News & Updates
November 29, 2015
COP21: Humanity’s Last Chance Salloon
By Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and the Reverend Canon Mpho Tutu. Original posted on The Desmond and Leah Legacy Foundation web site.
We are in uncharted territory. Never before have representatives of the entire human family had the opportunity to sit down together and collectively change the trajectory of our species and our earth.
Leaders of the world’s nations gathered for the 2015 Paris Climate Conference this week will (for the first time in 21 years of United Nations climate negotiations) seek to achieve a universal, legally binding and enforceable agreement on climate change. Their goal is to limit global warming to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Read More
November 25, 2015
Fighting the Climate Apartheid
At the end of this month, all diplomatic roads will lead to Paris for a global summit on the looming catastrophe of drastic and irreversible climate change. On its present course, man-made climate change will destroy the livelihoods of a quarter of the world’s people and hundreds of millions of them will be in Africa.
That being the case, one would expect African leaders to be seizing every opportunity to lobby and organise to ensure that the continent presses its case resolutely. Instead, there is an air of fatalism and despondency. Read More
November 11, 2015
Recognizing and Accepting White Privilege
“All the white people in the room, raise your hand.” As I sat in a classroom on Valencia College campus, I looked around as I and the other caucasians or predominantly caucasian people timidly raised their hand, fearing what was going to come out of the mouth Niso Tutu, the teenaged granddaughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “You all have ‘white privilege’. This isn’t a bad thing, you need to use it to make this world a better place.” Read More