Raised Voices

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I'm living here in South Africa near the oil refinery with my husband. And for sixteen years I had no problem. But since I came here to Merebank, David my husband fell sick. He was here for a few weeks and he was not well. As soon as he comes home, he gets sick. His legs get swollen up, his head starts spinning, he gets diarrhea. Now things are a little hard because he comes and he goes to Johannesburg. He can't even travel by car, he has to travel by plane. He has to go and come. I told him to go live there and come down in January. And it's hard for me to live like this. He always leaves me and then comes and goes. There's money problems. I'm a pensioner. He's a pensioner too. Money is just enough for our rent. Our rent comes to R800 sometimes R700. That's how I am living. I've also got a skin problem too. I didn't have this problem before. My mother died with no problem. But since I came here I also got this skin problem. My face, my neck. I'm also suffering with this skin problem.

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My name is Roy Nyer. I live in South Africa in South Durban where we are surrounded by large companies that pollute our area. I worked for Mondi for a period of twenty years. Mondi paper company that produces paper and newsprint. My concern is that two of my kids have been affected with sickness through the pollution. And on my investigation I found out that the company that I worked for for twenty years has been a contributing factor to the cause of my children's sickness. One of the reasons I believe that the industries have been built close to our community, predominantly an Indian community, is they've taken advantage of our passivity. We are a race that does not fight very aggressively. Whenever we want to bring our concerns, it's done very passively. This is the reason I believe that most of the industries have come and built their factories close to us because they would not get any violent reactions or violent protest. That's one of the reasons why they have built the company. The other reason is that we are poor. And they realised that as an Indian community that we always believed in family values. That our families would not let us lose our jobs. The companies knew that. Being poor, we would be scared of losing our jobs, so whatever they have done by polluting the area or causing any concern to our community, that we would not fight back. Because we're scared to lose out jobs and if we lose our jobs our families would suffer.

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Hi, my name's Norman Philip and I come from the town of Grangemouth in Scotland which is right next to BP Grangemouth one of the biggest oil refineries in Europe. Climate change has a number of dimensions but the dimension I'm concerned about is the people that have to live next to the fenceline. The people who have daily disturbance by noise and transport of the oil industry. And they don't see the benefits necessarily that the global corporations like BP are benefiting from at the community's expense. I think as oil becomes more and more scarce, the communities from where I come from will suffer more. Because the industry that's been built up to service the oil industry has a number of contaminated sites which the big companies will move away from and it'll be the community that will left to clear up these sites. BP in Grangemouth has already sold off their petroleum to a smaller company. And my fear is that in the next generation there will be no oil production in the town that I come from and we'll be left with an industrial wasteland.

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I live in South Africa, near the oil refinery. This place is polluted with all kinds of rubbish. And my parents and most of the people living in this area died of cancer, asthma and wheezing. What about the little children? We are suffering on this Earth. We are not living a happy life. We are living in a caged up area whereas we're supposed to be living free. We are humans, we are not animals. My brother just died of tumours last year. He just moved here and then he got the tumour and he just died. And the doctors could not find the fault. Only after he died did they find the fault that he had a tumour. We want to live a free life and a fair life. We just want to live a normal life. And we want to give our future generations a pure life.

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My name's Fiona, Scottish as you can tell by my accent. I live next to a petro-chemical industries. I have depression. If anyone knows anything about mental health, it affects one in four Scottish people sometime in their lives. It affects all your senses. It's very uncomfortable to live with such things. I'd just like you to take a few minutes to think of what it's like for people like myself who are on the ground level. Who have to live their lives 24/7 in such conditions. We have to eat, breathe, sleep, live, have our children, look after our grandmothers in this kind of situation. We've got constant pollution in our lungs at all times. Our children are playing in these areas. They're sleeping in all this rubbish that comes out of the plants. It really is very uncomfortable and to be honest a little bit unfair. You can all walk away to your nice areas and we're stuck with it on our very doorsteps, literally our doorsteps. The pollution is smelly, very uncomfortable. You've got to have dark curtains at night time because you can't block out the light from light pollution. You've got smells. And there's nothing you can do. You can put as much air freshener as you want into your sitting room but you just can not get rid of the smell. You're stuck with it. So I'd just like you to take a few moments to yourselves, whether it be now or sometime in the future when you're thinking about your carbon trade and all your great ideas. Just think of the people on the ground who have to eat, sleep and breathe pollution of three different types. Thank you for your time.

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Hi. I'm Diane Patrick who lives in Grangemouth, a volunteer member of the Kersiebank project. The BP lights up my bedroom. I really don't have to put lights on. It's given my small boy asthma.

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I am from the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance from South Africa. At present I'm concerned about carbon trading and climate justice because it's clear to us that Africans and the Third World countries in the South are going to pay to keep the rich countries of the North in their affluent ways.

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So while everyone's talking about how to reduce carbon emissions, what is not being talked about is basically the oil industry and the fossil fuel industry spending upwards of 300 billion US dollars a year looking for new fossil fuel reserves. When we can not afford to burn the reserves we already have found. This is happening in far remote places on the Earth and having huge consequences on the people and fragile ecosystems. Meanwhile 300 billion dollars a year is money that should be going into promoting solutions to climate change. Also looking at alternatives, efficiency, basically ways we are going to cope with our changing planet.