Alliance says social equality must be part of World Environment Day

Alliance Party media release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday 4 June 2009

Alliance Party co leader Kay Murray says World Environment Day must be about more than a few ceremonial tree plantings and other "feel good exercises."

"We can't afford token gestures on climate change and the degradation of the planet and its people."

Ms Murray says the Alliance believes the state of the planet, the people and the economy are all connected.

She says the quest for ever increasing profits and a consumer society are risking the earth and hurt everybody.

"For example, global warming has no borders, but is being caused almost entirely by affluent societies, and the most serious effects are felt by people in poorer nations."

Ms Murray says that sustainability depends on looking at the bigger picture and connections between environmental and social issues.

"For example, running the Range Rover on crop-based biofuel can take food out of the mouths of people, and is part of the problem not the solution."

She says free market globalization was literally an insane system that had resulted in the massive destruction of resources, including living resources, an example of which were depleted global fish stocks.

"We are a global community, a planet with limited resources. If some use more than their share through a culture of extravagance, then others miss out, and live and quite frequently die in poverty."

Ms Murray says the concept of social equality and environmentalism went together.

"Western nations and multinational corporations do not acknowledge the earth's resources belong to everyone, present and future. We all have the same right to them. The earth's resources should not be plundered for a quick buck."

She says that long term solutions mean fighting the privatisation of life sustaining resources such as water and abandoning so-called "market based" solutions to the problem of pollution.

"Schemes such as the emissions trading scheme are a nonsense that do not go to the root of the problem."

The Alliance says pollution, such as carbon emissions, must be taxed at source, not traded likes shares on the stock exchange.

"Most importantly, free trade agreements that allow corporations to roam the world at will, exploiting both the earth's people and its resources to maximise profit, must be shredded and burned, or at least composted in a environmentally friendly worm farm."

ENDS

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