Winona LaDuke Quotes

All communities have a right to clean water. The taxpayers of Pueblo should not have to carry the burden of the clean up cost simply because they live downstream.

If we could begin to look at water pollution as a human rights violation, and we could begin to look at criminal aspects of this, I think that could be a game changer for many companies who want to not be forthwith and think that they can just hold off in a lawsuit for 10 years, and in the meantime, people are still being poisoned.

There's no excuse in 2019, with the wealth we have as a nation, with the technology we have as a country, that we cannot clean this water, ensure that all communities have clean drinking water.

Everything that I'm seeing in America, when it comes to the groundwater contamination and the poisoning of people I see, it's a moral issue. Nobody's ever gonna convince me that a CEO wouldn't care if his own child was poisoned.

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters ahead of the health of our families. Our rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage. Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors, friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and asthma.

In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.

I've been working with them for a couple years and a couple of projects. Essentially Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the chief litigator for this corporation, this Alliance, and their job is to prosecute corporate polluters of the great bodies of water in North America.

The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.

I don't think it's too hippie to want to clean up the planet so you don't wind up dying of some kind of cancer when you're 45 years old. It enrages me that these big cancer-research organizations can't be bothered to man the front lines of environmental protest.

What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.

When a company creates a product that directly or indirectly adversely impacts the health of people, that product must be regulated. The process by which it's created must be regulated. No company has the right to injure people. No company.

Water and sanitation has not had the same kind of champion that global health, and even education, have had.

The Safe Drinking Water Act was passed in 1974 after tests discovered carcinogens, lead and dangerous bacteria flowing from faucets in New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Boston and elsewhere.

On April 16, 2010, 34 Chinese environmental organizations, including Friends of Nature, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, and Green Beagle, questioned heavy metal pollution in a letter sent to CEO Steve Jobs.

People who can turn on a tap and have safe and clean water to drink, to cook with and to bathe in often take it for granted — and yet more than one billion of our fellow human beings have little choice but to use potentially harmful sources of water

We cannot have profits at the expense of our children.

... a victim of the use of water as a beverage.

The people of West Virginia deserve jobs. But the people of West Virginia also deserve clean water.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller spent more money in New York to assure clean water than did the entire Federal Government.

I think CSR, corporate social responsibility, is something that is becoming front and center.

I'm concerned that we don't address the water pollution problems in other countries. If we move forward and don't clean up the messes of the past, they'll just get swept under the rug.

We've sued out-of-state power plants that are polluting our air and led a coalition of attorneys general from Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Massachusetts against efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives to remove critical environmental regulations that protect New York communities from toxic pollution.

The bottom line is this: A private company and/or its industry allies should not knowingly lie to the American people about the harms that are caused by its product.

By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate Left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.