The fourth Oilwatch General Assembly gathered in Quito on the 23rd and 24 rd of July, 2011:
Recognizing:
That we are living in a planetary crisis without precedent in the history of humanity, that in many ways it is already a catastrophic situation that demands global actions and commitments;
That this crisis is not just a financial or environmental crisis, it is an industrial, climatic, social and political crisis, and that therefore the solutions cannot be restricted to just one sphere;
That through old and new hegemonies there is an imposition of levels of accumulation, domination, dispossession and destruction that are threatening to limit live on the planet and that are condemning peoples in whose territories this wealth exists to pauperization and violence;
That in spite of the intensification of local, national and global problems, instead of putting limits to the oil-based capitalism, the tendency is to increase its exploration and extraction, including in extremely fragile areas and conditions;
That capitalism has succeeded in imposing “carbon” as a unit of global value to measure environmental problems, and that it has created a new tool to facilitate the increasing commodification of nature and its functions;
That criticism of the oil civilization and its technologies is urgent.
We propose:
To place oil in the center of the debates and identify its relationship with other forms of domination;
To overcome the reductionism imposed on the global debate on climate change, which has made invisible, the productive model based on oil and its extractive processes, the environmental conflicts and the disputes over territories on which this model is sustained;
To urgently build new productive patterns that will respect and strengthen existence and rhythms of life and that will contribute to the emancipation of the peoples;
To struggle against hoarding and the global foreign ownership of land, and support agrarian reform processes and the recognition of the right of the peoples to decide and protect their lands and territories, the concrete spaces for the materialization of the utopia understood as sumak kawsai or by any other name our societies may have;
To build alliances with other actors affected by the oil civilization and the barbarism of capitalism, including workers, urban and rural sectors, scholars, artists, women, youth; to confront the whole destructive cycle produced by the direct and indirect dependence on oil and other fossil fuels.
To leave oil, gas and coal in the ground is for Oilwatch a strategy to confront, in a feasible way, the entire oil civilization at the local, national and international levels and because of this we will promote it with different strategies according to the specificities of each people, nation or country.
