Category Archives: Indigenous Peoples

by | 2013-02-26 · 14:19

Global Justice Ecology Project to Receive 2013 International White Dove Award

We’re celebrating our 10th Anniversary this year!


Global Justice Ecology Project is being awarded the 2013 International White Dove Award this Friday evening from the Rochester Committee on Latin America (ROCLA) in Rochester, NY.

The White Dove Award honors GJEP’s long-time international work to protect the environment, defend the rights of Indigenous Peoples, preserve forests, and stop the release of genetically engineered trees.  For many years GJEP’s co-founders Orin Langelle and Anne Petermann have worked in solidarity with social movements, communities and organizations from around the world with a focus on Mexico, Central America and South America.

This awards dinner also marks the 40th anniversary of ROCLA–which was founded in response to the coup by brutal Chilean dictator Pinochet.  GJEP Executive Director Anne Petermann points out that some of the first work GJEP did was in solidarity with the Mapuche people of Chile who are still fighting for the return of their ancestral lands, stolen by the Pinochet regime and given to timber multinationals.

But the US has always treated Latin America as a ‘resource colony’ for cheap resources and labor.  The struggle for the land and the struggle for peoples’ self-determination are two sides of the same coin.

Over the years, GJEP Board Chair Orin Langelle has organized many delegations to Nicaragua’s Bosawas rainforest and to Chiapas, Mexico in rebel Zapatista territory.  He directs Langelle Photography and will show slides of GJEP’s work at the Award’s dinner.

“I approach my role as a concerned photographer by not merely documenting the struggle for social and ecological justice, but by being an active part of it,”

“My photography is an historical look at social movements, struggle and everyday life.  It is designed to counter the societal amnesia from which we collectively suffer-especially with regard to the history of social and ecological struggles. This is not merely a chronicling of history, but a call out to inspire new generations to participate in the making of a new history.  For there has been no time when such a call has been so badly needed.”  –Orin Langelle


The International White Dove Award will be presented at ROCLAs Annual Rice & Beans Dinner, Friday, March 1, 2013, 5:30 PM at Gates Presbyterian Church 1049 Wegman Road, Rochester, NY.

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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Events, Forests, GE Trees, Indigenous Peoples, Latin America-Caribbean

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by | 2013-02-16 · 11:16

KPFK Earth Watch interview: On Climate Change and Obama’s State of the Union Address

This week’s “Earth Watch” segment on KPFK features Dr. Rachel Smolker, Co-director of Biofuelwatch, who weighs in on President Obama’s proposals on climate change in his State of the Union Address.

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Filed under Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, GE Trees, Green Economy, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs

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by | 2013-01-25 · 16:30

How much will tar sands oil contribute to global warming?

Note: The article below contains urgent, alarming information regarding tar sands.  The science makes it clear: If the tar sands are extracted and burned, averting catastrophic warming will be a hope of the past (if it isn’t already).  However, there are major issues with this article.  The author fails to include voices from communities impacted from extreme energy extraction, and supports false solutions like Carbon Capture and Storage, nuclear energy and market-based mechanisms to reduce emissions and extraction.  He even implies that Shell might be taking serious steps to “clean up” tar sands extraction.

Biofuelwatch recently released a report detailing the ineffectiveness of Carbon Capture and Storage in reducing emissions, from fossil fuels and so-called “alternatives” like biomass.  Only a massive reduction in consumption will stop the extraction of extreme energy, and that massive reduction is not going to be provided by putting a price on carbon.

Kandi Mossett, an organizer with Indigenous Environmental Network, was featured on KPFK Sojourner Truth show’s Earth Segment in November, where she discussed the impacts of fracking and tar sands on Indigenous communities.  The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, who has been fighting to get Shell out of Alberta, is directly impacted from tar sands development.  There are real people and real communities behind the numbers presented in this article, and their stories need telling.

Its time to stop martyrizing the cautious white guys, and start taking leadership from the communities who have been fighting these projects – and the capitalist system that causes them – for decades.

-The GJEP Team

By David Biello, January 23, 2013.  Source: Scientific American

08sands-articleLarge-v2James Hansen has been publicly speaking about climate change since 1988. The NASA climatologist testified to Congress that year and he’s been testifying ever since to crowds large and small, most recently to a small gathering of religious leaders outside the White House last week. The grandfatherly scientist has the long face of a man used to seeing bad news in the numbers and speaks with the thick, even cadence of the northern Midwest, where he grew up, a trait that also helps ensure that his sometimes convoluted science gets across.

This cautious man has also been arrested multiple times.

His acts of civil disobedience started in 2009, and he was first arrested in 2011 for protesting the development of Canada’s tar sands and, especially, the Keystone XL pipeline proposal that would serve to open the spigot for such oil even wider. “To avoid passing tipping points, such as initiation of the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we need to limit the climate forcing severely. It’s still possible to do that, if we phase down carbon emissions rapidly, but that means moving expeditiously to clean energies of the future,” he explains. “Moving to tar sands, one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet, is a step in exactly the opposite direction, indicating either that governments don’t understand the situation or that they just don’t give a damn.”
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Filed under Climate Change, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Hydrofracking, Indigenous Peoples, Oil, Tar Sands

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by | 2013-01-01 · 09:00

2012 Top ten articles on Climate Connections

Note: The following are the top ten articles from Climate Connections from 2012, based on the number of views each story received. Several articles were written by GJEP, or were sent to Climate Connections by the original authors. They are posted in reverse order, from number 10 through number 1.  Our blog received a record 270,000 visitors in 2012 from over 200 countries.

Please subscribe to Climate Connections, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

Happy New Year,

-The GJEP Team

10. Three responses to Bill McKibben’s new article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” (July 24)

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director of GJEP, Rachel Smolker of BiofuelWatch, and Keith Brunner, GJEP Communications Associate

Bill McKibben, in his new Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” does an effective job at summarizing the hard and theoretical numbers that warn us of the devastating impacts of continuing to burn the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves–yet it somehow falls short of its stated goal to help mobilize a new movement for climate action.  Continue reading here

9. Breaking News: Secret US military testing of radiological materials on poor and minority communities (September 24)

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director of GJEP, and Orin Langelle, GJEP Board Chair

During an interview we conducted last week in St. Louis, MO, Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor gave us a long description of research she had conducted into a major military cover up of the use of U.S. citizens as test subjects for military experiments related to the Cold War.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Industrial agriculture, Nuclear power, Oil, Political Repression, Posts from Anne Petermann, Rio+20, Tar Sands

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by | 2012-12-31 · 16:30

Harper’s cabinet mulls massive Chinese resource project in Arctic

Note: Chinese investment in Canadian mega-projects is nothing new.  Plan Nord, an $80 billion mining, logging and hydroelectricity project in northern Quebec will rely heavily on Chinese and other foreign investment.  As reported by GJEP and Rising Tide Vermont this past July, during the 36th Annual Conference of New England Governor’s and Eastern Canada Premiers, indigenous Innu and Abenaki representatives were denied access to the conference at the same time Chinese investors were meeting inside with the governors and premiers.  In Canada-and the US-money speaks louder than rights.

-The GJEP Team

By Bob Weber, December 30, 2012.  Source: The Tyee

Some time in the new year, four federal ministers are to decide how to conduct an environmental review for the Izok Corridor proposal. It could bring many billions of dollars into the Arctic but would also see development of open-pit mines, roads, ports and other facilities in the centre of calving grounds for the fragile Bathurst caribou herd.

“This is going to be the biggest issue,” said Sally Fox, a spokeswoman for proponent MMG Minerals, a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned Minmetals Resources Ltd.

It would be hard to exaggerate the proposal’s scope. Centred at Izok Lake, about 260 kilometres southeast of Kugluktuk, the project would stretch throughout a vast swath of western Nunavut.

Izok Lake would have five separate underground and open-pit mines producing lead, zinc and copper. Another site at High Lake, 300 kilometres to the northeast, would have another three mines.

MMG also wants a processing plant that could handle 6,000 tonnes of ore a day, tank farms for 35 million litres of diesel, two permanent camps totalling 1,000 beds, airstrips and a 350-kilometre all-weather road with 70 bridges that would stretch from Izok Lake to Grays Bay on the central Arctic coast.
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Filed under Corporate Globalization, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Mining, Oceans

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by | 2012-12-28 · 09:00

One hour special on KPFK features GJEP and Indigenous Environmental Network

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Featuring the Tar Sands, Hurricane Sandy, climate justice and genetically engineered trees

Global Justice Ecology Project teamed up with the Sojourner Truth show in LA for a series of events in late-November, including the following one-hour in-studio interview featuring Clayton Thomas-Muller, Tar Sands Co-Director with the Indigenous Environmental Network; Orin Langelle, Board Chair for Global Justice Ecology Project, and Anne Petermann, GJEP Executive Director.  They discussed the link between Hurricane Sandy, climate change, social justice and extreme energy.  To listen, click the link below.

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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, GE Trees, Genetic Engineering, Indigenous Peoples, Natural Disasters, Oil, Tar Sands

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by | 2012-12-24 · 09:00

Radical Anthropology 2012 on Commodification of Life, Occupy and more

Screen shot 2012-12-23 at 9.58.21 AM

Cover photo: March for climate justice in Durban, South Africa December 2011 by Anne Petermann, Global Justice Ecology Project

To download the PDF of the current edition of Radical Anthropology, click here

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Africa, Biodiversity, Corporate Globalization, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, REDD, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration

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by | 2012-12-11 · 13:44

On Not Attending the UN Climate Conference in Doha

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

Christina Figueres, Executive Director of the UNFCCC

Christina Figueres, Executive Director of the UNFCCC at the Durban Climate COP in 2011.  Photo: Langelle/GJEP

For the first time since 2004, Global Justice Ecology Project did not sent any representatives to the annual UN Climate Conference (COP).  There were numerous reasons for this decision, one of which was a letter sent to us by Ms. Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) “suspending” three Global Justice Ecology Project activists from participating in Doha.  The list includes Lindsey Gillies, Keith Brunner and me–Global Justice Ecology Project’s “Head of Delegation.” We were officially banned from participating in any of the UNFCCC negotiating sessions in 2012 as well as any future sessions unless we sign a document agreeing to their terms to abide by their special “code of conduct” for observers.  Right.

Figueres page 1

Figueres page 2

Our crime?  Direct action.   Unpermitted, disobedient direct action in both Cancun and Durban designed to highlight the mounting repression against non-corporate observers.  (We also worked for over a year to help organize the amazing Reclaim Power action and Peoples’ Assembly at COP 15 in Copenhagen, which exposed the ineffectiveness of the UNFCCC and called for people to take their power back–though the letter did not mention that).

Over the years we have watched the UNFCCC become more and more like the World Trade Organization that we and many anti-corporate globalization organizations rose up against in the latter 1990s and early 2000s.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Copenhagen/COP-15, Corporate Globalization, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, GE Trees, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Political Repression, Posts from Anne Petermann, REDD, UNFCCC

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