Editor’s note: For capitalism, “renewable” energy is a transition to green(greed) colonialism. Splinter colonization is still the policy of the day, divide and conquer the masses and corrupting local elites with bribery.
Capitalists benefit from business-friendly legal doctrines and a uniform regulatory system. They do not have to contend with patchwork prohibitions and restrictions enforced by sovereign communities that require FPIC and put their sovereignty into practice by persuasion or physical force, refusing obedience and cooperation. No justice, no peace, so the guerrillas will keep investors away.
“Municipalities are the white man’s reservations. The only difference is, we know we’re on reservations.” – Debra White Plume (Wioweya Najin Win).
People of the global north must look upstream to the damage they cause to communities whose resources are being extracted by outsourcing diminished health and welfare externalities associated with alternative forms of energy.
The Philippine government has approved 99 hydropower projects in the mountainous Cordillera region, part of a broader plan to rely on renewable energy sources for 35% of the country’s power by 2030.
The planned projects are dividing rural communities between those who believe the dams will bring in jobs and money and those who fear damage to water sources and cultural sites.
The Cordillera region, home to many Indigenous groups, has a deep history of activism against dams.
It’s also heavily militarized as one of the last bastions of an armed communist insurgency — a circumstance state security forces are apparently exploiting to coerce communities into compliance.
KALINGA, Philippines — On the mountainsides flanking the mighty Chico River in the northern Philippines’ Kalinga province, residents of once tight-knit villages have drifted apart in recent years. Hearty greetings between neighbors tending to farmlands have been replaced with avoidant looks or glowering stares.
“We don’t talk much like before,” says Gohn Dangoy, a 59-year-old farmer of the Naneng tribe in Kalinga’s Tabuk city. “If we do, we argue. Families and friends alike are at odds.” He says the “deep division” started because of the proposed dam on the Chico River.
West of Tabuk, locals in the municipality of Balbalan live in fear of the military operations that began around the same time the hydropower projects rolled into town.
They remember the first of the bombings happening in March 2023, as they were sound asleep on the night following their annual Manchachatong festival. Eufemia Bog-as, 30, recalls jumping from her bed at around 2 a.m. “It was like an earthquake. I heard a big boom six times. I went outside and the sky was covered with smoke,” she tells Mongabay. The government and military said they were targeting armed rebels, who were supposedly stirring up opposition against the dams.
“They told us, it’s because we’re against development,” Bog-as says.
Kalinga is one of six provinces in the northern and mountainous Cordillera region, populated by the Indigenous Igorot people. For more than 50 years, the government has been in conflict with armed communist guerrillas in the countryside. During that time, the military has often set up posts in rural villages to stifle dissent and support for the rebels.
Now, the government is eyeing the resource-rich region for a bevy of renewable energy initiatives.
A pivot to renewable energy by the Philippine government has led to a wave of hyrdoprojects projects across the Cordillera region. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.
Since 2015, the Department of Energy has greenlit 99 hydropower projects in the region, with total combined generating capacity of more than 4,000 megawatts. Of these, 52 are listed by their proponents as being in the development stage, 32 in pre-development, and 15 already operating commercially.
At every stage of development, the hydropower projects are breeding conflict and fracturing communities between those who favor them for ushering in modernity, and those who resent the potential damage to farms, burial grounds and water sources. Moreover, experts believe that the staggering amount of projects threatens to drastically reshape the region’s hydrogeography and economy for the worse. Throughout the Cordillera mountains, Igorot communities opposing the dams are frequently reporting militarization and even aerial bombings close to pasturelands and villages.
Both national and local governments have firmly backed the spate of projects.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has styled himself as something of a climate champion. In his 2023 state-of-the-nation address, he hyped his administration for “aggressively promoting renewables so that it provides a 35% share in the power mix by 2030.”
In the same speech this year, Marcos spoke of having approved projects with a combined more than 3 trillion pesos ($54 billion) in investments for four priority sectors, including renewable energy. He called it a “crucial step” in addressing climate change.
To that end, the Cordillera region is similarly crucial for the government’s renewables pivot. The region hosts the headwaters of 13 major river systems and can harness around 30% of the country’s hydropower potential, six times more than what the Philippines makes use of at present.
And in 2022, the Cordillera regional council announced plans to fast-track renewable energy projects. For local communities and activists, this raises the question of whether these changes jeopardize the natural landscape and livelihoods in one of the country’s most resource-rich and culturally diverse regions.
Dam disagreements
In the 1970s, Kalinga’s Indigenous communities, led by Macli-ing Dulag, now a national icon, famously resisted construction of a huge dam on the Chico River. Dulag was killed by state forces in 1980, but the project was shelved and the struggle blossomed into a discourse on safeguarding ancestral domains.
Since then, just a single 1-MW micro dam has been built in Kalinga, and its operations were suspended in 2021 after farmers complained of decreased water flow for irrigation. Now, however, the province is the proposed site of 19 hydropower projects across its rivers, with the famous Chico among them.
Australian-owned JBD Water Power Inc. (JWPI) heads four of these planned projects, two each on the Saltan and Cal-oan rivers. The Saltan River projects are still in the consultation stage, while the villages along the Cal-oan River have registered opposing views to the projects there.
In March 2023 and August 2024, Mabaca village filed petitions with the National Commission for Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), registering its disapproval of the 45-MW Mabaca 2 Dam on Cal-oan.
The latest petition intends to stall the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) process required for the project to commence. It asserts the river as part of the community’s ancestral domain, thus giving it “legitimate claims to the watershed.”
Only initial talks have taken place. However, local leaders say the NCIP is forceful about the project, planning 12 further consultations with reluctant villagers.
Village captain Barcelon Badin says he’s seen the project blueprints and fears the dam will compromise their already scarce food sources since it “will clearly drown our rice fields.”
But downstream in Buaya, the next village over, locals are ready to sign a memorandum of agreement, a major step toward securing FPIC, with JWPI for the 40-MW Buaya hydropower project.
Hydropower projects have met with differening receptions in Cordillera villages such as Balbalan, Mabaca and Buaya. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.
Jermito Jacinto, an elder of the Buaya’s Butud tribe, is now a JWPI consultant. He says the project offers jobs, cheaper electricity, scholarships for children, and several million pesos in annual revenue for local authorities.
“Cal-oan River is full of honey and sugar but we don’t know how to use it,” Jacinto tells Mongabay.
He chides the villages that continue to hold out, calling their aversion to development a “hangover” from rebel rhetoric. Buaya and Mabaca villages are squabbling over these projects, as the former seeks revenue while the latter says any disruption to any part of the river risks the fields of all.
Having examined other dams in the region, former Balbalan mayor Eric Gonayon disputes any promise of growth associated with the dams.
“They will not develop the roads, only use them to relocate us from our heritage for the benefit of foreigners and businesses,” he tells Mongabay.
He scoffs at the potential revenue the projects could generate, saying “It’s not even worth 1% of the resources they’ll extract from us. It’s like they’re giving us candy but taking the whole shop!”
The Cal-oan River, also known as Mabaca River, where Australian-owned JBD Water Power Inc. (JWPI) has two planned hydropower projects. Image by Michael Beltran.
The Department of Energy mandates that companies allot village officials 0.01 pesos per kilowatt-hour, roughly 0.09% of average electricity sales.
Farther east in the provincial capital, Tabuk, the Karayan Hydropower Corporation, with ties to Singaporean investors, has secured memorandums of agreement with the three affected tribes this year for the 52-MW Karayan Dam on the Chico River.
Various tribal representatives allege the FPIC process was fraught with irregularities including bribery, withholding information, and excluding anyone against the dam from consultations.
Members of the Naneng tribe, who live in an area recognized by the province as a heritage village, say the dam will raise waters, drowning their coffee and rice fields and their ancestral burial sites.
“The ones who said yes were either bribed or unaffected!” says Dangoy, the farmer in Tabuk, who has rejected any financial assistance from the company in exchange for their consent. “What happens to our ‘rest in peace’ if we lose our tombs? We won’t replace that with a chance to be employees at the dam. The company won’t give jobs to all us farmers.”
Farmer Gohn Dangoy, of the Naneng tribe, says proposed dams have already caused deep divisions in his community. Image by Michael Beltran.
The NCIP has denied any wrongdoing, stating publicly that it consulted with all affected residents.
In Bagumbayan, one of the affected areas, village captain Andrew Cos-agom, says the dam’s critics won’t listen to reason. He swears by the project because it was twice surveyed by the city government and a third party and both gave assurances there would be minimal changes to the villages.
“It’s just a minority opposing the dam,” Cos-agom tells Mongabay.
However, Dominic Sugguiyao, the Kalinga provincial government’s environment and natural resources officer, refutes this. He says the surveys, which haven’t been made public, show that erosion and submersion are a distinct possibility. Sugguiyao says “misinformed politicians” are too blinded by the prospect of collecting taxes from these projects to see the negative impacts.
Because the Chico River is such a vital water and irrigation source, Sugguiyao says, the dam could inflict massive harm through siltation. “The fish and eels won’t be able to swim upstream!” he says.
Sugguiyao accuses the NCIP of brokering agreements with local communities on behalf of the companies and officials as though it were a one-sided middleman. “They just want to make money. Even without a consensus, they’ll make it seem like there is one,” he says.
When Mongabay raised these points with the NCIP’s regional office, it responded that “We would give no comments considering that issues are still being resolved.”
A man in Kalinga Province wears a shirt reading “No to Dam.” Image by Michael Beltran.
On the whole
Ariel Fronda, head of the Department of Energy’s hydropower division, says the surge in hydro projects is a good sign, a step away from fossil fuels and toward “energy self-reliance.”
The department has been tasked with speeding up project approvals with the help of a 2019 law, known as EVOSS (Energy Virtual One-Stop Shop), which guarantees that developers with a signed contract will be awarded approval in just 30 days. The law also enjoins the NCIP to standardize the release of FPIC approval in 105 days.
Additionally, the department updated its awarding and project guidelines in June, urging officials to troubleshoot complications for developers. Fronda tells Mongabay that he personally visited Kalinga earlier this year, speaking to officials about streamlining projects to meet their 2030 targets.
Fronda says not everything has gone according to plan, citing snags in obtaining community consent and political approval as the main obstacles — such as “when an elected official endorses a project, then, after elections, is replaced by someone who doesn’t.”
Fronda says the state must persist in explaining the benefits of hydropower. “We’ll save money with cheaper electricity!” he says.
Jose Antonio Montalban, an environmental and sanitation expert with the group Pro-People Engineers and Leaders (Propel), says pushing so many projects in such a small geographic area is “alarming.”
“It could have severe impacts on the Cordillera’s ecology and communities; altering basic features too quickly without understanding the area’s carrying capacity,” he says.
Abruptly altering rivers can choke water flows at several junctures, which Montalban says compromises supplies to communities that depend on them daily. “All these projects are intended to detain water,” he says.
Montalban adds that flash floods could become increasingly common during typhoon seasons, when dams have to abruptly release their load.
Lulu Gimenez, of the Cordillera People’s Alliance, raises concerns about the impact to food sources. “What about all the farms that depend on irrigation sources? They’ll either disappear or decrease their yield,” she says.
Rosario Guzman, research head at the Ibon Foundation, an economic think tank, calls into question the Department of Energy’s promise of cheaper electricity. The Philippine power sector is fully privatized, and because of this big businesses will reap the main benefits, Guzman says.
“Energy is a natural monopoly and demand for it is inelastic. By this nature, opening it up to other players in the guise of getting the best price that competition brings will only result in a monopoly price,” Guzman tells Mongabay.
Relying on renewables for more accessible energy will only work through “strong state intervention,” which will “redound to cheaper electricity and service and cheaper costs of production and commodities,” they add.
Locally, Sugguiyao laments how projects like the Karayan Dam will end the livelihoods of those who quarry sand and gravel. He says the industry is worth billions of pesos and its loss will “cost the locals millions.”
Residents of villages close to the Chico River meet to discuss plans to dam the river for hydroelectricity. Image by Michael Beltran.
Bombs follow
Since 2022, civil society groups have documented bombings and permanent military presence close to communities opposed to various renewable energy and mining projects.
Caselle Ton, of the Cordillera Human Rights Alliance (CHRA), brands the soldiers “investment defense forces,” adding that the heightened militarization is intended to “terrorize and coerce communities into accepting the projects.”
In March 2023, the military dropped bombs on Balbalan on two separate days, supposedly targeting armed guerrillas in the area. The CHRA documented bombs dropped on the provinces of Abra and Ilocos Sur on the same day in April this year. The latest bombs fell in June, in Balbalan once again.
In Abra, peasant and antimining leader Antonio Diwayan was killed in October 2023 by soldiers who claimed he was a guerrilla. The military also labeled a slew of prominent antimining and antihydropower activists as terrorists.
In October 2022, the military described Cordillera as the “last bastion” of a decades-long insurgency in the Philippines.
Kalinga Governor James Edduba likewise called on the entire region in August last year to support the efforts of the troops to weed out dissent. “Only peace and order will give us hope and development. If we have peace in our communities, the investors will surely come to Kalinga,” he said.
However, for Bog-as, the Balbalan resident and witness to the municipality’s bombings, the problem is the military makes no distinction between civilian dissent and insurgent activity.
“We hear it from the soldiers themselves, they blame us progressives who are keeping them here. Because we don’t want their dams or mines,” she says.
Johnny a farmer in Balbalan who asked to use a pseudonym for his safety, describes how the military’s once occasional presence turned permanent since the hydropower project was proposed.
Speaking in the Ilocano language, Johnny tells Mongabay: “The soldiers hold monthly and quarterly meetings. They force farmers’ associations to admit we’re supporting the guerrillas so that we can ‘clear our names.’ If we agree, it’s like we’re accepting their accusations. But we just want to fight for our community.”
Johnny says there are undoubtedly some rebels in the region, but the military paints civilians with the same brush. He also tells of how roving soldiers have disrupted their work in the fields.
“We don’t have any freedom to visit our fields. Children and adults alike would run away at the sight of a soldier!” he says.
The Philippine government’s continued press for renewables is causing friction among the villages of one of its most resource-rich regions. If all goes according to the state’s fast-tracking, Cordillera might never be the same.
Banner Chico River in Kalinga Province by Michael Beltran.
A crowd of 3,000 anti-tourism protesters descended on posh downtown Barcelona last July, their demeanor one of delighted malice. They cordoned off hotels and eateries with hazard tape, as if demarcating a crime scene. They sprayed with water guns the blithe holidaymakers seated in restaurants. Video footage showed unhappy couples and glowering young men chased from their seats by the mob, stunned at the indignity.
The protesters shouted, “Tourists go home.” They held signs that said, “Barcelona is not for sale.” They spoke of “mass touristification” and inveighed against the greed of restaurateurs and hoteliers and Airbnb landlords profiting from the madding crowd while the average Catalan struggled to meet the skyrocketing costs of daily life. One of the protesters told an interviewer, “The city has turned completely for tourists. What we want is a city for citizens.”
The revolt in Spain — resident population 47 million; yearly visitation 85 million — is no outlier in the hypervisited destination countries of Europe. In Greece and Italy, for example, residents also rose up this year to say they will accept no more the invasion of their native ground, as mass visitation strains to the breaking point infrastructure, natural resources – especially water – and, at last, social sanity.
It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces “The End of Tourism” podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe,” Christou told me in an email, “we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.” Christou has documented the industry’s long train of offenses: environmental degradation; cultural appropriation and what he calls petrification (“the stasis or congealing of culture’s flow or growth”); spiraling economic inequality; the Airbnbization of dwelling; gentrification and displacement; corporate and government nepotism; the revolving door of corruption between tourism bureaus and industry; the rise of an extremely precarious labor force; and, not least, “the spectacled surveillance of place that effectively turns home, for local residents, into a turnstile Disneyland.”
Mainstream media during the summer figured out there was a story here. In the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Reuters, the scourge of “overtourism” made headlines for the first time. The images of thronged locales published across the web and in newspapers had the quality of Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings of hell: people piling on one another, grasping, motioning, their forms indistinguishable, as the newly empowered consumers of the burgeoning global middle-class swarm across Earth in record numbers.
There is no end in sight to this growth, as it appears to be the norm of fossil-fueled footloose modernity. In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals. Twenty years later the number had jumped to 166 million, by 1990 it was 435 million, and by 2018 it hit an all-time pre-Covid high of 1.442 billion. By 2030, almost 2 billion tourist arrivals are projected.
In Barcelona, the big money is not in maintaining a city for citizens but in the flux of Boschian creatures. Some 26 million visitors crammed into Barcelona in 2023 and spent nearly $14 billion. The Barcelona city council and the Catalan government dedicate millions of tax-payer euros to ensure this continual flow through global marketing campaigns that sing the city’s praises.
The pressures from hyper-visitation and the greed of those who profit from it have become so great that residents have formed the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, whose purpose is to reverse the toxic touristification process. The group’s co-founder, 48-year-old Barcelonan Daniel Pardo, described touristification as “a transformation enacted on a territory and a population” by governments in collusion with commercial interests. He believes that degrowth of tourism means regulating it nearly out of existence.
“It means not only regulating tourism markets but promoting other activities in order to reduce the weight of tourism in the economy of the city,” Pardo told me. Most important is the recognition of the almost pathological dependence on tourism in Barcelona and the many places like it. The city has been shown to be painfully vulnerable to any unexpected crisis that upends travel patterns.
“It happened with Covid,” said Pardo, “happened before that with a terrorist attack, and before that with a volcanic explosion in Iceland.” And it will happen, sooner or later, because of the climate crisis and unleashed geopolitical chaos. “Better than keeping on the tourism wheel, which smashes lives, territory and environment, let’s plan a transition process for Barcelona which reduces this risky dependance,” Pardo told me. “How? Not easy to say, since nobody is trying that almost anywhere.”
One place to start is with the ideological error in how we think of leisure travel as a right rather than a privilege.
“The right to fly does not exist. The right to tourism does not exist,” said Pardo recently on the End of Tourism podcast. “You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population. It’s impossible.” Pardo added in an email to me that the central issue is “about the limits of the planet, something so many people absolutely do not want to hear about.”
The tourism explosion can reasonably be explained by the IPAT math formula used in the ecological sciences. Intended to measure how endless growth of modern industrial civilization strains a finite Earth, the formula states that impact equals population times affluence times technology.
With IPAT in mind, one could argue that too many would-be travelers with newly acquired affluence have access to new technologies. Easy online bookings and guides, smartphones in general for facilitating and smoothing the travel experience, high-quality digital photography and video equipment made available for use by amateurs on social media, with its influencers driving place-based envy and desire — all this combines in a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.
***
I have watched the touristification process wreck lives in an American city I once considered a place to settle and raise a family. Moab, Utah, is called “the adventure capital of the world,” and the hordes converge on it for exploration of the surrounding desert wildernesses on vast public lands that include two legendary national parks, Arches and Canyonlands. In the last 20 years, the city has become a nightmare of hypervisitation. The Utah state government and a cabal of elites – landowners, businesspeople, speculators, moneylenders, rentiers – have joined to market Moab across the United States and globally so that huge profits can be reaped from a harvest of ever-increasing numbers of tourists.
The effect is no different from that in Barcelona, especially in the spawning of a precariat working class in Moab. These are the service-industry peons at the bottom rungs of a system of economic inequality that has only worsened with hypervisitation. Many are driven out of town by the high cost of living and end up car-camping on public lands, where they are vulnerable to predation. Such was the case of Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner, a gay couple described as “deeply in love” and who lived out of their car, who were stalked and murdered in August 2021. As my friend Laurel Hagen, attorney and long-time Moab resident and mother of two young children, put it to me, “Moab’s people are being fed slowly but surely to the tourism Moloch.”
The beneficiaries are also the same as in Barcelona. “Those who benefit the most from hypertourism,” Jon Kovash, a writer and radio journalist in Moab, told me, “are the hedge funders engaged in raping the town. Anybody selling gasoline or liquor or restaurant food. Realtors and land pimps. The internet lodging industry.” Kovash also includes in this list of villains what he calls the “adventure scammers.” These are the businesspeople who seek to convince the public of the need for paid guides or expensive mechanized rent-a-toys to get into the backcountry, when all one needs really is boots, backpack, a compass and map and a modicum of courage. (I lived in Moab for several years and spent glorious times in the backcountry without spending a nickel.)
Moab’s citizens are today under assault “like never before” – so longtime friends in town tell me – with the arrival of the UTV tour industry. Utility task vehicles, or “side-by-sides,” are small, powerful four-wheel-drive autos designed for aggressive driving both off-road and on. Piston, camshaft, clutch, gearbox, and various belts produce extraordinarily high levels of noise. Renting a UTV to tear about Moab and into the surrounding desert at full blast has become the thing to do.
“People in Moab should be defending their homes against UTV colonization and the violence of noise pollution,” Christian Wright, an author and former National Park Service historian, told me when I first met him in 2022. Wright, who in 2019 published a book about radicalized “miners for democracy” in the coal towns of the American West, had himself been radicalized by the torture of years of living around UTVs in Moab. The machines, he said, “are destroying the peace, harmony, and friendliness that once characterized Moab Valley. Do we not have mountains of evidence that the constant noise leads to elevated heart rates, discontentment, and unprecedentedly colorful manifestations of language?”
The problem became so widespread that some Moabites, who happened to be parents dealing with infants terrified of the sound of the machines, described UTV tourism as a danger to the health of children. Jon Kovash and his daughter Josie Kovash, who lived a few blocks from her dad and was herself a new mother, produced a radio documentary in 2021 cataloging the complaints of besieged residents.
None of these concerns were aired in a political vacuum. Officials of Grand County, of which Moab is the seat, noted that their offices had in recent years received more complaints about noise than about any other issue. According to former Grand County prosecutor Christina Sloan, the impacts on residents included “stress-related illnesses, high blood pressure, hearing loss, sleep disruption and lost productivity,” along with “feelings of isolation,” “lowered morale” and “emotional trauma.”
Acting on these concerns of the great majority of Moabites, the city in 2021 placed restrictions on UTV businesses and daily tours, setting up an enforcement system to reduce noise levels – only to see the Utah state legislature, friend to the industry, kill the local ordinances with passage in 2022 of an extraordinary bill that appeared to violate municipal sovereignty. The infamous Blue Ribbon Coalition, a rightwing astroturf lobby group funded by fossil fuel companies and auto manufacturers, joined the fray with the filing of a lawsuit against the city of Moab for the attempt at regulation. Christina Sloan declared the 2022 pro-UTV bill “an illegal restraint on county and municipal constitutional police power. ” It turns out Utah is now the only state in the union that has made UTVs street legal while also prohibiting municipalities from opting out of their use on streets.
Such is the hypocrisy that one finds everywhere across the rightwing American West: local sovereignty is sacrosanct only so long as it doesn’t conflict with industrial profits. In this case, tourism trumped both liberty and democracy.
***
As a global force of havoc in the natural world, tourism is well-known to be “one of the leading sectors with deleterious effects on the environment.” The air travel related to tourism accounts for 8 percent or more of all greenhouse gas emissions. Tourism is anathema to biodiversity, implicated in producing wildlife deserts, as masses of people in animal habitat tend to adrenalize the animals and scatter them while impairing the habitat with dispersed pollutants. Backcountry tourism in Colorado, to take one example, has caused the die-off of elk populations.
Tourism is implicated in diminished freshwater supply for local residents. It increases the chance of contamination from sewage and chemicals, soil erosion from trampling, and the accumulation of waste and air pollution. Craig Downs, a toxicology expert who runs the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia, has found that sunscreen effluent from mass tourism produces “a cascade of insults to the ecological structure” of both marine and freshwater ecosystems, reducing the life cycle viability of aquatic wildlife – in other words, poisoning the animals to the point they can no longer reproduce.
Tourism is also a source of enormous volumes of noise pollution. The effect of noise pollution on human health is well-documented. Over time, it is debilitating to body and mind, and the problem is only getting worse with the growing din of technoindustrial civilization. What about the effect, on a captive population, of the peculiarly grating racket of UTVs? Moab is an experimental site, one resident told me, “to see how people react to the presence of high-pitched whining machines. I think we are guinea pigs and the goal of the experiment is to see how long it takes to drive us nuts.”
Christian Wright, the historian who worked for the National Park Service, was driven almost to the edge. His case, sensationalized and twisted in the media, made headlines across Utah. On February 17, 2023, he was surrounded at a gas station in Moab by heavily armed police. He was arrested, and his house was raided and searched. Police found five AR-15-style assault rifles, along with a stash of psychedelic mushrooms, possession of which made it illegal under Utah law to own the guns. His phones, computers, and hard drives were also seized. Local newspapers declared him a terrorist in waiting.
The evidence marshaled to justify the raid and arrest was that Wright may have participated in a vandalism campaign in which stickers were glued to various public objects in town, including utility poles. The campaign, I later learned, involved numerous Moabites who were posting such stickers. Wright was not some lone nutter. One of the stickers said DEATH TO INDUSTRIAL TOURISM: it burns oil – destroys habitat – low wages – expensive housing. Another said UTV NOISE IS CHILD ABUSE, and another said UTV NOISE IS RAPE CULTURE.
A sticker that Wright gave me as a gift was the old chestnut, DIE YUPPIE SCUM. Another that police allegedly found in their raid of his house was decorated with an image of an assault rifle and stated, DEFEND YOUR HOME, RESIST UTV NOISE HARASSMENT, ABUSIVE TOURISTS & SLC POLITICIANS TAKE NOTE: MOAB IS NOT YOUR WHORE.
I had been corresponding with Wright for close to a year prior to his arrest, and we had become friendly. Nothing in our exchanges suggested he was dangerous to people (though he might have been dangerous to property, which in the United States can be a worse crime). We had gone on long hikes together in the desert backcountry when I visited him in the snowy January of 2023, navigating the treacherous ice of red rock cliffs to collect in our backpacks the plastic detritus – mostly water bottles – that hikers had left in remote canyons of Arches National Park the previous summer. We had gone out boozing at a Moab saloon and had a fine time getting drunk. We played music in his basement, me on his drums, he on piano. He had a punk-rock style, with his mullet and leather jacket. He was aggressive in a gentle way, and a weirdo, and maladjusted (I can relate).
Yet here was Wright, one month later, confined to a holding cell in the Moab city jail, charged with crimes – terroristic threats, illegal possession of assault rifles and drugs – that made him sound like a lunatic ready to burst. It’s true that he had sent Grand County attorney Christina Sloan a letter, in 2022, stating that he wanted to chop up with an ax the owner of a UTV rental company that operated next door to the house he owned in Moab. The unceasing UTV traffic was like a jackhammer in his brain. He made no attempt to communicate with the person he wanted to kill, however, but only told prosecutor Sloan of his intentions – which is not how one usually conducts a death threat.
Sloan herself came to his defense in an article she published following his arrest. “I’ve watched this smart, articulate, engaged, empathetic human fall apart over the last two years,” she said of Wright. “It has made me feel more passionately than ever that noise pollution is a significant public health issue that needs our full attention.” Sloan recalled Wright’s comments on UTV tourism to the Grand County Commission in April 2021, noting that “he and his mullet were vibrant and refreshing.” Wright, she said, “articulately countered the pro-[UTV] conservative talking points hailing the supremacy of the American dollar above all else.”
Not long after his arrest, Wright was remanded for four months to a mental health facility in Utah, where he was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. He appreciated the care from the loving staff but didn’t enjoy being regarded as a “terrorist” based on slander spread by Moab authorities. As of this writing, he is back in his home, and most of the charges against him have been dropped.
***
The conflict over hyper-visitation plays out wherever there are lovely places that people want to consume as travelers. In my backyard, on the highlands along the Hudson River valley north of New York City, a man named Dave Merandy, ex-mayor of the touristed village of Cold Spring, is fighting to stop the flood of people on his home ground.
The Hudson Highlands is a major draw with its green hills and handsome cliffs that afford scenic views of the wide Hudson. The area already attracts hundreds of thousands of people a year. Merandy, who stepped down as mayor of Cold Spring in 2021 after seven years of service, is a leader in the opposition to a planned expansion of tourism amenities that will likely increase the number of visitors in the Highlands to more than a million per annum. Known as the Fjord Trail project, the expansion is supported by the New York State government, numerous environmental NGOs, and a friendly neighborhood billionaire named Chris Davis, heir to a Wall Street fortune who considers himself the lord over the commoners in this stretch of rural New York.
Why stop the growth of tourism in the Highlands? “Because we already have enough,” Merandy told me during a visit at his house. “We don’t need more people.” He understood with clear eyes that the conflict was part of a global problem. “Nobody wants to address overpopulation. Everybody thinks it’s sustainable. We think we can just keep growing and growing. It’s crazy. This is a case where we want to have as many people as possible. You only have X amount of acres that can sustain a certain number of people. But then we tell ourselves, just bring them in, more and more and more. Put up a neon light, have a ribbon cutting, and everybody will say Chris Davis the billionaire is a hero.“
After I left Merandy, I stopped at a busy intersection on Route 9, in the town of Fishkill, where a masked man stood in the median in a black robe that whipped in the wind of the passing cars. He wore the infamous Scream mask and a big analog clock around his neck. This, obviously, was the Grim Reaper. I stopped to ask him what he was doing. “I’m Death,” he said. “And I’m reminding people they’re going to die.”
It struck me that, yes, lots of us are going to die a lot sooner than we expect if the growthist monster isn’t stopped. Climate change and ecological collapse, driven by overpopulation coupled with affluence-seeking, will kill out not only the beautiful wild things worth keeping on this planet but also a large part of humanity that hasn’t the money to buy its way out of collapse.
The place to build opposition to the monster is in your backyard, where the consequences are most painfully felt. En revanche, the prostitutes of business-as-usual – say, the billionaire lords up in the manor – will curse and slander you, declare you reactionary, the enemy of “progress,” and, perhaps worst of all, a nimby, somebody who wants selfishly to keep the backyard all to yourself. Merandy, who grew up in the Highlands and learned there a love of nature, has been called all these things, as have the resisters in Barcelona and Moab.
Wright and Merandy and the Barcelonans armed with water guns are all engaged in the same fight in defense of the place they call home. They have the right and the duty to take their stand. And history will prove them to be honorable. Those who oppose mass tourism today are in fact doing a service for humanity tomorrow. The reality is that travel as we know it will have to end if society is to meet the reductions in carbon emissions to keep warming below catastrophic levels. The tourism industry – along with the billions who see an exotic vacation in their near future – will not accept that judgment.
An abridged version of this piece first appeared at Truthdig.
Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast continue to suffer threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining.
Residents say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
This year, there have been 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to Indigenous rights groups that spoke at an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights panel this month.
Increasing violence in northern Nicaragua this year has displaced rural families and led to calls for more drastic action from the international community, which activists say hasn’t done enough to hold the Ortega government accountable for human rights abuses.
For years, Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast have suffered threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining. This year appears to be as bad as ever, and residents say they are desperate for help.
“Urgent measures must be taken to protect these communities,” said Gloria Monique de Mees, the OAS rapporteur on the rights of Afro-descendants and against racial discrimination. “Failure to address the crisis will only embolden the Nicaraguan government to continue its repressive campaign.”
Much of the violence is concentrated within the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCN), a jurisdiction communally governed and titled by Indigenous communities since the late 1980s. It’s home to Miskitus, Mayangnas, Ulwa, Ramas, Creole and Garífunas peoples, and contains mountain, rainforest and coastal ecosystems.
The area has attracted non-Indigenous Nicaraguans, known locally as colonos, looking to set up farms, logging operations and artisanal mines. Massive gold and copper deposits have also created opportunities for multinational mining corporations, with backing from the government.
Indigenous communities say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
An IACHR panel in March on unlawful arrests in Nicaragua. Photo by CIDH via Flickr. CC BY 2.0
Conflicts between Indigenous communities and the colonos, who are often armed, have led to tragedy in multiple instances this year, according to witnesses who spoke at a panel hosted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) this month.
“This situation was created particularly by the dispossession of our territories as part of a process of colonization that implies, in the words of the communities, an ethnocide, in which settlers deprive us of our food and exploit our natural resources, usurping Indigenous territories through acts of armed violence and strategies to destroy out traditional ways of life,” Tininiska Rivera, a community member now living in exile, said during the panel.
In the first six months of this year, there have been over 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to several Indigenous rights groups present at the panel.
Many of the communities where the violence occurred have protection measures in place from the IACHR, which involves asking for special intervention by the Nicaraguan government. Human rights advocates say officials haven’t complied.
In one instance this year, five people were killed and two were seriously injured in the Wilú community in the Mayangna Sauní As territory. During the same incident, other families saw their homes and crops burned down, resulting in their displacement. At least 75 Indigenous people have been killed in the area since 2013, according to the panel.
At least 58 of this year’s cases in protected communities involved sexual, psychological, or physical violence against women, the groups said.
There have also been 37 cases in which forest rangers have been targeted by the government while carrying out patrols, according to Camila Ormar, an attorney for the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). Eleven Mayangna people have been formally convicted while another 14 have outstanding arrest warrants.
Colonos have used high-caliber weapons and deprived their captors of food, according to the communities. They allegedly have connections to the government as well as various groups made up of former combatants from the revolution.
“One of the stopping points is not to engage with the dictatorship as if everything were normal, but rather to recognize the scale of the abuses that are ongoing, the imprisonment of not just the religious but the young people, the sexual violence against women and children, the dispossession of whole communities,” said OAS Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Arif Bulkan.
In 2022, the US issuedsanctions against state-owned mining company Empresa Nicaragüense de Minas (ENIMIENAS), saying that it was “using gold revenue to continue to oppress the people of Nicaragua.” But the country’s mining concessions have continued to expand, often in Indigenous communities that struggle to find adequate legal representation or don’t understand their rights.
Between October 2023 and April 2024, the government granted three Chinese companies 13 mining concessions in the country, eight of them in the RACCN, according to a Confidential investigation published earlier this year. All of them were approved within eight months, suggesting that proper environmental impact studies and consultation with the communities were never carried out.
The concessions last 25 years and gives the three companies — Zhong Fu Development, Thomas Metal and Nicaragua XinXin Linze Minera Group — exclusive rights to extract minerals in the area, according to the investigation.
The companies couldn’t be reached for comment for this article. The Ministry of Energy and Mines didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests.
Speakers at the IACHR panel said it’s important to continue to document the human rights abuses taking place on the northern Caribbean coast and to bring it to attention of the rest of the world. They also said that many protection measures are still working but also need to be improved.
For his part, Bulkan said that the international community has been “timid” in its response to the situation in Nicaragua. “[There has been] a shameless response from what we would think of as champions of human rights in the region,” he said. Adding, “One clear line of work has to be continuing with advocacy with the international community.”
Max Radwin is a staff writer covering Latin America for Mongabay. For updates on his work, follow him on Twitter via @MaxRadwin.
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Goldman Prize Winner Murrawah Maroochy Johnson talks climate justice and inheriting a legacy of Indigenous resistance.
In 2019, Australia was on the cusp of approving a new coal mine on traditional Wirdi land in Queensland that would have extracted approximately 40 million tons of coal each year for 35 years. The Waratah coal mine would have destroyed a nature refuge and emitted 1.58 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
But that didn’t happen, thanks to the advocacy of Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, a 29-year-old Wirdi woman of the Birri Gubba Nation, who led a lawsuit against the coal company in 2021, and won.
The case was groundbreaking in many ways, but perhaps most strikingly, Johnson’s work helped set a new legal precedent that pushed members of the court to travel to where First Nations people lived in order hear their testimonies and perspectives, instead of expecting Indigenous people to travel long distances to settler courts. The lawsuit was also the first to successfully use Queensland’s new human rights law to challenge coal mining, arguing that greenhouse gas emissions from the Waratah coal mine would harm Indigenous peoples and their cultural traditions. Because of the litigation, the mine’s permit was denied in 2022, and its appeal failed last year.
Because of her work, Johnson is now among several of this year’s winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize honoring global grassroots environmental activism.
The last few years have been transformative for Johnson, who is the mother of a toddler and expecting her second baby in a few weeks. Grist spoke with her to learn about what motivates her, how she views the climate crisis, and what other young Indigenous activists can learn from her work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You have been working on behalf of your people since you were 19 years old. What drives you to do this work?
A. It’s definitely not a choice. First contact here was just 235 years ago. At that point, terra nullius was declared, which said that the land belonged to nobody, which essentially means that the first interaction with colonizing invading powers was one of dehumanization. They saw us here, but to say that the land belonged to no one really says that we are subhuman. They deemed us of a status where we couldn’t own our own land even though they saw us here inhabiting our own lands, living and thriving. And so there’s a long legacy of resistance in first contact frontier wars but also through advocacy over the generations. I’m just a young person who gets to inherit that great legacy.
I was raised by very strong parents. My father, my grandfather, my great grandparents, were all resistance fighters. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with inheriting that legacy and feeling like you need to do your part. But also, I feel like it’s not a choice because at the end of the day, what’s real is our people, our law, our custom — no matter the colonial apparatus attempts to disappear us, dilute us, absorb us into homogenous Australian mainstream and complete the assimilation process. To me, that’s continued injustice that our people face. And every First Nations person, I feel, every Indigenous person, has an obligation to resist that as well. Because at the end of the day, we First Nations people here in Australia, we are the oldest continuous living culture on the planet, and what comes with that is the fact that we have the oldest living creation stories, we have the oldest living law and custom. That in and of itself is so significant that we can’t just allow it to be washed away. I think that there has to be a continued active effort, by my generation and all future generations, to maintain our ways.
For us, colonial, Western, white contact is just such a small blip in time for how long our people have been here and how long we’ve maintained our ways and law and custom and culture. We have to collectively acknowledge that we have a duty of care and responsibility to maintain the way of our people. I’m really proud of being able to inherit that and also having a responsibility to protect and maintain it.
Q. Can you tell me about your perspective on climate change?
A. It’s always called human-induced climate change, but I think that that term doesn’t allow for colonial powers to be held accountable, or big polluters. I think it’s actually more accurate to say that it’s colonial-induced climate change, because it’s actually the process of colonization violently extracting and exploiting the resources of Indigenous nations, peoples’ land, especially in the Global South, that’s resulted in the crisis of climate change that we face today.
I see climate change not just as a crisis, but also an opportunity. In one sense, if what remains of our cultural knowledge is so intimately dependent on our land, and having access to our lands and waters, then climate change is a huge threat. For example, in the Torres Strait and throughout the Pacific, what do you actually do when your country, your homelands, your territory disappears because of the impacts of climate change? What does that mean for our identity that actually derives from being the people of that unique country and that unique place? Climate change could really signal finality of our diverse and distinct and unique cultural identities as Indigenous and First Nations people in the sense that land may become so changed or so disappeared that our people are no longer able to resonate or recognize or identify with it anymore or learn from it anymore. So that’s really scary.
But I think the other side is an opportunity because climate change creates a sense of urgency. It’s that sense of urgency that is going to be pushing our peoples to work collectively as Indigenous and First Nations people around the world, to highlight the importance of the shift required to address climate change, but also to recenter our traditional systems of caring for country and sustainability and living in harmony with the land as a solution to climate change — really combat this normalization of colonial history and the global system and power systems as unquestionable.
Q. That reminds me of how, on the video announcing your Goldman Prize, you mentioned that “there’s a lot to be learned from our ways of being.” Can you expand on that idea?
A. We’re at this moment where we can really take the best of our traditional ways of being and really use that to influence the decisions that we make about our future. What real climate justice is, to me, is really drawing on the greatest strengths that we have in terms of our traditional law and custom, using that as a guidance system in terms of the decisions we make about what the future looks like.
If you’re going to shift the entire global economy and global structure of how business is done, then you want to be talking to the experts. So you want to be talking to First Nations people and knowledge holders. I think climate change will ultimately lead those who are committed to the current system to be forced to be exposed to the reality that a lot of First Nations people have been living with for a long time: that this current global system doesn’t work for us. In the context of capitalism, it’s designed to work against us and facilitate outcomes for very few.
Climate change is here because of the current global systems, and that means that, eventually, the system will become obsolete. It already is when it comes to the survival of humanity. I think that ultimately people will come to see that the system doesn’t work for them. It’s never been designed to work for the masses.
So, I really see a huge shift toward leadership from First Nations people. Indigenous or non-Indigenous, people — this is my hope here in Australia — start to act in accordance with traditional principles of caring for country law and custom and really reestablishing old ways, governing ways, of these lands. I think that’s the only way to really address climate change. And maybe I’ve got a huge imagination, but I see it as part of my responsibility to work as hard as I can toward that goal of creating that reality, one in which a modern society essentially adheres to First Nations law and custom in a modern context.
Q. You’ve talked a lot about the importance of drawing from traditional knowledge. When I think about what it means to be Indigenous, I think about both the knowledge we have and also the challenge in bringing that forward because of how colonialism has eroded our ties to both culture and land. What would you say to Indigenous people who care about land and culture, but are feeling disconnected from both? How do they find their way back?
A. This is one that I actually really struggle with sometimes because in the Australian context here, we had the Stolen Generation, when Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their parents and indoctrinated. So you have whole generations that have been dispossessed of their cultural inheritance, of their families, and also their peoples have been dispossessed of future generations as well. The colonial process was a finely tuned machine by the time it came through the South Pacific and Australia. In one sense, we’re fortunate that it was only just over 230 years ago first contact happened, but at the same time, this colonial apparatus was so finely tuned that they didn’t need as long to do as much damage as they’ve been able to do.
Being in a settler colony, we’re dealing with mass incarceration, mass suicide rates, and the disappearing of our people. It feels like it’s hard to catch up. We can’t take a break or catch our breath because we’re dealing with the very real, frontier issues of losing our people. But at the same time, what’s required for healing and to actually rebuild our cultural strength is time. And actually being able to take the time to be on country, to sit with country, to learn, and to reconnect.
It’s this really delicate tug of war that all First Peoples who have been subject to colonialism have to face, and we have to sort of grapple with on a daily basis, what do we put our energy into? Am I fighting forced child removals and assimilation on the daily? Am I fighting the education system? Am I doing land and country work and going through the legal system? Or am I just sort of operating as an individual, sovereign person, under our own law and custom and that’s how I resist and maintain my strength? It’s so vast in terms of how we have to split ourselves up in a way to deal with the issues at hand, which essentially is the disappearance of our people, but also our way of life and custom.
At the end of the day, for me, I just have to take heed from my ancestors and my own people that we’ve seen the end of the world before. My great grandparents and their generation saw the end of their world already, and they’ve been fighting. They were in the physical frontier on the front line, and survived that, and saw everything that they knew to be ripped away from them. So I have to just acknowledge that I’m very lucky to be born in the generation I’m born in, with so much more opportunity. But at the same time, there is that huge gap in familiarity with culture and our ways.
Q. Before your successful litigation against the Warratah mine, you fought against the Carmichael mine, filing lawsuit after lawsuit. But the mine still opened in 2021 and is now in operation. How do you handle such setbacks, and the grief of climate trauma and colonialism? What would you say to other Indigenous activists who are dealing with similar challenges?
A. Being a young person, going through that, it’s really hard. You’re up against the actual powers that be of the colonial apparatus: the state government, the federal government, the mining lobby itself, and this idea that our traditional lands should be destroyed for extraction and exploitation for the benefit of everybody else. For the benefit of the state in terms of royalties, and for the benefit of the rest of settler Australia, where we, the people and our lands, are the collateral damage. And so for a long time I was very heartbroken, very depressed. For a long time I didn’t know what my next steps were.
But the reality is that I feel very much so guarded by my ancestors and all our people. I had time to mourn and get back on my feet before the opportunity to join the Youth Verdict case against the Waratah coal mine came along.
All I can say is we kept going. We’re fighting for our people, every single day. And something that I was always reminded of along the way was that even though it might not be the silver bullet that makes significant change, it’s still important that we create our own legacy of resistance and that we do our best every day to maintain what we hold dear.
We’ve got to do the work because we’ve got to do the work. It stands on its own and it’s our obligation as traditional custodians every day to do the work of maintaining and protecting country. We put on the record that we don’t consent, this isn’t free, prior, and informed consent as we are entitled under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And every step of the way, just maintaining that resistance, even if it’s just telling our story and challenging the prevailing, dominant, colonial narrative, I think is important to do every single day.
So in terms of advice, I think it’s to keep going. Take a break when you need to. And have a cry, because I cried for like eight years straight, but I think just knowing what some of my own people have been through and the horrors that they had to deal with, it’s the responsibility that we inherit to maintain the fight and continue on as best we can.
We might not be able to solve everything in one or two generations. But again, we’re the oldest living culture on the face of the earth. So, in that respect, we’ve been here the longest and, as long as my generation and our future generations maintain our own identities, cultural identities, and resistance as best as we can, we’ll be here long into the future as well.
Editor’s Note: Deep Green Resistance promotes a biocentric worldview. We believe in the dignity of the lives of every creature of the world, and nature herself. Human and nonhuman alike are a part of nature, and should live in harmony with her, not against her.
That’s why we invite you to come to the We Are All In This Together Symposium, a series of live-events where friends of nature can learn more about how to get active in resistance and bring the natural world to the center of their lives in a practical and intertwined way.
This is not an event organized by DGR. Therefore, we may not agree with everything in the event. For example, we believe that climate change is only the symptom of a wider problem, which is the destruction of nature. We do not believe it is possible to tackle climate change without tackling ecocide or biodiversity loss in the first place.
We appreciate the organizers for talking about colonization and commodification of the natural world. Human civilization has de-personified the natural world and nonhumans, stripping them of their inherent dignity and rights. Historically, it have treated indigenous people in the same way. Therefore, we understand the need for decolonization of indigenous people, nonhumans and natural world.
Yet, decolonization is not a simple issue anymore, as is exemplified by an increasing number of indigenous peoples opting to lease their ancestral land for mining companies. This has created a blurring of lines between colonizers and colonized. It is not enough to just return the captured land back to its original custodians. It is also important for the formerly colonized to remove the colonizing mentality of civilization, to return to a lifestyle in harmony with the land, and to restore their status as custodians of the land, rather than to replace the settlers as the “owners” of the land. Only then can we claim to have finally decolonized.
We Are All In This Together Symposium
We Are all in this Together Symposium seeks to reposition environmental stewardship and humanities disciplines within an eco-centric framework. Through a series of three virtual events, we are planning to explore the concepts of land “ownership,” and the importance of honoring nature’s more-than-human guardians. The events will first address the settler colonial history, which has brought us to this point of crisis. Then, we will invite the speakers to explore alternatives that honor the needs and interests of all ecosystems. Together, the speakers will join with audiences to consider how to shift the exploitative paradigm that currently dominates and build a future that protects and respects the life of all ecosystems and communities.
The Symposium is guided under the mission and vision of:
Standing up for the Guardians of the Natural World
In a series of three virtual events, we will join to discuss how we can expand the conception of environmental stewardship beyond the human, and unravel the historical roots of the climate crisis. Here you get access to three free live-webinars.
This event will grapple with the history of colonization and commodification of the more-than-human world, drawing the connection between settler colonial conception of private property, and the current climate crisis. We will also delve into how we can all shift away from this destructive paradigm and acknowledge the “Rights,” spirit and agency of Land.
The event will address how communities have, since time immemorial, honored and protected the spirits of the natural world. From communities standing up to defend the guardians of mountains to water guardians that advocate for the spirits of rivers, humans have long acknowledged the existence of the beings who don’t fit into the western empirical conception of nature. These beliefs were and are the foundation of humans’ relationship with the ecosystems they inhabit. In these times of crisis, the event will delve into the historical roots of these relationships, and the importance of celebrating these ancestral worldviews.
This event will focus on how more-than-human beings (such as Trees, Wolves and Eels) are fulfilling their roles and responsibilities towards the ecosystems they call home, while playing their part in maintaining an ecosystem balance that keeps all life flourishing. While the program will delve into the historical nature of these relationships, it will also address how we, humans, can act reciprocally and honor/protect these guardians of water and life.
A pivot to renewable energy by the Philippine government has led to a wave of hyrdoprojects projects across the Cordillera region. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.
Hydropower projects have met with differening receptions in Cordillera villages such as Balbalan, Mabaca and Buaya. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.
The Cal-oan River, also known as Mabaca River, where Australian-owned JBD Water Power Inc. (JWPI) has two planned hydropower projects. Image by Michael Beltran.
Farmer Gohn Dangoy, of the Naneng tribe, says proposed dams have already caused deep divisions in his community. Image by Michael Beltran.
A man in Kalinga Province wears a shirt reading “No to Dam.” Image by Michael Beltran.
Residents of villages close to the Chico River meet to discuss plans to dam the river for hydroelectricity. Image by Michael Beltran.
