Bulletin 259 - January 2022

We invite you to reflect with an activist who explores resistance processes and the challenges they face, based on her experience with struggles in Brazil. In this reflection, we also invite you to join the collective resistance from your own contexts and spaces of organization. The fight continues and the fight is one!

The Balik People will bear the impacts of the plans to build a New Capital City mega-project in Borneo, Indonesia. Government officials and business elites in the country are certainly among those who will enjoy the benefits. Available in Bahasa Indonesia.

The Argentinian government continues to subsidize industrial tree plantations, now as a policy against climate change as well. From dispossession and land appropriation, to deforestation and more forest fires, pine trees are devastating territories and communities.

The false idea that industrial plantations are a solution to the climate crisis is a golden opportunity for investment funds like Arbaro, which access scarce climate funding for expanding destructive monocultures.

Suzano was present at the 2021 UN climate negotiations for one main reason: to promote tree plantations as a ‘solution’ to climate change, under the name of ‘nature-based solutions’. It aims to profiteer ever more from the so-called climate policies.

The Gaia Foundation and other founding members of the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective- SALT in Kenya, AFRICE in Uganda, and EarthLore in Zimbabwe and South Africa, have produced three animated stories that explore the revival of land, water, seed and Earth-centred cultures by Indigenous and traditional communities in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Kenya. These decolonising stories demonstrate the immense value of Indigenous knowledge and practices and are living alternatives to the dominant industrial growth economy. As the producers affirm, these stories are a testament “That the damages and losses suffered since colonisation can be healed.” Watch and share the animations:

This video is produced by SOF Sempreviva Feminist Organization, in partnership with RAMA - Agroecological Network of Women Farmers of Barra do Turvo, from Brazil.

The WOMIN African Alliance released the first in a series of animated short films. This animation tells the story that rural, peasant and working-class communities across the African continent have confronted from the start of colonisation to the present neoliberal capitalism. This is a story of lives and livelihoods disrupted and destroyed, of environmental catastrophe caused by unfettered extractives industries, of the violence perpetrated upon Brown and Black people whose lives are consistently devalued, and of the exploitation of women’s labour of care and violence perpetrated on their bodies.

Get to know the threats of Agriculture 4.0. and the possible resistance of peasant women. As the technological titans come to the countryside—with robots, mapping, data extraction, persuasion and espionage—they meet the peasant resistance: wisdom, experience, exchange and respect for nature. An animation by Red Tecla, together with the Global Women’s March, the ETC Group and REDES—Friends of the Earth Uruguay, tells us this story. See the video in Spanish and Portuguese.

Offsetting scams are the new climate denial… and it has dangerous consequences. Greenpeace released this short video to highlight how French oil giant Total claims they’re committed to a clean energy future, but they are trying to drill for oil in a pristine forest in the Republic of Congo - home to many indigenous communities. See the video here.