Aline Sousa Speech to the United Nations in Geneva

With all the crises we must overcome, solving them while preventing new ones requires a different way of thinking:

We must be cooperative, not proprietary, in our thinking and actions.

There has been too much talking and minimal action. To improve the quality of life on this beautiful planet, we must COOPERATE!

In 2018, Brazil, the country with the most prominent black population outside of the continent of Africa AND the most indigenous that survived colonial genocide, elected a white supremacist president. That hadn’t happened since Hitler’s Germany!….

Imagine–a once brutally colonized country that kidnapped and enslaved the most Africans to this new world. 

We lived four years of hate, fear, and genocide. Black and brown people displayed the swastica, and some even marched to the nazi goose step. 

When the resistance defeated fascism through the next elections, the regime did not want to give up its power.  

Brazil was under threat of a violent coup. Our new democratically elected president, who always respected diversity, decided that people’s power would be the only way to establish a peaceful transition. Seven representatives, each leader of their class and position in Civil society, were chosen out of 220 million Brazilians. 

Our famous indigenous chief, the disabled, a great teacher and educational advocate, leading woman activists, lgbt, domestic workers, and my category, recyclers. 

I, as my mother and father, as their mother and father before them, was born homeless. We grew up in landfills separating trash, some of which we would build shacks, cloth, and sometimes even used to nourish ourselves.  

This went on for three generations! One day after another, of the many times that the police would arrive with bulldozers and trucks to destroy the little we had, I decided that one day we could break that cycle of poverty and violence of what was nothing more than ethnic cleansing. Like the untouchables of Índia, we were an eyesore that the then-ruling elite was uncomfortable with. 

We began to organize, and today, I’ve been honored with the task of leading one of Latin America’s largest waste cooperatives. My people have real homes and work and are part of what our planet needs for all, including that ruling elite, to survive. 

Now, they award us; they depend on our advice for social public inclusion policies. Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagined that I would be chosen to represent the seven leaders who helped transform a country infested with hatred and on the verge of civil war into the even stronger democracy we are today.

However, political democracy can not survive without economic democracy. We can not eliminate racism without identifying classism. Also, many talk about diversity today, but what good is diversity when we are dangerously close to decimating our biodiversity? 

 Many today will talk about cultural racism, but what about environmental racism? Ecological racism or ecological apartheid is a form of institutional racism leading to landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste disposal disproportionately placed in communities of color. 

This I’ve earned the right to claim some expertise with. I lived and studied it, and my life’s mission has been to abolish it. 

Now, Even that powerful elite that discriminated against us by demolishing our homes, destroyed our livelihoods, and, in my case, took what I most treasured as a child, the books I would read to dream about myself, my family, and all the many living in extreme and humiliating poverty to escape from.

Today, that same elite is starting to understand that we, once untouchables and invisible people marginalized by society, are vital to the survival of all, not just human society but all species of life on our planet. Now they understand that interconnectedness, Love, and tolerant coexistênce are natural laws. 

Our planet will not survive through continued resource extraction. Recycling has now leaped from the dark shadows towards a light for solution. Hence, I must end this speech with an important warning. The world is in the process of transformation from a unipolar to a multipolar one. This is a good thing, but I made the following alert.

We are on the right path, but some suffer as all shifts in world order. And history has taught us that people experiencing poverty are the most vulnerable.

Today, Recycling has become an essential part of a successful transition to a better world. Still, the instrumental changes needed for a revolution, as in de-dollarization, make Recycling impossible. The recent fall of the dólar has animated my people’s wages. For example, within the last few months, we must collect 8 tons of discarded boxes and paper to earn 270 dollars a month!  

In these same months, I’ve been invited to speak at events like this the world over; I’ve been awarded many awards, including the environmental and social justice award from the US ambassador to the UN, the very body I’m speaking to today, yet another event, another talk. 

With all due respect, I say enough awards, enough talk!

IF recyclers are critical to a sustainable world, I call on the UN to take emergency action to help recyclers survive because, at this moment, this is a category that is about to become extinct. After many years of struggle, the irony is that one of the critical solutions to climate change, meeting sustainable development goals and species survival, is in danger…in this war to save our planet, we need fewer awards and recognitions. We need more comprehension because I must apologize for the repetition, but again, the human diversity we defend here will not even exist without biodiversity. After decades of plodding and painful progress, Recyclers worldwide need immediate, urgent assistance. I am very sad to say that again, just in the last few months, this critical activity has quickly degenerated back to my grandmother’s generation, an endangered species……thank you for your attention and consideration, and much gratitude to this noble family of nations, may God help us all……