Steven Seagal is a well-known action star, to say the least.
You might know him from:
You might even know him for the controversial show, Steven Seagal: Lawman. It ran on A&E from 2009-2014.
I'll admit I lost interest in Seagal over the years. He's made numerous questionable claims, particularly that he ran a dojo in Japan.
The dojo in Juso is thirty minutes from my house, and I know for a fact he never ran it. He trained there alongside his ex-wife, Miyako Fujitani-sama, whose family owns it, but it was never his. You can read about how disrespectful he was to Fujitani-sama here. It's worth noting that their children, Ayako Fujitani and Kentaro Seagal become actors and have had good careers.
That said, as a kid, I deeply respected Seagal: studying martial arts partly because of him.
And growing a ponytail like his while sporting various tangzhuang in public (blue, red, and black kung fu uniforms), but luckily, I grew out of that phase.
Seagal represented something important to me then: a bridge between Eastern martial arts philosophy and Western willpower.
Recently, I watched On Deadly Ground (1994), and at the end, Seagal delivers a speech about environmental destruction, corporate greed, and our responsibility to the planet. It's passionate, prescient, and honestly moving. Thirty years later, everything he warned about has only gotten worse.
Hearing his speech reminded me, despite his flaws, Seagal does have a genuine heart for certain causes. He cared deeply about the environment when it wasn't trendy. He brought legitimate aikido to mainstream audiences. Seagal wasn't perfect, but he was worth respecting as both a thinker and a martial artist.
So, I'm sharing his speech below.
Love him or hate him, the message deserves to be seen again and again until people get it.
Steven Seagal's Speech from "On Deadly Ground" (1994)
"How many of you out there have heard of alternative engines? Engines that can run on anything from alcohol to garbage and water? Or carburetors that can get hundreds of miles to the gallon? Or electric or magnetic engines that can practically run for ever?
You don't know about them because if they were to come into use, they'd put the oil companies out of business. The concept of the internal combustion engine has been obsolete for fifty years. But because of the oil cartels and corrupt government regulations we, and the rest of the world, have been forced to use gasoline for over one hundred years.
Big business is primarily responsible for destroying the water we drink, the air that we breathe and the food we eat. They have no care for the world they destroy. Only for the money they make in the process. How many oil spills can we endure? Millions and millions of gallons of oil are now destroying the oceans and the many forms of life it supports. Among these is plankton, which supplies 60 to 90 percent of the earth's oxygen, which supports the entire marine eco-system which forms the basis of our planet's food supplies. But the plankton is dying.
I thought well, let's go to some remote state or country, anywhere on earth. But in doing a little research I realized these people brought their toxic waste all over the world. They basically control the legislation, and in fact they control the law. The law says that no company can be fined over $25,000 a day. For a company making $10 million a day by dumping lethal toxic waste into the ocean it's only good business to continue doing this.
They influence the media so that they can control our minds. They make it a crime to speak out for ourselves. And if we do so, we're called conspiracy nuts. We're laughed at. We're all angry because we're all being chemically and genetically damaged, and we don't even realize it. Unfortunately this will affect our children. We go to work each day and right under our noses we see our car and the car in front of us spewing noxious and poisonous gasses that are cumulative poisons. These poisons kill us slowly, even when we see no effect.
How many of us would have believed if we were told twenty years ago that on a certain day we wouldn't be able to see fifty feet in front of us? That we wouldn't be able to take a deep breath because the air would be a mass of poisonous gas? That we wouldn't be able to drink out of our faucets, that we'd have to buy water out of bottles? The most common and God given rights have been taken away from us. Unfortunately the reality of our lives is so grim nobody wants to hear it.
Now I have been asked what we can do. I think we need a responsible body of people that can actually represent us, rather than big business. This body of people must not allow the introduction of anything into our environment that is not absolutely biodegradable or able to be chemically neutralized upon production. And finally, as long as there is profit to be made from the polluting our earth, companies and individuals will continue to do what they want. We have to force these companies to operate safely and responsibly, with all our best interests in mind, so that when they don't we can take back our resources and our hearts and our minds to do what's right."
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