On October 12th, 2020, Indigenous People’s Day, a group of indigenous people and allies gathered in Illahee (Portland, Oregon) to confront the Sierra Club and 350.org for their corporate ties and advocacy of false solutions as outlined in the film Planet of the Humans.
These groups were informed that they had breached trust with the grassroots environmental movement and local indigenous people, and had betrayed their own stated goals.
Sierra Club was informed that their promotion of “green investments” in massive multinational corporations via their “sustainable investing funds” represent a fundamental opposition to life on the planet.
350.org was informed that even their name and stated goal, 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide, is incompatible with life for the small island nations. As the Association of Small Island States write in their 2009 briefing as part of the Copenhagen climate conference, “350 ppm is a death sentence. . . . The safe level of CO2 for SIDS (Small Island Developing States) is around 260 parts per million. . . . CO2 buildup must be reversed, not allowed to increase or even be stabilized at 350 ppm, which would amount to a death sentence for coral reefs, small island developing states, and billions of people living along low lying coastlines.”
Both of these groups have and continue to advocate for false solutions, including “green” technology, “green” investments, and other greenwashing schemes. Both groups failed to sign the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth created at the 2010 Cochabamba World People’s Conference on Climate Change, despite the opportunity to do so.
On October 12th, 2020, both groups were informed that they are no longer welcome, and were asked to cease operations in Oregon and across Turtle Island in favor of true grassroots resistance.
Featured image: Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo shows evidence of crude oil contamination in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Photograph: Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines
Dear presidents of the nine Amazonian countries and to all world leaders that share responsibility for the plundering of our rainforest,
My name is Nemonte Nenquimo. I am a Waorani woman, a mother, and a leader of my people. The Amazon rainforest is my home. I am writing you this letter because the fires are raging still. Because the corporations are spilling oil in our rivers. Because the miners are stealing gold (as they have been for 500 years), and leaving behind open pits and toxins. Because the land grabbers are cutting down primary forest so that the cattle can graze, plantations can be grown and the white man can eat. Because our elders are dying from coronavirus, while you are planning your next moves to cut up our lands to stimulate an economy that has never benefited us. Because, as Indigenous peoples, we are fighting to protect what we love – our way of life, our rivers, the animals, our forests, life on Earth – and it’s time that you listened to us.
In each of our many hundreds of different languages across the Amazon, we have a word for you – the outsider, the stranger. In my language, WaoTededo, that word is “cowori”. And it doesn’t need to be a bad word. But you have made it so. For us, the word has come to mean (and in a terrible way, your society has come to represent): the white man that knows too little for the power that he wields, and the damage that he causes.
You are probably not used to an Indigenous woman calling you ignorant and, less so, on a platform such as this. But for Indigenous peoples it is clear: the less you know about something, the less value it has to you, and the easier it is to destroy. And by easy, I mean: guiltlessly, remorselessly, foolishly, even righteously. And this is exactly what you are doing to us as Indigenous peoples, to our rainforest territories, and ultimately to our planet’s climate.
It took us thousands of years to get to know the Amazon rainforest. To understand her ways, her secrets, to learn how to survive and thrive with her. And for my people, the Waorani, we have only known you for 70 years (we were “contacted” in the 1950s by American evangelical missionaries), but we are fast learners, and you are not as complex as the rainforest.
When you say that the oil companies have marvellous new technologies that can sip the oil from beneath our lands like hummingbirds sip nectar from a flower, we know that you are lying because we live downriver from the spills. When you say that the Amazon is not burning, we do not need satellite images to prove you wrong; we are choking on the smoke of the fruit orchards that our ancestors planted centuries ago.
When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land, and the first to hear her cries.
I never had the chance to go to university, and become a doctor, or a lawyer, a politician, or a scientist. My elders are my teachers. The forest is my teacher. And I have learned enough (and I speak shoulder to shoulder with my Indigenous brothers and sisters across the world) to know that you have lost your way, and that you are in trouble (though you don’t fully understand it yet) and that your trouble is a threat to every form of life on Earth.
You forced your civilisation upon us and now look where we are: global pandemic, climate crisis, species extinction and, driving it all, widespread spiritual poverty. In all these years of taking, taking, taking from our lands, you have not had the courage, or the curiosity, or the respect to get to know us. To understand how we see, and think, and feel, and what we know about life on this Earth.
I won’t be able to teach you in this letter, either. But what I can say is that it has to do with thousands and thousands of years of love for this forest, for this place. Love in the deepest sense, as reverence. This forest has taught us how to walk lightly, and because we have listened, learned and defended her, she has given us everything: water, clean air, nourishment, shelter, medicines, happiness, meaning. And you are taking all this away, not just from us, but from everyone on the planet, and from future generations.
It is the early morning in the Amazon, just before first light: a time that is meant for us to share our dreams, our most potent thoughts. And so I say to all of you: the Earth does not expect you to save her, she expects you to respect her. And we, as Indigenous peoples, expect the same.
Nemonte Nenquimo is cofounder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organisation Ceibo Alliance, the first female president of the Waorani organisation of Pastaza province and one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.
BREAKING: Wet’suwet’en Women Occupy Pipeline Drillsite To Stop CGL from Drilling Beneath Their Sacred Headwaters
As Coastal GasLink attempts to destroy our homelands, we are surveilled, harassed, and criminalized even when we pray for our yintah.
Our rights are being trampled and our future is at risk. We ask our supporters to again stand with us and to take action, as Coastal GasLink is now days away from test drilling at our sacred headwaters .
The time is now to fight with all we have against this colonial invasion.
Indigenous Women Hold Ceremony at Pipeline Drill Site
Coastal GasLink has called in the RCMP to try and remove Wet’suwet’en community members and Indigenous youth as they hold a ceremony at a proposed drill site for Coastal Gaslink’s pipeline. Coastal Gaslink has been evicted from our territories by the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs – who have full jurisdiction over Wet’suwet’en lands. As CGL continues to trespass, we will do everything in our power to protect our waters and to uphold our laws.
We will not let CGL break our Wet’suwet’en laws and drill under the headwaters of the Wedzin Kwa river, which nourishes all of Wet’suwet’en territory. The standoff is ongoing. We call for solidarity actions from coast to coast. Take action where you stand, or come stand with us on the yintah.
On 14th September 2020, an adolescent woman was brutally raped by multiple men in India. This article examines the gender- and caste-based hierarchies at play in this region, and how it has affected the case.
Yet another victim of gang rape has died to injuries inflicted upon her during rape in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. The woman, who was nineteen years old, died after battling with her injuries for fourteen days.
The infamous 2012 Nirbhaya case set precedent for allowing capital punishment specifically in cases of brutal rapes. While the victim’s family welcomed this punishment, many have raised concern on this. A fear of capital punishment, rather than deterring future rapes, will encourage the perpetrators to kill their victims after the rape. Unfortunately, this fear has also rung true at least to some extent.
Since the infamous Nirbhaya gang rape, instances of rape have become more visible in India. Every year, the number of reported rapes have increased. It is estimated that every 20 minutes, a man rapes a woman in India. Many predict that thousands of rapes go unreported each year due to the stigma attached to women being hurt in this way.
Caste-based impunity
Adding to this is the dimension of the traditional caste-based hierarchy of India. The woman who died late last month belonged to the Dalit caste: previously called the untouchables. Her perpetrators, on the other hand, were all from the upper-caste. This spells a recipe for impunity. Police have previously been accused of negligence and downright covering up of information in order to protect the perpetrators. The police’s actions in this case suggest a similar cover-up.
Local journalists report that the police tried to force the woman’s family to cremate her immediately. When her family did not oblige, the local police forcefully cremated her body in the middle of the night. They formed a human chain to ward off community and family members. In addition to insensitivity to the victim’s family, the immediate cremation was clearly a coverup for any possible information.
On top of that, despite the dying victims rape allegations, Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) of the state, Prashant Kumar, made the following statement
“The forensic science laboratory report clearly says that sperm was not found in the samples collected from the woman… The report has made it clear that the woman was not raped,”
Medically, rape is evidenced by the signs of struggle and physical abuse on and in a woman’s body. Semen, on the other hand, is used to identify the perpetrator(s). It is not a determinant of whether a rape occurred or not. The ignorant statement from a senior officer of an investigating body clearly points to a foul play on an institutional level.
Individual or systemic violence?
An ex-supreme court judge made the following statement in response to the case:
”Sex is a natural urge in men. It is sometimes said that after food, the next requirement is sex. In a conservative society like India, one can ordinarily have sex only through marriage. But when there is massive and rising unemployment, a large number of young men remain deprived of sex, even though they have reached an age when it is a normal requirement. I once again make it clear that I am not justifying rapes, rather I condemn it. But considering the situation prevailing in the country, they are bound to increase. So if we really want to end or reduce rapes we have to create a social and system in India in which there is no or little unemployment.”
The statement has been criticized in social media for faulty logic, and for trying to shift the blame from the individual to systemic forces. The statement is problematic for many reasons. It places almost no responsibility on the perpetrator for his actions. Rather the rapist’s actions are justified through unfulfilled sexual urges. Most importantly, it completely misses out the major systemic forces behind the increasing rapes: patriarchy.
It is patriarchy that creates the entitlement to women and their bodies that men demand. It is patriarchy that deters women from reporting sexual abuses in fear of stigma. It is patriarchy that allows men to threaten women with physical harm for reporting. It is patriarchy that blames the woman for getting raped, while the man is excused for “acting on his sexual urges.” It is patriarchy that allows men the confidence and support so they continue to get away with crimes such as these.
The above statement also ignores the caste-based oppression that has allowed members of the higher caste to commit such acts against members of the oppressed groups. The caste-based oppression also gets the law enforcing agencies to align with the oppressor, instead of the oppressed.
The case is not an anomaly.
There have been numerous cases where police refuse to file an official report against any perpetrators but certainly perpetrators of higher castes. There are also many instances when women’s allegations of rapes have been questioned despite clear evidence on and in their bodies. Rapes where law enforcing agencies destroy the evidences are also not rare.
The resulting impunity men recieve in the sytem of patriarchy is evidenced by the systems of oppression: gender-based, caste-based and class-based. Dismantling these systems of oppression is imperative to ensure justice to victims.
Featured image: Protest in 2012 against Nirbhaya gang rape case via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.
In this research excerpt, the latest temporally inter-comparable maps of the terrestrial Human Footprint are presented, as well as an assessment of change in human pressure at global, biome, and ecoregional scales.
Humans have influenced the terrestrial biosphere for millennia, converting much of Earth’s surface to anthropogenic land uses. Nevertheless, there are still some ecosystems that remain free from significant human pressure, thereby providing crucial habitats for imperilled species and maintaining the ecosystem processes that underpin planetary life-support systems. As a consequence, calls for the global identification, monitoring, and retention of the remaining lands that are relatively free of direct anthropogenic disturbance are increasing.
Over the past two decades, cumulative pressure maps that combine remotely-sensed data with survey data are being increasingly used to assess the full range of human pressures on land spatially. These advances have facilitated the mapping of Earth’s remaining marine and terrestrial wilderness, improved measures and estimates of species extinction risk underpinned broader assessments of human impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity and enabled the identification of protected areas and world heritage sites in danger. The results of these mapping efforts are influencing global policy discussions and informing on-the-ground decisions about where to undertake biodiversity conservation action.
Here, we provide the latest global maps of cumulative human pressure for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2013, and use them to assess how changes in human pressure are altering Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. We used a human footprint threshold of <4 (on 0 – 50 scale) to identify where land is considered ecologically intact (below the threshold) or highly modified and thus ecologically degraded (equal to or above the threshold). Areas below this threshold are ecosystems that may be subject to some level of human pressure (for example low-density transitory human populations or pasture lands grazed at a low intensity), but still contain the majority of their natural habitat and ecological processes.
This threshold has been found to be robust from a species conservation perspective because once surpassed, species extinction risk increases dramatically , and several ecosystem processes are altered.
We assess transitions from intact to highly modified land at global, biome, and ecoregional scales and ascertain which nations contain Earth’s remaining intact systems, and had the greatest amounts of habitat loss. Previous global assessments of human pressure have attempted to identify at risk ecosystems by determining a ‘safe limit’ of biodiversity loss for ecosystem functionality, assessing protection levels, and analysing habitat conversion using land cover. But all of these ignore a broad range of threats that occur beyond land use such as accessibility via roads, railways and navigable waterways, human population density, and light pollution. These pressures have environmental impacts well beyond the local development footprint.
As such, our results provide the latest spatially explicit understanding of the state of human pressure on the natural environment, and how it is changing over time. We show that the human footprint methodology can be continually updated and, when more recent data becomes available, allow for assessment of habitat loss at scales relevant to planning activities.
State of Terrestrial Earth
As of 2013, 55.8 million km2 (41.6%) of Earth’s surface was intact (which includes wilderness, human footprint of <4), and 33.5 million km2 (25.0%) was wilderness (human footprint of <1). The remaining (human footprint of >4) 78.4 million km2 (58.4%) was under moderate or intense human pressure (and therefore highly modified), which was widespread, encompassing over half the area of 11 (or 78.6%) of Earth’s 14 biomes. Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests were the most altered biome, with 11.6 million km2 (91.0%) being highly modified, followed by tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests with 2.72 million km2 (90.5%), and Mediterranean forests, woodlands and scrubs with 2.88 million km2 (89.7%). Wilderness areas have all but disappeared in many biomes, for example, only 82,000 km2 (0.81%) remained in temperate grasslands, savannahs, and shrublands, 29,000 km2 (0.96%) in tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests, and just 12,000 km2 (1.69%) in tropical and subtropical coniferous forests. Earth’s 14 biomes consist of 795 ecoregions, which represent distinct biotic assemblages and abiotic features (such as landforms) at a finer scale than biomes. We found the entire extent of 46 (5.76%) ecoregions were highly modified. These 46 ecoregions span 10 biomes, with the majority located in tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests (n=17, 37.0%), tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests (n=6, 13.0%), and temperate broadleaf and mixed forests (n=6, 13.0%). One-quarter of all ecoregions (n=187) have lost all wilderness. The majority of land in tundra, boreal and taiga forests, and deserts and xeric shrubland biomes remains intact. At the ecoregion level, just 52 (6.53%) still have >90% of their land intact, and a mere 21 (2.64%) are >90% wilderness. These ecoregions with >90% wilderness are found in just four biomes, tundra (n = 12), boreal forests/taiga (n = 5), tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests (Rio Negro campinarana and Juruá-Purus moist forests), and tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannahs and shrublands (Northwestern Hawaii scrub).
Contemporary changes in human pressure
Between 2000 and 2013, 25.4 million km2 (18.9%) of Earth’s terrestrial surface deteriorated (human pressure increased), while only 8 million km2 (5.96%) improved (human pressure decreased). This increase in human pressure was substantial across 1.89 million km2 of Earth’s intact lands, an area the size of Mexico, that these places can be classified as highly modified (i.e. they transitioned from below to above the human footprint threshold of 4). During the same time period, over 1.1 million km2 of wilderness was lost (human footprint increasing above 1), with 67,000 km2 of that wilderness becoming highly modified (human footprint increasing from below 1 to above 4).
Intact lands were lost in all biomes during the assessment period, with the highest loss occurring in tropical and subtropical grassland, savannah and shrublands (655,000 km2 was lost representing 11.3% of all intact lands within the biome, an area approximately the size of France; Figure 4). The tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests and mangrove biomes also lost substantial areas of intact land (559,000 km2, 6.90% and 9,000 km2, 14.7% respectively). While the largest absolute loss of intact lands occurred in savannah and woodland ecoregions, the largest proportional losses occurred in tropical forest ecoregion types. For example, intact areas were completely lost in seven forested ecoregions including the Louisiade Archipelago rainforests (Papua New Guinea), and Sumatran freshwater swamp forests (Indonesia).
