Vivienne Westwood joined us at Green Lens Studios to film the End Ecocide campaign video. She spoke inspiringly about the movement:
Who are we? We are human beings. We fight each other, we kill each other, we don’t care how we treat every life form on the planet, it’s something we just make use of. We are losing our humanity, our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of other people.
We face the biggest problem that the human race has ever faced which is that we’re in the process of destroying the planet and ourselves and everything on it. I don’t believe in the whole of the universe there happens to be another planet like this. It’s a complete accident. The accident is so special that most scientists would think it’s impossible for it to exist anywhere else even if the universe is endless.
Here we are at this point in time and we are not taking this seriously at all. The problem that’s caused it all is the problem we’re still dealing with. We’re still dealing in killing we’re still dealing in exploiting all the earth for personal gain.
That’s what causes war. All our wars are caused by exploiting the land for cheap labour and for the treasures that are in the ground of it and now we’re exploiting even the very top soil.
Our whole system that’s caused it is not telling us this. They’re trying to avoid telling it to us because whoever is in charge, our rulers are still interested in making that last profit, for what, for what, for what?
If we converted to a green economy we would have a wonderful world, a world which didn’t need to exploit the earth. We could live beautifully, we could evolve into superior beings than we are. Instead of which we just keep on somehow doing the same thing.
Most of us don’t want this. We want a better world and I believe we really could have one. Anyway the idea that we’ve got here is that ecocide should be a crime. The crime of killing life in any way should be a crime. Ecocide is a way of killing all life on the planet eventually and so what we’re trying to do is to get people to acknowledge that it is a crime that can be legally enforced and that we can prosecute the people who wish to do this. They do it purposefully and for a profit, this is madness.
What I care about is the child that’s just been born. I mean we don’t want it to be blown sky high with a bomb, we don’t want something even worse probably to happen to it, but we’re prepared to do this, we’re prepared to just kill each other, to cut each others arms and legs off, just kill each other. Anyway why don’t we stop?
Even to constantly mention the word is really important. Ecocide, it means killing life. What I want to say is that there really are solutions that could be implemented very, very quickly. We could save the planet but nobody is really focusing properly and this film is a brilliant way because we’re trying always to get people to focus on the problem. Anyway our politicians are stupid and we have to do something about it.
Find out more about End Ecocide at www.endecocide.org