Indigenous peoples have a historic responsibility to protect the natural environment, to generate awareness of traditional ecological knowledge, and to promote models for sustainable development that reflect our values. Yet our communities are threatened on a local and global level, as fossil fuels are endangering the health of the planet.
The Earth is soon to be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, the point at which catastrophic impacts will be unavoidable. The most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released February 28, sounds a dire warning about the consequences of global warming, including droughts, floods, severe storms, and fires, that are escalating at alarming rates, and hitting the most vulnerable.
The response to global warming must be global democracy for life and for the protection of the territorial integrity and rights of Mother Earth.
Our Indigenous climate movement, with Black folks, people of color, and frontline communities, is engaged in exposing climate investment schemes that profit from this global crisis. All claim to address the climate crisis while avoiding the underlying drivers that got us into this mess. Economies of greed. Endless growth. Erosion of biodiversity. The exploitation of life.
We have seen a dangerous slide toward lawless capitalism, where free market ideology (neoliberalism) is privatizing every aspect of our lives with virtually no public oversight or accountability.
Mechanisms of carbon pricing are being rebranded as “nature-based solutions,” or natural climate solutions and regenerative agriculture. We believe these “solutions” seek to impose property rights on all living things, to privatize and sell nature—to sell Mother Earth and Father Sky. This approach treats soils, plants, trees, mangroves, coastal areas, and oceans as commodities. It is the financialization of nature.
“Nature-based solutions” is an umbrella term covering a range of schemes for climate, conservation, and biodiversity protection. Even corporations like Shell Oil claim to be proponents. It is a broad and vague term that can include wetlands, peatlands, planting trees, restoring grasslands, and, in the Global South, mangrove restoration and monoculture plantations. In short, it’s a bad idea dressed up in public relations–friendly terminology.
The idea of nature-based solutions is firmly based in carbon markets, nature neocolonialism, discredited market mechanisms, and corporate greenwashing. These mechanisms emerge from a world view defined by white supremacist and patriarchal narratives of conquest. This includes a blind faith in corporate policies and technologies, and an arrogant assumption that these technologies can supplant the complexity of the Earth’s natural systems for sustaining balance and harmony.
In this worldview, Mother Earth is objectified and treated like a machine made of parts that can be replaced, redesigned, or engineered—not as a complex entity of interdependent, beautiful, and sacred relations.
These “solutions” are a distraction from the essential need to cut carbon emissions and properly protect, conserve, and restore biodiversity and ecosystems.
My group, the Indigenous Environmental Network, in collaboration with Oil Change International and Canada-based Indigenous Climate Action, released an August 2021 report titled “Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon.” It revealed that Indigenous resistance to carbon and fossil fuel supply over the past decade has stopped projects equivalent to 400 new coal-fired power plants, or roughly 345 million new passenger vehicles.
Additionally, Indigenous resistance has helped shift the public debate on fossil fuels, carbon pricing, geoengineering techno-fixes, clean electricity standards, the rights of Mother Earth, and the inherent rights and treaty rights of Indigenous peoples.
So what should be done?
We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, to move away from a fossil-fuel economy to a regenerative living economy. Humanity must join with our climate justice movement in transforming the social structures, institutions, and power relations that lead to oppression and exploitation.
The response to global warming must be global democracy for life and for the protection of the territorial integrity and rights of Mother Earth. Climate justice centers on organizing, direct action, and self-determination by those on the frontlines of the crisis. It is about respect, reciprocity, mutuality, and solidarity across all communities, and with the rest of the living world and Mother Earth herself.
We are committed to promoting integrated and transformational solutions to the multiple crises we face. We support agroecology, community-based forest management, and an end to fossil fuel extraction. And we call for divesting from fossil fuels and reinvesting in clean renewable energy.
We only have one Earth. Let’s protect it.