What had begun as a protest against a 1,900-kilometre oil pipeline skirting Standing Rock Sioux territory and potentially threatening the tribe’s primary water source had turned into an epic battle over Indigenous rights, which resonated far and wide. Members of some 300 Indigenous nations travelled to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota for the Indigenous-led protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). As water protectors conducted ceremonies on the banks of the Missouri River, largely peaceful demonstrations were punctuated by violent confrontations, with law enforcement using tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers and other militarized equipment to crack down on protesters. 

It was one of the most potent examples of the intersection between the climate, Indigenous and anti-capitalist movements on the continent. After the months-long standoff came to a close, with oil starting to flow, pipeline owner Energy Transfer LP set out to make an example of the opposition. In 2017, it sued a smattering of environmental groups, including Greenpeace International and its entities in the United States, under anti-racketeering laws, accusing them of misinformation and hindering the company’s profits. A judge dismissed that case in 2019. One week later, Energy Transfer took aim again at the high-profile climate crusaders by accusing them of defamation, “militant direct action” and “incit[ing]” protests by spreading misinformation, even though Greenpeace’s lawyers say the organization played only a minor peaceful role in the protests.

That second lawsuit came to a dramatic head in March 2025, when a jury took the oil company’s side, ordering Greenpeace International and subsidiaries to pay an unprecedented US$669 million in damages to the oil giant (which made US$4.1 billion in revenue last quarter) in a decision that was shocking for its scale and the message that it sent. Greenpeace has appealed the decision, with a raft of human rights and environmental groups dubbing it an “unfair trial” tainted by “flagrant” due process violations and posing “irreparable harm” to free speech, not to mention Indigenous sovereignty. “Energy Transfer’s false and self-serving narrative that Greenpeace manipulated Standing Rock into protesting DAPL is patronizing and disrespectful to our people,” Janet Alkire, chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, wrote in a statement following the decision. 

For Steven Donziger, the proceedings sounded all too familiar. In court, Energy Transfer “became the good guys who had been quote-unquote victimized by the very tribe whose culture, lands and burial sites were being destroyed by these pipelines,” says Donziger, a famed environmental lawyer who sat in on the trial as part of an independent monitoring group. 

Donziger has been locked for years in a legal battle with Chevron, which was found guilty of illegally dumping toxic oil waste in Indigenous ancestral lands in the Ecuadorian rainforest in 2011. “I’ve been dealing with attacks on me from Chevron for 15 years,” Donziger says. “It’s pretty much baked into my professional life.” Donziger spent 993 days under house arrest and then in jail in the United States for refusing to hand over his cellphone in a lawsuit that Chevron launched against him and other members of the case following the Ecuador judgment. 

Like Energy Transfer, he says, Chevron cast itself as the victim, resorting to what legal experts call a “strategic lawsuit against public participation” (SLAPP) to intimidate and silence critics. EarthRights found 152 cases between 2012 and 2022 in which the fossil fuel industry had resorted to SLAPPs and other tactics in the United States to curb dissent. Europe, while generally less tolerant of these sorts of lawsuits, has seen their numbers climb, with 166 cases initiated in 2023. The most common driver was corruption, followed by environmental issues, according to the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe. Prior to the North Dakota ruling, Greenpeace launched a lawsuit in the Netherlands under the European Union’s new anti-SLAPP directive, seeking to recoup the costs incurred by Energy Transfer’s back-to-back lawsuits in the United States. 

“What happened to Greenpeace, to me, is the culmination of years of work by the fossil fuel industry and other elements of the corporate sector in the United States and Canada to silence opposition to oil and gas development,” Donziger says. “This is not new. But it is an intensification.” He calls it “the ultimate existential showdown” – one that pits the fossil fuel industry’s eye-popping profits against the survival of the planet. “As the climate movement grows stronger, the industry gets more desperate – and spends more money to manipulate the legal system.” 

What happened to Greenpeace is the culmination of years of work by the fossil fuel industry . . .
to silence opposition to oil and gas development.

— Steven Donziger, environmental lawyer

It has all been “turbocharged” by the Trump administration and a political environment that Donziger says “favours the aggressor and disfavours those who rely on the first amendment” on free speech. Within days of his inauguration, Trump slashed environmental regulations and withdrew commitments to reduce emissions, alongside a presidential mandate to “unleash American energy” by pumping up fossil fuel extraction and exports. The administration scrubbed references to climate change from federal websites and fired scores of scientists in its cutbacks, including 400 who were working on a major congressionally mandated climate report that would detail the impacts of climate change in the United States. In April, Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), crowed that a suite of reforms that curtailed restrictions on pollution from cars, trucks and power plants was a “dagger to the heart of the climate religion.” 

Gutting funding for environmental advocates is a more subtle form of destabilizing the movement. In one of his first acts as president, Trump froze funding for the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest single piece of climate legislation in U.S. history, which included a raft of incentives for renewable energy. A court has since ordered the administration to resume funding. In the meantime, the 2026 budget includes deep cuts to climate and science funding, including a 54% cut – or US$5 billion – to the EPA and the elimination of more than $15 billion in what it calls “Green New Scam funds.”

“Grassroots work, unfortunately, isn’t for the fearful,” says Asti Robins, director of climate justice at the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a Louisiana-based group of community organizations, which has seen clean energy projects shuttered as federal grants are revoked. The Power Coalition is among a number of groups that raised the spectre of audits as another tool in the Trump arsenal against climate groups, with reports surfacing that groups were being asked to turn over correspondence with the EPA along with the paper trail of how they were spending money, articles of incorporation and policies. There were also worries that the president would target green groups’ tax-exempt status, but as of April the move had not occurred. Beyond the economic attacks, there has been the broader “anti-woke” attack on all things DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – which is also a crucial part of the climate movement today. Environmental justice groups that focus on racialized communities – both in terms of the climate impact they face and ensuring that their priorities are considered in the energy transition – are reeling. 

“Under this administration there’s been a closing of all environmental justice offices in government agencies,” Robins laments. “To know the leaps and bounds we’ve made in the last 10 years – of even being recognized on the stage as an actual part of the environmental movement, which has historically been white-led,” she says, only to have it stripped away through attacks on DEI initiatives, has been deeply demoralizing. “I feel like we’re going backwards.”  

Life-or-death stakes

Curbing dissent in the green space is neither new nor exclusive to the United States. Human rights groups have documented the years-long campaign in Canada to criminalize Indigenous Wet’suwet’en land defenders who opposed the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline that would carry natural gas through their unceded ancestral territory in British Columbia. With the court on their side, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police carried out multiple raids between 2019 and 2023 to remove protesters from a road blocking the construction of the pipeline, which was completed last year. 

Latin America is a particularly perilous location to be an environmental land defender. The latest report from Global Witness, a non-governmental group that tracks such attacks, found that 85% of the 196 land and environmental defenders who were murdered in 2023 were in Latin America. Of those, some 43% were Indigenous and 12% were women. Mining is the biggest industry driver of the attacks, according to the study, which found that 25 land defenders were killed opposing mining projects. One recent case involves Julia Chuñir, a Mapuche woman who had been living in a contested piece of forested land in the Chilean Patagonia region as a way to protect it from deforestation. She disappeared without a trace in late 2024. 

No matter what they want me to call this work, I’m still going to be doing it.

—Asti Robins, climate justice director, Power Coalition for Equity and Justice

Whatever shape the crackdown on dissent takes, the stakes appear ever higher, as communities continue to advocate, in some cases around issues that mean life or death. 

The Power Coalition, for example, has been trying to relocate students who attend a school that is dangerously close to a carcinogen-emitting factory in St. James Parish, Louisiana. In another project, the organization had received government funding to help communities craft local benefit agreements for hosting new carbon-capture projects. That grant was cancelled by the Trump administration. It’s one example of the kind of funding rollbacks that threaten the ability of small organizations to build capacity. In the face of this onslaught, Robins remains resolute, echoing the sentiments emanating from Greenpeace and other climate organizations that are regrouping. 

“No matter what they want me to call this work, I’m still going to be doing it,” Robins says. “We have to stand with community and what they demand.”

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights.

The post The new era of policing green dissent appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“There is no solution to the climate crisis without the recognition and protection of our territorial rights,” they wrote in a statement that called on the government to demarcate more Indigenous territories in the Amazon.

The gathering of an estimated 8,000 people from across the country, other parts of South America, the Pacific Islands and Australia came at a critical juncture, as Brazil’s Supreme Court considered a proposal that would strip Indigenous Peoples of the right to veto projects that have an impact on their ancestral lands, including mining. It also would make it easier for non-Indigenous settlers to temporarily remain on demarcated Indigenous territory.    

“The UN has already warned that this proposal weakens Indigenous sovereignty and violates international human rights law,” the Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil, a major Indigenous rights advocacy group in Brazil, said in a statement. “It represents a serious threat to environmental protection, given that Indigenous territories are critical to mitigating climate change and preserving biodiversity.”  

The proposed legislation is tied to the “time frame thesis” law in Brazil that states that Indigenous Peoples have rights only to land they occupied in October 1988. Communities say that law disregards the history of violence they suffered that made it impossible for them to occupy their traditional territories. The law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court but was passed by the government anyway last year. It is now undergoing a “conciliation” process, in which Indigenous Peoples have a minority voice, and a new bill is being drafted.  

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, has placed climate and Indigenous Peoples at the centre of his third term as leader of the largest country in Latin America. Reversing course from his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, whose aggressive deregulation saw rates of deforestation in the Amazon surge, da Silva is trumpeting the arrival of the UN climate conference, COP30, in the northern city of Belém in November. He has reinstated climate funds, brought back stricter greenhouse gas controls and vowed to end deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest by 2030. He has also prioritized the rights of Indigenous Peoples, naming the country’s first Indigenous minister and, after significant delays, demarcated 13 new Indigenous territories. “We are an administration that respects the Indigenous Peoples, recognizes their rights, and works day and night to protect them,” da Silva said in April.  

But many first peoples note that the pace of change is too slow, and they don’t want it to go unnoticed as the country prepares to welcome international delegates for the climate conference. The rally in Brasília included tense encounters with security forces, who on one occasion lobbed tear gas at protesters as they marched toward the congressional building.  

Kari Guajajara, a lawyer, told Al Jazeera at the Brasília gathering that Indigenous communities have made significant strides in reclaiming territory. But they have also suffered more invasions from illegal miners, poachers and loggers. “It’s a never-ending struggle,” she said.  

Take the plight of the Yanomami, one of the largest tribes in Brazil, who live in relative isolation in remote forest outposts. Numbering some 30,000 people, the Yanomami have suffered the devastating impacts of rampant illegal gold mining, which has polluted their riverways. A study in 2023 found that 84% of the nearly 300 Yanomami people from which researchers took samples had levels of mercury high enough to cause health problems. Mercury, which is commonly used to process gold in illegal mining, was also found in fish in the river the Yanomami rely on for food. “Our people are being poisoned and our women are afraid to bear children,” Dario Kopenawa, a Yanomami leader, said at the Indigenous gathering.    

Da Silva stepped up efforts to combat illegal mining with dedicated teams sent in to patrol the deep crevices of the Amazon waterways. But Kopenawa says that protection has come and gone. “As soon as the armed forces left, the illegal miners returned,” he said. “Every day we see their planes coming and going. Sometimes 15 per day.”  

Indigenous leaders such as Kopenawa plan to bring these and other urgent issues to the forefront at COP30, stressing that their “significant” participation in decision-making processes is essential to environmental protection efforts. 

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But from those depths comes another chapter in Fort Nelson First Nation’s energy story, one that is green, and that it controls. Using royalties that the band office received from oil prospectors over decades, the community is now embarking on an entirely different transformation, looking to the future and developing a geothermal plant out of an orphaned oil well. It’s called Tu Deh-Kah, a Dene phrase that translates to “boiling water.” The First Nation hopes that the plant will go online in 2027, becoming one of Canada’s first electricity-generating geothermal facilities – and possibly the first one to be purely geothermal. Currently, the only large-scale plant is the dual natural gas and geothermal Swan Hills project in Alberta.

“We want to see a sustainable energy project in our territory that we own,” says Taylor Behn-Tsakoza, a community liaison officer with Tu Deh-Kah.

For Jim Hodgson, CEO of Deh Tai Corp., Fort Nelson First Nation’s economic development company, the project is steeped in pride.

Tu Deh-Kah is 100% Indigenous-owned and poised to generate seven to 15 megawatts, nearly enough to power the First Nation and Fort Nelson, the adjacent municipality of the same name.

Hodgson is an old-school oil and gas man who has worked in the industry for decades. Now, he is carrying over his expertise, and he’s not alone. Many in the First Nation have worked in the oil and gas sector, which Hodgson says gives them a skill set that transfers well to geothermal development. The burgeoning industry presents new opportunities for First Nations as the world drives toward an energy transition that leaves fossil fuels behind.

First Nations, Inuit and Métis people are already at the forefront of the energy transition in Canada, as partners in or beneficiaries of roughly 20% of the country’s electricity-generating infrastructure – virtually all in renewables. But oil and gas remains the largest private employer of Indigenous people in Canada, with 10,800 Indigenous workers, according to the most recent data from Ottawa.

As Indigenous communities around the globe forge transnational understandings of how to ensure that their interests are protected, can this renewable power help First Nations transition to the net-zero age?

The ‘whole moose’ approach

Tu Deh-Kah is not a traditional geothermal power-generating plant. For decades, geothermal has relied on the extreme heat of volcanic and high-temperature regions. But unlike the geyser-powered plants of Northern California or the volcanic heat of New Zealand, this project relies on a newer form of geothermal rooted in the sedimentary basin of Western Canada, which has traditionally housed rich oil and gas fields. “But there is a lot of heat in the earth,” says Jeremy O’Brien, the energy segment director for Seequent, a geoscience company that works closely with geothermal proponents to map the subsurface for geothermal projects.

Geothermal power plants do not burn fuel to generate electricity; instead, hot brine is pumped from deep inside the earth and used on the surface as direct heat or to produce electricity. All told, the plants emit 97% less acid-rain-causing sulfur compounds and 99% less carbon dioxide than fossil fuel power plants of similar size, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Traditionally, geothermal projects in volcanic regions can run as hot as 250°C to 300°C. In contrast, Tu Deh-Kah expects its heat to operate between 107°C and 120°C. The lower heat means less power-generation efficiency, which is partly why projects on sedimentary-basin geological formations are lagging behind volcanic or geyser-based ventures. But O’Brien thinks there is an opportunity for oil and gas regions to transition to geothermal plants within basin regions. There is both expertise in drilling and deep knowledge of the subsurface, he says. “I think the technological crossover is really important.”

Tu Deh-Kah also carries the ethos of what Behn-Tsakoza calls the “whole moose” approach. “When we harvest the moose, we use everything; you would never even know we were there.”

We want to see a sustainable energy project in our territory that we own.

— Taylor Behn-Tsakoza, community liaison officer, Tu Deh-Kah 

For example, the Tu Deh-Kah team plans to use the gas that remains deep in the old well to ensure that every element of the project is given a use, as if it were a moose. The First Nation is also exploring methods to extract lithium, a coveted critical mineral in the energy transition, from the brine, which it can then sell. And it has finished building a 2,000-square-foot greenhouse near the community’s school, Behn-Tsakoza says. It is the first of several that the First Nation plans to heat with the geothermal plant. The ambition is to grow enough commercial produce to “feed the North,” she says. Fort Nelson is an hour and a half south of the Northwest Territories border and on the transportation route to Whitehorse.

“Who knows what the future holds,” Behn-Tsakoza says. It’s a message she has tried to get across at dozens of community meetings, where she explains the project to local residents and receives their input and concerns.

Hodgson notes that the band office has held the project to the same standard that it would apply to any other company. “We don’t get it passed just because we’re owned by them,” he says. Band administrators conducted the required environmental and archaeological assessments and the project is now awaiting a final investment decision from the community’s council and membership. In February, the project received $1.2 million from Natural Resources Canada through the Indigenous Natural Resource Partnerships program, which is designed to increase the participation of Indigenous communities in the clean energy economy.

At the grocery store, Behn-Tsakoza sometimes runs into Elders who have their doubts about the project. “Has the project failed yet?” they’ll ask her. “Nope, I don’t think it’s going to,” she responds.

The reality is that geothermal in sedimentary basins remains relatively unproven on the continent. That has led to skepticism of the project’s viability, and its green credentials.

The Elders thought they had a “told-you-so moment” recently when project proponents discovered a lot more gas underground than expected. The former oil well extended approximately 1,500 metres into the earth; the geothermal project goes deeper, some 2,000 metres. But more sour gas remained deeper in the well than initially projected, and the geothermal project ran into it, raising an engineering and operational problem for the Tu Deh-Kah team, who are now figuring out what to do with it.

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Since the discovery, Behn-Tsakoza has been hearing it from Fort Nelson Elders at the grocery store. “See, this project isn’t going to be as clean as you think,” they say. “Whoa, whoa, whoa: our mission hasn’t changed,” she tells them – that is, to reap the benefits of a truly sustainable project. “Our vision hasn’t changed.”

Fort Nelson First Nation is not the only Indigenous community to cast its eyes to the promise of geothermal, though not without a strong sense of caution.

Jessica Eagle-Bluestone acts as an Indigenous liaison for Geothermal Rising, an international geothermal industry association. She says many tribal nations in the United States are “waiting to see if the technology improves more over the next couple of years” before venturing in. She says a lot of economic and structural risk remains with some old oil wells, depending on their integrity. But she believes there’s opportunity. While studying at the University of North Dakota, Eagle-Bluestone won a U.S. Department of Energy competition for developing a concept for a project to convert an old oil well in her home community in North Dakota into a geothermal plant. “It’s definitely on the radar of tribes,” she says.

O’Brien says that North American developers just need to look to Europe for successful sedimentary-basin geothermal developments. In Paris, geothermal is powering around 250,000 homes. In Munich, numerous geothermal plants provide a significant chunk of the city’s heating. “We see that potential starting to roll through,” he says.

The Dixie Meadows warning and the Indigenous geothermal declaration

Like any major energy project, geothermal development can fall victim to mistakes and the antipathy of Indigenous Peoples, often as a result of poor site selection and lack of meaningful consultation.

In Dixie Meadows, Nevada, a controversial geothermal project has led to court challenges from the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe and the Center for Biological Diversity. The project’s plant is proposed to be built on a spiritual site for the tribal nation, cutting off the community from the location that is home to their creation story. The site is also home to a unique species of toad that is at risk of extinction if the project goes ahead.

The main issue here has been a lack of meaningful consultation that incorporates the interests and values of the Fallon Paiute Shoshone. Scott Lake, a litigator for the Center for Biological Diversity, says that during the consultation there was an emphasis on “process over outcome,” which didn’t take the concerns of the tribe seriously. As a result, the community launched a legal challenge over concerns about the impact the project would have on its religious and historical site. “No one started out on a crusade against geothermal energy – it just happens to be right where they view their creation site,” says Lake, who is working with the Fallon Paiute Shoshone to litigate against the project. “I mean, it’s just a really terrible place [to put it], and that’s the issue we’re dealing with.”

For Lake, unless thoughtful decisions on site selection are informed by meaningful consultation and free, prior and informed consent, projects like the geothermal plant in Dixie Meadows will run up against opposition. He says the United States is behind other countries in upholding the spirit of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and its meaningful- and early-consultation principles. “At the end of the day, it’s an efficiency issue,” he says. “Do you want to push through projects that are going to get litigated and delayed, or do you want to find, you know, situations where there’s not as much conflict?”

Do you want to push through projects that are going to get litigated and delayed, or do you want to find situations where there’s not as much conflict?

— Scott Lake, litigator, Center for Biological Diversity

A bid to chart a better path forward emerged last year at the first-ever Indigenous Geothermal Symposium in Hawaii. Indigenous leaders in the geothermal space came together and developed the Geothermal Indigenous People’s Declaration. The declaration calls on the wider geothermal community to uphold UNDRIP, to consult early in the process and to ensure that Indigenous nations benefit from the project, while not compromising their duties as land stewards.

Aroha Campbell is a kaitiaki consultant and one of the leading voices in developing the declaration. Decades ago, she saw geothermal plants built across the Maori homeland without benefits to local communities. She has dedicated her career to changing that equation and has negotiated partnerships with geothermal developments that earmark funding for Maori community initiatives, including cultural camps and housing.

For Campbell, the declaration is a starting point for all Indigenous nations across the world wrestling with the potential and pitfalls of geothermal. Campbell believes each Indigenous nation can take the declaration to their homelands and place it on the negotiating table with developers. The hope is to help the industry understand what working with Indigenous nations on geothermal projects will look like. Until then, Indigenous nations must keep their networks among kin strong.

“I believe the best thing that could happen for Indigenous people in geothermal is sharing,” Campbell says. “The good and the bad, and that sharing of the stories in regards to the developers as well, and the likelihood that all of our stories are very similar.”

Matteo Cimellaro was the Indigenous affairs reporter for Canada’s National Observer, with whom this story is co-published. He now reports on the public service for the Ottawa Citizen.

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On the ground, the trails are marked by culturally modified trees, circles carved into bark, proof of the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s history in this area. As we approached Caas Tl’aat Kwah (aka Serb Creek), a 15,054 hectare watershed that has not yet been logged or mined, the forest stitched together in a blanket of deep green, cleaved only by yellow-green wetlands threaded with glacial blue streams.

“We want to conserve it for future generations,” says Charlotte Euverman, the Wet’suwet’en woman leading a fight to save this area, which includes a traditional gathering and feasting site. “We have to leave them something.”

Like most First Nations here, the Wet’suwet’en never signed treaties with Canada or the province. Nevertheless, the latter took the land and leased forested areas to logging companies. Today just 20% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests remain. In 2020, after decades of activist pressure, the province released its Old Growth Strategic Review, a report that identified about a quarter of the remaining old growth as high risk for logging and recommended a pause while land-use decisions were made. Yet four years on, logging has been deferred in less than half of the high-risk area.

First Nations and an array of species have paid dearly for the wide-scale logging, and now some forestry experts say its effects are being felt farther afield too.

Scientists are finding that industrial logging can contribute to the intensity and frequency of forest fires because it dries out the land. In summer 2023, more than 150,000 square kilometres (58,000 square miles) burned across Canada, an all-time record, carrying smoke across the continent and air pollution all the way to Europe and China.

Despite promises from the province’s Ministry of Forests, environmental activists say that classic “talk and log” delay tactics continue. Independent analysis by the Wilderness Committee, Sierra Club BC and Stand.earth found that 50,000 to 100,000 hectares (123,000 to 247,000 acres) of the at-risk forests have been logged or approved for logging in British Columbia since the province’s 2020 report.

“With so little old growth left, it is crucial [for the province] to step up to the plate for watersheds like Serb Creek and offer nations every support needed for long-term solutions,” says Jens Wieting, senior forest and climate campaigner with Sierra Club BC.

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Before boarding the helicopter, de Wit leads us in a ceremony, inviting us to rub charcoal on our cheeks. It’s a sign to their ancestors that we’re coming with respect, he explains, acknowledging that they reside on the land and that alpine places are sacred. Because the area is not yet accessible by road, nation members Caroline Muir and Sandra Harris are seeing it for the first time.

After 30 minutes of flying, the pilot waggles the helicopter down, setting it upon a boggy meadow. As we step out, Muir takes a moment, eyes closed, hand on her heart. Harris stoops to examine the plants: low cedar (Diphasiastrum complanatum), Labrador tea (Ledum groenlandicum Oeder), frilly white bogbean (Menyanthes trifoliata) flowers.

Harris’s great-grandfather and Muir’s great-uncle, Jack Joseph, had a cabin here. It’s gone now, but we follow de Wit through the trees to a newer cabin. He opens his backpack and pulls out a framed photo of Joseph and nails it to the wall in a place of pride.

Harris explains the significance of this moment for her. “We have a lot of stress in our lives with racism, working with colonial systems that are so unkind to our ways.” The land is healing, she says.

“Today, we can feel our ancestors. We remember our stories when we are able to put our feet on the land,” Harris says. “My spirit needs that . . . There’s lots of good medicine there for us.”

Where there’s logging, there’s fire

Canadian governments’ commitments to reconciliation with First Nations and to biodiversity conservation might lead the Ministry of Forests to spare some of the remaining old growth. But the rise in extreme fires does not appear to factor into its calculus, says Torrance Coste, associate director of the Wilderness Committee. The link between logging and fires is “absolutely not” acknowledged by the province, he says.

Yet Coste says that industry lobby groups use the threat of wildfire to argue for more logging, saying, “We need to log these areas so they don’t burn.” That argument is driven by the conventional wisdom that increased fire severity is due not just to climate change but also fire suppression that created “fuel loading” – dense growth.

The Ministry of Forests would not make someone available for an interview. But a spokesperson wrote in an email that their approach to reducing wildfire severity is thinning (some logging) and prescribed burns.

Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist for Wild Heritage, says that thinning forests reduces fire severity only in narrow circumstances. “It’s critical to leave large, fire-resistant trees in place,” he says, and not to remove too much of the forest canopy, which dries out plants and soil and allows winds to blow fires longer distances. Even if done right, benefits last only about a decade, he says, and thwart fire only when the weather isn’t too hot or dry.

Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington, says thinning can be a helpful step before prescribed burns in certain ecosystems, such as interior Douglas fir and ponderosa pine forests that Indigenous Peoples used to burn regularly. Outlawing the practice has led to overgrowth. Caas Tl’aat Kwah, on the other hand, contains interior cedar hemlock and Engelmann spruce subalpine fir ecosystems, with trees up to 350 years old. Prichard says thinning or prescribed burns in these types of forests would not reduce fire severity.

DellaSala and other scientists say that the focus on fuel loading and thinning fails to recognize the way in which industrial logging increases fire severity: it kills complex communities of life that stabilize the water cycle, leading to much drier landscapes.

One paper that DellaSala co-authored looked at the severity of 1,500 fires in Western U.S. states over 30 years and found that protected forests, with higher levels of biomass [plants] and fuel loading, actually had lower fire severity than intensively managed areas of commercial logging. Another from 2018 found that “intensive plantation forestry characterized by young forests and spatially homogenized fuels, rather than pre-fire biomass, were significant drivers of wildfire severity.” Another from 2022 found that clear-cutting was a key factor leading to “frequent, high-severity fire.”

Other studies suggest that old growth reduces fire severity by retaining moisture and helping to generate rain. In an intact forest, dense, layered canopies of multiple species slow rain when it falls, and roots provide pathways for water to move underground. From there, it filters into creeks, wetlands and rivers over weeks and months. As trees photosynthesize, they release water vapour into the air, forming clouds.

They also release particles of microbes and fungi that help vapour coalesce into rain. Their rough surfaces slow wind, keeping moisture in the area. Old trees transpire more water, even through the dry season, because their roots tap groundwater from deep below. This phenomenon, called hydraulic lift, also distributes water to seedlings and weaker trees through the soil and mycorrhizal networks, keeping the whole forest moist, says University of British Columbia forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree.

Damp soil, plant litter and woody debris are filled with living beings – fungi, microbes, insects and other animals – that hold on to water for a long time and “really help with fire resistance,” Simard says.

For example, wild forests can hold more than 10 times the species of mycorrhizal fungi than young plantations. Trees feed the fungi via their own photosynthesis. After clear-cutting, the few species that survive are not ones seen in old growth that are “big and fat and that really take up water and move it around the ecosystem,” Simard says.

Although British Columbia requires logging companies to replant after cutting, typically they install just a few marketable species. Deciduous trees such as maples, aspen and birch are less flammable; their stands create fire breaks in natural landscapes. But they are also less marketable, so standard operating practice is to kill their sprouts with herbicide, Simard says. Herbicides can also kill living matter in the soil, making it far less able to absorb water, contributing to drought and landslides.

These differences are obvious even to laypeople, Coste says. “The forest floor is spongy and, if you dug in your hands, would have moisture, whereas the cut blocks are crispy and dry,” he says. And the lack of shade and evaporative cooling means that “walking from a standing forest into a clear-cut, the temperature can go up 15 degrees.”

Harris has observed this too. “The soil health is a concern. Walking on our territory, it’s crunchy.” And water isn’t filtering underground as much: “We used to have springs to drink from. And those are drying up.”

A plan to save Caas Tl’aat Kwah

From the province’s perspective, Caas Tl’aat Kwah is the jurisdiction of British Columbia Timber Sales (BCTS), a commercial arm of the Ministry of Forests. Under the Old Growth Strategic Review, the Wet’suwet’en notified BCTS that they support a logging deferral, which the Ministry of Forests acknowledged in 2023.

BCTS had proposed a 10-kilometre (6.2-mile) road and logging in the area, which Sierra Club BC verified by accessing recent planning maps. But, the Ministry of Forests spokesperson wrote in an email, “Deferrals will remain in place until a long-term forest management approach is implemented.”

Wet’suwet’en Nation is composed of five clans, each made up of several houses. To the Wet’suwet’en, Caas Tl’aat Kwah is the jurisdiction of Kwen Bea Yex (House Beside the Fire) of the Laksilyu (Small Frog Clan). Euverman is a member of Kwen Bea Yex. Sitting above the rushing Bulkley River, cottonwood fluff drifting like snow, she explains her motivation to protect Caas Tl’aat Kwah from logging. “Coastal tailed frog is my biggest reason. The frog is on our crest,” she says.

A species of special concern under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, the frog is ancient. It is one of just two tailed frogs in the world and significantly different from other frogs. It doesn’t vocalize, and its “tail” is actually used for making more frogs. Other species that survive in the Caas Tl’aat Kwah watershed include wolverine, grizzly, wolf, mountain goat, moose, bull trout, cutthroat trout, Western red cedar, whitebark pine and arboreal lichen, which feed endangered caribou.

The frogs are “very sensitive to their surroundings being disturbed,” Euverman says, adding that noise prevents them from breeding. “They’re important, and so are all the other animals.” If BCTS goes against Wet’suwet’en desires to protect the watershed, “we’ll fight to the end to keep them out,” she says.

Wet’suwet’en played an outsized role in getting the province and Canada to engage with First Nations in land-use decisions. It was one of two nations to bring the precedent-setting 1997 case in which the Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged that First Nations have collective property rights and their oral histories are valid. However, the ruling didn’t actually grant nations property rights, leaving details vague. Canadian governments since have frequently delayed and dissembled.

In recent years, British Columbia and Canada have both passed into law the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). That requires colonial governments to engage in “free, prior and informed consent” with First Nations. However, Canadian and provincial governments do not give nations veto power over development projects within their territories. Wet’suwet’en activists experienced this firsthand: they waged a decade-long effort to prevent the Coastal GasLink pipeline from bifurcating their territory – and lost.

An uncertain future

Ultimately, BCTS could decide to log Caas Tl’aat Kwah. The spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests writes, “If the temporary deferral is lifted for areas within the Serb Creek watershed, BC Timber Sales will continue to work with First Nations, biologists, ecologists and other professionals to plan any potential future harvest [logging] in a way that would preserve the area’s biodiversity, wildlife, cultural values and recreational opportunities.”

Coste, with the Wilderness Committee, is skeptical. “The whole structure of government is built around the prioritization of timber and its extraction,” he says. “So, these other values, like conservation or protecting forests for cultural value . . . it’s hard to do.”

One of the most challenging aspects, Harris says, is that provincial rules change every couple of years, with each new government. In fact, British Columbia is holding an election in October, which could change priorities yet again. Wet’suwet’en laws, on the other hand, are unchanging; gifts from their ancestors and the Creator, Harris says: “Our stories help us learn our laws, what our responsibilities are. That doesn’t change.”

Wieting says he’s familiar with this issue. “We’ve seen countless examples in this province. A nation is successful at opposing logging, only to confront the same struggle a few years later – and sometimes losing that battle.”

Besides the old-growth program, Caas Tl’aat Kwah could be protected as a park or as part of a carbon-storage or biodiversity-conservation program.

But de Wit dismisses those approaches. “All those Western tools are the Western system realizing that they made a mistake. I wouldn’t say that they are the instrument for protection.”

Another possibility is a recent movement in which First Nations declare places Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas. But Wieting says, “We have not seen examples of colonial governments quickly respecting unilaterally declared Indigenous Protected Areas.”

Instead, de Wit wants Wet’suwet’en to protect it entirely according to its own governance traditions. That requires members of Kwen Bea Yex to decide that Caas Tl’aat Kwah is needed for cultural and ecological purposes and off-limits to commercial logging, he says. The house would then secure agreement from its clan followed by all the clans. Then they’d have a feast, which ratifies the agreement.

“The feast hall is the site of the Wet’suwet’en Parliament,” de Wit says.

The B.C. Supreme Court previously upheld Wet’suwet’en governance to prevent logging in another culturally important place.

Harris works on the nation’s watershed planning committee and is a member of Ginehklaiyex (House of Many Eyes), which is also part of Laksilyu Clan. “Serb Creek is of interest for the whole nation,” she says. “The houses support keeping it in a pristine state.”

Meanwhile, the fires continue. In August, 353 fires were burning across British Columbia, including a “wildfire of note” just outside of Witset, a Wet’suwet’en reserve. Racism and colonialism have left deep wounds, Harris says. But de Wit sounds an optimistic note, saying, “When we heal the land, we will heal the people.”

This article was published collaboratively with The Guardian. Reporting for this story was supported by the Science Media Centre of Canada and the Sitka Foundation.

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This spring in Michigan, the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Potawatomi, or Gun Lake Tribe, received $4 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Climate Resilience program, an initiative that aims to help tribes prepare for climate change. The money will be used to buy a fleet of electric vehicles, help the nation manage a grey-water system, and install a solar array that will cut the tribe’s electricity bills by around 80% and make the nation more self-sufficient. Underneath the two-acre solar array will be gardens of native flowers like butterfly weed, purple prairie clover and primrose to help with the tribe’s prairie restoration efforts.

“We need to be innovative and find ways to leave less of a carbon footprint,” says Gun Lake Tribal Council member Virginia Vanderband. “If we can generate enough energy for our infrastructure, great.” The tribe has other investments – real estate, a construction company, a grocery store – and while the green energy project is doing well, becoming part of the energy market is “not a focus,” Vanderband says.

That seeming lack of interest in joining the growing green energy market is the focus of a recent economic study coming out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison detailing barriers – like federal red tape – that tribes face when starting green energy projects. If these prohibitive barriers are not addressed, researchers expect that tribes across the United States will lose out on $19 billion of revenue by 2050.

During the early 1800s, tribes were forcibly relocated to reservations. They were coerced into signing treaties that ceded land for settlers in exchange for lands and rights, a process that built the United States and its wealth. Many of the reservations that tribal nations were moved to were lands that settlers deemed less economically rich; however, today, much of that land is perfect for solar and wind development.

Altogether, tribal lands represent an area the size of New Mexico, but not all nations have access to land for development, leaving out hundreds of tribes from the green energy market. Out of the 574 federally recognized tribes, nearly 250 do not have reservations.

In 2022, approximately 100 solar farms on reservations generated about 2% of all solar energy in the U.S., while around 3,000 reservation wind turbines produced about 5% of the nation’s wind energy. However, the University of Wisconsin-Madison study found that of 169 utility-sized wind and solar projects on reservation land, only around 5% are tribally owned.

In many tribal communities, poverty rates remain high – the result of federal policies that have undermined Indigenous economies – and according to the study, “the top 25 percent of reservations in terms of renewable endowments are also currently the group with the lowest incomes.” But while these tribal communities have the most to gain in terms of energy independence and new income streams, the study found that the lands in question aren’t any more likely to be developed than national parks, forests or wildlife refuges where development is not allowed.

“That’s striking,” says Dominic Parker, the author of the study. “You have reservation areas where there’s populations living. [Wind and solar] development is not expressly prohibited. And yet, you’re not seeing any more development than these nearby areas where it is expressly prohibited.”

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One reason, according to Parker, is the long process of getting permissions from tribal and federal entities, a process he calls “white tape,” instead of “red,” to describe the patronizing relationship between federal entities and tribes. Tribes are not legally allowed to fully manage land, water and other resources that are theirs that could contribute to growing their economies. As well, Parker’s research shows that green energy development companies often go to private land near reservations where “paternalistic” federal regulatory rules don’t apply.

“Historically, when resources have been harnessed for mainstream public or private economic benefit, the consequences have often been disastrous for Indigenous peoples,” the study says. In the 1950s, federal initiatives incentivized nuclear power that eventually poisoned communities like the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe, while the push for dams as an energy resource decimated and flooded tribal lands in the Pacific Northwest.

But a big part of the green energy conversation, at least for Virginia Vanderband at Gun Lake, is keeping tribal sovereignty a priority. Just because energy initiatives are going green doesn’t mean that it’s the responsibility of tribes to go along with what the federal government wants.

“We have a social responsibility to the land to keep it clean, to only take what we need,” Vanderband says. “We must maintain our sovereignty first. We have the right to govern ourselves. This allows us to honour and preserve our culture and our way of life.”

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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 to 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 honouring 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.

You have been working on behalf of your people since you were 19 years old. What drives you to do this work? 

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.

Can you tell me about your perspective on climate change? 

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, people’s 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 recentre 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.

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? 

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.

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? 

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.

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? 

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.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here. 

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A recent study shows this problem might be a lot worse than the oil industry has let on. The study, which used aircraft to measure emissions from Alberta’s oil sands industry, found that pollution was actually 1,900% to 6,300% more than previous measurements that, the authors contend, were “severely” underestimated. The study measured chemicals known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), as well as semi-volatile organic compounds, which are both generated through the extraction of bitumen.

“These findings validate what Indigenous communities have been saying for decades: the air is making them sick,” said Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada. “Alongside the oil company’s own workers, who are bearing the initial brunt of these truly astonishing levels of toxic pollution, Indigenous communities are paying the price of turning large chunks of northern Alberta into a sacrifice zone. No one should accept this as inevitable, because it’s not.”

These findings validate what Indigenous communities have been saying for decades: the air is making them sick.

 

– Keith Stewart, Greenpeace Canada

The study, conducted by researchers at Environment and Climate Change Canada and Yale University, found that the methods used by the oil industry to record emission levels failed to account for certain organic compounds. Typically, the oil industry measures its emissions using ground-based methods, but researchers claim that their “top-down” approach is capturing a more holistic picture of what polluters are actually emitting.

“Work over the last 15 years or so has continually shown that there’s more going into the air from the oil sands than is being officially recorded,” Jeffrey Brook, an air quality expert and professor at the University of Toronto, told CBC News.

Researchers collected the data in 2018 from 17 different sites in Alberta’s Athabasca region. The study is the latest investigation to show that emissions are worse than what are being officially reported by Alberta’s oil industry. Last year, a similar study suggested that the oil sands could be spewing 31 million tonnes more of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year than what the industry is reporting.

“You can’t know what you’re missing and how important what you’re missing is until you go out and measure it, and that’s the point of this paper,” John Liggio, a co-author of the recent study, told CBC.

The Pathways Alliance – which includes Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Cenovus Energy, ConocoPhillips Canada, Imperial, MEG Energy and Suncor Energy – has questioned the validity of using aircraft to measure emissions in the past, arguing that its methods follow international standards. But Pathways spokesperson Mark Cameron said that the disparity between the oil industry’s numbers and those in the latest study that analyzed VOCs “warrant further review.”

Stewart said that if the oil industry’s reporting methods have followed the rules, then “the rules need to change.”

“This study has highlighted the urgent need to strictly enforce tough new air pollution regulations, as part of a just transition from an economy based on fossil fuels to one rooted in the wise use of renewable energy,” he said.

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In a milestone for Indigenous Peoples’ rights, Brazil’s Supreme Court recently ruled in their favour in a case known as “Marco Temporal” – meaning their rights to ancestral lands were endorsed by the state. This decision follows the landmark summit in Brazil in August, when President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva brought the leaders of eight nations – including Colombia, Peru and Venezuela – together with thousands of Indigenous activists to hear their hopes and fears concerning the rainforest’s future.

These events provide hopeful opportunities to catalyze action around protecting the world’s forests – the extraordinary biosphere that is home to many Indigenous Peoples. As a UN report highlights, Indigenous Peoples are the ultimate experts when it comes to forest conservation. They have practised it for millennia.

Yet despite this integral role in managing and safeguarding the Amazon rainforest throughout most of the course of human history, Indigenous Peoples are often excluded from talks on how we protect it.

The descendants of these societies are now the communities most severely affected by deforestation and the climate emergency. They are living on the front line of our ecosystems – with their unique insights into how to turn the situation around often going unheard. It is crucial that we respect their knowledge, culture and rights – especially considering that they own, occupy or use about a quarter of the world’s land.

The corporate world has a key role to play in raising Indigenous voices and creating a forest-positive world. A large proportion of consumer brands and retailers rely on forest ecosystems to provide essential commodities – like paper, pulp and packaging – while millions of the people employed in the global supply chains of consumer goods companies live and work in forests.

Companies should be integrating social obligations into their forest commitments, particularly in terms of any potential changes of land use that would affect Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Respect for their ancestral lands must go hand in hand with an open and inclusive approach that aims to protect their culture and improve their livelihoods.

Every business in global supply chains should make the same commitment. Companies should ensure not only that the products they source from suppliers are forest positive, but that all the products the suppliers create are forest positive too.

That means putting Indigenous Peoples at the heart of all forest-based products and commodities. We must put in place policies and actions that advance respect for Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ rights.

At The Consumer Goods Forum, we are striving to ensure that all businesses prioritize the rights of Indigenous Peoples and work closely with them to protect the world’s forests – through our Forest Positive and Human Rights Coalitions of Action.

As some of the world’s largest consumer goods retailers and manufacturers, our members are committed to collaborating with Indigenous communities, peers, supply chain partners, government bodies and civil society organizations to stop the collapse of the world’s forests.

There is no more time to waste. New scientific research from Rutgers University adds to the growing number of studies outlining that the escalating climate crisis risks turning vast tracts of the Amazon rainforest into dry grassland.

Let’s not forget that the world’s greatest forest stabilizes the global climate. Its loss would result in unprecedented volumes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere and prove catastrophic for us all.

The way forward is to listen to Indigenous Peoples, the original guardians of the forest.

Didier Bergeret is sustainability director at The Consumer Goods Forum

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Yesterday, representatives of 185 countries officially agreed to launch a new fund to ramp up investment in meeting major global biodiversity goals.

The new Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) was ratified at the Global Environmental Facility’s (GEF) seventh assembly in Vancouver, Canada, with wildfires in British Columbia as a backdrop. This comes after global delegates at the U.N. biodiversity conference (COP15) committed last December in Montreal to meet a set of goals inked into a Global Biodiversity Framework. This framework is designed to help halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put nature on a path to recovery by 2030.

The fund will mobilize and accelerate investment from governments, philanthropy, and the private sector to support nations in the conservation and sustainability of wild species and ecosystems whose health is threatened by wildfires, flooding, extreme weather, and human activity, including unsustainable industrial agriculture, consumption and production pressures, and urban sprawl.

According to an in-depth assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, in 2019, one million species of plants and animals face extinction.

“The creation of this biodiversity fund is a game-changer for countries’ ability to protect, restore, and ensure the sustainable use of nature,” said Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, GEF CEO and chairperson, in a meeting last month.

So far, two countries announced initial contributions to start the fund’s capitalization and support budget-stressed industrially developing countries, many of which are some of the most highly biodiverse in the world. This included $146.8 million (CA$200 million) from Canada and $12.58 million (£10 million) from the United Kingdom.

Canada’s Minister of International Development also announced the country is providing an additional $16.75 million (CA$22.8 million) in funding for the GEF’s eighth replenishment to support global efforts to tackle the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

As much as 20% of funds from the GBFF is targeted to support Indigenous and local action to protect and conserve biodiversity, and at least 36% of the fund’s resources are aimed to support the most vulnerable people, small island developing states, and least developed countries. About 25% of the fund will be delivered through selected international financial institutions to increase resources through private sector involvement and ensure policies are streamlined.

Indigenous organizers around the U.N. biodiversity convention, known as the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), welcomed the target of 20% of funds directed to Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs). Indigenous organizations frequently report being sidelined in receiving biodiversity and climate funds.

“The approval of this trust fund with a specific commitment to Indigenous peoples and local communities motivates and gives us hope that support will be achieved for the efforts to conserve biodiversity at local level,” said Lucy Mulenkei, co-chair of the IIFB and member of the Indigenous advisory group to the GEF, while speaking at the assembly.

The Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in Montreal last year recognizes the role and rights of IPLCs in the conservation of biodiversity in their lands and territories. Several targets also highlight their full and equitable participation in decision-making in the implementation of the framework.

This fund also provides an increase of support to the least developed countries and small island developing countries who are among the most vulnerable regions to the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change.

To meet the ambitious biodiversity targets, countries need a substantial increase in resources, as was recognized by COP15 and in related decisions on resource mobilization and the financial mechanism. The Montreal agreement seeks to raise international financial flows from developed nations to developing countries to at least $20 billion per year by 2025 and to at least $30 billion per year by 2030. However, this is far shorter than the total some industrially developing countries desired, with some parties like the Democratic Republic of Congo calling for a total of $100 billion a year.

Agreement on these financial matters, from the amount of funds allocated to how they should be distributed, was the most difficult part of the negotiations in Montreal.

The GBFF will provide an opportunity to receive funding from all sources quickly disburse through streamlined procedures, said David Cooper, acting executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, in a statement.

Additional resources will need to be mobilized from domestic sources at all levels of government, the private sector, and innovative mechanisms.

“We are off to a good start. We now call for further pledges from countries and from other sources so that the first projects under the new fund can be launched next year ahead of COP 16 [the next U.N. biodiversity conference],” he said.

While some human rights and environmental activists welcome the first commitments to the GBFF, they say contributions so far fall short by $40 million to make the fund operational. The initial contributions for the GBF Fund are set at $200 million from at least three donors by December 2023, while current contributions by Canada and the U.K. total approximately $160 million.

The GEF Council should also take immediate action to allocate these funds to Indigenous groups to continue conserving biodiversity, said Avaaz, a global human rights group, in a statement. In addition, these pledges should turn any “aspirational” share of funding for Indigenous groups into a firm target of the agreed 20% share.

The GEF’s seventh assembly ends on August 26 and delegated may convene again in four years.

Over the past three decades, the GEF has provided more than $22 billion and mobilized $120 billion in co-financing for more than 5,000 national and regional projects.

This article was first published by Mongabay. 

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Grassy Narrows First Nation, in northwestern Ontario, is an Anishinaabe community of some 1,500 people. Between 1962 and 1970, a paper mill owned by Dryden Chemicals dumped about 9,000 kilograms of mercury into the English-Wabigoon river system, contaminating the fish with levels of methylmercury up to 50 times higher than what was considered safe and poisoning the people who ate them. The community relied on fish not just for sustenance, but for their livelihood, so their local economy was also devastated.  

Today, 90% of Grassy Narrows residents are believed to suffer from symptoms of mercury poisoning, which attacks the nervous system and can result in tremors, insomnia, memory loss, neuromuscular effects, headaches, and cognitive and motor dysfunction.  

Researchers have now identified the intergenerational impact of mercury poisoning on the behaviour, emotions and suicide attempts of Grassy Narrows children.  

“In the ’70s, following the mercury discharge, youth suicide in Grassy Narrows went from zero – it had been unheard of before that time – to very high,” said Donna Mergler, the lead author of a new study published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Health Perspective journal, at a press conference this week at Ontario’s provincial legislature, where the study’s findings were unveiled. Over an 11-month period in 1977/1978, 26 young people between the ages of 11 and 19 attempted suicide.  

“That is an incredibly high rate,” said Mergler, a physiologist and professor emerita in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal.  

Those numbers remain high today, with mothers reporting that 41% of girls and almost 11% of boys between the ages of 12 and 17 have attempted suicide – figures that are three times higher than in other First Nations.  

The study uses data collected from a questionnaire conducted in 2016 and 2017 related to 80 mothers and 162 children from Grassy Narrows, along with historical data from biomonitoring programs that collected blood samples from umbilical cords and children’s hair. That allowed researchers to trace how mercury was passed to children in utero.  

Most of the women who participated in the study were born between 1962 and 1993.  

They were exposed to mercury poisoning prenatally, through their mothers’ consumption of fish, and subsequently as children, teenagers and adults. Researchers also found correlations between grandfathers who had been fishing guides, using the indicator as a proxy for mercury exposure in the family, and mental health and behavioural issues faced by their grandchildren, the children of today.  

“You can see this cascade of effects,” Mergler said. “We found that the mother’s childhood mercury exposure is associated with today’s nervous system disorders, as well as a psychological distress.” 

Researchers found that the effect of mercury exposure may have been compounded by the intergenerational trauma of the residential school system, in which Indigenous children were taken from their communities and sent to government-funded boarding schools, often administered by Christian churches, where many were abused and died.  

For Rudy Turtle, the chief of Grassy Narrows First Nation, who also spoke at the press conference, the study confirms “what we’ve been fearing all along.”  

We’re in an emergency in our home.

 

– Chrissy Isaacs, Grassy Narrows resident

“The impacts of mercury have been very devastating in terms of our economy,” he said. “Our way of life has been totally destroyed. One-hundred percent we’ve been unable to continue our traditional activity.”  

“We’re in an emergency in our home,” said Grassy Narrows resident Chrissy Isaacs, in a recording played at the press conference. “Even on social media you see people saying that they feel like they don’t want to live or they don’t know how to deal with what they’re going through.”  

Isaacs said that her niece recently died by suicide. “It’s not their fault,” she said. “It’s a part of the sickness from the dumping of mercury, and I feel like we need to make people aware of that.” 

Multiple studies have exposed the devastating toll the mercury dump has had on Grassy Narrows, a community that has fought for the government to acknowledge the devastation and deliver accountability. One study released in 2020 found that residents who died prematurely before the age of 60 had five times more mercury in their bodies than those who lived past 60. That same year, decades of lobbying by the community secured a commitment from the federal government to build a treatment centre for people suffering from the effects of mercury poisioning. But three years later, costs have ballooned, and the project has yet to break ground.  A report in 2017 suggested that the decommissioned mill was still leaking mercury. 

This week, Chief Turtle called on the government to provide “fair compensation” to his community for the devastation wreaked by the toxic dump. The researchers said they hoped the study would help restore the health and well–being of Grassy Narrows residents.  

“This study was possible only because of the leadership of the people of Grassy Narrows, who fought for decades to expose and correct the health impacts wrought by [mercury] contamination of the English-Wabigoon River system,” noted Sarah E. Rothenberg, of Oregon State University, in an a separate Environmental Health Perspectives article.  

“Because of their advocacy and bravery, the results of this study may inform interventions that could benefit millions of people living in vulnerable communities where [methylmercury] exposure is elevated.” 

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