While the 2024 Jury Meeting takes place in South Africa, one of its members shared that the process of selecting the new Right Livelihood Laureates means much more than choosing incredible change-makers.
Right Livelihood Laureate and Jury member Juan Pablo Orrego explains how reading the Jury report—the extensive document compiling the nominations for the Award—and the Jury discussions have enabled new connections for his work in Chile.
The following text is an excerpt of Orrego’s introductory speech at the recent launch of the documentary “Mining and the Military Industry: Chilean Metals in the Business of War” in Santiago de Chile.
“The link between the arms industry and the global ecological crisis is direct”
By Juan Pablo Orrego Silva*
The Right Livelihood Award is at the heart of this story: I have been honoured to be a member of the Right Livelihood Award Jury, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”, for the past eight years. This year, I will also be a member of the Jury, which will meet in South Africa.
Every August, we study a 700-page document about the admirable work of hundreds of nominees. It makes you immerse yourself in the horrors of war and its aftermath around the world and in regions and countries to which the Chilean media pay little attention.
I also learned about the heroism of women and men and organisations fighting to confront all this, which makes one feel small and not exactly very brave. In the past and present of the Right Livelihood Award, there are imprisoned, tortured, killed people and survivors of attempted murders.
Knowing this “environment” made me reflect more deeply on the unpleasant subject of arms and war. I began to comment during the Jury’s deliberations regarding the need for a global campaign to question the mega-business of war at its roots. Right Livelihood gave me access to European organisations working on the subject, who shared with me the document mentioned in the video “Raw materials in the European defence industry” from the Joint Research Center of the European Commission.
Note the use of the word “defence,” as if these things were not used to offend or attack. This report indicates that Anglo-American, Glencore and Rio Tinto are the leading minerals suppliers to the European arms industry.
Based on this data and others related to the consumption of metals in the Second World War, for example, we published a powerful report in El Desconcierto that went relatively unnoticed. I must say that I have also been motivated by the fact that in various meetings with grassroots communities in different countries of the “Third World”, I have seen written or heard the phrase “mining is killing us.”
Later, Ole Von Uexkull, Executive Director of Right Livelihood, who knew of my obsession with the subject because we had talked about it during the Jury sessions, sent me this book, “Ecologies of Power”. It is an exhaustive study of the United States Department of Defense, which shows that, as a single entity, it is by far the one that consumes the most oil and its derivatives on Earth. Therefore, it is the entity that emits, by far, the greatest amount of greenhouse gases globally. It demonstrates —although in reality, it is obvious— the direct relationship between the arms industry and war with the global ecological crisis, mainly due to all the mining activity that this sector requires.
Clearly, of all the industries of humanity, the arms industry, with its extensive derivative chain, is the primary climate changer, “chaos-creator”, and the principal agent of socio-ecological degradation in the world. All the countries of the “Third World” supply this disastrous industry from within, as seen in the aforementioned colonial extractivism with its trail of negative socio-ecological impacts. Chile is a perfect example of this, unfortunately.
Thus, after more than 35 years as a socio-environmental activist, working on significant campaigns and causes, with important achievements and also frustrations and failures, I have been finding that we have only scratched the shell of the beast of dysfunctional developmentalism at all costs and that we are working on the peripheries of the underlying problem of civilisation, of humanity, which is war with its disastrous direct humanitarian, social and ecological impacts, and the gigantic industrial framework of arms, and its multiple effects, which affect practically all of humanity and the entire biosphere.
Where is the global campaign to stop this madness? As we speak, the global north is rearming, and military spending budgets are increasing rapidly. According to SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), this year’s global military spending amounts to 2.443 trillion USD, with the United States, China, and Russia leading the way and virtually all European countries following suit. The United States is far ahead in the frenzy, with military spending approaching 1 trillion USD annually.
In Europe, even climate change seems relegated to the last places of attention in the old continent. The priorities are internal security, terrorism, which is always a consequence of wars; migrants, who almost always flee from internal or external armed conflicts; and the numerous current wars that are constantly threatening to spread.
Everything I have just told you may seem a bit disproportionate in relation to the video we are presenting. From Ecosistemas, we were able to make, with a sense of extreme urgency, this brief audiovisual report on such a burning situation. The subject gives rise to much, much more.
Our intention today is to raise a big red flag to you regarding all this that is going unnoticed or being ignored, either out of genuine ignorance, fear or outright denialism because of the unpleasantness of the subject. We invite you to reflect and collectively act to face what we consider the fundamental problem of humanity and the biosphere today.
If the war and the arms industry end, humanity and the biosphere change, meaning the climate system could recover some of its pre-industrial balance. That is what we must aim for. It does not seem easy, but that is utopia.
*President of Ecosistemas, 1998 Right Livelihood Laureate, member of the 2024 Right Livelihood Jury.
Watch the documentary with English subtitles!