“The free enterprise policies that produce solely for waste and for profit and that promote a consumerist mentality rather than one of need are damaging to the environment. I am in no sense defending the centralised economies of eastern Europe. They have polluted the north sea and rivers just as industries in Britain and North America have destroyed rivers, wasted natural resources and ruined people's lives by their form of pollution. It is not good enough to promote an economic system that produces for waste and to promote environmental controls in western Europe and North America to look after our environment if at the same time we transfer that destruction of the environment to poorer Third-world countries, either by exporting toxic waste and letting those countries get rid of it by whatever means they can, because they are desperate for foreign currency, or by promoting the destruction of the rain forests, through raping those countries to collect debt payments, when they can make them only by destroying all their natural resources. We live in an age when we have an opportunity to improve our environment and save ourselves from mass destruction through climatic change and environmental disasters.”

— Jeremy Corbyn

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/jan/15/environmental-protection-bill in the House of Commons (15 January 1990).
1990s

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Jeremy Corbyn 76

British Labour Party politician 1949

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“The right hon. Gentleman should be aware that, two weeks ago, I had an interesting meeting with an environmental campaigning group from the Soviet Union who openly admitted that the industrial policies followed in the past by the Soviet Union and many countries in central and eastern Europe had done a great deal of environmental damage. The difference is that those people felt that they had the power to change the policies to stop the destruction of their own environment. The policies of free-market economies which the right hon. Gentleman propounds have led to the pollution of the North sea and the Irish sea, the destruction of the rain forests in Brazil and Malaysia and long-term serious environmental damage by multinational companies all over the southern countries of this planet.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/dec/15/future-of-socialism in the House of Commons (15 December 1989).
1980s

“There will have to be three objects for farming and farm products. First, we must end over-production. The over-production that is taking place in Europe and the United States is damaging and obscenely wasteful. It is damaging to the environment, and it is obviously obscenely wasteful when products that are the result of over-production are being burnt in an attempt to maintain prices…Secondly, we must end export dumping. Instead, we must promote aid and trade policies that encourage self-reliant production, which is more protective of the local economy and less dependent on the economies of western Europe and of the United States…Thirdly, what happens to the political sovereignty of poor countries that do not have the infrastructure that is available in Europe and north America when they are told that, because of the debt crisis, they must open up their economies to multinational capital to do whatever it will, and when the IMF and the World bank tell them that they must cut social expenditure? They are now told that they must pursue free trade policies for farm products. Those policies add up to disaster for poor countries.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/nov/23/general-agreement-on-tariffs-and-trade-1 in the House of Commons (23 November 1990).
1990s

“You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!”

Utah Phillips (1935–2008) American labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller and poet

The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, Righteous Babe Records (1996)

“It is time to give city and county regions the powers and resources they need to promote growth, and I will happily work with all of those who are genuinely committed to building an economic powerhouse in the north.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

Devolution and Growth Across Britain (19 June 2015)

“Widespread public ignorance is a type of pollution that infects the political system rather than our physical environment.”

Ilya Somin (1973) American law school professor

Source: Democracy and Political ignorance: Why smaller government is better (2013), p. 6
Context: In the same way, it is not necessarily paternalistic to advocate the restriction of air pollution. Individual citizens and firms may produce more air pollution than any of them actually want because they know that there is little to be gained from uncoordinated individual restraint. If I avoid driving a gas-guzzling car, the impact on the overall level of air pollution w ill be utterly insignificant. So I have no incentive to take it into account in making my driving decisions even if I care greatly about reducing air pollution. Widespread public ignorance is a type of pollution that infects the political system rather than our physical environment.

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.”

Barry Lyga (1971) American writer

Source: I Hunt Killers

“A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. Our businesses take resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste…”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Epilogue: Ecological Literacy
The Web of Life (1996)

“There is but one reason for cantoning the eastern troops on the east side of the North River; and that is, they are more convenient to receive their State stores. But this is so trifling a consideration, that it ought to have no weight, when it is opposed to so many more important considerations.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

“We need to talk about more than just the health care plan. We need to realize we have a sickness care rather than a health care system. We need to be the party talking about why so many of our chemical policies and our food policies and our agricultural policies and our environment policies and even our economic policies are leading to people sick to begin with.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Quoted in We Desperately Need Marianne Williamson’s Message, https://theintercept.com/2019/08/05/marianne-williamson-2020-presidential-campaign/ The Intercept, Jon Schwarz (5 August 2019)

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Jeremy Corbyn 76

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