It's easy for people in an air-conditioned room to continue with the policies of destruction of Mother Earth. We need instead to put ourselves in the shoes of families in Bolivia and worldwide that lack water and food and suffer misery and hunger.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the disconnect between those who are comfortable and the suffering of those affected by environmental destruction.
Evo Morales highlights the issue of environmental neglect by contrasting the comfortable living conditions of people in wealthy, air-conditioned spaces with the dire circumstances faced by families in impoverished regions like Bolivia. He calls for empathy and a recognition of our responsibility towards those suffering from the consequences of our policies, urging a shift in perspective to foster greater awareness and action against environmental degradation.
In practice
In a speech on climate awareness, use this quote to illustrate the disparity between privilege and suffering.
Bolivia's majority Indian population was always excluded, politically oppressed and culturally alienated. Our national wealth, our raw materials, was plundered. Indios were once treated like animals here. In the 1930s and 40s, they were sprayed with DDT to kill the vermin on their skin and in their hair whenever they came into the city.
The peoples of the Andes believe in the concept of 'living well' instead of wanting to 'live better' by consuming more, regardless of the cost to our neighbors and our environment.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.
You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.
The earth says have a place, be what that place_x000D_ requires; hear the sound the birds imply_x000D_ and see as deep as ridges go behind_x000D_ each other.
It is important what you eat now, what you do now. If we were interested in a sustainable planet where other generations have a right to a decent future, we would not live like this.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.