Winona LaDuke Quotes

Our daily habits of driving, drilling, buying and supporting all of the economic benefits a free economy demands has cost us dearly, but none more so than for the people of Shishmaref.

The history of fossil-fuel development has always been that certain people are expendable. What's changed is that new, larger populations are now considered expendable.

The tar sands boom has become the world's largest energy project, the world's largest construction project, and the world's largest capital project.

There's no question that tar sands in Canada are probably the largest source of oil available to the U.S. over a long period of time. There's as much oil in the tar sands probably as there is in Saudi Arabia. The problem is, there's a huge capital requirement to develop that.

Tar sands oil is dirtier, more corrosive, and worse for the environment than conventional oil.

There's a lot of propaganda that contaminates a discussion around what we should do about pipelines, how our economy may or may not be dependent on exports of raw bitumen.

The extraction of oil, coal and minerals brought, and still brings, a cost to the environment.

Our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value encourages drilling without taking into account the costs to the ocean, even without major spills.

I want to emphasize that I am not opposed to pipelines. We already have hundreds of them in our state. I am opposed to the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline route because it is directly over the Ogallala Aquifer.

It would be nice if we didn't have to drill for oil in the gulf. We have this shallow continental shelf on the west coast of Florida, and it would be a real disaster if we had a major oil spill there. It would be wonderful if we could find some other source of energy.

I fracked over 3,000 wells in my life and never had a problem with an aquifer.

I see a lot of damage to Mother Earth. I see water being taken from creeks where water belongs to animals, not to oil companies.

The more people learn about the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, the worse it looks.

In 1972, Texaco Oil Company, in partnership with PetroEcuador, the state-run oil company of Ecuador, began to drill for oil in the jungles of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Agriculture is the most destructive industry that we have. More than coal mining and other extractive industries.

When you make $78 billion a year, as the three large oil companies are doing, you have no interest in changing the status quo…. Oil companies are not interested innovation.

Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change - they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies.

There are serious worries about unconventional gas and oil, especially those concerning the environment.

It is time to get rid of the harmful and dangerous practice of offshore drilling once and for all.

As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

Where I come from, people will spit at you if they think you support Enbridge.

We oppose any pipeline whose sole purpose is to export bitumen from Canada to make profits in other countries.

The oilsands will be phased out by 2030 or 2035.

In the world of globalization, the fossil fuel masters of the universe who are digging up our boreal forest and our muskeg and scraping out the bitumen would rather have Canadians take all the risks - and then the oceans take the risks to ship it to refineries that they've already built in other countries rather than create jobs for Canadians here.

The process to generate energy using the Canadian tar sands is particularly dirty, producing one of the most noxious fossil fuels on the planet and leaving a devastated landscape in its wake.