EOne year we know more about the climate crisis. Data flows: rising heat, unprecedented deforestation, record rainfall. And once a year, we also learn more about the human impact of the crisis, as data is published on the killings of land and environmental activists, the same people who stand out and protest the rupture of the our climate. In 2020, that number reached a record 227 murders worldwide.
Each time, the data hits me like a blow to the face. I’ve spent much of my life as an environmental activist and journalist, so if I haven’t really met the people sadly on this list, I’ve met hundreds just like them. Strong local people, linked to the place and the community, who see their role in defending the land and the ancestral territory. Everyone like this around the world is at risk.
And in the end, they run the risk, not so much because of another local person taking the trigger or dipping the blade; they are at risk because they are living in or near something that some company demands. Like Fikile Ntshangase, the South African grandmother who led a lively campaign against a coal mine in KwaZulu-Natal province and was shot dead at her home last year. Or Óscar Eyraud Adams, the indigenous activist who, during Mexico’s worst drought in 30 years, vocally defended his community’s right to water, as authorities denied them and granted companies more and more permissions. Oscar was shot dead at Tecate last September.
The demand for the maximum possible profit, the fastest possible timeline, the cheapest possible operation, seems to ultimately translate into understanding, somewhere, that the problem-maker has to go. Guilt rarely reaches the headquarters of a corporation. But it should be. Especially because the people who inhabit these places never really share the riches that are produced there: colonialism remains in place, even if it is dressed in corporate logos or hidden with offshore bank accounts.
Meanwhile, the rest of us need to realize that people killed every year defending their local places also defend our shared planet, particularly our climate. The activities that flood our carbon atmosphere – the extraction and deforestation of fossil fuels – are the focus of so many of these killings. When people get up to block a pipe, an illegal mine, or a new plantation planned for an old forest, they also get involved in activities that threaten us all. They hinder the lives of oil companies and timber barons, and in doing so, they strive to protect us all from incessant temperature rises.
And as we try to cope with this increase, moving to more benign technologies such as solar panels and electric cars, we will have to do so in ways that do not create the same kind of sad sagas: cobalt mining or the production of lithium can also be exploitative. If we took the stories told in the Global Witness report seriously, we would surely be able to better design these emerging industries.
Great respect is due to those who work to develop corporate codes of conduct, or industry-wide standards or government regulations: these are the tools that can help rebalance power, so that people can stand up to exploiters with less. fear of being killed. . But as we live in a world where greenwashing is a constant threat, let’s be clear: the value of these codes, standards, and regulations are not the words themselves, nor the promises their sponsors proudly make. Its value is measured entirely in results, such as reducing threats against land and environmental advocates.
How are the advances in the climate crisis? One wants so badly to pick up this annual report some year and see that the answer to that question is: fewer murders. That violence tends to fall sharply, that deaths have begun to decline; it would be as satisfying as watching Covid’s cases fall in the spring. Since there is no vaccine against the greed of the rich, it may be years before this happens. But we can still speed up the day: you and I, armed with the stories of these lost lives, are able to put enough pressure on the culprits to feel the need to change.
None of this will bring back the defenders of the planet who have been killed. That we have to fight simply to get our leaders to pay attention to science is frustrating, but there is a big difference between fighting and dying: the names of these activists should be on our lips and in our hearts. We owe them debts that cannot be repaid, only paid in advance.
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Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, Vermont, and leader of the 350.org Climate Campaign Group