The environmental issue Tony Blair wants discussed at the G8 summit is climate change, but here at the G8 Alternatives Summit they have another idea: climate justice. A panel in Edinburgh's Queen's Hall is discussing the impact that environmental damage, mostly caused by coporations, has on the poorest and most vulnerable people.
Bianca Jagger has told the audience of what she witnessed among the indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where contaminated water supplies from oil drilling led to blistering skin and miscarriages.
Her point is that western countries - especially the US - are such huge consumers of oil that the oil companies can hold their governments to hostage and more or less do as they please. "We must call for the seperation of oil and state," she said.
Actvist and writer Ken Wiwa, whose father, Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged 10 years ago by Nigeria's former military dictatorship for his campaigns on behalf of the Ogoni people and against Shell, made a similar point. He said the "gravest danger" facing us all were corporations, who had successfully exercised control of developing world governments and were now doing the same in the west. "What we have to do now is take back the government from the coporate agenda," he said. "We must find a way to hold coroporations to account."
The other big issue rumbling away is Live 8, which some here feel upstaged the 200,000 plus march in Edinburgh yesterday. Jagger hinted at conspiracy when she said the only reason Edinburgh had not featured in the global Live 8 coverage was "because we were discussing the issues".
Wiwa had been in Hyde Park, writing about it for the Observer, and though he continually referred to it almost disdainfully as "that event" he said "there was a sense that at least the issues were being raised".
The one thing he did not like were levels of the business sponsorship: Nokia's name plastered all over, an AOL-branded computer tent and, incongruously for an anti-poverty event, a Moet et Chandon champagne bar.
It was those corporations again.
