Environmental Activists

Environmental Protesters Under Attack And Often Treated As Terrorists

July 11, 2024 Peter Speetjens, Resilience. Educate! climate crisis, Environmental Activists, Environmental Justice, Free Speech, Indigenous Rights, Suppression

Events in February felt like a legal double whammy for the environment and its defenders. First, the United Nations Environment Assembly declined a Bolivian proposal to grant rights to nature and Mother Earth. Then, Michel Forst, the U.N. special rapporteur on environmental defenders under the Aarhus Convention, raised the alarm with his new paper: “State Repression of Environmental Protest and Civil Disobedience: A Major Threat to Human Rights and Democracy.” Although the right to protest is safeguarded by universal human rights like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, Forst signals a worrisome rise in police brutality in dealing with environmental defenders.

The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Defenders

July 10, 2024 Alessandra Bergamin, In These Times. Educate! Assassination, Environment, Environmental Activists, extrajudicial murder, History

Before the day’s light had begun to dim, Brandon Lee picked up his phone and texted Sister Genny. “Even until now,” he told the nun, “I feel like I’m being watched.” It was Tuesday, August 6, 2019, and the habagat season was pulling tropical storms across the mountains of the Cordillera, the rural interior of the Philippine island of Luzon. In Lee’s home province of Ifugao, the threat of a deluge had passed, leaving behind leaden skies and the sticky heat of the wet season. For a week, after a fraught decision made with his wife, Bernice, Lee had hardly left their home in the municipality of Lagawe. He no longer went to work at the office down the road, no longer walked his niece and daughter to school, no longer went anywhere on foot.

Forest Defenders Declare Victory After 22-Day Tree Sit

April 24, 2024 Unicorn Riot. Resist! Environment, Environmental Activists, Environmental Justice, Forest Defenders, Oregon, Treesit, Victory

Josephine County, OR – Environmentalists are declaring victory after occupying a stand of old growth forest for three weeks to prevent trees from being logged. Forest defenders launched a tree sit on April 1 to prevent Boise Cascade Wood Products, the timber company who bought the logging rights, from cutting a stand of mature trees which represents some of the last remaining intact old growth in the region. For 22 days, community members occupied a patch of old growth forest that sits inside the boundaries of the Poor Windy Forest Management Plan.

Environmentalists Owe An Enormous Debt To Julian Assange

August 24, 2023 Mitchel Cohen, Counter Punch. Educate! Environmental Activists, Julian Assange, Monsanto, Wikileaks

Environmentalists throughout the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to political prisoner Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks — and most of them don’t know it. It wasn’t only secret recordings pertaining to war and crimes-against-humanity that Wikileaks published, based on the heroic work of Chelsea Manning who downloaded thousands of secret US military files. A slew of cables Assange published revealed massive U.S. government attempts on behalf of Monsanto to coerce governments to allow foreign corporate land ownership, and with it genetically engineered agriculture throughout the world

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