Editor’s note: Environmental activism will only play a role in the lives of young people if adults are great role models and walk the talk. As custodians, we need to take the young out into nature to help them gain an appreciation for wilderness. So that they will want to protect the earth in the future. At the same time, many teenagers lose their connection to the natural world, because the lifestyle of our sedentary, technology-focused culture doesn’t give them any incentive to connect. Instead of investing in research for techno-fixes, we should find out how people will care more deeply about the planet’s ecosystems.
I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address these problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that. – Gus Speth, Founder, World Resources Institute.
At the federal level, even recent Democratic administrations have proven unable to enact policy measures ambitious enough to bend the curve of carbon emissions (at least without “help” from COVID). Nor has technology been our salvation. Although they held promise to reduce the carbon intensity of our economic output, technological advances have been offset by Americans’ consumption habits, population growth, and the energy intensity of information-processing technologies.
With each passing year, the disconnect grows ever more stark between 1) the mounting scientific evidence that global climate disruption is happening now and 2) the inadequacy of collective action to control rising carbon emissions. We do not lack for effective solutions. Rather, society and its leaders lack sufficient will and caring about future generations to implement solutions that meet the challenge. Like it or not, we find ourselves in a long game with adverse climate and biodiversity impacts baked in for decades to come.
One resource that has not yet been adequately mobilized, however, is the innate human capacity for caring, compassion, and love. Compared to technology and policy innovations, little research attention has been devoted to what makes people care enough to adopt pro-nature attitudes and behaviors and to support environmental policy initiatives that affect their lifestyles.
At the same time, people are increasingly disconnected from the environment they are being asked to help protect. The physical and psychic disconnection is due in part to urbanization and sedentary lifestyles, exacerbated by the explosive increase in time spent interacting with the physical world through a small two-dimensional screen.
To combat what some call “nature deficit disorder,” parents, schools, nonprofits, and governments have long offered a wide range of nature-based experiences for young people. Some are structured, such as outdoor education programs, forest schools, green schoolyards, community clean-up and tree-planting projects, and scouting. Others are unstructured: climbing trees, foraging, hunting, and having pets. The Children and Nature Network (C&NN), a national nonprofit that tracks and supports childhood nature activities, has documented that such activities yield significant immediate psychological, physiological and emotional benefits to participants.
But do nature-based experiences also result in their young participants developing pro-environmental attitudes, behaviors, and activism in adulthood? Given currently adverse environmental trajectories, this is clearly a question with high stakes. To explore linkages between childhood nature activities and adult environmental activism, I reviewed recent research in this field on behalf of C&NN.
Findings suggest that instilling a love for the natural world in young people does offer hope for future generations becoming better ancestors than the present one. Early experiences in nature can lead to feelings of connectedness, which can then lead to pro-environmental attitudes, and ultimately pro-environmental behavior. Many studies suggest that nature experiences and connection to nature in childhood are vital to pro-environmental behaviors in adulthood.
The link between time in nature and connectedness to nature is often explored retrospectively by asking adults to recall their childhood nature experiences. Studies taking this approach have documented significant relationships between childhood nature experience and ecologically conscious behavior later in life. These findings underscore the importance of ample time in nature during childhood. However, there are nuances that suggest various factors may result in individual variation.
For example, early experiences that stimulate emotional responses to nature create a deeper bond than purely information-based experiences. Emotional bonds with nature offer a pathway for inspiring future environmental action in adulthood. While cognitive understanding and environmental knowledge may influence behaviors, investigations have established stronger connections between emotional feelings for nature and increased care for nature through pro-environmental behaviors. A program that brings inner-city teens from New York into the Adirondacks for both learning and hiking inspires some participants to pursue subsequent environmental education and careers.
Childhood nature experiences are not the only path to pro-environmental behavior in adulthood. For example, an urban environmental justice or climate justice advocate might have grown up in a household that placed a high value on social justice more generally.
Overall, despite a growing body of research, this field of study is not as robust as the above question demands. Significant research gaps and methodological deficiencies persist. Empirical evidence is stronger for correlative than for causal relationships.
The challenge facing both outdoor educators and environmental advocates may be less about designing initiatives to instill a newfound love for nature than about how to retain humans’ innate tendencies to do so. At an early age, children demonstrate compassion towards each other, other animal species, and even to non-living entities. Children come into the world with the capacity to experience curiosity, wonder, and (especially at an early age) a less sharp distinction between themselves and their surrounding world. At an early age, children demonstrate the capacity to develop moral relationships with both sentient and non-sentient nature. (My then three-year-old son befriended a chicken pinata at the start of a birthday party, a friendship that did not end well.)
Creating opportunities for exposure to nature may help nurture such instincts and prevent them from withering as kids develop to adulthood. Implications for adults may thus be to focus less on fostering connections with nature than on getting out of the way of children’s “natural” tendencies. Relatedly, connection to nature tends to drop off during the teen years, suggesting that nature experiences need to be designed and targeted to teens’ developmental stage.
The pathways by which children in Western societies feel connected with nature are often different than in indigenous societies. In place-based societies that depend on natural resources for their sustenance, survival depends on practices that evolve from long-term experience in responding to the natural world. Stewardship norms and behaviors become established in children through demonstrating traditional livelihoods in which older children and adults play strong teaching roles. One largely untapped opportunity for Western society is to elevate wisdom about relationships with the natural world that are contained in indigenous traditions.
One challenge in designing nature-based initiatives is that opportunities for young people to connect with nature are becoming more constrained. Disrupted climate patterns may make it less pleasant to be outdoors, especially in ever-hotter summers. Young people today are precluded from forming connections with aspects of the natural world that have already been lost or altered from shifting baselines (insect and bird populations, white Christmas, etc.). Risk aversion and legal liability result in rules limiting the range of acceptable childhood activities — like tree-climbing or unsupervised outdoor play.
If we expect the next generation to do better than the present one at protecting our precious blue marble, however, we have an obligation to help them as much as possible. That means equipping them with a suite of nature-friendly technologies and policies. It also means providing them with experiences that form the basis for an emotional and moral commitment to protect what they love.
Photo by U.S. Department of Agriculture/Public Domain CC0
Editor’s note: We can no longer continue to deny the evidence. We are living through the end stage of the Pyrocene. We have hit rock bottom and are seeking solutions from anywhere else but to slow down. Unfortunately, the necessary change will not come from us, rather something external will bring us down. But we should give it a push whenever possible. Dying and being reborn is a natural process, we must contract when faced with hard times.
“The best type of degrowth is practiced as a pre-emptive measure at a time of health and abundance, not when it is too late, to ensure that maximum resource is conserved for the difficult times ahead.” – George Tsakraklides
Ancestral Future’, a book by Ailton Krenak, the first Indigenous person elected to join the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters), was published in English on July 30, 2024.
An Indigenous leader, environmentalist, philosopher, poet and writer, Krenak advocates for a paradigm shift away from modern Western notions of progress, development and unrestrained economic growth that are the root cause of global challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss.
He says he believes we can change course and that several possible sustainable futures exist if humanity reconnects with ancient wisdom, recognizes Earth as a living organism and lives in harmony with nature.
In this interview, Krenak discusses his newly translated book and what he thinks our possible futures look like.
For decades, scientists have been warning that the world is heading toward catastrophic scenarios due to climate change. But Ailton Krenak refuses to think about an apocalypse. On the contrary, he argues that there are several possible futures — but they will only be achievable when we realize that “being is more important than having.”
For the Brazilian Indigenous leader, environmentalist, philosopher, poet and writer, Western society is facing an urgent need for a paradigm shift that challenges the ideas of progress and development themselves.
“I’m not a pessimist, but I’m sure that the only way to move forward in this world is to reconnect with ancient wisdom. We have long been divorced from this living organism that is the Earth,” Krenak said in an interview with Mongabay.
Born in Itabirinha, in the state of Minas Gerais, the 71-year-old Indigenous leader has been a prominent figure and an advocate for Indigenous rights for decades. In the late ‘80s, he became famous for his appearance at Brazil’s National Constituent Assembly, where he functioned as a representative of Indigenous peoples in constitutional debates.
While giving his speech at the Congress in 1987, he stood on a platform, in front of those who threatened the land rights and culture of Indigenous peoples, and painted his face in black jenipapo paste (from the genipap fruit, Genipa americana). It was a form of protest against the setbacks and violent attacks on his rights and those of his Krenak relatives by the Brazilian dictatorship. The following year, a new Constitution was put into law, establishing fundamental rights for Brazil’s Indigenous peoples for the first time in history.
From then on, Krenak’s efforts to raise awareness around the world about the need to rescue ancestral values intensified. His profound ideas have been disseminated through lectures, educational courses and articles. He has been awarded with honorary doctorates from three esteemed Brazilian universities, published more than 15 books — some of them have been translated into more than 13 languages. And, in 2024, he became the first Indigenous person elected to join the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters).
Well known for thinking outside the box and being provocative, Krenak has a deeply skeptical view of capitalist progress and agues it devalues the natural world. He says he believes humanity is facing an urgent need to reconnect with the biocentric approach that dethrones humanity from its pedestal and roots us back to our origin. This is the main argument of his most recent book, Ancestral Future. Published in Portuguese in 2022, it is a compilation of five essays in which Krenak deals with the preservation of rivers as a way of conserving the future. The English translation of the book is now available and was published on July 30.
To mark the new release of his translated book, Mongabay spoke with the Indigenous academic by phone for more than an hour about spirituality, modern Western society, ancestral values and his ideas for possible futures.
Mongabay: In your books and lectures, you advocate for an eco-centric perspective that recognizes intrinsic value in all life forms and seeks to de-emphasize human prominence. This is similar to how many Indigenous peoples live, but it is very distant from modern Western mentality, which centers humans and treats nature primarily as a resource. Why do you believe this radical paradigm shift in the Western world is so urgent and necessary?
Ailton Krenak: We are all experiencing a rupture in our sense of belonging to life. We are now perceiving everything as a threat: rains, floods, temperatures. But we don’t realize that what we are experiencing is the fever of the planet. This is the Earth responding to human actions that have long placed us at the center. It is what scientists define as the ‘Anthropocene,’ a theory suggesting that human activities have profoundly altered the functioning of the planet and that could mark a new geological era.
This scares us because we’re not accustomed to not having control over the planet. We struggle to accept that the Earth is a living, intelligent organism that cannot be subjected to anthropocentric logic. Yet, this reality asserts itself, and that’s why we live in constant tension. What we are experiencing today is a phenomenon of the 21st century, arising because we treated the 20th century as if it were a period where we could be on an industrial binge on the planet.
(Left) Ancestral Future by Ailton Krenak in English (available in English on July 30, 2024). (Right) Futuro Ancestral by Ailton Krenak in Portuguese (published in 2022).
Mongabay: Do you mean by ‘living irresponsibly’?
Ailton Krenak: Yes. The 20th century was very prosperous. The world experienced what the United Nations and other major organizations called global development, which resulted in the term ‘globalization.’ We spent the 20th century euphoric with this idea of a global village. But no one paid attention that if harm came to this village, everyone would be affected. The idea of a single global economy resulted in finance capitalism, which we experience today, which is an unsustainable way of living.
It’s frightening to observe that today, wealth isn’t where valuable things are. It’s not where rivers, mountains or forests are. It’s in large cities, in major industries. We’ve become accustomed to a false sense of well-being.
This Western worldview is very different, for example, from that of the Indigenous peoples of the Andes mountains in South America. They have been living for centuries under the concept of buen vivir or ‘good living,’ questioning the prevalent economic development narratives and recognizing humans as part of the natural world. Good Living is a translation of the Quechan phrase sumaq kawsay. Sumaq means plenitude and kawsay means living. This is what I call a cosmovision, a lifestyle that considers only what the land has to offer us in the place we live in. For many peoples, this perspective has been sufficient for thousands of years. The idea of wealth is perceived differently — not from the experience of having things, but from belonging to a place. I see life on Earth as a cosmic dance. But this is only possible in communities that have this ancestral wisdom, that have managed to persevere with the Earth.
Mongabay: And why have modern Western societies moved so far away from this way of life?
Ailton Krenak: Western society has long been divorced from this living organism that is the Earth. This divorce from interconnection with Mother Earth has left us orphans. While humanity is moving away from its place, a bunch of big corporations are taking over and subjugating the planet: destroying forests, mountains and turning everything into merchandise.
In the West, what we experience is the constant stimulus to have, to buy, but not to be. If we look at human history, we see that it is impossible for everyone to have everything. When a few have a lot, thousands of others are materially poor. This is very easy to understand but very difficult to accept. Propaganda does that to us. More than a hundred years ago, when Henry Ford discovered that he could awaken everyone’s desire to own a car, he made the first billboard of a car with a slogan that said something like, ‘You will have one.’ That was the most disgraceful promise anyone has ever made to humanity. Fordism created the illusion that we can mass-produce the world. We have become a huge crowd of people wanting the same things.
I honestly don’t know if we will be able to reeducate ourselves for a world where what matters is life and the quality of life. It is not the clothes you wear or how much money you can show off. We are hostages of a broad and socially experienced condition that is an illusion. This results in tragedies, and they are everywhere. A river that you destroy never comes back. A mountain that you cut down to make laminate turns into a plain.
A group of women from a Quechan community spinning and dyeing fibers. Krenak talks about how the Indigenous peoples of the Andes mountains, including the Quechan, have been living for centuries under the concept of buen vivir or ‘good living,’ questioning the prevalent economic development narratives and recognizing humans as part of the natural world. Image by Shawn Harquail via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Mongabay: What are the premises of this ‘ancestral way of life’ that need to be rescued to create possible futures?
Ailton Krenak: These cosmovisions are not theories, they cannot be presented in a literary work or in a document because they represent a way of being in the world. A collective way of living. If we were to answer in one sentence, it would be: We must learn to live with only what is necessary. In the children’s story The Jungle Book, all the creatures in the forest talk. At one point, the bear says to the boy that lives in the forest, ‘Only what is necessary, only what is necessary.’ It is beautiful because children understand what is necessary, but adults often do not. When we become adults, we go beyond the limits of what is necessary; we think we can force the Earth to give us what we want, not what it can sustainably provide. The phrase ‘only what is necessary’ is the first thing we will have to relearn. We have drawers to store everything we do not need. Maybe the first step is to imagine a world without drawers.
Mongabay: In 2024, you were elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters and became the first Indigenous person to occupy a chair at the century-old institution. Do you consider this to be a sign that Indigenous culture and thoughts are beginning to be valued?
Ailton Krenak: I believe so. Indigenous literature is not only gaining relevance in Brazil but is also being translated in various countries. I believe this is likely because the Western repertoire has been exhausted. I see this movement as a desire to find some way out, a desire to think about the future. It’s as if we have hit rock bottom and are seeking solutions elsewhere.
For a long time, Brazilian educational institutions were subservient to European knowledge and literature. The majority still seek to transplant dominant thinking here. Brazil has not managed to shake off its ‘mongrel complex’ [an inferiority complex Brazilians feel in relation to the rest of the world] and continues to wait for a white boss to come and teach people how to live, even within the forest. Everyone, except for the deniers, knows that our modern relationship with nature is leading us to very difficult experiences in the coming years due to rising global temperatures.
If we are already highly vulnerable with current climate conditions, imagine when we reach temperatures unbearable for human life? We are undergoing changes that were not planned. We are experiencing a disruption within ourselves that was not programmed. If we wish to envision a future possibility, we need to put a limit on our relentless pursuit of development, of technology at any cost. This drive has been encouraged since childhood. You no longer see children building their own toys. In most schools, childhood is being shaped for a dystopian future, where toys are even influenced by the military industry. You see children playing with guns made out of plastic, pretending to kill each other. How can we cultivate a future like this? I understand that the world is realizing this is unsustainable and searching elsewhere for future possibilities.
Uros people harvesting some “totora” (Schoenoplectus californicus ssp. tatora) on Lake Titicaca, Peru. Image by Christophe Meneboeuf via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).
Mongabay: Is it obsolete to think about economic development and growth in today’s world? Or can a cosmovision complement the idea of economic development?
Ailton Krenak: The planet’s economic development is what is destroying life on Earth. We do not need economic development anymore. The wealth of the world is at least 8-10 times bigger than what we actually need. There are about 110 armed conflicts happening worldwide because the military industry needs to produce weapons. War is what boosts the economy the most in the world. It’s not life, it’s war. We invest trillions in war, not in protecting biodiversity. The discourse of progress and development is foolish because if you ask where humans will get water and food for everyone, they will tell you it’s from the land, as there’s no other place to get it from. Yet, they persist in ignoring adequate policies for land access.
Before talking about more development, it would be necessary to consider greater engagement with environmental issues, territorial issues, land management and the privatization, destruction and degradation of river basins. Otherwise, it is unsustainable. This paradigm shift is needed. I thought humanity would begin to reconsider the idea of development and globalization after the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic because, as a global event, it paralyzed everyone. I thought we would emerge as better human beings from this horror. But I am impressed by how we have worsened.
Mongabay: How do we change this paradigm? The signs are all there that we are heading for trouble, yet it seems that nothing much is happening.
Ailton Krenak: We should be skeptical of any expert, philosopher or global leader who claims to have a solution, because it’s a lie. It took us a long time to build the scenario we find ourselves in, and we won’t be able to undo it with a magic wand. If we had learned anything from the pandemic, which was a global experience, we would have changed our behavior. For example, greenhouse gas emissions would have decreased. But nothing has changed.
That’s why I fear that what will provoke this change that we need will be something external, it will not come from us. It could be another virus, an extreme weather event. Something that collapses our ability to move, our ability to live as we do now. Perhaps then we will undergo a cognitive rupture that stops us from being this consumerist metastasis and leads us to experience another way of living. I believe we have reached our limit and will be thrust into a different situation, a different reality. This could be very tragic though.
Mongabay: This seems like a rather pessimistic view …
Ailton Krenak: Yeah, it seems like we’ve gathered here to talk about the apocalypse. I don’t want to nurture that feeling within myself, nor do I want to cultivate it in others as if it were a declaration of surrender, but we can’t continue to deny the evidence. If we have climate events altering the weather, why should we continue to overspend on things nobody needs? When I published the bookIdeas to Delay the End of the World, I announced my distrust of the idea that development and progress would be the path to the future. I explained that a biocentric vision — an ethical perspective that holds every life as sacred — would be a path to the future.
But for that, we need to renounce the materialistic apparatus that surrounds us. Today, life has become solely focused on consumption, on economic growth at any cost. When I denounce this kind of end of the world, I’m not renouncing hope. But I also don’t want to promote a ‘placebo hope,’ one where you pat someone on the shoulder and say everything will be fine. It won’t be fine. We’re going to get worse for a while. But after that, we can improve, as long as we learn to renounce.
Mongabay: You say we will get worse for a while. Yet, you insist on the idea of possible futures. Do you really believe this is possible?
Ailton Krenak: Our planet is so wonderful. We cannot lose sight of the fact that life is everywhere. No one is a separate cocoon in the cosmos living this experience alone. You experience this with all the organisms that are in the planet’s biosphere. It is as if we were diluted in everything. We need to relearn how to walk softly on the Earth. When we learn to walk like this, we will experience wonder and nothing else will be needed. We must accept Nature’s invitation to dance with life. If we could have an organic mindset, which connects us with bees, ants, the grass that grows, the trees that shake in the wind, that shed their leaves and bring forth new shoots, we would understand that everything is constantly sprouting, growing, dying, being born.
Homo sapiens is the only animal that wants to be eternalized, wants to mummify itself, wants this monoculture way of eating the world. The Earth, Gaia, Pachamama, this living organism is intelligent, and we will have to negotiate with it our possible way out of this hole we have dug. Perhaps the answer lies in the capacity for affection, for embracing all other nonhuman beings.
Mongabay: When you close your eyes, what future do you see?
Ailton Krenak: When I’m on my land, cleaning the yard, I meditate. I detach from the harshness of daily life, close my eyes, and imagine a landscape where waters emerge from the mountains and form small streams. I become such a tiny organism that I dissolve into water. In this place, the concept of future isn’t something you problematize. You experience being the future. This is the ancestral future.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a young documentary filmmaker began quietly joining a growing number of Facebook community groups run by traders of rare Indonesian birds.
Over the following two years, a reporting team from several news organizations uncovered a wide network of actors offering species for sale for as little as 250,000 rupiah ($15). These individuals included a serving naval officer.
One shop owner selling birds in Morowali, the epicenter of Indonesia’s nickel mining and smelting boom, said they began trading in birds in 2018, after ships began docking in the local port bringing oil and cement.
KENDARI, Indonesia — In 2021, as the world grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, Irwan watched online as a flurry of new social media groups dedicated to parrots sprang up across Indonesia.
When Irwan, whose name Mongabay has changed to protect his identity, first began participating in these online marketplaces, he saw a rainbow of parrot species offered for as little as $15 a bird, but with little further information about the species.
Two years later, after careful research, Irwan helped uncover a diffuse network of operators quietly transporting rare birds from eastern Indonesia for sale. He set out to establish whether the birds were bred in captivity or plucked from protected forests around the industrial boomtown of Kendari, his home in Southeast Sulawesi province.
“This was never detailed,” Irwan told Mongabay Indonesia. “That’s what interested me about it.”
Illegal trade in wildlife around the world is worth up to $23 billion each year, with one out of four global bird and mammal species falling victim to the business, according to BirdLife International.
As in other criminal enterprises, researchers emphasize that the true extent of the illegal trade dwarfs the number of seizures by authorities.
Much of the trade is conducted on social media. In 2016, Facebook partnered with WWF and other environmental groups to form the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, aiming to reduce wildlife trade on the platform by 80% within four years.
In 2019, Facebook banned all live animal trade on its platform, allowing only verified sellers with legitimate business reasons. By 2020, the partnership introduced an alert system that notified users about the illegality of trading wildlife products whenever relevant search terms were used.
Flight plan
Mongabay Indonesia worked with other news outlets including Garda Animalia, which reports exclusively on the wildlife trade in Indonesia, to track and document the illegal bird trade in Sulawesi, an important transit hub for wildlife in the archipelago.
Reporters saw protected species advertised openly on social media, including the yellow-crested cockatoo (Cacatua sulphurea), black-capped lory (Lorius lory) and Moluccan eclectus (Eclectus roratus).
One account was traced to an individual whom reporters dubbed by their initials, WL: a university student in Puwatu, a subdistrict of Kendari. Reporters found WL in a two-story house fenced in by concrete and iron walls, with a plastic sheet obscuring the view of a terrace. Parrots native to the island of New Guinea perched in an enclosure outside.
WL said he’d obtained the parrots from a contact known by the Facebook pseudonym “M Parrot.” He claimed the man held a breeding permit from the provincial conservation agency in Southeast Sulawesi, the BKSDA.
WL and M Parrot were members of the same Facebook groups, where they interacted. WL said he understood that M Parrot kept around 20 pairs of birds, and that they could be identified by rings on the birds’ talons used to show certification.
“If it turns out that it’s against the law … well, don’t blame me,” WL told our reporting team. “I’m just a buyer.”
The student said the trade in birds from New Guinea likely came from hunters based in the island, whose western half is part of Indonesia.
Meanwhile, parrots in Kendari are often sourced from Obi Island in North Maluku province, and sent to port in Morowali by weekly ship. From there, the cages are switched to an overland transfer to Kendari.
Bungku harbor serves the industrial heartland of Morowali, which is undergoing rapid development as part of Indonesia’s nickel mining boom. The port was undergoing renovations and there wasn’t a ship to be seen when reporters visited this year.
A port worker said he usually saw crates of birds endemic to Maluku and Papua unloaded every week as large ships docked in Morowali. From here, the bird trade fans out into this part of Sulawesi, the world’s 11th largest island.
We met a man on the roadside of the main highway north of Morowali selling various types of parrots, without any official documents.
“This is 650,000 rupiah [$40],” he said, offering us a cage. “It’s a Maluku parrot.”
The man said he obtained the birds from crew members of ships anchored in Morowali, and that he would occasionally purchase birds from a trader in South Bungku, a subdistrict of Morowali.
The main road was packed with thousands of motorcycles of workers from the vast Morowali nickel smelting complex, a key node in the global electric vehicle industry. Inside one small shop by the road we found two black-capped lories, the birds’ feet chained to a small perch. Three yellow-streaked lories (Chalcopsitta scintillata) idled in their cages above a thin base of sand.
The black-capped lories were each priced at 1.8 million rupiah ($110), while the asking price for a yellow-streaked lory was 800,000 rupiah ($50). A contact number was displayed in front of the shop.
The owner said he’d been trading in birds since 2018, after ships bringing oil and cement started docking more frequently in Morowali to feed the mining boom in the region.
Later, when asked to identify the source of the birds via a WhatsApp message, the shop owner didn’t respond.
Bird on a wire
In October 2023, our reporting team visited the Southeast Sulawesi office of Indonesia’s conservation agency, the BKSDA, to obtain information on breeding permits for birds in the province.
The agency held only one such permit on file. It had been authorized in March 2023 in the name of Asriaddin.
Erni Timang, forest ecosystem lead for the Southeast Sulawesi BKSDA, said that documentation held by the conservation agency showed the permit holder didn’t have a license to deal in the birds.
“He can only breed, he can’t trade yet,” Erni told Mongabay. “You need to have a distribution permit first.”
Ahmar, the BKSDA’s conservation lead for Kendari, said his office had on several occasions attempted to clarify the trading status of the permit holder. However, Ahmar said that on every occasion, Asriaddin was unavailable at his registered address because he was on duty at the Kendari naval base. A public relations officer at the base confirmed that Asriaddin was a serving naval officer.
Mongabay visited the registered address in late March. At the home we saw cages containing various colorful parrot species, exotic imports as well as eastern Indonesian endemics, including black-capped lories, yellow-crested cockatoos, and a black lory (Chalcopsitta atra).
“In the past there were many, but now there are fewer,” a resident at the address told reporters.
On May 25, reporters reached Asriaddin by phone and asked about his status as a trader of birds.
“That’s not correct, it’s just speculation,” Asriaddin said.
When asked whether he had failed to report any breeding activities to the government conservation agency, Asriaddin claimed to not properly understand the reporting requirements.
Singky Soewadji from the Indonesian Wildlife Lovers Alliance (Apecsi), a civil society organization, criticized the awarding of breeding permits by the BKSDA conservation agency, which is part of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
“The director-general of the BKSDA should carry out its control function,” Singky said, “not wait until there is a violation of the law.”
Editor’s Note: The following is a response we got on our recent article Ways to Fight Reliance on the Violent War Economy. We believe that discourses and discussions are important to further our analysis. In order to encourage that, we encourage our readers to participate in comments at the end of the article. You could also send us written responses to us. If you want to submit responses to any of our published pieces, please mail it to newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org putting “Letter to Editor” as a subject.
The article “Ways to Fight Reliance on the Violent War Economy” is superficially a feel-good take about promoting peace instead of war, promoting community and collaboration instead of competition. The author correctly identifies how the global human supremacy culture (although she doesn’t call it that) we all live within rewards a belief that we are somehow separate from the natural world, rather than human animals living as part of and utterly dependent on the natural world; a belief that results in a war economy—a culture and economy that is at war with the natural world, and with the living beings, including humans, who live on Earth.
However, many of the author’s suggestions for cultivating a peace economy fall short. I’ll highlight just a few of the problems I see with the article.
The author suggests we move into a culture of peace by beginning with ourselves. “We begin to break our war economy habits… we purposefully invest ourselves at the local level in what is often called the peace economy—the caring, sharing, supportive economies that already exist all around us.”
I completely agree that all efforts to end industrial civilization must begin with ourselves—we must, after all, understand deep in our own hearts that industrial civilization is a war on nature and thus a war on each of us as individuals—but we cannot stop there. We know that personal change does not equal political or social change. We must go beyond personal change if we have any hope of dismantling this ecocidal way of life.
We all live in local communities to one degree or another. Some of us are invested in these local communities more than others; some participate by supporting local farmers and buying local goods and services rather than from big international conglomerates; others participate by offering services to help families in need or by volunteering in their communities. I am lucky to live in a community where people are heavily invested in these ways. But it should be obvious that participating in our local communities does very little to stop the global industrial Machine. It makes us feel good. It helps some local people. It fosters community spirit and resilience that will be vital once this insane way of life collapses.
But it’s not enough. To stop the Machine, we must do more. We must actively fight against it, either as above ground activists building campaigns against mines, against development, against logging, and so on, or as underground activists working to dismantle the industrial Machine with direct action.
I don’t want to suggest that encouraging people to participate in a “peace economy” is a waste of time; it isn’t. But we must always understand that it is not enough. We must be willing to fight back in this war on nature.
In addition, while many of the author’s concrete suggestions might sound good on the surface, some encourage and contribute to the “war economy” the author is purportedly advocating against.
Here are just a few notes I made while reading the author’s suggestions.
In one of the points, the author suggests that “Creative cooperatives are reclaiming real estate and … shaping the culture of cities across the U.S.” and that this can help build a “peace economy”. In a later point, the author notes the “free-food fridges stocked in cities around the world” to help people get through the initial phase of the ongoing Covid pandemic.
While providing better access to housing, community spaces, and food to underserved communities in cities is certainly a good thing, the author fails to note that cities themselves are incredibly destructive, requiring the support of often 100 times or more land than the city itself takes up, thus taking land away from the natural world in order to support the large populations of cities. This is not “peace”; this is war on nature. Cities are an integral part of the “war economy” and our goal should be to eliminate them, not make them incrementally better.
In another point, the author suggests that dam removal on the Klamath River is the result of “Indigenous-led community activism.” While I certainly support everyone opposing dams and advocating that dams be removed from rivers, unfortunately the Klamath River Dams coming down has little to do with Native American activism, and everything to do with economics. The cost of building mandated fish ladders would have been much more than removing the dams, and the dams produced less than 2% of one utility’s electricity supply. It simply made economic sense to remove the dams.
Economics is usually the reason projects destructive to the environment fail or are cancelled, despite the efforts of activists. The reason is that the law in the United States (and in most countries) does not protect the environment; indeed, the law actively and directly supports and encourages development and extraction. A prime example of this is the 1872 U.S. mining law which says that extraction is the highest use of U.S. public land. Not even the minerals below the surface in our National Parks are exempt from the right, by law, of corporations to extract those minerals if it’s economical. It is essentially illegal to refuse corporations access to these minerals for extraction.
Rather than make a feel-good but erroneous point about indigenous-led activism and the Klamath River dams, the author might have better made her point by discussing community efforts to pass Rights of Nature legislation, or by pointing out the futility of fighting corporations and states via the law and encouraging communities to band together and take direct action instead.
The author writes that “Fire recovery efforts in Oregon and California have largely been community-led, and networks have formed among neighbors to create resilience and support—including grief spaces like those created in Ashland, Oregon, which provide a space for people to share their experiences of loss.” While I agree that it is wonderful communities have come together to support one another after losing their homes in fires across Oregon and California, the truth is that many of the homes and towns lost to fire in these states were built where they should never have been built—in areas particularly susceptible to fire (natural or otherwise). These houses and towns were likely built on the dead bodies of the natural communities these areas previously supported. As these states become more and more populated, developments expand into more fire-prone areas that inevitably burn. Rebuilding these developments might sound good on the surface, but look more closely and we see that this simply perpetuates the idea that humans can use the environment however we want, rather than respecting limits of population and development, and the right of nature to exist and flourish.
The last point I’ll mention is about the author’s suggestion that “People are reimagining safety through alternatives to policing.” I will be the first to acknowledge that police have become militarized in recent years and this is dangerous and counter-productive. However, we also know that most underserved city communities want more police, not fewer. This has been stated so many times now, the idea that “alternatives to policing” in cities is actually desirable should have been put to rest.
When we shove hundreds of thousands or millions of people together in a city–an unnatural habitat for humans evolved to live in tribes of 150 or so with lots of space in between–police are an unfortunate requirement in order to keep the peace because the “rats in the cage” so-to-speak (with apologies to rats) will fight each other to the death in these unnatural and cruel conditions.
I believe war is primarily the result of disputes over land, resources, and ideology–all related to ecological overshoot and civilization. One of the primary drivers of ecological overshoot is population, and it seems obvious that the more population increases, so too will disputes over land, resources, and ideology. Those who wish to foster a “peace economy” must surely recognize this. I’m surprised that “Educating women” and “Addressing over-population” are not mentioned in the article, because educating women is the primary way we can humanely reduce the human population on Earth and bring it below carrying capacity once again, resulting in far fewer reasons to war with one another.
Another glaring omission from this article is a biocentric view, one that centers the natural world. It is lovely to recognize and highlight where people are being kind to one another and attempting to reduce our impacts on the environment. But until we truly and deeply understand that we are human animals, and that the Machine—the war economy, as the author describes it—we have put in motion is completely at odds with the natural world and thus with ourselves, these paltry efforts at a peace economy will fail to make significant change in the war economy.
Ultimately, I find this article depressing. Not only does it spin unpeaceful things like cities and industrially-supported agriculture to try to sound positive, it is a reminder of how we grasp at ridiculously tiny straws to find anything even remotely positive to discuss in a world the Machine is rapidly destroying, with greater speed each and every day.
Yes, we should recognize the good things humans do to help each other. And, I believe, we should always describe the broader context of the culture in which these good things happen—the war on the natural world, which spawns countless wars against each other. Until we stop the war on the natural world, these wars we fight against each other will never end.
Editor’s Note: Building up local structures is an essential part of fighting the militarized global culture. The following piece explains how that is being done in many places across the world. That said, it is important to understand that such structures are only effective if they are a part of a wider culture of resistance.
All cities are unsustainable, they are built on the surplus that is created through agriculture. They require the importation of resources. Then the land-base and functioning ecosystems are destroyed as they grow. Civilization is a war on nature. This article is anthropocentric but it does point out how the self-organizing super organism that is the globalized capitalist economy operates and controls people. DGR’s battle is not one of a person’s identity, we fight to protect nature.
War is not innate to humanity; it is learned culturally, and intentional systems of peace can prevent it from happening, according to anthropological research. We are living at a critical time in the history of humanity in which preventing and divesting from war are essential to our future existence—especially given the realities of the global climate crisis and the fact that the U.S. military is the worst single polluter that exists (and not even mentioning the unspeakable potential for destruction that nuclear weapons pose). If war is cultural, then we can prevent it by intentionally moving ourselves into a culture of peace. How do we do this? We begin with ourselves. We begin to break our war economy habits, and actively divest ourselves, wherever possible, from the ways in which the war economy takes hold in our lives. And we purposefully invest ourselves at the local level in what is often called the peace economy—the caring, sharing, supportive economies that already exist all around us.
The economy of war thrives on extraction and materialism, so it has—for thousands of years, and by no accident—made trite (or violently stifled) the things that are most valuable and important about living: caring; nurturing; love; art; peace; expression; and connection with nature, our bodies, and each other. The war economy, which is the overarching economic system of our times, promotes a culture that actively devalues play and community, and overly values hard work and individualism—to the grave detriment of mental and physical health. It uplifts money hoarding, competition, and the flaunting of one’s material wealth over generosity, sharing, collaboration, and appreciation. It stifles grief and asks us to harden ourselves against the expression of feeling rather than inviting us into depths of emotion where we can realize the gift of being alive in this world, together, for just a brief time.
The results of this unsustainable and unnatural lifestyle are ugly: Clear-cut, monocropped tree farms where once thrived biodiverse FernGully-esque old grove forests in the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon, and around the world; endless mining and building projects that plunder habitats, natural wonders, and Indigenous communities; worsening mental health afflictions, an opioid addiction epidemic, and soaring suicide rates; toxic chemicals and microplastics in our soils, oceans, streams, and bloodstreams that are causing irreparable damage to the planet and our bodies; people treated like criminals for experiencing homelessness, even amidst a devastating cost of living crisis; racist, militarized police murdering people in broad daylight, and often walking free even when they’re caught on camera; hustle and greed culture and the agony that comes with living a daily grind; so much unnecessary loneliness and stress… and this list could go on and on.
But a movement is building from the commons to break with these war economy ways and replenish ways of being that are actually livable. Around the world, there are projects, people, and organizations creating solutions to the problems of our times. They are actively helping in divesting from the war economy in powerful ways. These examples of the local peace economy in action demonstrate that it is possible to create systems in which wealth and worth are rooted in equitable, community-centered care practices like health care for all, farming and feeding each other, parenting and education that are entrenched in love and engagement, and a culture that uplifts us and inspires interconnection.
The peace economy is built brick by brick, through the commitments of individual people and communities. What follows are some examples (of many more that exist worldwide) showing how people and communities are divesting from the war economy and investing in a future centered in peace, love, and aliveness:
Our globalized, Big Ag, monoculture food systems—which are monopolized by a handful of megacorporations owned by billionaires responsible for the war economy—are unraveling. The COVID-19 pandemic cast a bright light on the fragility of those systems. But the issues the pandemic exposed were present prior to 2020, and they promise to continue into the future. People in communities around the world are relocalizing food supply chains to create food sovereignty and reclaim culture in these times of fraying global food systems:
Communities in the Pacific Northwest have been working to regionalize food supply chains through relocalized flour mills and community garden programs. These efforts have paid off in creating food security for communities while also leading to greater job opportunities and a thriving ecosystem.
Palestinian farmers have been rekindling connections with Indigenous farming practices and creating community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs to resist Israeli colonialism. This has helped Palestinians to reconnect with their land and economically support locally grown food.
Black, formerly incarcerated people in Chicago are challenging the megacorporations that tend to dominate food contracting with schools and other large facilities in America by prepping locally sourced meals for schools, nursing homes, and transitional housing. The Chicago worker cooperative ChiFresh Kitchen is 100 percent employee-owned and provides nutritious and culturally appropriate food to these institutions and facilities.
There are many networks of Indigenous seed savers and others keeping and propagating seeds in community gardens and cooperative programs in the U.S. and around the world. Indigenous-led communities like Seeding Sovereignty and many others are keeping their spiritual connections and cultural practices alive through their connections with seeds, and seed savers are challenging the monocrop-based Big Ag industry that is responsible for so much deforestation and other climate destruction. These networks have also helped bring back “Indigenous foodways that were lost during genocide and forced relocation” inflicted by European colonizers.
The Deep Medicine Circle in the San Francisco Bay Area, a women of color-led, worker-directed 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is one group that is rethinking health care at its roots, and healing the ways U.S. colonial extraction is making people sick. Local community members who make up Deep Medicine Circle are creating systems of health and care, through the lens of community food justice. They’re planting community gardens and thinking up long-term models of localized food and community engagement that uplift Indigenous practices, provide access to healthy foods in poor urban neighborhoods, and dismantle colonialist ways of thinking and being in the world.
Neighbors are voluntarily keeping free-food fridges stocked in cities around the world, in a mutual aid movement that gained speed in response to the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. People have fed and cared for each other through the pandemic and beyond, creating a free-fridge movement that has raised awareness about racial inequity in food systems.
Sallie Calhoun’s Paicines Ranch in California is working to bring agricultural business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature by prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices. The project was founded with the aim of working with the dynamic natural world to explore ways of building healthy ecosystems while growing crops and supporting community through food. Paicines Ranch is intentionally creating a model of doing business that is focused on managing complexities rather than solving problems, and is centered on adding true value over profits.
Outside of the food system, examples of other applications of mutual aid, social justice, creative arts, community resilience, and activism for human rights and the environment that all embrace the peace economy include:
People are reimagining safety through alternatives to policing. Safety in the peace economy comes from the engagement of community and the reallocation of resources and funding into programs of care—not militarized police forces and punitive systems of justice. While many alternatives to policing already exist, recent initiatives after the murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 have introduced changes, both big and small, across the U.S., and the global uprisings against systemic racism have led to these issues being part of the mainstream conversation.
Creative cooperatives are reclaiming real estate and bringing access to art, living spaces, and community spaces back to marginalized Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in Oakland and elsewhere who have played an integral part in shaping the culture of cities across the U.S.
Fire recovery efforts in Oregon, California, and elsewhere have depended on people-led mutual aid projects and local volunteer networks. Devastating fires, worsened by climate change and the criminal negligence of public utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), have been increasing in recent years, some of them incinerating entire towns. Fire recovery efforts in Oregon and California have largely been community-led, and networks have formed among neighbors to create resilience and support—including grief spaces like those created in Ashland, Oregon, which provide a space for people to share their experiences of loss.
People are fighting the fossil fuel industry while building community spaces and support for people who are homeless in New Mexico. The grassroots project is part of a larger project in New Mexico. SOL for All has brought solar power to various locations across the state in an effort to support alternative energy solutions, which are necessary to combat climate change.
The largest dam removal in historystarted in 2023 in southern Oregon and Northern California, thanks to years of Indigenous-led community activism. The Karuk, Yurok, and other Native American groups for whom the Klamath River Basin is their ancestral home since time immemorial have been organizing against the dams since they were proposed in the 1910s—which have had disastrous results for people, salmon, and other wildlife—for decades. After multigenerational efforts, the massive dam removal project is expected to be completed by 2024.
Many people are also building a peace economy through creative sharing efforts and alternatives to money-based exchanges. This includes community gardens, mutual aid groups, and participation in the solidarity economy, and just transition efforts like those of Americans with jobs sharing their stimulus checks with those in need in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. People are also creating skill share networks like Kola Nut Collaborative and others, and millions of people daily are sharing tools and operating in a moneyless economy via “free” signs on street corners, Craigslist’s “free stuff” page, Freecycle, and other creative routes.
The above are just some of the countless examples of the peace economy in action—and most of these efforts were started by just one or two people deciding to do something about the problems they saw happening in their local community.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Deep Green Resistance, the News Service or its staff.
Relocalizing the Planet with Helena Norberg-Hodge
To know more about global movements for localization, listen to this Green Flame episode on relocalization:
