Hi London Climate March!
I am humbled to be standing here today with my friends who have travelled a long way to be here from the Pacific Islands and Sweden. We are standing at an incredible juncture for our climate movement. When we go into the talks next week we will come with peace and love and light to make sure that we respect what the people of Paris have gone through and to ensure that we bring the voices of people who are on the front lines of the fossil fuel extraction and those communities around the globe already feeling the impacts of climate change to the table.
We are a generation that is not going into those talks with rose-tinted glasses, we have lived through the failed promises of climate talks and government action. We know that the fossil fuel lobbyists and climate deniers will do their best to continue to push us towards climate catastrophe. But we are a generation who when we saw those climate talks fail in Copenhagen we set out to create one of the most incredible movements in history. A movement led by indigenous communities and people of colour that has got Shell to pull out of the Arctic and President Obama to call a halt to the Keystone XL pipeline that would take Tar Sands from Alberta and bring it here to Europe. We are an intersectional, intergenerational creative movement that has been built on the strong foundations of environmental justice.
This is a movement who against all odds fighting for the rights of indigenous people to keep highly polluting fossil fuels in the ground. From Delta to Delta, from the Athabasca Delta in Canada to the people of Ogoniland in Nigeria, we are seeing a movement that is demanding an end to the core causes of climate change. This is the legacy of colonialism and environmental racism that has taken us down this path to industrial genocide and climate chaos.
In the UK we have a deep responsibility as the home of Shell and BP and the historical centre of colonialsm, the dark heart of industrial genocide, environmental racism and climate change.
We must continue to do the work to make this movement accountable to the people on the frontline across the globe and also the people of colour and communities who must be front and centre of this movement. Because our people are on the front lines of the solutions. We are speaking with urgency and knowledge of what is really happening to our Earth and our indigenous allies are leading the land rights struggles that are keeping the fossil fuels in the ground and are the genusies behind our social movements.
Whatever happens in the talks in Paris, we are going with incredible hope with indigenous communites from across the globe and we will fight hard with our creativity and unity to be heard at that table. But we know whatever happens the next day we will be back at it, taking on BP and Shell at their shareholder meetings and cultural institutions. We will commit to working with frontline communities who are leading the struggle to keep fossil fuels in the ground and creating a global movement that understands that the way we are going to solve this is not by carbon trading or false solutions that industry and government will try to peddle in Paris.
In the next few weeks as all eyes are on COP21 do not lose heart. With mutual respect and creativity let us amplify the voices of the people who are leading this struggle. Lets keep building the deep and often difficult relationship thank link our social and ecological movements and continue to nurture this incredible movement that is already changing history and does not wait for climate justice to come from anyone, we are the generation we have been waiting for!
When I say climate, you say justice,
#Climate
#Justice!
#Climate
#Justice!
