“I can’t get people to bat an eyelash. It’s like there’s something wrong with our brains that we can’t understand just how grave this situation is.”
“I think the right to a healthy environment is actually the foundation that we require to enjoy all other human rights. If we don’t have a living, healthy planet Earth, then all the other rights are just words on paper.”
David Boyd, who served as UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment from 2018 to April 2024
‘The right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment was finally recognised as a fundamental human right by the United Nations in 2021-22. Some countries, notably the US, the world’s worst historic polluter, argue that UN resolutions are legally influential but not binding.
The right to a healthy environment is also enshrined into law by 161 countries with the UK, US and Russia among notable exceptions.’
“It has driven me crazy in the past six years that governments are just oblivious to history. We know that the tobacco industry lied through their teeth for decades. The lead industry did the same. The asbestos industry did the same. The plastics industry has done the same. The pesticide industry has done the same.”
It’s so sad to see yet another outgoing speaker for climate action just despairing at the stranglehold of capitalism and the oil, plastics and pesticide industries that are allowed to ride roughshod over our environment and ultimately kill people in terrifying numbers.
What is the purpose of UN rapporteur, if they have only have the power to report and the big countries just pretend to be deaf?
“Powerful interconnected business and political elites – the diesel mafia – are still becoming wealthy from the existing system. Dislodging this requires a huge grassroots movement using tools like human rights and public protest and every other tool in the arsenal of change-makers.”
“I think there’s millions of invisible climate migrants today, and unless we get a handle on this problem and do so quickly, that’s going to look like a trickle before the flood.”
Add comment