and wisdom of the Laureates available to universities in systematic and creative ways that will generate catalysts, multipliers and accelerators among a new generation of change makers. All Right Livelihood Award Laureates are made Fellows of the College. I am particularly happy that the inaugural Director of the College, Professor Anwar Fazal, who is himself one of the earliest  Right Livelihood Awardees (1982) and who has taken on the challenge of leading this new initiative, is here with us today. And I would like to give a warm welcome to another Right Livelihood Award Laureate, who is with us today: Dr. Ibrahim Abouleish from Egypt.

Next year, we celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the Right Livelihood Award. I would like to express my deep gratitude to all who have helped sustain the awards over the last three decades – and to those who are working with us to secure the award for the future. Some of you are with us here today. To all of you, I would like to say a heartfelt thank you! Your contribution helps to build the paths to a positive future.

I would also like to thank the City of Bonn, the Foundation for Environment and Development in North Rhine-Westphalia (represented here tonight by Natalia Fedossenko and Dr. Martin Michalzik), and the Foundation for International Dialogue of the Savings Bank in Bonn. Their invitation and generous support make it possible for us and our Laureates to meet in Bonn, Germany, in September next year for our 30th anniversary conference.

I now have the pleasure to introduce a long-standing supporter of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation: Margot Wallström, Vice-President of the European Commission, and member of the Right Livelihood Council, who will present the 2009 Right Livelihood Award Recipients.