With the release in April of the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the time is ripe to celebrate a breakthrough by Indigenous Peoples in participation on the scientific advisory board that guides global warming policy for 195 U.N. countries. Opinion leaders should push the envelope for more of the same.
In the Indigenous Yaqui territory of the Mexican state of Sonora on the northern border, water defenders who oppose pipelines have to choose between self-exile or the likely outcome of imprisonment, kidnapping, disappearance, and murder. The defenders have called for ‘cease-fire’ in the long-running water war.
The Escazú Agreement is the first treaty in the world to contain specific provisions on human rights defenders in environmental matters.
The involvement of drug cartel operatives in the illegal trade of critically endangered totoaba and vaquita porpoise bycatch has eclipsed efforts to enforce a five-year-long ban on gillnets, provoking foreign sanctions on the village’s all important seafood exports.
The long-running global struggle to prevent extinction of the world’s most endangered marine mammal claimed its first human life in Baja California on Jan. 2, in the conflict between illegal fishing and conservation of the vaquita porpoise.
The final rulings of the Supreme Court calendar year favored indigenous causes diametrically opposed to those of incumbent candidate Donald Trump, reaffirming treaty rights and proving the power of recent grassroots mobilizations.
From Anchorage to Acoma, all over the United States and Canada, native women have been mobilizing to procure justice for missing and murdered sisters. In recent years, the mounting grassroots efforts have made hard-won progress to counter gender-related violence in colonized communities.
There are increasing threats to nature, as well as to those who are involved in the defense of natural resources and land rights. In this scenario, the workers of the media whose duty it is to investigate such facts are exposed.
Tribal chairmen decried the newly finished Dakota Access Pipeline when reports surfaced that its first crude oil spill in South Dakota occurred even before the private infrastructure project went into service.
Caceres’ memory must be invoked along with that of dozens of other martyrs for the defense of the sanctity of all living beings, as the cross-boundary struggle builds to reinstate indigenous primacy in the protection of land tenure rights, biological diversity, habitat, food and water security, and the balance of nature.
