This past Sunday was the UN-declared World Environment Day. It’s theme? “Forests: Nature at Your Service.”
(Link to this week’s Earth Minute below text)
This week and next, governments from around the world are gathering in Bonn, Germany for climate talks, during which they will make important decisions regarding the fate of the world’s forests by promoting their protection under the so-called “green economy.”
Proponents of the “Green Economy” believe that forests and other ecosystems can be saved by selling their ‘services’—such as storing carbon—to polluting companies that want the “carbon offsets” to make them look more green.
Fiu Elisara, an indigenous activist from the island of Samoa, calls this theme a perverse approach. Forests, he says, have an intrinsic value and should be conserved in their own right, not because they serve humans.”
Indeed, the “green economy” is being strongly rejected by a growing global movement charging it gives corporations a “license to pollute” while displacing Indigenous and forest dependent peoples from their lands.
In the case of the green economy, the green stands for money, not nature.
For the Earth Minute and the Sojourner Truth Show, this is Anne Petermann from Global Justice Ecology Project.
Listen to this week’s Earth minute written and recorded by Global Justice Ecology Project, by clicking the link below. It starts with an introduction at minute 40:21:
