[douglasdickel]

Geniais quotes do bom - porém longo - documentário canadense de 2003 'The corporation'. (Depois eu traduzo.)


Ray Anderson: Drawing the metaphor of the early attempts to fly. The man going off of a very high cliff in his airplane, with the wings flapping, and the guys flapping the wings and the wind is in his face, and this poor fool thinks he's flying, but, in fact, he's in free fall, and he just doesn't know it yet because the ground is so far away, but, of course, the craft is doomed to crash. That's the way our civilization is, the very high cliff represents the virtually unlimited resources we seem to have when we began this journey. The craft isn't flying because it's not built according to the laws of aerodynamics and it's subject to the law of gravity. Our civilization is not flying because it's not built according to the laws of aerodynamics for civilizations that would fly. And, of course, the ground is still a long way away, but some people have seen that ground rushing up sooner than the rest of us have. The visionaries have seen it and have told us it's coming. There's not a single scientific, peer-reviewed paper published in the last 25 years that would contradict this scenario: every living system of earth is in decline, every life support system of earth is in decline, and these together constitute the biosphere, the biosphere that supports and nurtures all of life, and not just our life but perhaps 30 million other species that share this planet with us. The typical company of the 20th century: extractive, wasteful, abusive, linear in all of its processes, taking from the earth, making, wasting, sending its products back to the biosphere, waste to a landfill. I, myself, was amazed to learn just how much stuff the earth has to produce through our extraction process to produce a dollar of revenue for our company. When I learned, I was flabbergasted. We are leaving a terrible legacy of poison and diminishment of the environment for our grandchildren's grandchildren, generations not yet born. Some people have called that intergeneration tyranny, a form of taxation without representation, levied by us on generations yet to be. It's the wrong thing to do.

Robert Monks: In our search for wealth and prosperity, we created something that's gonna destroy us.

Samuel Epstein M.D.: Something happened in 1940, which marked the beginning of a new era. The era of the ability to synthesise and create, on an unlimited scale, new chemicals that had never existed before in the world. So, suddenly it became possible to produce any new synthetic chemical, the like of which had never existed before in the world, for any purpose and at virtually no cost. For instance, if you wanted to go to a chemist and say, 'Look, I want to have chemical, say a pesticide that will persist throughout the food chain and I don't want to have to renew it very, very often, I'd like it to be relatively non-destructible', and then he'd put 2 benzene molecules on the blackboard and add a chlorine here, and a chlorine there, that was DDT! As the petrochemical era grew and grew, warning signs emerged that some of these chemicals could pose hazards. The data initially were trivial, anecdotal, but gradually, a body of data started accumulating to the extent that we now know that the synthetic chemicals, which have permeated our workplace, our consumer products, our air, our water, produced cancer, and also birth defects and some other toxic effects. Furthermore, industry has known about this, at least most industries have known about this, and have attempted to trivialise these risks. If I take a gun and shoot you, that's criminal. If I expose you to some chemicals, which knowingly are going to kill you, what difference is there? The difference is that it takes longer to kill you. We are now in the midst of a major cancer epidemic and I have no doubt and I have documented the basis for this, that industry is largely responsible for this overwhelming epidemic of cancer, in which 1 in every two men get cancer in their lifetimes, and 1 in every 3 women get cancer in their lifetimes.