Struggles for the Forests
When corporations destroy forests, or restrict or even prohibit access to forest peoples' territories, they place communities' ways of life and their very existence at risk. WRM supports forest peoples' struggles to defend their territories, and their right to decide how to live, and how to use the forests they depend on.
The government of Indonesia endorsed the criticized Omnibus Law by saying that it is “crucial to attract investment and ultimately create jobs.” The Law is a direct attack on the territories and communities resisting the increasing destruction that has been ongoing for decades in Indonesia. (Available in Indonesian).
WRM spoke with close allies from Brazil, Gabon, India, Mexico and Mozambique, to hear from them and learn about their understandings of development.
The approval of a road construction inside the first Ecosystem Restoration Concession in Indonesia puts in evidence the inherent contradictions of such concessions. (Available in Indonesian)
This article highlights four trends that evidence how the mining industry continues to benefit from the Covid-19 pandemic while continuing its destruction throughout the archipelago. While corporate-oligarchs are hijacking democracy by perpetuating emergencies, a new dictatorship is being installed under the flag of mining capitalism. (Available in Indonesian).
Funds from the Compensatory Afforestation scheme have been allocated for Covid-19 relief measures. The scheme has funded plantations that invade community land and has led to illegal evictions where “Protected Areas” have been declared. This has not stopped during the lockdown.
Back in 2004, conservation NGOs and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry pioneered with a model called Ecosystem Restoration Concessions. This article takes a closer look at this model in the context of new and old threats to forests, and the global push for “forest restoration”. (Available in Indonesian).
The inter-dependencies in and among communities with their life spaces and practices sheds light to the conservation practices of forest communities. And within these interdependencies lie the stories of women.
Oil multinational Shell claims that it is possible that consumers drive “carbon neutral”, simply by paying extra for offsetting their emissions - planting trees or investing in existing forest areas elsewhere. But what is happening in those areas elsewhere? (Available in Indonesian).
A feminist view on Commons reveals that accumulation opposes the basic principles of sharing and sustaining: receiving from nature’s abundance is done by ensuring that needs (and not wants or greed) define the extent of extraction.
This study looks at how Compensatory Afforestation is accelerating both, the destruction of forests in India by big corporations and the appropriation of community land for the supposed compensation.
“If our land, water sources, air and livelihoods are being destroyed by geothermal exploration and exploitation, how can this energy be called “clean”? “Clean” for whom?”