Depending on how you define it, activism has a long history in so called Australia. 

When Arthur Phillip — a former whaler and longtime servant of the British Navy — attempted to establish a colony on Gadigal land, he was resisted by Bennelong, Pemulwuy and the many Eora people who fought beside them. The Colony was established in the settlement of Sydney Cove, and early settlers invaded the nearby land of the Dharawal, Dharug, Awabakal, Darkinjung, Gandangara and Wiradjuri peoples. The fifth Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, effectively declared war on the “hostile natives”. Communities were massacred and native forests were felled, as settlements spread with the support of British agriculture and grazing methods that were imposed on the land. The Original Peoples of the Sovereign Nations that criss-cross the Australian continent and its surrounding islands, resisted an onslaught of violence and terror for over 100 years through a series of conflicts commonly referred to as the Frontier Wars. Musquito, Yagan, Windradyne, Tarenorerer, Tunnerminnerwait, Maulboyheenner, Truganini, Jandamarra and Dhakiyarr are some of the many figures of resistance who fought alongside their respective communities.

Eventually the colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Port Phillip, Swan River, South Australia and Queensland united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. Resistance continued as communities lived in the face of the restrictions imposed on their culture and connection to Country by the newly formed state and federal governments. Foreign settlers also resisted British rule and imposition, reflected in the Rum Rebellion of 1808 and the Eureka Stockade of 1854, as well as the development of labour unions throughout the colonies in the 19th century.

Unionism also influenced the development of the first politically organised Aboriginal activist group, the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association (AAPA), formed in 1924, campaigning for rights to land ownership, citizenship, control of their own affairs and an end to the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. The AAPA was renamed the Aborigines’ Progressive Association and along with the Australian Aborigines League, they organised the first Day of Mourning on January 26 1938. It was the culmination of years of work, encouraging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism across Australia, which led to the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, the Freedom Ride, the Wave Hill walk-off, the campaign for the constitutional referendum of 1967, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the Mabo Case.

The worldview and cultural practices of the Original Sovereign Nations of Australia, particularly their connection to Country, is well documented, and the outcry for civil rights was intrinsically linked to the protection of their territories. As the Australian population increased through waves of migration, the native landscape was destroyed to make way for industries that supported the growing number of settlements, particularly agriculture and grazing, the extraction of natural resources, and the eventual privatisation of land. Despite the ongoing desecration of the environment across the continent, it took time for settlers to develop a connection to the landscape and thus develop an awareness of the need for its protection, as well as the rights of the indigenous peoples who have always called it home.

Although many settlers campaigned for the rights of the Original Sovereign Nations of Australia and advocated for the protection of native plants and wildlife, the history books suggest the Australian conservation movement began with the creation of National Parks in the late 19th century. It was with the near extinction of the thylacine — also known as the Tasmanian Tiger — that environmental awareness spread through the dominant colonial culture, leading to koalas being declared protected species in 1937 and Tasmanian Devils in 1941. 

The thylacine population of Lutruwita (Tasmania) was around 5,000 when the British settled there, but they were known to attack sheep and thus hunted by farmers. As the thylacine population dwindled, sightings became significant news, as standards at the time stated an animal could not be declared extinct until 50 years had passed without a confirmed sighting. In 1968, zoologist Jeremy Griffith and local dairy farmer James Malley conducted what has been described as the the most extensive recorded search for the thylacine in the history of Lutruwita. In 1972, they formed the Thylacine Expeditionary Research Team with Bob Brown, which concluded without discovering evidence of the thylacine’s existence.

“I’d read about the Tasmanian Tiger and its alleged extinction, and then I saw a black and white television program, I think it was Four Corners, on Lake Pedder.”

Nestled amongst the peaks of the Frankland Range in Lutruwita’s southwest, Lake Pedder was a once glacial lake adorned by a pink quartzite beach. It was often referred to as “the mirror of heaven”.

“I wanted to know more about what was going on, so I kept my eye out for a job in Tasmania. I was working on ships in the Pacific as a doctor, and I was reading a medical magazine, and there was an ad for a three month position in Launceston replacing a doctor who was travelling to England. So I came, applied, got the job and within a year, I ran into two guys who were looking for the Tasmanian Tiger.”

The search for the thylacine inspired Bob’s early explorations of Lutruwita’s famed wilderness. He travelled into the Tarkine and the island’s northeast, to places where the thylacine had allegedly been sighted.

“The sightings always led to some other animal which may or may not have looked like a Tasmanian Tiger. But this presumption that if you couldn’t identify something that you saw in the night, it must be a Tiger, needed to be met with a fair degree of clarity of mind, but the Tiger is extinct.”

Bob also became involved in the campaign to protect Lake Pedder. The Lake and its surrounding wilderness was protected by National Park status in 1955 but it was then revoked in 1967, as the Tasmanian government wanted to flood the Gordon, Serpentine and Huon Rivers as part of a hydro-electric generation scheme, which was pushed forward through the avid support of Premier Eric Reece (who was nicknamed “Electric Eric”). The eventual dam obfuscated Lake Pedder’s unique natural beauty, creating a sprawling reservoir that provides extra “storage” to Lake Gordon, where the power station is located.

“I took out a big ad in The Australian, it was over $1,000 at the time, saying Lake Pedder is another disaster for Tasmania… It was sort of a cry in the dark but it also alerted the Lake Pedder campaigners to the fact that this unusual doctor had arrived in Launceston, and I quickly got asked to stand for Parliament. I didn’t want to, but I did.”

The newly formed United Tasmania Group (UTG) is acknowledged as the world’s first environmental political party to contest elections. The party was formed during a meeting of the Lake Pedder Action Committee to field candidates in the April 1972 Tasmanian election. The founder of the UTG, a senior lecturer in botany at the University of Tasmania, Dick Jones, asked Bob to stand, as they needed a candidate in the north of the state. 

“I stood with him on a Senate ticket, I think I got 112 votes statewide. But I quickly learned that environmentalism is off the agenda in politics, even more so back then… This was a period of nascent organic farming, permaculture, a lot of things happening in Tasmania, and it was all viewed with disdain and arrogance by the Hydro-Electric Commission, which had no trouble running ads against the UTG to say our policies would lead to higher power prices and the loss of jobs and so on. So we learned from that for the Franklin campaign, which came a decade later.”

Wild “from source to mouth”, the Franklin River is in Lutruwita’s southwest, and the Hydro-Electric Commission coveted it to create another hydro-electric dam. Bob gathered a group of activists in his home — all of whom were either members of the UTG or had campaigned for Lake Pedder — to discuss the Franklin’s protection, and together they formed the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS). 

“We discussed peaceful direct action. Some of the group had considered it but had decided against it because they didn’t want to lose public support by sitting in front of bulldozers. But we invited some Quaker activists from New Zealand to talk to us about the theory of direct action and communal direct action, and while some individuals amongst us hated it, it nevertheless was enormously important in the blockade that saved the Franklin River.”

The TWS coordinated the massive campaign against the Franklin Dam, which lasted seven years from 1976 through to 1983. The campaign was initiated by a film that screened on Tasmanian television stations, and was followed with blockades on the Gordon and Franklin Rivers, many public rallies, letter writing, widespread door-knocking and significant political actions. In 1980, 10,000 people protested on the streets of Hobart — more than three times the size of any public rally to that moment in Lutruwita — demanding the wild Franklin be saved. Through the strength of the campaign, the Tasmanian government backed down on its initial plans for a new site for the dam, but the Wilderness Society did not back down from its call for “NO DAMS” in the southwest of Lutruwita. Their stance was supported by the uncovering of cultural artefacts at Kutikina Cave, located on the Franklin River, which led to the creation of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in 1982, strengthening the position of TWS and the protestors. After a deadlock in the Tasmanian Parliament and an eventual referendum, the sitting Labor government was defeated in a state election.

“It was then that the strong man of Liberal politics arrived on the scene, Robin Grey, he won the election over Labor in 1982. In every seat of that election we stood ‘Save the Franklin’ candidates, and in every seat they lost. Although Norm Sanders here in Hobart, in Denison, had been an advocate for the Franklin’s protection, he was, to my knowledge, the first environmentalist elected into a parliament anywhere in Australia, he was a trailblazer. But he resigned his seat in Parliament because of the mistreatment of the Franklin Blockaders that got tougher and nastier as time went on, it was a very clear the government was calling for harsher treatment.”

Bob was one of 1500 people who were arrested during the Franklin campaign and was one of 600 jailed, when he spent 19 days in Hobart’s Risdon Prison.

“The day after I came out of jail, I was elected to Tasmania’s House of Assembly on a countback. So I was suddenly in Parliament on the side of the Franklin ticket, while also being director of the Wilderness Society, helping to run the blockade that was happening on the Gordon and Franklin Rivers. But I said at the time when the Franklin is saved, that’ll be my political career.”

Through the support of the newly elected Prime Minister Bob Hawke — who had promised to save the Franklin in the lead up to the election — and intervention from Australia’s High Court, construction of the dam was stopped and the River was saved, yet Bob Brown remained in politics.

“We had parallel campaigns to stop wood chipping and the marauding of Tasmania’s forests, and it was accelerating at a great rate, and there were social justice issues that I wanted to attend to, because nobody else in the Parliament was giving them voice, so I stayed on.”

He stayed for ten years. During his tenure, Bob proposed legislative initiatives on gay rights, nuclear regulation and euthanasia (amongst others).

“In the 1989 election, we ended up with five Greens seats that allowed us to double the size of the World Heritage area and to get new National Parks. You could say I became a relentless driver for the environment, but to me it was just about relentless common sense, it was a priority that looked to the future. And in retrospect, I would have regretted greatly backing off when that opportunity arose. But after ten years, I’d had enough, so I resigned from the Greens and took three years out.”

Bob went on holiday, travelling the world until he was pulled back to land he loved. He was drawn back to politics, initially to campaign for the newly created Australian Greens, and eventually standing for election in the Federal Senate in 1996 with the provision that he could continue to be an activist. 

“It included, if necessary, breaking the law, even though under the Constitution that loses you a seat in Parliament, and the Greens were happy to accept that condition.”

He was the first Greens’ candidate to be elected to the Australian Senate.

“When I arrived in Tasmania and found this nascent Greens Party, I felt at home with their politics that was based on a humility for nature and a concern for all human beings, and that includes all human cultures. So taking that on and helping to develop it was important. Labor will always grab kudos for social justice, Liberals will always grab kudos for economic innovation, but what they don’t have is any kudos on the environment, except when it’s manufactured here and there, and so the Greens Party grew.”

Bob Brown was a sensible voice in the Senate, often opposing the conservative Liberal government of John Howard. He introduced bills to block radioactive waste dumping and to ban mandatory sentencing of Aboriginal children, he was vocal of Australia’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and he famously told John Howard to “relax and accept gay marriages as part of the future’s social fabric“. When four Greens senators were elected in 2004, Bob was formally named the first Federal Parliamentary Leader of the party. In 2007, he stated that coal was the energy industry’s “heroin habit” and suggested the ban of coal exports. He said it was an “appalling and disgusting failure” when Kevin Rudd failed to commit to strong carbon reduction targets in 2008. He also suggested tax revenues from the excess profits of the coal industry should be set aside for future environmental catastrophes in Australia.

In the 2010 election, the Greens achieved a historic result attracting 1.6 million votes, with the election of nine senators and one member of the House of Representatives. It meant that the Green held the balance of power in the Senate and Bob used this position to negotiate.

“We brought in probably the most advanced climate change legislation, of regulation and offsetting. We got it through with Julia Gillard as Prime Minister because we drove a very hard bargain. You might remember she’d said four days before the election, there’ll be no carbon tax under a government that she runs. Well 18 months later, they not only had a carbon trading scheme, but one of the best in the world.”

In April 2012 Bob stepped down as leader of the Australian Greens and then he retired from the Senate in June 2012. This time he stepped away from politics for good. 

“I endlessly quote Abraham Lincoln in 1857 saying that the corporations are coming to steal the throne of democracy from the people, and it happened. I watched our democracy become usurped by the wealthy and the corporate sector. That influence spreads right across the spectrum and there’s no greater example of that than the Murdoch ownership of the media here in Australia, which is corrupt and perverting of democracy. But one thing they all have great difficulty with is peaceful activism, and history shows that to be the case.

“I had seen that through the Pedder and Franklin campaigns, and our forestry campaigns — which I continued to be involved with while I was in politics — but a large component of the environment movement, which I love dearly, was trying to influence politicians by going to see them. I was very well aware they are no match for the corporate lobbyists who infested our parliaments, banging on people’s doors every day, particularly ministers doors, leading to this absurd situation we have now where 80% of Australians want native forest logging stopped and 80% of politicians want to subsidise it with even more public money. So getting out and focusing on activism was important, because politics doesn’t know how to deal with it. It cuts through.”

Along with Steven Chaffer, Bob decided to form an organisation with activism as its focus.

“I was in my late 60s and I recognised that it was a big thing to take on, but I had people like Steven. We started with nothing except a good idea, but we knew we had a lot of public sympathy out there.”

Their first employee was Jenny Weber. Jenny had grown up on Dharawal Country in Wollongong and experienced a lot of her childhood at the beach.

“I had this sense of awe about the ocean being bigger than I am, and the need to be careful in the ocean, it’s not something I took for granted, I had to learn to swim with the waves pummelling in. I was totally immersed in nature as a child.”

Jenny also grew up with the political leanings of her father, who was a member of the Australian Labor Party. He was also a teacher and part of a union.

“He was an organiser. I have memories faintly of my Dad organising or the teachers going on strike or always handing out how to vote cards on voting day. So really early on I was aware there was something going on with politics, to the extent there were politicians that for some reason were on the bad list. There was always a conversation about politics in my life, which was really influential in my childhood.” 

She liked punk music and helped organise concerts of visiting international bands at the local youth centre. 

“I think we were like 14, 15. It was a fabulous life, and it introduced me to a DIY style of working and giving back to your community, and it set the groundwork for the belief that if you want to get stuff done, you just need to get a few people to get together and do it.” 

At 17 she met her current partner, Adam, who was involved with the Wilderness Society and opened Jenny’s eyes to activism and the possibility of dedicating her life to the environment. Adam was living on Bundjalung Country near Byron Bay and took Jenny to a logging area in the Whian Whian State Forest when she was 18.

“I just could not believe it. And then I met the North East Forest Alliance, who were a bunch of activists pulling off blockades. It was a whole new thing, I was like who is this community of people who are getting together to resist the destruction of the environment? So I just immersed myself into that space entirely.”

Jenny was about to complete her university studies when Adam said to her, “I’m going to Tasmania, do you want to come? I was like, ‘not really, there’s no live music, I can’t swim in the sea. I thought that it would be freezing cold all the time. And then he was like, ‘I’m going to go anyway.’ So I had to choose between doing whatever I might have ended up doing in New South Wales and coming here to Tasmania, so I asked, ‘can we do a deal that it’s just for six months?’”

They drew a circle on a map between Hobart and the southern forests and they decided to move to Huonville.

“It’s a logging town in the middle of nowhere, we didn’t know anyone, it was a completely bizarre thing to do.” 

They initially volunteered with the Wilderness Society in Hobart, but Adam was inspired by his time with the Byron Environment Centre and the North East Forest Alliance and was keen on creating something similar in the southern forests of Lutruwita. 

“We set up this little place called the Huon Valley Environment Centre, which became our life for about 15 years. Being a forest activist, taking action, doing lots of blockading and forest protests. We had two beautiful children, we were living off-grid on 60 acres of wildlife reserve in a straw bale place we built, and we were there resisting non-violently in a town that hated us, being right there with the logging community.”

Jenny and Adam were living on the frontlines.

“I was shopping once with my little ones in Woolworths, and this woman just screamed at me and was like, ‘I’m going to lock-on to your trolley, that’s what you do to my husband,’ and it was a bit shocking. The same thing happened at the laundromat, people getting angry at me. I think it’s just being calm and trying to state your place or ignoring the situation completely. In the laundromat, the woman was a bit more aggressive and so I just tried to de-escalate and say, ‘look I’m just here for the forests.’ I also had a death threat against me. They said, ‘I saw her on the street, I should have run her down, I’m going to kill that bitch.’ So I went to the police, and the police handled it okay. But I never truly feared for my life. I’ve spent a bit of time in Sarawak, we have a company here in Tasmania that’s from Sarawak, and it opened up my life to the indigenous people there fighting for their forests, and my time with them made me realise I’m a white, privileged, educated woman who lives in a democracy, and I am so far from being threatened in my life because of what I do. So I’ve had a reality check a number of times.”

In 2012, the Tasmanian government struck a supposed peace deal with environmentalists and the logging industry, the Tasmanian Forest Agreement. 

“We didn’t agree with the deal, it compensated this Sarawak logging company to stay in Tasmania. And this was after we had achieved some great gains in the Japanese markets, and Ta Ann was going to leave Tasmania, and these environmentalists went into those markets and said, ‘no, keep buying from Tasmania, don’t leave,’ which was shocking, and so we lost, a lot of activists were disillusioned, they felt they had been sold out. We had a beautiful community of people who were all volunteers and hanging on by a thread. It wasn’t like they had paid employment, they were all dedicating their lives to the forests. And I witnessed when you have a tipping point like that, where you feel sold out or disillusioned, that’s all that needs to happen and it’s over. Why would I give my life up if I’m not going to be, you know, effective?

“So at that time I was really frustrated because not only did we have success and gains in unsettling a major company, we also had environmentalists who were working against us. Anyway, I saw Bob at an art exhibition in town. We used to run these art exhibitions where the activists would tell their stories through art and they were beautiful and confronting and intense. And so we had an exhibition and Bob came along and he asked about the Centre closing and I was like, ‘I’m so angry, I’m going to leave Tasmania, Adam and I are just done, we’ve had enough.’ And he said, ‘if you’re angry and you haven’t been angry until now, imagine what you could do if you keep campaigning, why don’t you come and work for the Bob Brown Foundation?’ And I was blessed in that very moment of my life, I had a blessing that people would love to have across this planet, to have Bob Brown take me under his wing and say, ‘let’s campaign together.’”

Tony Abbott had just become Australia’s Prime Minister, and he wanted to remove Lutruwita’s forests from their World Heritage listing. 

“Insane. So my first task here was to resist that and say, ‘no way.’ Incredibly it meant I went to Doha to the World Heritage meeting and was part of a team of people who were lobbying to not have the forests delisted. I thought I was just here at the Foundation for that little stint to make sure Abbott didn’t get his way. And we were successful, there was no appetite in the World Heritage Committee for that to happen. And when I returned, Bob said to me, ‘okay, now there’s a window of opportunity to have the Tarkine protected, so let’s dedicate you to the Tarkine campaign.’ Bob had been trying to get the place protected for 20 years, but it’s just so powerfully dominated by the mining industry and a little bit by the logging industry. So I was like, ‘yeah I’ll stick around with the Foundation.’”

There are now around 20 employees at the Bob Brown Foundation, supported by a dedicated community of volunteers whose activities include sending out merchandise, gathering petition signatures or, if they’re involved in frontline demonstrations, they might be locking-on to a tripod or in a tree sitting. 

Dr Colette Harmsen has been a consistent presence at the Foundation’s many protests and blockades. Colette was born and raised in Lutruwita to a Tasmanian mother and a Dutch father. They lived in the bush, so Colette lived a “sheltered and isolated” life immersed in the surrounding natural environment.

“As long as I can remember I was into insects and plants. I spent hours watching ants, building nests and doing that kind of stuff. I used to smear honey on the walls in my bedroom so the ants would come in and eat it. It’s funny, I haven’t seen that species of ant since I was a little kid, the insects seem to be diminishing.”

Her parents were part of the activist community of the time, attending protests all over Lutruwita, so it seemed normal to want to protect nature, “like it was normal that you didn’t want people to come out and kill the animals or pollute or destroy.” Colette eventually moved to Yuggera Country, to Brisbane to study veterinary science, but returned to her homeland to join the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program, where she worked for eight years. 

“My job was as a field veterinary officer, so I had a pretty good time of it working with the program, which felt worthwhile up to a point when I realised I needed to step up again, like just going to protests didn’t feel like it was enough. So I started locking-on to stuff. I think the first time I was arrested I didn’t even lock-on to anything, I think I stood with a group of other activists and we stood in front of a primary school and refused to leave. They were having a meeting inside about the pulp mill, politicians and local people and councillors, and we all got arrested.“

Since then Colette has been arrested 23 times. 

“Most of those times I have been chained to things like machinery gates, drill rigs, that kind of thing. I was up a tripod at one stage. When I do that I feel that it doesn’t matter what people say, I’m there and I’m not going anywhere, and they’ve got to physically come and cut me off and remove me, and if that doesn’t make people go, ‘why are people doing this, this doesn’t make sense,’ then I don’t know what will. 

“I guess the reality is that people don’t pay much attention, but the more we do it, I can see it’s making a difference, every step of the way it is making people ask ‘why are they arresting these people for? Like they’re trying to protect the planet,’ and at some point, someone’s going to make a decision and just say we need better environmental laws or we need better protection of forests.”

Having lived in Lutruwita for most of her life, Colette has seen firsthand how the forests are constantly threatened with destruction.

“The first time I flew to Melaleuca, which is in the southwest of Tasmania, to do a walking trip, we flew south from Cambridge Airport and we flew over Hartz Mountain and a lot of the southern forests and out towards the southwest wilderness. And when I looked down from the plane in the southern forests area, I could see a patchwork quilt underneath you: it was all the forests that were being logged and then regrowing at different stages. And basically Forestry Tasmania has all the forests available to them that aren’t in the Southwest Conservation Area or the National Parks, and all of that is just a patchwork of logged areas that are regrowing at different ages. And it’s devastating that we go in there to save one little patch, and it’s like the last old growth patch in the whole bloody area, and everything else is a bunch of plantation trees. And it just really hurts me to think that all of that would have been a continuous forest of absolutely pristine mosses and fungi and all the wildlife living in there, but now it has been chopped up into tiny pieces.”

It’s the loss of this natural heritage that pains Bob too.

“People need to recognise that the planet is finite, and that it’s amazingly intricate in the way in which it has evolved and supports life. There is a spiritual dimension to that, which I often shortcut for people by saying if you give a person a bunch of flowers, which is from wild nature, they feel good about it, but if you give them a bunch of plastic flowers, which look exactly the same — because they’re amazingly contrived these days — as they slowly realise they’re not real, it’s often a sign of insult. Why is that? You could write books and books and books on it, but it’s because we are creatures of the forest and the wild planet, and that’s where our soul as well as our body comes from, and we’re still linked to it, but we’re divorcing ourselves artificially, or cutting ourselves from it and destroying it at a great rate. 

“As a boy, there was a book called ‘The Big Snake Hunters’ that came out of England about the Amazon, and while it was the typical beagle stuff of those days, I was nevertheless imbued by this idea, which was then still true, that there were large realms of forest that we from the developing and invading world didn’t know about, and people lived in all of them and were completely encompassed in body and mind by them. That’s almost gone in my lifetime. And when I hear from the World Wildlife Fund that 70% of the mass of wildlife has gone since 1970, or the other statistic that 94% of the mammals left on the planet are human beings and what we eat, and 6% is wildlife, you get a picture of the complete desecration of the planet. 

“The thing about it is, while more and more people are becoming alarmed about it, it’s increasing in rate. And when you talk about a road going through the Amazon or the felling of ancient trees here, it’s all part of this onrush of materialism, capitalism if you like, which is quite absurd. It’s working in a finite system, which is the planet, and yet there’s not a government that I know of that doesn’t adhere to growth as being a central pillar of good management. And growth means increased exploitation of nature in a world in which we’re already using twice the renewable living resources of the planet. So every morning we wake up to fewer forests, fewer fisheries, less arable land, fewer species, more human mouths to feed, and generally more devastation and anxiety.”

These words relate back to pre-colonial days, when Tasmania was always referred to as Lutruwita, and the island was populated by Palawa people and was covered in the world’s tallest flowering plants. But it wasn’t just Lutruwita, it was all over the land called Australia that was covered in its native vegetation and teeming with ancient wildlife coexisting with the diverse and vibrant cultures of the continent’s Original Peoples. Can we ever know how much has been lost now that so much is gone? To paraphrase the Revolutionary Proclamation of the Junta Tuitiva, most of humanity maintains a silence that closely resembles stupidity. But fortunately there are still giants like Colette, Jenny and of course the great Bob Brown, who protect the giants of our ancient past so they will still remain as part of our future.

“We are so fortunate in this country but it is so easy to be complacent. I learned early on that we’re just passing patterns here, all species are a relay of life, and we’re part of a community. Capitalism, of course, makes the individual all important, but as human beings, we’ve always lived as communities, with the spirits of ancestors before us and the hopes of future generations in front of us. And it is incredibly important to honour those past ancestors, but to also be active, to put ourselves on the line for those coming after us, who can’t come back and undo what’s happening now. 

“Although the idea that there is no time, that we can do nothing else but be planet savers, can be self-defeating. It’s important that people find good companionship, have good relationships, have parties, have holidays, complete their studies and assume that there is time. You have to take time. And it’s very, very important for people to look after themselves. The idea that you can have fun in such a desperate and daunting planet seems contra intelligent, but nevertheless we are just human creatures, we do like happiness, and we have to find that in amongst this very fraught life we’re leading, waking the planet up and converting it against all odds into a global community that, above all, respects the planet and life on it and works to ensure that it’s here forever.”

As they say in parliament: hear, hear!

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

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Until relatively recently, legal systems all over the world have been positioned against the environment’s conservation. The path toward legal reform requires a delicate balance between new and existing principles that ensure the preservation of nature, and thus environmental and human rights, for present and future generations.

Humanity’s relationship with nature is in a new phase, where environmental and human systems are inextricably determinative of one another and their respective fates. With recent reports suggesting we have passed six of nine planetary boundaries, there is a tangible shift in understanding that we cannot sustain the illusion of unchecked interference with our finite natural environment, and that our shared planet, and even outer space, has a hastily depleting capacity to sustain such practices. 

Unlike human rights, the environment doesn’t have a comprehensive and foundational legal provision that reflects the severity of violations committed against it. Accompanied by very weak monitoring and enforcement, environmental protection is misaligned in both theory and procedure. For example, Article 4(2) of the Paris Agreement – widely hailed as the best international commitment on climate change to date – only states parties shall “aim” to achieve objectives, a non-binding obligation that doesn’t emphasise the need for strong environmental action. The framing of environmental offences as regulatory infractions enables environmental damage through the acquisition of an appropriate licence, and environmental regulation is frequently contingent upon decisions of administrative authorities, often overlooking cultural sensitivities. Thus, environmental crimes have been regarded by European prosecutors and judges as difficult to identify, define and enforce effectively.

By their very nature, regulation of environmental issues necessitates a global and inter-disciplinary approach to reflect the complexity of our interrelated climatic system. Repercussions of environmental crimes and harms are transboundary and trans-generational, and the challenge of legal reform is simultaneously inter-spatial and inter-temporal. It is therefore fundamental to propose comprehensive and inclusive legal frameworks that reach a wide variety of actors and contexts and preserve rights for nature and humans. Given the scale of the crises, it is also essential to pose effective offences that can adequately deter and punish the worst forms of environmental harm.

The assumption that capital holds the sole solution to the climate and ecological crises conceals the systemic roots of these crises, embedded in current patterns of global production, consumption, finance and the organisation of social life. In recent years, there have been significant advances in environmental law and the protection of environmental resources, not only for their human-derived value but for their intrinsic value in themselves. 

With the changes onset by capitalism, accelerated by the neoliberal era of the 1980s, the world has bent further and further to the insatiable drives of a social system predicated on infinite growth, changes that depend on the exploitation of both citizens and the environment. Many are acquainted with Marx’s arguments to this effect, but neglect the fact that the environment, predominantly since this era, has also been viewed as a tool for profit. The ideological discourse that grounds this is “concerned about human impacts on the environment but at the same time deeply romantic about the existing capitalist world”, which is accepted a priori as progressive development and anthropocentric in our agency as a species.

The logic of unlimited growth has enabled ecocide: the wilful or reckless destruction of conditions that maintain life such as ecosystems. It is clear all human actions result in an ecological imprint, and it is undoubtedly important that environmental law acknowledges and reflects competing considerations such as the right to development, which is why it is so fundamental to create a framework of safety around these inevitable considerations. Increasingly, experts are convinced a paradigm shift is vital that advocates the interdependence of human and non-humans based on a community of interests. 

Criminal law can play a pivotal role in affirming our inherent interdependencies with the natural world and our collective duties to it. As the ultimate sanction, it is important that criminal law has a restricted field of application: we must extend our vision beyond theories of punishment to understand criminal law’s fundamental role in facilitating coordination around essential collective social values. Due to the different nature of their legal frameworks, reconciling environmental law with criminal law raises complex new issues, although there are strong reasons to supplement existing environmental legal frameworks with a criminal law backstop. A new crime of ecocide, a preventative and all-encompassing framework, can rectify an existing taboo in international environmental regulation: the most serious destructions of nature are morally reprehensible and thus criminally liable acts. Ecocide law therefore holds significant potential to usher in a new era of environmental governance that can ensure exacting protection for nature, on Earth and in outer space.

Ecocide Law  

Ecocide is not a new concept in domestic or International law. For example, a provision with similarities to ecocide is found in Article 8 (2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute, which provides for the crime of “intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause…widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated.” Ecocide was almost a crime in peace time too, and was included in early drafts of the Rome Statute. The crime has been promoted at various high-level conferences such as the UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, been subject to various juridical formulations — such as Professor Richard Anderson Falk’s draft Convention, published by the competent UN Sub-Commission on the prevention and punishment of genocide — and has been debated amongst the International Law Commission regarding the “Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind”. The crime gains traction at legal, academic and grassroots levels for its possibility to provide an enforceable legal measure that can deter the severest forms of environmental damage. 

Adapted from existing international law, the most authoritative definition of ecocide defines the crime as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment caused by those acts.”

The existing nature of international environmental harm is largely considered technical, scattered and difficult to enforce, and does not account for the reality of nature, and the damage committed against it, as interconnected and occurring on a multitude of scales.

An Independent Expert Panel considered these limitations when creating the definition of ecocide. To ensure all aspects of the environment, including its interlinkages and interconnections, were included, the environment is defined on the basis of earth-system science and the five main spheres of the Earth — biosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere — as well as outer space. 

The qualitative nature of the definition ensures it applies to any actions, whether committed intentionally or through gross negligence, that directly or indirectly expose the environment in its various components to an immediate risk of substantial degeneration, endangering the safety of the planet and the survival of humankind. This is important to change behaviour: faced with an ambiguous list of legally prohibited actions against the environment, a potential perpetrator may spend a significant amount of time or resources to evade legal liability. A general standard of significant harm shifts mindsets from how do I avoid fitting into this list, toward how do I avoid creating that level of severe environmental harm.

The “unlawful” element of the definition promotes a strengthening of existing environmental laws, as they would be invoked in ecocide law’s application. The “wanton” standard — referring to an action’s potential harm in relation to the social and material benefits anticipated — can reflect the reality of new and emerging issues in environmental law, providing an appropriate analytical tool to ensure that ecocide law is reflective of other human rights. It is essential that environmental provisions can operate both independently and interdependently, ensuring that impunity does not result because of legal technicalities. Ecocide law, according to a continuum of enforcement through domestic criminal courts to the ICC, would further prevent severe and widespread or long-term environmental offences that occur under the existing protections of a licence, those committed in countries with poor environmental laws, and areas beyond national jurisdiction, like the high seas and outer space.

Ecocide Law and International Environmental Governance

Society’s relationship with nature under extractivist capitalism largely reflects “individualism and individualisation, leading to the appropriation, monopolisation, commodification and financialisation of nature against a backdrop of scarce natural and living resources and the deterioration or dysfunctioning of ecosystems”. The success of this system is largely contingent upon insufficient wages, the exploitation of natural resources and societal indifference to environmental and social issues. It is well accepted that the unhindered commodification of nature has accelerated climate change. Globalisation in particular is understood as a key driver of environmental and biodiversity damage due to increased consumption, production and movement of goods, along with their associated GHG emissions. Consequently, legal measures proposed for governing the climate and ecological crises must be aware of these considerations, in conjunction with the more specific, and just as significant, local and national elements to environmental governance. 

The definition of ecocide law largely reflects a “natural commons approach”, where the environment and its regulation is conceived as a relational and dynamic system, composed of a web of interdependent relationships between humans, non-humans and the planet. The things or resources classified as natural commons thus form part of a whole called “common heritage”. By including them in this heritage they can be collectively managed with the purpose of preservation. This perspective conceives law’s role in environmental protection distinct from the dichotomy between a subject and object or an exploiter and exploited, towards relationships of solidarity and greater balance. Conceptualising environmental resources as “common heritages of humankind” implies that such resources belong to all of humanity in collectivity, available for everyone’s use and benefit, taking into account future generations and the needs of developing countries. 

From the perspectives of Indigenous peoples and local communities across the world, the emphasis on resources and relations to things that are held as common ownership is critical, where community and kinship relations, and relations with nature and life are highly intertwined with the idea of commons. The legal construction of natural commons proposes an alliance of companionship between species and nature. On this basis, the common heritage principle embodies new connotations, highlighting our “special responsibility to safeguard and wisely manage the heritage of wildlife and its habitat, which are now gravely imperilled by a combination of adverse factors”.  The collective responsibility to preserve nature is referred to as “Earth stewardship”. 

There has been a resurgence of interest in community-based conservation and resource management systems that use customary practice and local knowledge, as it is no coincidence Indigenous communities are guardians of roughly 80% of the world’s biodiversity. On a local scale, commons management, when implemented correctly, has consistently led to improved rates of regeneration, protection and biodiversity. Increasingly, it has been evidenced that the assumption that common-property regimes will lead to the famous “tragedy of the commons” — in that allowing open access and unrestricted demand for common resources will inevitably lead to over-exploitation, requiring privatisation —  is simply a misunderstanding of how commons operate successfully. When Hardin referenced a “a pasture open to all” in his depiction of the commons tragedy, he was referencing an ungoverned, law-less, open-access scheme from which nobody could be excluded. This is not a reference to common property regimes as properly managed, but a resulting collective action problem. Climate change itself is a clear collective action problem, for example. The distinction between common property and open-access is well understood in the relevant literature. Moreover, a growing body of empirical evidence exists that demonstrates users of commons are able to work their way out of the trap envisaged by Hardin and, in fact, environmental management according to theories of the commons reveal significant success. Therefore, the necessary question in reviewing the suitability of common property schemes in global management of the climate and ecological crises is not whether common property is feasible at all, but rather under what (legal) conditions.

Rather than promoting rigid protection and management of landscapes under centralised state agencies and institutions, community management seeks to incorporate the perspective of Indigenous and local peoples, setting up a negotiable framework that supports local innovation and experimentation and is thus tailored to the specific requirements of the environmental resource. Elinor Ostrom and colleagues have identified that the distillation of certain features in common property regimes across the world, which have proved effective in ensuring the sustainable management of common-property resources: a clearly defined community of resource users; a clearly defined resource; the presence of clearly defined rules clarifying rights, responsibilities and sanctions for non-compliance; effective monitoring systems; graduated sanctions matched to the level of the offence; cheap and easily accessible conflict resolution mechanisms; minimal recognition of rights to organise; and systems for adaptive management. Community models adapt technical and regulatory norms to specific local conditions. The challenge is understanding how to translate local principles to global environmental governance issues, such as transboundary environmental crime. 

Existing international law, in conjunction with ecocide law, supports this possibility. In current international law, the “common heritage of mankind” (CHM) generally refers to the high seas, outer space and celestial bodies, all of which may not be subject to the sovereignty of any state, and states are bound, at least in theory, to refrain from actions that adversely affect their use by other states. The term mankind here reflects a collective concept referring to an entity comprising all people in the world. In Article 137(2) of UNCLOS for example, the rights are vested in “mankind as a whole”. In terms of scope, mankind is “inter-spatial” and “inter-temporal”. Since mankind is a separate legal entity representing all people in the world, the CHM, as mankind’s property, should meet the demands of mankind. As the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies note, “the principle of the Common Heritage of Mankind demands intra- and intergenerational equity, and entails a particular respect for transparency, accountability and environmental sustainability”. On this basis, the “common heritage of mankind” principle highlights our “special responsibility to safeguard and wisely manage the heritage of wildlife and its habitat, which are now gravely imperilled by a combination of adverse factors”. 

As the State of South Africa has highlighted: “[T]he common heritage of mankind principle is not solely about benefit sharing. [It] is just as much about conservation and preservation. The principle is about solidarity; solidarity in the preservation and conservation of a good we all share and therefore should protect. But also solidarity in ensuring that this good, which we all share, is for all our benefit.” 

In spite of our traditional top-down international models of environmental regulation, the “common heritage” of humankind principle has sustained conceptions around particular global resources for decades, and the relations of Indigenous communities with the environment for millennia. This different perspective and practice reveals a different picture for environmental protection possibilities, and the unquestionable success of common-property management schemes globally in ensuring more exacting environmental protection than traditional state-based models. Reiteration of such principles at the international level is one important step, however the critical issue is integrating global and local perspectives in a legal framework of environmental protection which is neither excessively punitive — and therefore hindering other crucial rights such as the right to development — or neglectful of vital ecocentric mainstreaming to international and national societies.

Ecocide law is relevant to theoretical and procedural elements to protection of the global commons. At the root of the growing movement for the international criminalisation of ecocide is the protection of the Earth and the biosphere as the common good of humanity, which requires necessary interventions to be taken in order to stop and avert the dangers for present and future generations. Along with a greater assurance of enforceability of environmental and therefore human rights, ecocide law offers an avenue for shifting general values underlying the legal framework, from anthropocentric to ecocentric, a move from a relationship of dominance to mutual reciprocity and respect for the environment in law. Ecocide law’s theoretical basis is that of a universal value: respect for our natural environment. Moreover, with a rooting in criminal law — a legal framework constituted by morality and accountability, which is enforceable in national and international courts — ecocide law can also represent a less political and more localised avenue for environmental protection than the existing state-based liability international framework, reflecting the “common heritage of mankind” principle in theory, with accompanying procedural protection strategies. 

The Role of Enforcement

Research details that in order for regulation of the commons — at local and global levels — to be effective, it must be rooted in adequate enforcement. For example, in a discussion of the Marine Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, it was argued that “ideally, a central international governing authority would apply the same policies and rules to all countries activities’ in the ABNJ”, which would “likely produce more coherent and consistent results than a Paris-style system of each country formulating its own policies and submitting them to a central authority for review”. It was further highlighted however that hybrid governance models, or smaller, regional, authorities are also effective when they include strong reporting and enforcement requirements. Similar results were obtained in research by Helen Ross and James Innes on cooperative management of the Great Barrier Reef, where they found that “for a range of factors that we have identified as necessary to successful co-management in the context of the Great Barrier Reef, we advocate treating the non-negotiable ‘givens’ as parameters, outlining a flexible shared space where common interests can be developed”. Research of another commons, outer space, showed that top-down regulations, combined with monitoring and sanction mechanisms, could ensure greater sustainability in orbit.

Where clear and non-discriminatory rules facilitate convergence towards cooperative behaviour, enforcement mechanisms can dissuade “free-riding”. Ecocide law is reflective of this framework, as the crime would not neglect the role of adaptive, community-oriented environmental governance, while providing clear and enforceable rules for key decision-makers. 

Substantively, ecocide law under the Rome Statute could provide clear parameters and homogenised rules of environmental protection to the international community. Procedurally, national, regional and international levels of an ecocide crime could provide the multi-spectred and networked enforceability, and prevention of impunity, that effective environmental protection, and consequently protection of all our human rights, requires. 

The place of criminal law in tackling the climate and ecological crises is a key question. More and more stakeholders see the merit of a legal parameter, and criminal law is the guarantor of social values deemed essential to the collective. An intentionally evolving legal discipline that follows changes in society, encompassing the social needs of the time and reflecting new challenges. This now includes the inescapable emergence of the issue of the environment and the narrative we sustain globally around it. To this effect, terminology and its associated narrative is central to the ecocide debate, most prominently in the 2021 definition. As Daryl Robinson has argued, “the argument in favour of ‘ecocide’ [etymologically] is that it is striking: it is the proposed crime of ‘ecocide’ that has stirred public and political interest and passion, whereas anodyne labels have not. The expressive function of a label is a legitimate consideration; an important function of criminal law is ‘message’.”

Legal history denotes a traditional reliance on criminal law by a sovereign state as a primary and effective way to solve numerous social, political and economic problems. As Andrew Ashworth has highlighted, criminal law’s boundaries are “historically contingent” – depending not on the product of principled inquiry or consistent application of a given set of criteria, but the fortune of successive governments, campaigns in the media and the activities of various pressure groups. 

With increasing engagement and support at governmental, academic and grassroots levels, ecocide law stands to promote a new era of environmental governance: one that can provide a useful cross-sector outer-boundary through which to examine business, prevent the most destructive projects, and invoke investment and action in more sustainable practices. It also reflects a deeper respect of nature and our duties as its steward for future generations.

Criminal law has been historically used to guide societies, protecting our most fundamental rights and ensuring social order. The International Criminal Court was devised with the understanding that some offences are so grave their criminalisation warrants further international protection and a greater emphasis on transboundary cooperation on the world’s most serious crimes. In the face of catastrophic climate and ecological breakdown, and recent estimates of a near guaranteed warming close to two degrees, ongoing hesitations and protracted deliberations are no longer possible. We need exacting legal sanctions that punish individuals who threaten disruption of our most vital life systems: if not from an ecological appreciation of our environment and its species, but from an anthropocentric lens regarding the delivery of our most basic human rights. 

As the Rome Statute professes in its preamble, its ambit is to protect the peace and security of international society from the gravest crimes that “shock the conscience of humanity”, for present and future generations. It is intuitively clear that significant environmental harms threaten not only environmental rights but also all other human rights, for present and future generations. There is a compelling argument that this consideration should be transposed into legal rules and enforcement. 

We would be wise to reflect on the potential consequences of further exploitation of nature and put limits in place to ensure any developments no longer reflect a one-sided relationship. Protecting our planetary boundaries protects our peace and security, and the route to action in this regard is enforceable law, for people and nature, on Earth and in space.

Ecocide may be conceived as the missing crime against peace.

Anna Maddrick is a Climate Adviser at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Vanuatu to the United Nations, New York, and PhD student at the University of Bologna, focusing on ecocide law.

The post Our Common Heritage: the Role of Ecocide Law appeared first on eco-nnect.

I was invited to Davos by Rudy Randa, the Managing Director of the Boa Foundation. Rudy was attending the World Economic Forum (WEF) to gather support for indigenous-led land buyback and reforestation projects, a key focus for Boa.

Originally founded by Klaus Schwab in 1971 as the European Management Forum, the World Economic Forum is a not-for-profit foundation focused on creating a more fair, inclusive, just and sustainable world through the cooperation of international public and private institutions. The WEF is guided by stakeholder theory — which is predicated on the belief that an organisation should be accountable to all aspects of society — and through its annual meeting in Davos, it brings together corporate and government leaders to discuss the most pressing global issues of the moment.

Rudy and I were attending the WEF with Ben Meeus from Grounded and the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute; Ana, Daniel, Carrie and Pascal from the Aguila Condor Foundation, one of Boa’s partner organisations; and Carlos Vicente from the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative. Each day our group gathered at a stall in the Trust House, which was facilitated by yeswetrust, a members club focused on positive global change.

After helping to organise our stall on the first morning, I walked to the meeting room, which hosted talks and events each day of the WEF, from nine in the morning until midnight. When I entered, a man stood on the stage wearing a wide-brimmed hat with what looked like a macaw feather attached to it. He was explaining how a global game could be an antithesis to the nation state system and a solution to global problems. After introducing the concept, he invited the audience to gather in a circle for a visualisation exercise. His colleague then stepped into the centre of the circle, holding a microphone. She spoke softly, guiding the group into meditation, asking everyone to visualise a thriving abundant planet. She then asked the participants to focus on the finer details of this planet, and then to focus on a single detail: “this is the part of the planet that you most care about.” She finally guided everyone out of the visualisation, back into the room and invited the participants to share their single observation.

The first speaker spoke with a Polish accent of a planet going through a great reset, which led to free healthcare and universal income. The next speaker spoke with an American accent about a magical nut that grows in the Andes. A woman with an Indian accent spoke of women’s rights and safety, which was celebrated by the next speaker, who spoke with an Eastern European accent about the importance of living with our hearts. An American woman spoke to the importance of living in alignment with personal truth. Next to her, a British man introduced a Sanskrit term, ahimsa, as the necessary core value of his world. An American man shared an indigenous prophecy of a new humanity living in harmony with one another and the world. A man with a Dutch accent spoke of the wisdom of the forest, referring to the previously mentioned principle of ahimsa and the need to truly collaborate and honour the value of all living beings. Finally a woman introduced herself as Ukrainian and spoke to the importance of peace. At this point, the man who introduced the game asked for the microphone and spoke to collective consciousness and the wisdom within it. He asked the group “what does the world look like when love wins”, inviting everyone to think of themselves at Davos as part of a collective we, to connect to the collective purpose, to be together in the here and now, and to connect with “the power of Gaia”. Everyone clapped. The session ended and the audience dispersed, with most people gathering at the bar or around a self-service coffee machine where they exchanged business cards and LinkedIn profiles.

I walked to our stall where Ben and Carlos were offering a VR experience called Amazônia Viva. This 360 degree immersive experience transports viewers to the Tapajós River in Brazil, where their 10 minute journey is guided by Raquel Tupinambá, an indigenous leader from the Surucuá community. There were three headsets at our stall, and as I returned a woman took off one of them, revealing her wide excited eyes. She spoke animatedly to Ben.

“It took me out of this Davos chaos and into a world I could feel was sacred. Thank you so much.”

Ben looked over to me and raised his eyebrows while smiling, clearly excited by the enthusiastic response he had received. I smiled back, then felt a wave of tiredness, so I decided to get a coffee. I walked to the self-service machine, passing a few of the nearby stalls. The first was focused on technology that promises a longer lifespan. The next consisted of an air mattress that a man was lying on while wearing headphones and VR goggles. The stallholder had been watching my gaze and as our eyes met he raised his eyebrows. I nodded towards the guy on the floor. What is he doing?

“It’s sonic technology that reduces stress and increases creativity.”

If it’s sonic what is happening in the goggles?

“It’s a light display that moves and evolves with the soundscape.”

I smiled and walked the remaining steps to join the queue for the coffee machine. As I waited, I looked around the room, appreciating how everyone seemed to be there to share what they perceived was most valuable to the world, reflecting the WEF’s belief in stakeholder theory, how our work should benefit all facets of society. I then closed my eyes, conducting my own visualisation exercise: what do I feel is most valuable, what does our world need?

I was abruptly pulled from my meditation by someone tapping on my shoulder. It was the person standing behind me, “it’s your turn.” I placed a paper cup in the centre of the tray and looked at the options on the screen and pressed FLAT WHITE. I walked back to our stall while sipping my coffee. I took my phone from my pocket and checked the calendar of events I had for the day. “11:00am – Big Questions: Cannabis & Psychedelics.” I looked at the current time at the top of my screen, it was 10:50am, so I gathered my belongings and rushed to the nearby hotel where the talk was held.

The WEF’s Annual Meeting are the sessions within The Congress, the exclusive area where political and corporate leaders gather each day, which requires an official invitation or a $19,000 (USD) ticket. This year, Congress speakers included Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI; Bill Anderson, the CEO of Bayer; Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer; Sadie Creese, Professor in Cybersecurity at the University of Oxford; Mafalda Duarte, the Executive Director of the Green Climate Fund; Bill Gates, the Founder of Microsoft; David Gelles, the Managing Correspondent of The New York Times; Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the IMF; António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations; Mike Henry, the CEO of BHP; Nicolas Hieronimus, the CEO of L’Oréal; Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK; Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda; Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank; Emmanuel Macron, the President of France; Lynn Martin, the President of the New York Stock Exchange; Javier Milei, the recently elected President of Argentina; Jennifer Morris, the CEO of The Nature Conservancy; Sri Mulyani Indrawati, the Minister of Finance of Indonesia; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the WTO; Chief Putanny of the Yawanawá people of the Brazilian Amazon; Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the President of Singapore; Kadri Simson, the Commissioner for Energy at the European Commission; Jürgen Stock, the Secretary-General of INTERPOL; Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of NATO; Mohammed Shyaa Al Sudani, the Prime Minister of Iraq; Nisia Trindade Lima, the Minister of Health in Brazil; Kathy Wengel, the Executive Vice-President of Johnson & Johnson; Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine; and many others, including a dabble of entertainers like Angelique Kidjo, Nile Rodgers and Michelle Yeoh.

Surrounding The Congress, along Davos’ Promenade, are the various “houses” convened by organisations and governments, which can be visited by anyone willing to travel to Davos and pay the exorbitant rates for a nearby hotel room during the WEF. While walking along the Promenade, I spotted the AI House, Equality Lounge, Greek House, Maharastra House, Meta House and Uber House, all of which have taken over the usual stores that line Davos’ high street, and have been repurposed to host branded events and experiences.

I arrived at the Mountain Plaza Hotel, which wasn’t a “house” per se, as it lacked the customary branding. I had no idea where the talk was, so I asked the receptionist where is the cannabis and psychedelics event. “Go down that hall,” they pointed to a door behind me, “and take the elevator to level three.” I followed her instructions, which led me to a makeshift foyer on the third floor: there were two coat racks to my left, three tables serving food and drinks directly in front of me, and what now appeared to be the standard Davos self-service coffee machine to my right. There were also two signs indicating “Room A” and “Room B”. The door to “Room A” was open, and I could see nobody was inside, so I assumed the talk was in “Room B”. I opened the door, all the seats were taken, people were standing at the back, the room was full and the session was underway, so I smiled and closed the door. I made my way back to the Promenade and slowly walked by the branded houses to the “Table of Tomorrow” lunch, at the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) Tent, which was next on my schedule.

The UNSDG Tent was a well-heated marquee with two meeting rooms, a toilet and a bar area. The lunch was in the smaller of the two rooms, where seven tables faced a small stage, and was organised by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company that also creates fertilisers and seeds for agricultural use; and Clim-Eat, an organisation focused on the intersection between food and climate to create collective action for a sustainable and healthy future. As attendees entered the room, they found their assigned seat at their assigned table. I put my jacket on the back of my chair and introduced myself to the man seated beside me, Franck, who worked at Innovate 4 Nature, a Swiss-based accelerator for “nature-positive solutions”. We swapped stories from our time in Davos until the host of the lunch, Professor David Nabarro, stepped onto the stage. He held a microphone that he used to introduce himself — “I am the Co-Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and Strategic Director of the social enterprise 4SD” — the topic of the lunch — “over the past few years we’ve experienced a storm, where food insecurity and malnutrition are on the rise” — and to explain how the next two hours had been organised — “we’re going to enjoy great food, listen to great speakers, and discuss approaches to this significant moment in our collective history.”

The two speakers were Jennifer Baarn from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and Arnold Puech Pays d’Alissac, the President of the World Farmers’ Organisation. Both organisations, along with Clim-Eat, are partners of Bayer, so their perspectives were aligned. They spoke of the power of innovation and technology to ensure sustainability, equity and resilience in our food systems; how seed inputs increase yields; and how corporations provide knowledge and innovation to farmers. They also agreed how long-term trusting partnerships and stable investment were crucial to future food systems. When they finished speaking, Dhanush Dinesh and Leanne Zeppenfeldt from Clim-Eat spoke to the next phase of the lunch, facilitated conversations on each table. I don’t recall much of this conversation and I didn’t take notes, but what I found interesting and memorable were the different backgrounds and careers of the people surrounding me. It is easy to look at people and classify them as “corporate” or “in government” forgetting they have a personal history defined by an assortment of choices that led them to that room on that day. This thought inspired questions as I left the event and walked back to Trust House: what led me to that room, and where am I going?

I arrived back to our stall and sat down on a free chair. I watched Ben and Carlos speak with people who had just finished the Amazônia Viva experience, how they spoke of the Amazon rain forest with passion, fuelled by their belief in nature as a solution to the climate crisis. I turned my head to see Rudy speaking with a man about the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, and the importance of indigenous-led projects to support the protection and regeneration of vital ecosystems. Watching my friends and colleagues discuss the projects that brought them to Davos reminded me of why I was there too.

It’s easy to forget what moves us as individuals, our minds are so easily pulled into the conceptual thinking of Occidental knowledge systems through discussions on trickle-down economics, government budgets and impact investments. It’s easy to forget my why when I meet a confident entrepreneur and listen to how engaged they are with the solution they believe the world needs. Media platforms are predominantly focused on reporting problems that encourage anxious thought patterns, news that highlights what makes us weak rather than celebrating what makes us strong.

It was in that moment I was approached by Lars Bergmann, who was invited to join our group at the WEF by his long-time friend Daniel, from the Aguila Condor Foundation. Lars has worked in wastewater treatment for over 20 years. The first line of his LinkedIn profile explains how he is a “passionate innovator and tech enthusiast”, but when speaking with him, I learned how much he loves his wife and daughter, and how his focus on water is centred on its necessity to humanity and the systems we call life. He explained the technology and thinking that defines his work, how it transforms wastewater by removing polluting elements so that it can then be potentially reused for irrigation. I asked him why water is not a bigger talking point at Davos?

“I am surprised by this too.”

We spoke about the droughts that are now so prevalent in the world. I told Lars the story of how Rudy and I fought wildfires in the Amazon rain forest in September.

“How did it change you?”

Nobody had asked me that question since the experience. I responded how it was powerful to think back to that moment, how confronted I was to witness the drying of one of the world’s most precious freshwater systems, to see it overwhelmed by flames, and how far away it was from the WEF, from everyone explaining how their project or idea will solve global problems, and how speaking about solutions was not the antidote to the issues we face. Although they may lead to action, and I hope they do, because immediate action is necessary.

“So what is immediate, necessary action?”

Another good question, an important question, a question I left the WEF asking myself. A question I ask myself now, sitting here, writing. I don’t have an answer. If anything, I think the answer is another question with slightly more specificity.

What action am I focused on?

Or with even more specificity.

How can I nurture our world today?

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

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Three months ago, I boarded a Sea Shepherd ship, the Sea Eagle, in Paola, Calabria, in southern Italy.

Sea Shepherd Global is an NGO that protects wildlife and combats illegal fishing in direct-action campaigns around the world. You might have heard of them as the good pirates of the sea. Today its fleet, also known as Neptune’s Navy, is made up of eight refurbished fishing vessels a one custom-built ship, each one is crewed by volunteers that share a deep love for the ocean and defending its voiceless creatures.

I had traveled by train from Florence and by the time I made it to the ship it was nightfall,  past dinner time. Most of the crew was already asleep but the First Officer, Yuval Elroy, had stayed awake to greet me and offer me some delicious vegan food. As I ate, we got to know one another, and towards the end of our conversation, I asked Yuval what was the plan for the following day?

“Removing longlines from dawn ‘til dusk.”

For the last six years Sea Eagle’s Operation Siso has been focused on removing abandoned or illegal longlines, octopus traps and FADs (fish aggregating devices) from the Mediterranean. Since its inception the campaign has decreased illegal fishing in Calabria by 70 percent. When I boarded the crew was searching for longlines, a very harmful method of fishing, where floating nylon lines connect a buoy to the seabed with several hooks and baits attached to it. Once attached fishers go and check, every once in a while, to see whether a swordfish has taken the bait. About 300,000km of abandoned longlines are currently floating in the Mediterranean, which is the same distance between the Earth and the Moon. As a result, the population of swordfish in the Med has decreased by 90 percent. Every day, the deck crew on board the Sea Eagle work tirelessly to remove thousands of abandoned longlines that, despite not being in use, still catch hundreds of marine wildlife as bycatch.

The following morning, the core team met at 7:30am on the bridge where the Captain suggested the plan for the day as well as locations of possible abandoned longlines, then everyone flocked to the dining room to share a nutritious vegan breakfast. Apart from the core team, everyone else onboard are volunteers — from the oiler to the deckhands, the cook and the photographers — exchanging their time and work for food, shelter and an experience out at sea. After breakfast, everyone dissipated to their respective work areas and the day began. It felt as though every crew member has an important role to play to keep the ship afloat and its community safe and healthy, just like a buzzing hive, where each working bee is aware of where they have to be and what they have to do to ensure smooth sailing.

We set sail in search of longlines. Once we anchored, I joined the deckhands pulling longlines out of the water on the bow. Finally, I had a longline in my hands, actually touching what had been an abstract fishing method until now. Only twenty minutes into pulling, we found a dead swordfish.

There’s a conceptual dilemma in ocean conservation that is referred to as the “out of sight, out of mind” problem. Arguably, only a tiny fraction of the world’s population has a direct relationship with the ocean and an even smaller number has actually spent time out at sea. This is exactly why the fishing industry — which now numbers over four million vessels — can get away with destructive methods of fishing: nobody sees what they’re up to, except for the volunteers of Neptune’s Navy.

After spending the morning working on the deck, I approached Yuval and asked her about her experience in several Sea Shepherd ships. Over the past six years, she has worked with Sea Shepherd in almost every ocean: the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, the Southern Ocean of Antarctica, the Atlantic near West Africa, the Pacific near Latin America, and the tranquil blue Seas of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. I asked her what have been the most intense operations she has worked on?

“When I was working on the campaign in Peru, all the time I kept thinking this is so far away from the public eye, I can’t believe that I’m witnessing this brutality. I couldn’t believe the amount of fishing vessels, probably more than many other countries combined. In Peru fishers are mostly looking for tuna. I remember being on watch and at some point our radar was packed with vessels coming in and out to sea, at least a few times a day. Each time they were probably taking between 200 to 300 tonnes of fish. That coast has a huge population of seals, and of course they were attracted to the tuna the fishers were catching, and they just kept coming in until there were thousands of them, and they were constantly getting caught in those nets. I remember looking with the binoculars and watching them trying to escape from the fishing nets, their heads popping out of the water under the black nets, trying to find a way out that they will never find, because that’s it, it’s over. And all of this is just because the fishing industry gets away with killing thousands of other animals as bycatch. Few people realise how much damage they’re truly causing.”

Bycatch is a term used to describe animals that are not intended to be caught by that fishing operation. An estimated 300,000 cetaceans and 500,000 turtles are killed each year in unintentional entanglements, but the real number is probably higher.

Where else did you see a lot of bycatch? I asked.

“While in Mexico during Operation Milagro, patrolling the Sea of Cortez, when we were out spotting gillnets.”

Gillnets are another destructive method of fishing, they look like floating curtains that are anchored to the seabed and attached to buoys on the surface. They entangle anything that tries to swim through it, from small juvenile fish to whales.

“Those nets were full of marine life, as the Sea of Cortez is known to be as the aquarium of the world. It is just so rich, it’s teeming with life. Every night that we were pulling in nets we found tens of caught marine animals. Sometimes we would pull those nets and we could tell that those carcasses had been there for a long time. Probably the fishers took what they needed, which was the bladder of the totoaba, and just left. It’s frustrating because they don’t clean up after, it shouldn’t be the end for more animals, but the nets become ghost nets and keep killing. Every day we pulled between 10-14 nets. When we’d find a dead animal we’d put the carcass in a tarp in the bow of the ship. I remember one day that tarp had about 20 stingrays.”

In Chinese medicine, the swim bladder of the totoaba fish is thought to cure ailments. Due to overfishing the totoaba can’t be found anymore in Chinese waters, increasing the price of one bladder to nearly $20,000 – $80,000 per kg. In Mexico, the intense fishing of the totoaba with gillnets has caused the quick decline of the world’s smallest cetacean, the vaquita.

Technically, since 2017, the use of gillnets has been banned in Baja California in an effort to save the elusive vaquita porpoise. However, laws out at sea are hard to enforce, which is why Sea Shepherd works with local authorities to support the enforcement of fishing regulations and apprehend illegal fishers. Sea Shepherd’s presence in Mexico has encouraged more regulation in the sector, as they have provided strong evidence against destructive forms of fishing. Last October, Sea Shepherd managed to secure an agreement with the Mexican government to help expand the protection area for the vaquita porpoise and therefore expand the area where they can patrol and operate. I asked Yuval, where else has Sea Shepherd successfully worked with local law enforcement?

“In West Africa we collaborated quite closely with the local governments: we provide the ship, the crew, the fuel, and the country will provide the local authorities to make all the required inspections and investigations that are needed to tackle and eventually apprehend illegal fishing operations in the water. With each operation we are showing the area that illegal fishing is not tolerated, giving the fish and the animals and the ocean the opportunity to thrive again.”

So what happens when you find an illegal fishing vessel?

“When we find a ship suspected of illegal activity, we board with the local authorities to begin the inspection. Usually our field medic will also join as workers’ conditions on these ships are horrible, they lack basic safety gear and hygiene. So the first thing our medic does is to treat wounds, infections and cuts — many fishers are not even allowed to leave the ships, there’s a lot of forced labour out at sea, essentially modern day slavery. Then our media team joins us to capture footage as evidence of what is happening onboard. What is really shocking to witness is how much bycatch is caught in these fishing vessels that just goes to waste. For example, we’ve found shrimp boats that throw away 90 percent of their catch, hundreds of fish and marine life are just thrown overboard, it makes no sense.”

Shrimp trawlers are notorious for having the worst bycatch ratio, the standard amount is shocking: for every pound of shrimp caught, six pounds of bycatch is thrown overboard, including sharks, turtles and rays. In September 2021, during Sea Shepherd’s Operation Albacore, a trawler was arrested in Gabon that had an even worse ratio of 0.2% shrimp to 99.8% bycatch. Gabon’s Minister of Fisheries Maganga-Moussavou was present during the arrest and was completely dumbfounded by the waste:

“It was important for me to see firsthand the impact of the shrimp fishery off Gabon’s coast. These wasteful practices cannot be tolerated in Gabon. I have commissioned an official inquiry into the shrimp fishery and pending the outcome of the investigation, I am prepared to suspend the fishing season until a solution can be found to the bycatch problem.”

Yet 65 percent of the world’s seas don’t fall under any jurisdiction, the high seas or Antarctica are no man’s land, places where Sea Shepherd can’t apprehend vessels with local authorities. In those areas their strategy is different. Last winter, Neptune’s Navy’s newest addition, the Allankay, headed to the Southern Ocean for Operation Antarctica Defense to document the fishing industry’s furthest endeavour, supertrawlers catching krill. Yuval was onboard.

“There are several supertrawlers that are out there looking for krill, and one of the biggest challenges in Antarctica is that this is perfectly legal, because they are licensed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). So the best thing we can do is to go down there and just do a lot of documentation and show the world what happens when they choose to consume krill.”

In the last five years, krill fishing has increased five times. Krill are vital for the survival of the Antarctic ecosystem. As a keystone species they are the main source of food for whales and penguins. In early 2023, the Bob Brown Foundation joined the Sea Shepherd’s Antarctica campaign to dive deeper into this topic. Their research shows that one supertrawler catches around 50 tonnes of krill per day, that’s enough to feed 30 whales.

“Mainly, krill is used for the colouring of salmon in fish farms or it’s used for omega 3 supplements. I think few people are realising how much this industry is decimating Antarctica’s marine life. This is a marine area that is so rich with life, whales, seals, truly the last wilderness on Earth. Yet these supertrawlers are huge, huge floating factories, and they are literally taking food away from those animals’ mouths.”

Technically, the CCAMLR is also supposed to protect Antarctica’s wildlife and nature. Last year, the krill industry was directly lobbying CCAMLR in an effort to increase their yearly catch allowance. Thanks to the Bob Brown Foundation’s report and Sea Shepherd documentation of Antarctica’s destruction, the CCAMLR rejected the krill industry’s request, a win for the whales and the world.

It was another success for the replicable system that Sea Shepherd has created, which can actually protect the ocean from its worst enemy: industrial fishing. Sea Shepherd’s campaigns support local law enforcement, encourage more regulation, deter illegal fishing activities all while showing the world what is happening out of sight and out of mind on the High Seas. One could say that they’re the much needed eyes watching our oceans. This has made Yuval, along with the rest of Neptune’s Navy, a key witness of the fishing industry’s shady and murky business: from slavery, to absurd amounts of bycatch and destructive and senseless methods of fishing in giant floating factories. The sad reality of how the fishing industry operates is miles away from their idealistic marketing image of a fisherman with his rod.

Thanks to this passionate and global community of volunteers, the oceans and its creatures finally have some protection. After four days, I disembarked the Sea Eagle with a heart full of hope and admiration for this floating crew of dedicated activists.

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

You might also like: Making a Marine Biosphere

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This past month, when I open Instagram each morning, I am met with story after story focused on the situation in Israel and Palestine. I engage, reading the different perspectives, occasionally reposting one that resonates with my own, before I close the app and continue on with my day, a privilege of being a spectator of conflict. As time passes, and this stream of videos, photos and captions accumulate in my subconscious, my thoughts have repeatedly circled back to the concept of land, to Country, and my relationship with it.

I was born in Narrm, in East Melbourne, on Wurundjeri Country, in the south east of mainland Australia. 10 years ago, if you had asked me about my relationship with my birthplace, I would have told you I grew up in Eltham, and maybe described the eucalyptus trees endemic to that place, but I could not speak of a connection to that landscape, I hadn’t considered that possibility. 

My awareness of the tangible relationship we form with land was precipitated by my return to Australia, after living in the UK for two and a half years. I had lived in Manchester for six months, and then London for more than two years, and these densely populated concrete environments had become a familiar, normal reality. Upon my return to Narrm (Melbourne), I was struck by the space, by the wide view of the sky on every street. When I returned to the landscape of my childhood, to Eltham, it was the first time I truly appreciated the rare beauty of my home: the trees, the plants, the River. Depending on traffic, Eltham is a mere 30 minute drive from the centre of Melbourne, and I was shocked I could access an abundant natural environment in the same amount of time it took to travel from Bethnal Green to Soho.

Over the next few weeks, I looked for somewhere to live. I would visit sharehouses and meet my potential housemates, explaining my life and how I decided to move back to Narrm to study playwriting. I would often speak of how refreshing it was to be back in Australia with its abundance of natural space. After a few weeks, I received a message from my childhood friend Josh, who had heard I was looking for somewhere to live.

“We have a room in Warrandyte.”

His parents had moved out of their house — a ten minute drive from my childhood home — and he and his brother decided to stay and convert the space into a sharehouse.

“We’d love you to move in.”

My girlfriend at the time was living in Northcote, close to the city, and I had been staying at her place a few nights each week, so the prospect of living away from the urban bustle, after so long in London, didn’t seem as daunting. But within weeks of moving in, we split, and I was suddenly immersed in my decision to live amongst the trees and memories of my youth. 

It was May, the days had started to cool, signalling the coming winter, and on a Saturday morning I walked with my housemates to Birrarung, the Yarra River, which flows through the heart of Warrandyte. Swimming in the River was a strong memory from my childhood, and as we walked along the winding streets near our house, I tried to recall the last time I swam in its waters. When we reached Birrarung, I felt the cold water in the air, and I asked my housemate Kristian “it’s going to be freezing right?” He nodded.

“I’ll tell you a secret though, it’s best to swim in winter. In summer everyone swims, there are always people around, but in winter you’re the only one, and it feels like the River shares its secrets with you when it knows no-one else can listen.”

There was an energy in Kristian’s words that connected with me, and this feeling overcame my fear of submerging in the cold water. So I took off my clothes and hung them on the branch of a nearby tree and stepped into the River. It was colder than I expected, I thought to turn back, but I recalled Kristian’s words and they pushed me forward until the water reached my torso and I dove into the River’s brown depths. When I came up for air, I screamed out, reacting to the cold that had penetrated my body. I didn’t stay in for long, maybe 30 seconds, but I remember standing on the bank feeling warm even though the air surrounding me was only 12 degrees.

Despite swimming in Birrarung since my early teens, when I think of the beginning of our relationship, I think of this moment. For the next five months, I would visit the River three or four times each week, inspired by Kristian’s words, committed to understanding its secrets. Although this wasn’t a conscious thought at the time. I had experienced a lot of pain through my breakup with my girlfriend, and there was something in those cold swims that helped me heal. I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but the more I swam, the better I felt. It became a ritual, silent walks alone through the winter and eventually spring air, meeting couples walking their dogs, nodding as I passed, sometimes saying hello, and finally plunging into the cold Birrarung.

By October I got a job in the city. I decided to leave the trees and once again immerse myself in the urban hum, but I didn’t forget the River, and continued to visit it once or twice a fortnight. In summer, friends would join, and on New Year’s Eve, a group of us visited the same spot where I first connected with the River in April. It was a hot day, so once we were in Birrarung, we didn’t get out, and we sat amongst a part of the waters where rocks had accumulated. As we talked, I kept picking up the rocks, holding them for a minute or two before letting them go. Eventually I held a Rock that fit perfectly in the fist of my hand. It was shaped like a rectangular prism, and I held onto it for over an hour, until we decided to leave and drive back to the city where we were all attending a party. I went to drop the Rock in the waters as I stood up, but something in me said no. I closed my eyes to feel the Rock and I felt to take it with me. Having completed my studies in playwriting, I had decided to move to Europe, where my Dad lives, and feeling this Rock, I felt it was a way to continue my relationship with Birrarung.

The Rock remained with me for the next five months. When I felt anxious, I would put my hand into my pocket to hold the Rock, remembering that place and Birrarung, which brought me strength and clarity. The Rock went with me everywhere. When I slept, I would leave it on a table or floor next to me. After three months, I decided against creating a base in Europe, opting to travel to the Kimberley, in the north of Western Australia, accepting an invitation of a friend who was creating an event there. 

Before leaving, I was in London, walking around Holland Park with my friend Lili. She had just moved to the UK from Sydney and was feeling unsettled, she was feeling a lot come up around a former relationship she left in Australia. Thinking of the same experiences in me — of my breakup in Australia and the swims in Birrarung — I thought of the Rock and offered it to her to hold as we walked. When we went to say goodbye, she didn’t want to let go of it. 

“I feel so calm with this rock in my hand”. 

She reluctantly placed it into my open palm. So I held the Rock, and closed my eyes, feeling whether to offer it to her so she too could maintain a connection to the Country of her birth. I felt the Rock tell me she could look after it but I had to make sure she brought it back, so it could return to the spot where I had taken it, the small rapids in Birrarung near Warrandyte. I explained to Lili the terms of the Rock, she looked at me with bewilderment, but then began to nod, appreciating I was serious.

“Okay, I will look after it and bring it back before the end of the year.” 

We shook hands, embodying the agreement, and then parted ways.

I travelled to the Kimberley and within a day of arriving I was told the event was no longer happening. I was confused why I was there and tried to think of a new plan. I thought to message people I knew who had visited that part of Australia. I remembered one of the lecturers in my playwriting degree, Tom, had told me he directed a play with a community in the Kimberley, so I messaged him and he responded with excitement, telling me to find two Bunuba Elders he worked with. He offered one of their phone numbers, while the other he explained couldn’t be contacted. 

“You need to go to Windjana Gorge, he will be there, it’s worth the trip.” 

Later that day I went to Cable Beach in Broome, to swim in the calm waters of the Indian Ocean. After my swim I was standing on the beach, looking out at the ocean, wondering why I was there. A woman approached. 

“Hello.”

I turned to respond, surprised by this stranger walking up to me.

“Sorry, I saw you looking out over the ocean for a while and felt like coming over. Are you okay?” 

I told her I was, “thank you”, then smiled.

“I”m Petrine.” 

Petrine had tanned skin and bright eyes. She stood solidly, like her bare feet were rooted into the sand below. The conversation between us started to flow. She asked why I was in the Kimberley. “If I’m honest, I don’t know.” Petrine asked if I knew anyone in the region? “Not really, but I was given two names a few hours ago by a former lecturer. I have one of their phone numbers, but the other one I have to go to Windjana Gorge to find.”

“Windjana Gorge? Are you talking about Dillon Andrews?” 

I checked the name in the message from Tom. 

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“I am going camping with him on Friday, do you want to come?”

During the five hour drive to Windjana Gorge two days later, Petrine explained more about the project with Dillon.

“Dillon, his niece Denise and I are meeting with five members of the Regional Services Reform Unit. We’re meeting to discuss a response – from Dillon and Denise’s community Biridu – to the Western Australian Government’s plan to close remote communities. Dillon and Denise felt it was important for any meeting to happen on Country, so the government representatives can literally feel the spirit of the land and witness Dillon and Denise’s connection to it. The plan is to visit three sacred sites of the Bunuba” – Dillon and Denise’s language group – “Tunnel Creek, Windjana Gorge and Carpenter’s Gap.”

The two days I shared with Dillon, Denise, Petrine and the representatives of the Government is its own story, too long to share here. These days deeply shifted my life along a new pathway I am still walking. The initial steps led me to Sydney, where I decided to live, and after a month of moving there, I received a call from Petrine asking me to help write the report we eventually submitted to the Government. 

Throughout this time I kept thinking of the Rock, and at the end of the year Lili returned to Sydney to visit her family, and we met two days after her arrival and she returned the Rock to me. I kept it in my pocket and beside my bed, until I travelled to Narrm, to Melbourne, and to Warrandyte. It was my first journey back to Birrarung since I had left for Europe, and when I arrived to that sacred swimming spot, I took the Rock from my pocket and threw it back into the water, in the rapids where I had sat with my friends over a year earlier. I felt a tension release within my body, not realising the responsibility I had assumed when I removed the Rock from its home. I didn’t fully appreciate this at the time, I had just felt the energetic relief within my body, but it was upon meeting Thunghutti and Bundjalung man Warren Roberts, that I started to understand this story. 

Warren and I had a mutual friend, Charlie, who told Warren about the report I wrote with the Bunuba. He wanted to meet me, so Charlie invited us both to his apartment for lunch, and I learned about YARN Australia, the organisation that Warren founded, which uses storytelling to create intentional relationships between the Original Sovereign Nations of Australia and people all over the world. Warren and I had an immediate connection, and from that day we started our walk together, in relationship, both focused on storytelling as a tool for understanding the many relationships we share in life. Like with the Bunuba, I began to document Warren’s ideas and visions through writing.

In one of the first few YARN workshops I collaborated with Warren, he shared a story he named “sticks and stones”, which recalls a day his Grandmother took him and his cousins to connect with a River close to his childhood home. The story explains how his Grandmother taught him not to remove stones from the Country he found them, how those stones have a connection to that Country, and it’s important to respect that relationship. In that workshop, Warren was explaining the practice of a Welcome to Country and an Acknowledgement of Country. A Welcome to Country is a ritual that has become common practice in public and private events held in Australia. This practice has also spread to Turtle Island, or North America, where a traditional custodian of the Country the event is taking place will welcome the attendees to the Country of their people. In Australia, for a welcome to be recognised as official, it must be performed by an Elder from the Original Peoples of that land. If an Elder or a traditional owner of that Country is unable to be present, an Acknowledgement of Country is offered, recognising the Country where the attendees are gathered and the Original Peoples of that place. During the workshop, Warren explained the intention that guides this practice.

“Connection to Country is about connecting to who you are. Let’s say you’ve got your grandmother’s Italian recipe, are you not going to acknowledge it, are you going to say it’s my recipe? Are you not going to acknowledge the people you are in relationship with, like when you lived in Melbourne and grew up with your family, are you not going to acknowledge them? Of course, every time you see them you are going to acknowledge them in some way. So we acknowledge our people and our connection to our Country, just like everyone else has the right to recognise where they come from, and that connection and that acknowledgement is based on their relationships. If you don’t want to acknowledge, does that mean you are not in relationship with the people and places you experience life?

“See back in the day, we would acknowledge each other through our ochre, through the ways we dressed, and because we don’t wear our ochre and our traditional things anymore, we have to acknowledge it in the open, so we know who is who, but traditionally we would know who we are through the way we spoke and the way we carved our instruments and our artefacts. 

“Acknowledgement has always been in our culture. When you would travel from one Country to the next, you had to be welcomed, you couldn’t just walk across Country because you felt like it, you had to get permission to travel from here to there. Respect for Country is about respecting the people who were there before. For us, we’ve always been here, we haven’t left, so we all continue to acknowledge the people who came before us because they’re in the land. Our people are in Country, and all of the creation stories, all of the things that make us who we are, are in our Country.”

When the workshop finished we packed up the space and reflected on the proceedings of the day. Before we left, I shared this story with Warren, about the Rock from Birrarung, he just smiled and nodded.

“It’s an important lesson that one.”

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like: Protecting Our Home

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Alberto Ruz Buenfil is the kind of spirited soul that shakes society.

His father was a notable archaeologist that unearthed the tomb of Pakal in the ancient Mayan city of Palenque, in the Yucatan region of Mexico, where he grew up. In 1968, at the tender age of 22, Alberto left Mexico and embarked on a long journey. Influenced by the global counterculture movement, he travelled with a group of friends across North America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and India. In each town they’d stay in an eco-village or community and learn from their alternative ways of living. With old beaten cars, they would drive in “caravan”, and upon arrival they would put on a theatrical show as an offering for the welcome of that community.

“We ended up travelling as a group for eight years. In those years, our nomadic tribe went everywhere: from communities in Sweden to ashrams in India and eco-villages in Greece. As the years went by members of the tribe began having children and so we decided it was time to stop. The kids were asking for more permanent friends and the women wanted a place to build a nest, so we went back home to Mexico.”

This tribe, now composed of 20 adults and 12 children, searched the country for the ideal settlement to start their own community. They travelled the country until Alberto stumbled upon Tepoztlan, a charming town just one hour south of Mexico City.

“This place called us, he searched for us, he found us. I was the one who arrived first and what most attracted me was a tree, a fantastic tree. After seeing that tree, I saw the possibility. Even though it didn’t have wells or springs, and it was a very dry spot, we had learned in our travels how to deal with arid landscapes from our time in a Kibbutz in Israel. If they could grow anything in the desert, then we could live here too. So we settled here in 1982 and named it Huehuecoyotl.”

Huehuecoyotl is the god of the arts, music and ceremonial dance in the Mexica tradition.

“Each community tends to have a common interest that brings them together, from our years traveling the World we knew that ours was our passion for the arts.”

Huehuecoyotl also means “old coyote” in Nahuatl, which is also how eventually Alberto received his nickname, El Coyote.

“The first thing was to open up a path, then we built a water catchment to be able to sustain ourselves. When our children grew up we built a school. Of course we were the teachers. Then parents from the town began sending their kids to our school, because we offered an alternative system. This also allowed our children to meet kids from outside of the community.

“As a community we developed what we call ‘eco-techniques’ and began hosting workshops and teaching them here. As my father was an archaeologist, I knew the importance of preserving history, so throughout the years of travel I had kept testimonies of everything that we had lived, which became the content of our conferences, shows and books. We even had a monthly magazine.”

The magazine focused on stories of community, land rights, and eco-techniques to live in harmony with nature, avant-garde content for Mexico in the 1980s.

By 1996, at the age of 50, El Coyote felt the call of the road again and embarked on another epic journey, this time he headed south.

“I was always inspired by movement. Movement opens the head, opens the heart, opens your vision of the world, opens everything it has to offer. And I have always been like that. All my life I’ve tried to learn more and more and more from everywhere I go and from the people that I meet. So in 1996, I left with a bus from here and headed to Tierra del Fuego, to the end of America. I started a new caravan. We left here in June of 1996 and had enough money for gasoline to get to Puebla.”

Puebla is a city two hours drive south from Huehuecoyotl. The bus had already journeyed from Colorado, a classic American school-bus, a gift from a close friend. After converting it into a mobile home, El Coyote set-off, accompanied by a new group of young adventurers.

“About ten other people got on the bus, and at the last moment a lady with a van joined too. That’s how “the Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz” (the Rainbow Caravan of Peace) was formed. So once we arrived in Puebla, we thought how are we going to get to Veracruz? Well, we are going to host workshops and give presentations on eco-techniques, because that’s what we know how to do. In my opinion when you arrive somewhere you have to offer something. Not see what you can get, but what you can give. So that’s what we did. I have friends in Puebla who received us and helped us organise the workshops. Then from there we went to Veracruz and did the same. In Veracruz, the Zapatistas heard about us and invited us to go to Chiapas. So we headed down to Chiapas.”

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation is a far-left political militant group that has been at war with the Mexican state since 1994. The group takes its name from Emiliano Zapata, the commander of the Liberation Army of the South during the Mexican Revolution. They aim to continue Zapata’s work of land reforms and Indigenous Rights, to this day they control large areas of the region of Chiapas.

“At that time, the Zapatista movement was hosting a meeting of thousands of people, about 6000 left radicals from all over the world. The Zapatistas built a tent city for them, with bathrooms and dining rooms and all. So we got there with our bus and the other little truck, and brought some gifts, among them my books and our music, and we gave it to Subcomandante Marcos, we then interviewed him too. Then we settled in the Zapatista community and did the same thing: first bring out the theatre and then give workshops about eco-techniques. We stayed there for about a month. The event had ended and everyone left, but we stayed there, living, coexisting with the Zapatista community and learning a lot from them too.”

Initially, El Coyote thought the journey south would take him two to three years, instead it lasted thirteen. From war zones to crowded favelas and remote Indigenous villages, everywhere they went the Rainbow Caravan for Peace would first put on a theatre show and then host workshops teaching eco-techniques to the locals, just how they had done for the Zapatistas. Their workshops taught locals different things: from how to build solar panels and rain catchment technologies, to composting and alternative eco-schools. In many towns and cities they would also convene gatherings of local environmental and Indigenous groups, so they could share their knowledge too.

“We also organised and convened two huge international gatherings, one in Peru, at the foot of Machu Picchu and the other in Brazil, in Alto Paraíso. We hosted other smaller gatherings in communities across Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, in each place we travelled to. The gatherings attracted environmental groups, Indigenous groups, artists and everything in between. They would usually last a week and they were the impetus for what then became the Council of Visions of Guardians of the Earth and CASA: the Council of Sustainable Settlements of Latin America.

“In some countries we stayed for months, in other countries we stayed for over a year. That is why it took us so long. Although we were travelling at an interesting historical moment, where neoliberal governments were being replaced by social, leftist governments. So borders that before would’ve been closed to us, all welcomed us instead. Doors were opening everywhere for us to continue working with communities, hosting workshops, conferences, gatherings, shows. So yes, we left a mark, a very beautiful mark everywhere we went. And on those trips, we began to form relationships with the locals, people left the caravan, new ones joined, couples were formed and new projects were mushrooming everywhere we had been.”

In 2005, the Rainbow Caravan of Peace made it to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, nine years after leaving Tepoztlan.

“Once we arrived in Tierra del Fuego, we had the invitation to hold another great gathering in Brazil, ‘The Second Great Call of the Beijaflor (Hummingbird)’ in Alto Paraíso. Well technically the trip was done, we had reached Tierra del Fuego, which had been my commitment to the Great Spirit, to reach Tierra del Fuego and raise the rainbow flag, the flag of the land and the flag of peace among the glaciers. I had lowered the Argentinian flag and put up ours instead, but nevertheless we headed back north to help setup this large gathering.”

At the Second Hummingbird Gathering in Alto Paraíso, El Coyote met Gilberto Gil, then the Minister of Culture of Brazil. Gil knew about El Coyote, he had read his latest book on his caravan travels and was inspired by all of the work he had accomplished across the continent. Gil is one of Brazil’s most notable figures, a famous musician from Bahia and a vocal opponent of Brazil’s previous military government.

“So Gil told me ‘I want you to join us here in Brazil, to become part of the project we are doing now. The money that is allocated to culture, for the whole country, always goes to the same things: opera, art, dance, carnival. But now we are going to allocate it to living culture points. And I need a caravan that goes to different towns across the country and brings the communities together and celebrates their local traditions and knowledge. And you already have the caravan and the know-how. You already did it in 16 other countries, you have the experience. Please, do it here.’”

The Rainbow Caravan for Peace spent four more years travelling around Brazil. This would be the first funding the caravan and its tribe received.

“The only time when we had institutional money was when we were working with the Ministry of Culture of Brazil, with Gilberto Gil. There he gave us money to repair the vehicles, to buy a truck, to have better equipment, and for the first time each of the members of the caravan received what was equivalent to 100 reais a month. The rest of the time, there were no wages, there were no privileges. I was never privileged, I worked in mechanics, in the dry latrines, in everything that had to be done. The caravan years took me from 50 to 64 years. Then I remembered the Beatles song ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, and I decided that it was time to head home.”

In 2009, the World Social Forum Gathering was taking place in Belem de Para, where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean. The event attracted 150,000 people and discussions ranged from the protection of the Amazon Rainforest to alternative economic models. El Coyote decided it would be the ideal setting to end the Rainbow Caravan of Peace’s epic voyage.

“When we got to the forum we built a circus tent for 500 people. Sound, lights, costumes, cooking, everything. By then we knew how to set this stuff up, we called it ‘The Village of Peace’ and hosted talks and shows. After it ended, I told the tribe ‘this is where my journey ends, I’ll stop here. Whoever wants to continue, can continue.’ And I gave away one of the buses, and the other one I sent to Mexico thanks to donations. The one that is parked here.”

In the 13 years of travel, 450 people joined and left the Rainbow Caravan of Peace from a total of 17 different countries. El Coyote was the only one that travelled the entire time.

“I have done all this as a service to Mother Earth, as a volunteer for humanity. On that trip it became very clear to me, especially after having lived for a long time in the towns around the Andes with the Aymara peoples, that Pachamama comes before anything else. We ecologists knew it, we knew that the Earth was not ours, but that we belong to the Earth, but it is one thing to know it and another to live it.

“The Aymara, they live it. Their concept of Sumak Kawsay (good living) is still alive, which means caring for Mother Earth. So having learned that lesson, at a certain point I realised we cannot exclude the legal part of the rights of Mother Earth, it can’t just be a ceremony, it has to become law. And then I read that Evo Morales, who was the President of Bolivia at the time, had brought the first Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth to the United Nations, and I said to myself ‘wow, well that’s what I want to do from here on out.’ So in 2009, I closed the chapter of the caravan in Belén de Para.”

Back in Mexico, El Coyote returned to Huehuecoyotl. He was then hired by the local municipality of Coyoacán to implement his workshops at the neighbourhood level, he called these “eco-barrios” (eco-neighbourhoods) and he spent three more years holding the same eco-technique workshops around the southern part of Mexico City, with the same bus that had criss-crossed the Americas.

“We created a small group of ten people and travelled to ten neighbourhoods of Coyoacán. We mainly held a training program of 40 to 50 eco-techniques, from how to build an ecological house to how to teach at an ecological school. The idea was to give the local leaders of the communities the tools so that then they could develop their own projects.”

Many of the neighbourhoods they entered were dangerous, controlled by gangs and narcos. Yet, El Coyote and his team would arrive and the first thing they would do was put on their signature theatre show, this would make them stars with the neighbourhood children and therefore grant them protection from the local gang leader. El Coyote reminisces that despite the areas of high risk that he worked in, nobody from his team was ever hurt. At the end of the training courses they would bring the students back to Huehuecoyotl for a weekend.

“We brought them here to camp and for three days we showed them how to build what they had learned in the workshops. For example how to make a solar panel, or how to make a rain catchment system, build compost toilets, etcetera. Many of the attendees had never lived a week without witnessing a shootout. We would host singing circles around a fire and cook-outs outside. Everyone always left inspired.”

After his neighbourhood work, El Coyote was engaged by the Governor of Morelos to become the State’s Director of Environmental Culture.

“So I started doing things like I’ve always done. I still had the truck, we still had the samples, we still had a number of things, and I started trying to do them in the state. And it didn’t work. I began to see that there was a blockade on the part of the Secretary of Sustainable Development, who did not want me to do anything but sit there from eight to five every day. So I knew I wouldn’t stay long, but during that time I did manage to install an ecological house in Cuernavaca’s main park. A beautiful ecological house with ten eco-technologies: ten solar panels, bicycle pumps, a rain catchment system, an orchard, everything. Next to it we set up a large cultural centre and began hosting events that celebrated Earth Day, Water Day, the day against open-pit mining. Such were the things that we celebrated, instead of ‘Saint Day’ or ‘Independence Day’ or ‘Revolution Day’. Everything we celebrated was related to ecology. That didn’t go well with the Governor.”

After his stint in Mexican institutions, in 2015 El Coyote returned to his home of Huehuecoyotl and shifted his attention to the realisation he had had at the end of his voyage, to focus on spreading the Andean vision of giving legal rights to nature.

“In the summers I would go to Italy and friends would organise a tour for me all over the country in several different towns. I would usually stay two to three days in each place. One summer I visited 25 towns. In each I gave talks, hosted gatherings, opened temazcales and at the end of each visit I delivered ‘The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth’ to the Mayor, as well as a flag of peace to put in their municipality. I did the same in Switzerland and Spain too.”

Since the pandemic El Coyote has been promoting the legal rights of Mother Nature online instead, while also publishing memoirs of his adventurous life.

“I decided from a very young age not to live a normal life and not to live only one life. So all those who speak of their past lives and how their souls had reincarnated from Napoleon or Cleopatra etcetera. Well I decided not to investigate my past lives, but instead live many lives in one.”

Alberto Ruz Buenfil lives his life in service to Mother Nature. Many projects and organisations emerged thanks to the Rainbow Caravan of Peace’s work across the Americas. The eco-techniques developed in Huehuecoyotl are now being taught at universities in Mexico; his legendary gatherings still bring hundreds of environmentalists together every year; and Coyoacán is the neighbourhood in Mexico City with the most urban food farms, thanks to his eco-barrios initiative. El Coyote’s achievements are a testament of how environmental change emerges through strengthening communities with creativity and consciousness.

“I always quote the same phrase from Martin Luther King: ‘even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.’”

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Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

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Dry leaves crunched under my feet. I looked at the dead plant material layered over the forest floor and glanced ahead to a group of workers from the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, who were sweeping this plant litter to create what looked like a pathway through the forest. Unfortunately they were creating a firebreak, a gap in vegetation that acts as a barrier for the wildfire that was sweeping through the forest to my left. After an hour of grueling work, the workers found a log, they brushed off insects with their hands before sitting down to drink water and talk. I sat down on the end of the log, it was brittle and cracked under my weight, a sign of the many insects that occupied its core. I reached for the drink bottle attached to my camera bag. I drank water and looked to the workers as smoke blew over and around our heads, it was impossible not to breathe it in.

Ze, one of the workers, was seated next to me, and as the smoke accumulated in my lungs, I coughed. He raised his eyebrows then smiled. I realised this is not a new experience for him, he clearly has done this before, all of these men probably have. It’s a sad reality of life in the Brazilian Amazon, where fire activity is rapidly increasing. These fires are often caused by weather, but more often they are the result of the economic interests of farmers, who use fire to deforest and prepare their land for crops and pasture. Agriculture has been the most valuable sector of Brazil’s economy in recent years, so farmers are encouraged and supported in their practices as they fuel the country’s economic growth. But when farmers’ burning practices coincide with dry conditions, their fires can easily move, escaping their control, spreading across their property, and with the wind, to nearby land.

The Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute (YTI), founded by Ashaninka leader Benki Piyãko, is focused on recovering degraded land caused by illegal logging activities to create extensive cattle farms. The Institute is attempting to revert the loss of biodiversity, and the destruction of virgin forest and precious water sources, including the Jurua River, one of the most important tributaries of the Amazon River, which sustains the Amazon rain forest. Due to the focus on recovering degraded land, the YTI’s property borders farms — the land was previously owned by cattle grazers — who regularly use fire practices.

When I arrived at the YTI three weeks ago, Benki spoke of the intense drought they are currently experiencing. He encouraged me to walk through the forest to see the dying plants and trees. One day, when visiting a sacred water spring on the Institute’s land, I heard a branch fall from a nearby palm, crashing through the forest canopy onto the ground, maybe 20 metres from where I stood. I was with a friend, Hami, and I turned to him and echoed Benki’s words, “the forest needs water”. Yet the rain has not come to quench the land’s thirst, Benki says it has been over 90 days with almost no rain. Last Tuesday morning, light rain offered the forest a shower, bathing the leaves and branches without the necessary volume to satisfy the roots.

A week later, in the heat of the day, just after lunch, a group of us gathered in an outdoor seating area near the entry to Benki’s home. Benki spoke to us about the YTI’s work, and the challenges they are currently facing with the drought. He spoke about the threat of fire, knowing that September is traditionally the hottest month of the year and the wet season rains don’t truly begin until October. He then spoke of the intensity of this drought and how the Jurua River, which flanks the Institute’s land, was at a historically low level, as shallow as anyone living can remember. He then invited everyone on a field trip, in two boats, to experience the truth in his words. We travelled less than a kilometre up the River, we had to get out twice to push the boats when the water was too low. Eventually when there was not enough water for us to move any further, we got out, stepping into the River, which reached our shins or ankles, depending on our height. Despite this sad reality, Benki encouraged everyone to bathe in the River and enjoy the power and beauty of the water.

This drought has intensified with the return of the El Niño weather system, which involves the weakening of easterly trade winds and the subsequent movement of warm water from the western Pacific to the western coast of South America. It is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is countered by a cool phase, La Niña. The United States of America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, through its Climate Prediction Center, released a report in early June heralding that El Niño conditions were again present in the world.

During the past two major El Niño events (from 2014 to 2016, and 1997 to 1998), the Amazon rain forest experienced significantly severe droughts. Research conducted by Dr Amy Bennett, a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Leeds, found that in the 2014 to 2016 El Niño event, the Amazon rain forest was unable to function as a carbon sink due to an increase in the death of trees. It reminds me of Benki’s words, how the trees are dying, which in turn reminds me of a speech he offered in the initial days of this visit. A group of us were sitting in the forest: Benki’s family, workers from the Institute and guests, like me, Occidentals, who Benki calls “my friends from all over the world”. We shared the afternoon together, listening and learning with the plants, as we tuned into the natural consciousness that surrounded us. 

It’s easy to think the forest is not aware, science has been arguing this for years. Growing evidence acknowledges the conscious activity of natural ecosystems, and how being with nature can improve physical and mental health. This was the focus of Benki’s speech, which offered his understanding of the qualities of the forest.

“We are alive, we breathe air, air is medicine. Who breathes poison? Nobody breathes poison, you would die. When we go into the forest, we breathe fresh air, because the forest purifies everything. The Earth gives everything to us. It gives us trees that are able to give us fruit… If you eat the fruit of a native tree, it’s pure medicine. If you drink the tea from the bark of a native tree, it’s pure medicine. If you wet the earth, and take a bath in the clay, it’s pure medicine. Everything is medicine here.

“The science world today discovers everything there is in the forest, all of the molecules of all of the plants, that is important, yet everyone wants to be the owner of the discovery of these plants, yet they are not the owner of anything. This thinking has created and spread a sickness in the world.

“This is why we need to take care of the natural medicines, because they can heal, man can heal, the forest can heal. We need to take care of this diversity. Do you think the animals of the forest need a vaccine? They don’t, because they know all of the medicines of the forest, they know what to eat to be able to heal the illnesses inside their bodies. Do we know more than the animals, are we the teachers teaching the animals how to live with this knowledge? No. They are born like that, like we are born like that, but they take much better care than the man. And that’s what we say worldwide, if we don’t take care of the water, of the Earth, we will come to the point where there will be nothing left.”

These words were enhanced by the setting of Benki’s talk, the forest that he was speaking with, and I recalled his words as I followed the workers carving firebreaks through the forest with machetes and rakes. We had arrived at an opening, and I followed them into a clearing and I saw the devastation of the fire we were meeting: the ground before us was covered in grey and white ash, most of the tree trunks were now black, half their previous size, and the green leaves of this part of the forest had vanished in flames the previous night. The opening was maybe 850 metres long and 100 metres wide, and walking through the dead trees and charred remains of the plants that once covered the forest floor, offered space to see the group of workers and volunteers who had gathered to put out the fires that had spread over the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute’s land. Everyone’s face reflected the devastation they were feeling, trying to comprehend the landscape we were witnessing, knowing just 24 hours before it was beautiful lush forest filled with the conscious awareness of the plants, trees, animals and insects who co-created this ecosystem. We all felt the grief of the life that we had lost.

With our heads bowed, we made our way back into the forest that remained, searching for the source of the smoke that was entering our lungs, finding small and big fires that we tried to put out with rakes and shovels. When we thought we had contained a small section of fire, it would spark again and burn with speed, and we would rush to contain it. We split into small groups to focus on the different fires, each group armed with machetes and rakes. I regularly thought, surely there is a better way to fight this fire. One of the other volunteers told me that Benki had called the Mayor of the local town Marechal Thaumaturgo, Valdélio Furtado, for support. “They have no fire fighting service nor fire fighting equipment to offer, so Valdélio came with his colleagues and friends.”

He was pointing to the man that was leading our group through the forest, wearing a peach coloured polo shirt and a white cap while carrying a long stick to help clear through the plants and vines. He held up a large vine for the group to pass under, I smiled at him to show gratitude, he smiled back and nodded, and as I went to grasp a nearby tree to balance as I stepped over a log on the ground, he pointed with his stick to stop me. I looked at him, he pointed to the tree and then shook his head. He spoke to me in Portuguese and my friend Tommaso translated, “he said not to touch that”, I asked why, “I’m not sure, but it won’t be good for your skin”. I needed something to hold onto, so I grasped a nearby branch that was part of a different plant. It shook with my weight. Two ants fell from higher branches onto the back of my hand, I hadn’t noticed until I received my first bite, and a deep pain moved along my fingertips and up towards my shoulder. It was followed by a second bite, so I quickly brushed the ants from my hand. I felt to make a noise to communicate my pain, but I realised fighting a fire deep in the rain forest means being exposed to insects my body isn’t used to.

I was pulled from my pain by a sound in the distance: a tractor and falling trees. I followed the group as we trudged ahead and the sound became louder. Soon I could see a yellow and black New Holland bulldozer, operated by Chagas, one of the key workers at the YTI. He was creating a path into the forest that would support the next phase of the fire fight. Benki had reflected on the work of the morning, he felt we hadn’t stopped the fires we had attempted to, in some situations we helped to spread them, so we needed a new approach. Chagas’ path would allow us to carry water with buckets and large plastic bottles. We would still sweep up the organic matter that covered the forest floor to create firebreaks, but we would also complement this with water, dampening the Earth to slow the fire’s path, and when we could, using water to extinguish the flames.

In this moment, a pickup truck arrived and the crew inside offered us lunch: a caldo (a stew) kindly cooked by Nayana, another key member of the YTI team. Everyone gathered to regenerate, and then it was back to work, now with the aid of water. When it got dark, a group of six people, including Benki, tried to contain a fire that had unexpectedly erupted out of control, spreading throughout the forest. They worked all night, combatting the sparks and flames that were spreading through the dry plant material on the forest floor. They returned to the community in the morning to pick up those who were ready to support, directing them to this new front. Chagas had also been working hard, fixing an 80 year old truck to ensure the day’s activities were better resourced. The truck’s tray was fitted with two large containers for water, which would be pumped into an assortment of connected hoses. The fire the team were trying to contain throughout the night had moved towards one of the roads that helped navigate the Institute’s 1100 hectares. This location assisted our efforts, as it meant the truck could remain on the road and a new path didn’t need to be created. We could also access a nearby fish pond, further up the road, when we ran out of water.

I had woken that morning with a swollen right hand, a result of the ant bites from the previous day, and a large wound on my right knee. Everyone was visibly affected by this experience, if not through wounds like my own, then a furrowed brow reflected their emotions. Yet the team’s morale was high, the care for one another was palpable, a sense of community was clearly our strongest resource. This was emphasised when we began using the pump and hose. The containers couldn’t hold enough water for sustained use — a larger container was eventually sought — the pump needed to be fixed on two occasions, and the connecting hoses often sprayed water. Again I found myself thinking, surely there is a better way to fight this fire, appreciating the lack of resources at the YTI, as well as the municipality of Marechal Thaumaturgo, to face this situation.

The past two Presidents of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, liberally cut funding to the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA). Among its directives, IBAMA is focused on protecting the forest from loggers, farming and grazing, as well as other activities, like fire, that threaten the Amazon rain forest. In 2017 Temer cut IBAMA’s budget by around 40%, in 2019 Bolsonaro removed 24%, and he removed a further 24% in 2021. These cuts led to IBAMA’s removal of approximately 1400 people who worked at the National Center for Prevention and Fight against Forest Fires (Prevfogo) in 2020, citing an “exhaustion of resources”.

In this political landscape, in an economy that subsidises the destruction of the rain forest, I understand why an Indigenous-led organisation like the YTI, in the remote state of Acre, in the even more remote municipality of Marechal Thaumaturgo, lack the resources to fight a wildfire. It underlines why the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC) have been so focused on securing funds at the United Nations’ climate conferences to build resilience and adapt to a changing climate. Yet this movement took many years to gain the necessary commitment from governments, and frontline communities now need to wade through a bureaucratic system of policies and guidelines to receive money, further delaying the support they need. It’s with urgency that the YTI, along with their partners the Boa Foundation and Little Treehouse, have been fundraising — to purchase a truck with a water tank and firehoses, and backpacks to carry and disperse water — to combat the conditions of this deepening drought and the possibility of more fire. This equipment will also support the thirsty forest throughout the drought, as well as the Institute’s ongoing planting efforts.

As I write these words, after four days, the fire still burns. Last night, we thought it was under control, allowing Benki time to rest, to sit with the group under the stars, to watch the moon rise, and offer his reflections to us all.

“For us, in our lives, we see the Earth not just as a place where we walk, but also as a Mother. It’s Her that is supporting this living universe, and today we see everything the Earth has been giving us for millions of years, and this change that is happening now will affect all of our lives. We cannot think about what will happen in the future, we need to think about the present moment, because what we are planting here in the present moment will define our future…

“We have to see all of the plants as brothers and sisters of our life, because it’s from them, and our Mother, that we breathe, that we eat. We are all connecting to the same source… And this heat that is happening is our responsibility, it is the responsibility of every government, every person of this Earth, and if no one takes care of it, we will pay a high price that no one deserves…

“We lost more trees in four days than what we planted in the first five years of the Institute, as well as all of the plants and animals that also died there. Since I was a kid, I have been planting the forest to save the biodiversity, and now I am experiencing this shock. We need the consciousness to understand what we are doing with our lives. This has been very strong for me, very hard…

“These past two days, it rained over all the surrounding areas, but not here, in this place. There was a very strong wind, but it didn’t rain. But it was good, all of the other fires in the area are now out. And we, like hummingbirds, carried water to put out our fire. And all of you who came and helped us in this difficult moment, it created an opportunity for us all to see this reality and think about what we are going to do from now on.”

What will we do? For us here at the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, the fire still burns, and we continue on together, protecting our Mother, our nature, our world.

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

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Raposa-Serra do Sol, in the State of Roraima, in the north of Brazil, is a network of biomes locally known as lavrado. In this region, the lavrado encompass grasslands, steppe savannas, shrubs and patches of small forest, which are part of a delicate interconnected network of ecosystems that nourish and support what is often referred to as the Amazon. These ecosystems are sustained by a mostly humid climate, with two clear seasons: the wet from April to November; and the dry from December to March. During the wet months, seasonal lakes appear that connect to larger rivers, watercourses that act as barriers against fire. In dry years, during El Niño events, these once watery channels become corridors of fire.

Lavrados are largely protected in Brazil due to the demarcation of Indigenous territories — which encompass more than 46 percent of Roraima State — including Raposa-Serra do Sol, the Land of the Fox and Mountain of the Sun, which covers more than 1.7 million hectares. Raposa-Serra do Sol was signed into Brazilian law by President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva on April 15 2005. The land is along the border with Venezuela and Guyana, and is the home to approximately 58,000 inhabitants from nine different Indigenous communities: Macuxi, Wapichana, Taurepang, Ingarikó, Wai-Wai, Yanomami, Ye’kuana, Patamona, and Sapará. The way of life of these communities is focused on their environment, where they hunt, farm and fish.

The demarcation process emerged through community discussions in 1983, which developed into the Assemblies of Tuxauas and led to the formation of the Conselho Indígena de Roraima (Indigenous Council of Roraima, the CIR) in 1990. The CIR brought together people from Ingarikó, Macuxi, Patamona, Sapará, Taurepang, Wai-Wai, Wapichana, Yanomami and Ye’kuana communities, who advocated for their collective and respective sovereignty. For the first two decades of operations, the CIR focused on the struggle for demarcation of the lands of the Ingaricó, Macuxi, Patamona, Tuarepang and Wapichana peoples, which spans nearly half of Roraima, and is one the highest areas of conservation of any State in the Brazilian Amazon.

While this is a story of the symbiotic relationship between the Indigenous Peoples and their land, it is also a story of the way this land, and how land more generally, is perceived through an economic and political lens by both the Brazilian and international community.

Raposa-Serra do Sol is rich in biodiversity — and cultural significance to the people who have long called it home — and abundant in so called natural resources: deposits of gold, diamond, titanium, amethyst, kaolin, zinc, copper, niobium, cassiterite, crystal, diatomite, barite, molybdenum, niobium, limestone, mineral water and possibly, although not confirmed, oil.

The long resistance of the Indigenous Peoples of Raposa-Serra do Sol is exemplified by the well-documented interest in the neighbouring Yanomami territory by opportunistic miners.

The invasion of miners through Yanomami territory began after the fall of Brazil’s lengthy military dictatorship. The Federal Government of the dictatorship had encouraged the belief that the Amazon will bring economic development to Brazil. Advertising in 1972 claimed that the Amazon is where “land is cheap and your farm can have all the pasture your cattle need.” This claim was aided by tax incentives and financing to support those seeking this proposed opportunity.

Propelled by the discovery of gold at the base of Serra Pelada, in the State of Pará, a mining rush swept through the north of Brazil into Yanomami territory. Fuelled by personal ambition, miners were emboldened by the belief that Brazilian society would be strengthened by the extraction of the natural resources supposedly offered by the Amazon rain forest. 40,000 miners sought gold and cassiterite in Yanomami territory, viewing the Yanomami people as obstacles to overcome along the path toward fortune.

In the town of Saúde, in the State of Bahia, a young Lieutenant in the Brazilian Army, Jair Bolsonaro, prospected for gold while on holiday during his active service. His superiors received word of this holiday — which he enjoyed with three lieutenants and two paratrooper sergeants — leading to an internal evaluation that labelled the young Bolsonaro as having “excessive ambition”. This may have been true — Bolsonaro’s ambition was evident when he left the army to begin his long political career — but it also reflected the view that mining equated to wealth, both personal and collective, which was encouraged by the Brazilian government and was gaining more popularity in Brazilian society. A 1987 survey by Brazilian anthropologists found that 30 percent of Indigenous territories had experienced entry by independent miners and 70 percent by mining companies.

As miners established themselves on Yanomami territory, more and more violence was directed toward Yanomami people, leading to the death of around twenty percent of their population over seven years. Yanomami spiritual and political leader Davi Kopenawa, along with Survival International and the Comissão Pró-Yanomami (CCPY), led an international campaign for the demarcation and protection of Yanomami territory through the Interministerial Decree nº 160 on September 13 1988, which declared 8,216,925 hectares of land as the permanent possession of the Yanomami People.

The Decree was issued in the lead-up to the ratification of the new Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil, which guaranteed the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by articulating the legitimacy of the Brazilian State to legislate over them. This was achieved through Chapter VIII, and specifically Article 231, which defines Indigenous territory as land “traditionally occupied…which they live on a permanent basis…used for their productive activities, those indispensable to the preservation of the environmental resources necessary for their well-being and for their physical and cultural reproduction, according to their uses, customs and traditions”. Article 231 articulated the Brazilian State will demarcate, protect and ensure respect for Indigenous territories; that Indigenous Peoples will have exclusive use of the resources emanating from the soil, rivers and lakes existing within their territories; that the minerals below their territories can only be prospected and mined with the authorisation of the National Congress; that the removal of Indigenous Peoples from their land is forbidden except by the National Congress (in case of a catastrophe, an epidemic or in the interest of the sovereignty of Brazil); and any act with a view to occupation, domain or possession of their lands is “null and void”, unless it was accomplished with “relevant public interest” of the Brazilian State and through a supplementary law. Article 232 gave the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil the right to sue to defend their rights and interests.

The Yanomami’s submission of Decree nº 160, with support of the Rights contained within the new Constitution, inspired a long process that involved significant opposition, which included Members of Congress from Roraima filing a lawsuit against the process, and the Governor of the State of Amazonas threatening to send state police to shoot any Fondazione Nazionale dell’Indio (FUNAI) agent trying to demarcate the territory. Jair Bolsonaro, now the Federal Deputy for Rio de Janeiro, asked the Federal Congress, “that area is the richest in the country, why set up an indigenous reserve there?” He also claimed the Yanomami were a threat to national security and could start a separatist movement. This echoed the words of Sertanista Orlando Villas-Bôas, who, in the 1970s, articulated the belief that the creation of Indigenous reserves in border areas were a risk to the integrity of the Brazilian territory and that missionaries had the covert goal of establishing independent or semi-independent bodies that would fragment the Brazilian Government’s control of the Amazon. Despite these objections, the Decree nº 160 was finally passed into Brazilian law in 1992 and the many miners operating in Yanomami Territory were temporarily expelled.

Throughout this period, the Indigenous Peoples of Raposa-Serra do Sol were also struggling with the incursions of miners, as well as those of cattle breeders, rice producers and the Brazilian Army — who built barracks in the area and carried out training procedures near the border with Guyana. Indigenous land was stolen or destroyed, and many Indigenous Peoples suffered through physical attacks. These tensions were partly inspired by the advancement of the demarcation process of Raposa-Serra do Sol, through mapping conducted by FUNAI and the ratification of the territory by President Lula da Silva through Decree 534/2005, which led to the Federal Government trying to remove the remaining non-Indigenous occupants, who resisted, burning bridges and attacking community centres, leading to violent confrontations that culminated in the shooting of ten Indigenous people on May 5 2008.

As this process was conducted by Federal bodies, the State Government of Roraima, encouraged by local landowners reluctant to relinquish control of these lands, attempted to stop the demarcation of Raposa-Serra do Sol. The State Government filed an injunction alleging “FUNAI has promoted the compensation and removal of the non-indigenous settlers since 2002.” The injunction articulates the process of removal, and the subsequent compensation for the “non-Indigenous settlers”, and how “a group of 40 to 50 families, under the leadership of 8 large-scale rice growing business owners, do not accept the government’s offers and refuse to leave the location.” The injunction meant that the settlers could not be removed until legal actions dealing with the demarcation of Raposa-Serra do Sol were resolved, which required the intervention of the Brazilian Supreme Court, who initially set August 27 2008 as the date of its ruling.

The first and only judge to vote on August 27, Carlos Ayres Britto, voted in favour of the demarcation, stating the Indigenous Peoples of Raposa-Serra do Sol are the original and continuous occupants of the territory, and the area of land outlined by FUNAI needed to be maintained to ensure these communities could maintain their way of life. The ruling was then postponed after one of the justices, Carlos Alberto Menezes Direito, asked for more time to further examine the case. The second session of the judgement occurred on December 10, with another seven justices voting in favour of Raposa-Serra do Sol, until Minster Marco Aurélio de Mello requested to review the case further. Finally, on March 19 2009, the Supreme Court confirmed the validity of Raposa-Serra do Sol, with 10 justices voting in favour and only Minister de Mello voting against.

The judgement was given with 19 conditions, called “institutional safeguards“, which gave Brazilian states the right to be involved in demarcation processes, and could affect the way Indigenous territories would be approved in the future. Among the 19 conditions of the Raposa-Serra do Sol judgement was the first legal articulation of the Temporal Framework, often referred to as the “time frame”, or Marco Temporal.

The discussion of Marco Temporal relates to Indigenous Rights to land, as referenced within the Constitution, and specifically the land they “traditionally occupy”. Throughout the case there was significant discussion around the timeless connection between Indigenous Peoples and the land that defines their being, and how the land and Indigenous Peoples are interconnected. Yet as the case arose from the tensions between the different perceptions of the disputed territory — of the Indigenous Peoples, rice producers, farmers and miners, as well as the State and Federal Governments — a specific articulation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the laws that uphold them, was necessary. For the sake of specificity, I quote from the judgement (albeit a translation of the judgement) and the words of Minister Carlos Alberto Menezes Direito:

“In the first place, indigenous lands are lands occupied by Indians. They are not lands that they occupied in times gone by and no longer occupy; they are not lands that they occupied up to a certain date and no longer occupy. They are lands occupied by the Indians when the 1988 Constitution was promulgated.

“The landmark for determining indigenous occupation (5/10/1988) derives from the very constitutional system of protecting the rights of Indians, which could not fail to cover all the indigenous lands existing when the Constitution was promulgated, under penalty of giving rise to the unlawful dispossession of Indians by non-Indians after it came into force. This even occurred after the 1946 Constitution, even though it guaranteed their right over their lands… The correct extension of the protection initiated by the 1988 Constitution requires, therefore, that the presence of Indians be verified on the date of its promulgation… Occupation is, therefore, a fact to be verified.

“Secondly, indigenous lands are lands traditionally occupied by Indians. For José Afonso da Silva, so often cited in this process, contrary to what prevailed in previous Constitutions, the adverb ‘traditionally’ should not be understood as referring to an occupation since more than prehistoric times, an immemorial occupation:

“‘Traditionally occupied lands’ does not reveal a temporal relationship. If we refer to the Charter of 1 April 1680, which recognised that the Indians had the land where they are just like the land they occupied in the hinterland, we will see that the expression traditionally occupied does not mean immemorial occupation. It does not mean, therefore, lands immemorially occupied, i.e. lands that they would have been occupying since remote times that have already been lost to memory and, thus, only these would be their lands’. 

“The concept indicates mode of occupation, the way in which the Indians relate to the land. It is a new angle on the previous Constitutions which, if on the one hand justifies the geographical extension of the rights to be recognised, on the other hand may mean the requirement that occupation by the Indians must be in accordance with the culture and ‘modus vivendi’ which it is wished to preserve…

“‘Lands which Indians traditionally occupy’ are, of course, lands which the Indians have occupied for some time at the time of the promulgation of the Constitution. It is a question of both a constant presence and persistence on these lands. Lands that are eventually abandoned do not lend themselves to classification as indigenous lands, as already stated in Precedent no. 650 of this Federal Supreme Court. A well-defined presence in space over a certain period of time and a persistence of that presence, which makes permanent habitation another fact to be verified…

“I propose, therefore, that we adopt as the constitutional criterion not the theory of indigenato, but that of the indigenous fact. The assessment of the indigenous fact on 5th October 1988 involves a choice that gives prestige to legal security and avoids the practical difficulties of an immemorial investigation of indigenous occupation. But permanent dwelling is not the only parameter to be used in the identification of indigenous lands. In truth, it is the parameter for identifying the base or nucleus of occupation of indigenous lands, from which the other expressions of that occupation must manifest themselves.”

These words are what people refer to as the Marco Temporal thesis. It is a shift from the indigenato theory — the belief that the Rights of Indigenous Peoples predate the conception of the Brazilian State — to “indigenous fact” — fixing the date of occupation to the Constitution — an attempt to create clarity between the different perceptions of the demarcation of Indigenous territories in Brazil. Minister Gilmar Mendes described the judgement and its conditions:

“We fixed a true statute that should be applied not only to the case of Raposa-Serra do Sol, but also to the other demarcation processes, including ongoing processes. The court established, for example, that areas already demarcated will no longer be subject to revision, whether after or before the Constitution. With this, we put an end to a large number of controversies and some expansionist impulses”.

The judgement led to the demarcation of Raposa-Serra do Sol and the eviction of the non-Indigenous occupants. While a decision by the Supreme Court does not define future decisions, they are commonly used to frame similar cases, and after the initial relief of Raposa-Serra do Sol finally being demarcated, fears emerged with how the 19 conditions would influence the Rights of Indigenous Peoples across Brazil. In a letter addressed to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the peoples of Raposa-Serra do Sol, along with the Indigenous Council of Roraima, expressed their “concern” with the Supreme Court’s judgement:

“The Supreme Court did not confine itself to endorsing the Raposa demarcation, but it went further to interpret and define – if not ‘redefine’ – the rights of indigenous peoples as currently affirmed in Article 231 of the Brazilian federal Constitution. Among other things, the Supreme Court placed numerous limitations on the rights of indigenous peoples to their property. In many ways those rights are now unrecognizable when compared to their growing meaning and application under Brazilian law”.

In the “Special Report on the Situation of Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil“, James Anaya, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, provided the UN’s perspective on the situation:

“Article 27 of the United Nations Declaration affirms the right of indigenous peoples to ‘own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources’ they traditionally occupy; for its part, ILO Convention 169 declares in its article 14, ‘The rights of ownership and possession of the peoples concerned over the lands which they traditionally occupy shall be recognized.’ In light of these international standards, to which Brazil has committed, indigenous peoples must effectively enjoy rights over their lands that are the equivalent of ownership, and the State’s property interest in indigenous lands must operate only as a means of protection and not as a means of interference with indigenous control. Additionally, both under the Declaration (arts. 19, 30, 32) and ILO Convention 169 (arts. 6, 15.2), indigenous peoples have the right to be consulted on any decision affecting them with the objective of achieving their agreement or consent, including with regard to the exploitation of subsurface resources owned by the State or the establishment of military installations. Whatever the validity or ultimate disposition of the 19 conditions articulated by the Supreme Federal Tribunal, administrative, legislative and military authorities should exercise their powers in relation to indigenous lands in a manner consistent with these international norms. Further, the enactment of domestic legislation or administrative regulations to implement these standards is desirable.”

Through this period, discussion around the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant had reignited. Initially proposed in 1970s, the Plant was to be built in the state of Pará on the Xingu River, and after more than 40 years of the mappings, and considerable backlash from Indigenous Peoples and NGOs, an 18-member consortium called Norte Energia — comprising government-owned Eletrobrás and a handful of state pension and private investment funds — won an auction in 2010 to begin construction. The Federal Court suspended the licence citing concerns of “irreparable damage” to the environment and the belief the project was unconstitutional — specifically relating to Article 176 of the Federal Constitution and that the proposed dam was to be built on Indigenous territories. Discussions moved between the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), FUNAI, the representative bodies of the many affected Indigenous communities and the Brazilian Government, until President Lula da Silva signed a contract with Norte Energia on 26 August 2010. The Brazilian Government believed the project would maintain economic growth and would lift a proportion of the population from poverty, which relates to Article 231 of the Constitution and the Brazilian Government’s ability to possess Indigenous territory if done with “relevant public interest”. 

A federal court in Pará, suspended the commencement of construction as environmental requirements for the project had not been met. This was then overturned by Olindo Menezes, the President of the Federal Regional Court in Brasilia, a higher court than the one in Pará. Construction finally began but was quickly suspended, through a ruling by yet another judge, which was then overturned by the Supreme Court. Belo Monte was then constructed and directly impacted the Arara, Arawaté, Assurini, Curuaya, Juruna, Kayapó, Parakanã, Xicrin and Xipaya people. For the Arara and Juruna peoples of the Volta Grande do Xingu, the impacts were great, with almost 80% of the Xingu River in their lands diverted, completely transforming their territory while simultaneously affecting their economy, politics and culture.

In the background of this process, the Marco Temporal debate continued. Six requests for clarification of the Raposa-Serra do Sol decisions were made, which led the Attorney General of Brazil, through Ordinance 303, to state the conditions were mandatory for all processes of demarcation of Indigenous territories. Protests ensued throughout Brazil and the National Commission for Indigenous Policy (CNPI) asked the Brazilian Government to revoke the Attorney General’s Ordinance. This led to another trial in the Supreme Court, with the justices ruling that the Raposa-Serra do Sol decisions are “not binding on judges and courts when examining other cases relating to different indigenous lands” and the Raposa-Serra do Sol judgement “applies only to the land in question”. Despite this decision, the Attorney General reissued Ordinance 303. The Raposa-Serra do Sol case was then referenced in judgements on the Guyraroká, Limão Verde and Porquinhos territories, which were suspended or annulled.

These rulings, and the tension of the contrasting positions of the Attorney General and the Supreme Court, created greater ambiguity in the demarcation of Indigenous territories, which inspired the Government of President Michel Temer, in July 2017, to publish an official opinion on the matter, emphasising the Marco Temporal thesis, which Temer considered as “binding“. The Attorney General at the time, Grace Mendonça, offered her perspective:

“This opinion, now binding on the federal public administration, pays tribute to the guidelines established by the STF in the Raposa-Serra do Sol demarcation process, provides greater legal security and is aligned with an effort by the AGU to promote a reduction in litigation”.

FUNAI immediately reevaluated demarcation processes of Indigenous territories throughout Brazil, including those already submitted to the Ministry of Justice for approval. This was followed by the election of Jair Bolsonaro as President, who followed through with his campaign promise to not demarcate any new Indigenous territories. Bolsonaro, a champion of agribusiness and mining, actively pursued policies that threatened the Rights and lives of Indigenous Peoples, which led to current President Lula da Silva accusing his predecessor of “genocide” against Brazil’s Indigenous communities, particularly the Yanomami.

Despite all of these judgements and decisions, the debate surrounding Marco Temporal remains unresolved. This is due to an appeal by FUNAI to the Supreme Court in 2016 against the Foundation for Technological Support to the Environment (FATMA) in Santa Catarina, who previously filed an action for the repossession of the Ibirama-Laklãnõ Indigenous Territory in the State of Santa Catarina in 2009. This appeal had a “general repercussion” unanimously recognised by the Supreme Court on April 11 2019, meaning the judgement of this case — referred to as Extraordinary Appeal 1,017,365 — will act as a precedent for all cases involving the demarcation of Indigenous territories at all levels of the Brazilian judicial system.

The development of this case, and its ongoing delays, occurred alongside the progression of Bill (PL) 490/2007. The Bill, filed by the Federal Deputy of Mato Grasso Homero Pereira in 2007, has since received 13 additional points and has been archived and unarchived three times. PL 490 was approved on June 23 2021 by the Constitution and Justice Committee and moved into the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Federal Congress. The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) wrote a technical note summarising the intentions of PL 490:

“i) transfer the competence for the demarcation of Indigenous Lands from the Executive Power to the Legislative Power; ii) transform into Law the thesis of the temporal landmark, with the objective of making the demarcation of Indigenous Lands unviable; iii) allow the construction of highways, hydroelectric plants and other construction sites inside Indigenous Lands, without free, prior and informed consultation with the affected communities; iv) mitigate the difference between traditional indigenous land possession as stated in the Federal Constitution and private land possession under civil law, foreseeing that farmers may sign contracts with indigenous people to plant soybeans, raise cattle and even illegal gold-digging and mining sites, which violates the rights of Indigenous Peoples’  to the exclusive usufruct of demarcated lands and weakens the protection and demarcation of Indigenous Lands; v) authorize any person to question demarcation procedures in all phases of the process, including those already approved, causing legal insecurity; vi) recognize the legitimacy of titles, possessions, and domains taking place over areas of traditional occupation, as a means of favouring land grabbing; vii) revive dictatorial paradigms in the Brazilian legal system that were overcome by the Federal Constitution of 1988, such as the tutelary regime and assimilationism, which seek to acculturate Indigenous Peoples (within national standards), denying them the Right to Identity; viii) disregard and disrespect indigenous policy of non-contact with Indigenous Peoples in a situation of voluntary isolation by making it more flexible; ix) reformulate fundamental constitutional concepts of indigenous policy, such as the traditional nature of occupation, the original right and exclusive usufruct.”

The political process of PL 490 is connected to the legislative process of Marco Temporal, as both seek to change the legal interpretation of the Constitution, specifically the rules for demarcating Indigenous territories. The Bill’s reintroduction meant there were simultaneous processes focused on Indigenous territories in the legislative and political systems of Brazil.

On September 9 2021, the Federal Supreme Court began its judgement of Extraordinary Appeal 1,017,365. Minister Edson Fachin, Rapporteur of the process, voted against Marco Temporal and the definition of the Raposa-Serra do Sol judgement, and its conditions, as precedent for future demarcations of Indigenous territories. He offered his perspective when lodging his vote:

“It is necessary to recognise that the decision taken in Petition nº 3,388 (the Raposa-Serra do Sol case), far from achieving the desired pacification, brought about a real paralysis in the demarcation of indigenous lands in the country…with an intensification of conflicts and a significant worsening in the quality of life of Indians in Brazil… To say that Raposa-Serra do Sol is a precedent for the entire indigenous question is to make other indigenous ethnic groups unviable. It is to say that the solution given to the Macuxi is the same as that given to the Guarani. For the Xokleng, it would be the same for the Pataxó. Only those who, with all due respect, call everyone ‘Indian’ forget the more than 270 languages that make up Brazilian culture. And only he who pacifies the different and distinct ethnic groups can say that the solution must always be the same. Whoever does not see the difference does not promote equality.”

The case adjourned for a week, recommencing on September 15 2021. That morning, President Jair Bolsonaro offered his thoughts, “if this new time limit comes into existence, should the Supreme Court decide so, it will be a hard blow to our agribusiness, with almost catastrophic internal repercussions, but also abroad.” Hours later, Minister Nunes Marques voted in favour of Marco Temporal:

“It is necessary to bear in mind that the wording of the constitutional text clearly points in the direction that indigenous possession should exist in the year 1988, in traditional character. Possessions after 1988 cannot be considered traditional because this would imply not only recognition of indigenous rights to their lands, but also the right to unlimited expansion to new areas already definitively incorporated into the national real estate market.”

He felt that the Raposa-Serra do Sol judgement and conditions provided necessary clarity that should help settle future demarcations. Minister Alexandre de Moraes was next to vote and asked to see the case records, once again delaying the process.

In April this year, Supreme Court Justice Rosa Weber announced that the vote would resume on June 7. The Chamber of Deputies decision on PL 490 was also delayed, finally being approved on May 24, which led to a vote in the Federal Congress on May 30, with the Bill passing 283 votes to 155. The Bill thus enters into the Senate, where it has been given a new number, now known as PL 2903. On June 7 in the Supreme Court, Justice Alexandre de Moraes voted against the Marco Temporal thesis before proceedings were again halted, this time by Justice André Mendonça, who requested more time to analyse the case.

When casting his vote, Justice Alexandre de Moraes proposed alternative approaches to conflict caused by future demarcations. The first suggestion relates to what he called “prior indemnification“, where the Brazilian Government would compensate landowners of land traditionally occupied by Indigenous Peoples — only if there’s no evidence of illegal land seizure, physical conflict or legal disputes — on the date the Constitution was enacted. The second relates to the compensation of territories seized “in the public interest”, where the Brazilian Government would offer Indigenous Peoples an alternative territory to the one they intended to demarcate. Mauricio Terena, a legal coordinator for APIB believes this proposal does not support Indigenous Peoples, disconnecting them from their territory while potentially exacerbating current conflicts.

In response to the crisis created by the simultaneous votes in the Senate and the Supreme Court, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, issued a statement condemning the Marco Temporal thesis and urging both the Supreme Court and the Federal Senate, as well as the Brazilian Government, “to guarantee historic reparations for Indigenous Peoples and prevent the perpetuation of further injustices.“

It is here that the situation surrounding Marco Temporal currently stands. This has been a long process where lives have been lost and even more threatened. It has led to devastation on a personal, cultural and environmental level.

While this article has largely focused on dates, bills and judgements, this reflects the reality of the situation, where the lives of individuals and communities, and the natural environment they nurture and protect — which sustains the entirety of life on our planet — has been reduced to a particular date and the political and legal arguments that support it. 

This is a story of sovereignty, a concept dating back to 1648 and the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, and two treaties collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia. These treaties birthed the defining principle of the international nation state system that each state has exclusive rule over its determined territory. The specific parameters of the sovereignty of modern Brazil dates back to the Treaty of Tordesillas, an agreement between Portugal and Spain, Empires that stem from the Holy Roman Empire, which believes sovereignty comes from above, through divine right and the belief in a Catholic God. This belief was imposed on the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, despite their own traditions of sovereignty and spirituality, traditions that Article 231 of the Brazilian Constitution acknowledge and supposedly protect. While we are now speaking in terms of politics, bureaucracy and law, when we trace the roots of this system of thought and action, we are still discussing the different worldviews and the different conceptions of sovereignty for the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil and the settlers who call that territory home.

eco-nnect has been a proud part of an informal alliance of individuals and groups who have come together to support the situation in Brazil. The focus of this alliance has been a petition and a social media campaign to put pressure on the President of Brazil’s Federal Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco — who has the ability to block PL 2903 — while also reminding the Representatives of the Federal Senate and the Justices of the Supreme Court of the responsibility they currently hold. The situation is ongoing, so please support the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil; their important and inherent relationship with their territories; and the legal recognition of their sovereignty.

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

The post Indigenous Sovereignty: the contention of Marco Temporal appeared first on eco-nnect.

“There was nothing but a small shed and a backyard, and within a year you could already begin to see a small forest.”

Last year I took a four day syntropic agriculture course in Ibiza. With my teachers Daniel Meneses and Rodrigo Marques, along with 20 other eager students, we planted a 600sqm edible forest for the Tierra Iris community to enjoy throughout the year. After the course, I kept in touch with Rodrigo and Daniel, and in March this year, I went to Tepoztlan, Mexico to visit the project they had launched with Victoria Sánchez in 2021: Solar.

Tepoztlan is a charming town, only two hours south of Mexico City. Driving in you are greeted by imposing rocky mountains, each with its own personality, peering down onto the colourful homes and cobbled streets. Rodrigo and I arranged to meet on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Solar is in the residential area of town, a 20 minute walk from the town center. When I arrived, the gates opened to reveal a light pink country home with a backyard flourishing with life. Rodrigo greeted me with a booming smile. I remembered his warm and kind approach when he taught 20 aspiring farmers last summer. He walked me to the growing food forest and I ask him how Solar came about. 

“Solar is an agroecological cultural center. The project started a year and a half ago. We had been working on similar projects for a while and were looking for a place to produce ourselves. Then a friend put us in touch with the owner of this property, who wanted to use his garden in a different way. It used to be a normal yard that only had grass. Honestly, he didn’t really know what he was getting into, but together we planted a syntropic food forest. We started with three modules, setting up a fully productive system that we could harvest and sell, then those sales paid for the next module, and so on.

“Through this financial movement from consumer growth, we grew the modules. Today we’ve planted 10. On the other side of the property we host courses and events. Our strategy is simple, we grow for the locals: restaurants and families. And little by little we established a bigger production thanks to our direct sales strategy, a classic CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model.”

For people who don’t know what it is, could you explain what makes syntropic agriculture different?

“Syntropic agroforestry systems try to imitate nature and adapt it to agricultural production. We always have two dimensions in dialogue — space and time — so everything we plant needs to be high density and successional. For example we plant different vegetables with short, medium and long cycles in the same areas. In other words, what we create is a system that is resilient and that can maintain constant productivity. Each intervention that we make we improve the conditions of the soil for continuously abundant production. In this system water retention in the soil, soil fertility, carbon sequestration, root density, all these factors are always improving rather than diminishing — which is the opposite of what happens in conventional agriculture. Conventional agriculture transforms forests into deserts, we transform deserts into forests.

“Here at Solar we planted more or less 90 plant species including aromatic and medicinal herbs, vegetables, fruit trees, and biomass production plants in an area of 2,500sqm. Basically this first line of vegetables is planted close to fruiting trees. The first two to three years, we’ll be able to harvest vegetables, however as the fruiting trees grow, eventually we’ll have to stop the vegetable harvesting. This happens because we are following nature’s inner intelligence, she knows when it’s time for vegetables and when it’s time for fruit. So once the forest has grown we will harvest the fruit of the forest and plant in the shade of the trees other crops that need less light than the vegetables we have now. Our plan is to plant coffee once the forest has grown because it’s a shade loving crop.”

At Solar they also host courses and events to spread the syntropic agriculture methodology to the farming community of Mexico. Rodrigo is originally from Brasilia, Brazil, where he first learned about this method of farming.

“In Brazil the method is already consolidated, but not in Mexico. So the first barrier that we had to break was to implement our knowledge to show that it is a financially viable technique. And that it’s easy, that it’s nothing special or complicated. You simply need technical knowledge and a change in perception. This is why we started Solar, so we can show it as a successful case study, proving to visitors that it’s a profitable business. Because for a producer who comes to take a course with us, that is always his first question, can I live from this? Can I raise my children from it? So, Solar has been a bridge, to kickstart a dialogue with Mexico’s rural reality. Now we can really expand the technique and show it to all kinds of people: from rural universities to private ones, to government institutions to private landowners. Many people from different walks of life have already come to check it out.”

Rodrigo and Daniel also manage Tierra Negra, a consultancy that helps projects develop their own agrosyntropic systems. It is through their work for Tierra Negra that I met them both last summer. Although a community project in Ibiza isn’t their typical client, usually Rodrigo and Daniel travel throughout Mexico spreading the agrosyntropic farming method to rural communities.

“We’ve worked with several communities in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Hidalgo and Mexico. When we give courses for people who have a connection with the countryside, who either grew up there or are children of farmers, everything we say makes sense to them. It’s almost as though they intuitively understand that this is a better form of farming, only they didn’t have a word for it. It’s always an emotional moment for them, realizing that these types of techniques are being used today.

“Ultimately they’re observing their ancestral trajectory. Except now there’s a systematization, which is what we recognize in Ernst’s work. He managed to systematize ancestral agricultural knowledge and also to modernize its use and make it economically viable . Of course ancestral forest systems gave much autonomy and freedom to the communities, but the modern global context is very different today.”

Ernst Gotsch — the founder and leader of syntropic agriculture — was deeply inspired by indigenous people’s ancestral knowledge in land management, and with a background in agricultural science he systemized the process to be able to teach it and share it with the rest of the western world. Originally from Switzerland, in 1982 he decided to settle in Brazil and bought 500ha of degraded land in southern Bahia to test his theories. Today, it’s a flourishing forest with its own microclimate that produces more water than it consumes and sells the world’s highest quality cacao.

“You can truly admire ancestral forest systems just by understanding the Amazon Rainforest, it has so much biodiversity thanks to thousands of years of indigenous peoples’ management. At the core, agrosyntropy has very similar philosophies to indigenous cosmovisions yet Ernst managed to translate them into modern scientific terms eg. mechanisation, species density, spacing, stratification. This made it easier to commercialise the method and have the crops compete with conventional agriculture.  

“In my opinion, Ernst gave us both ecological literacy as well as a new lens to be able to observe nature in its breadth: in development, not as a static photo, rather as an ecosystem in constant development, a movie. Nature is constantly changing, it is transforming all the time, so accompanying that transformation and designing and thinking about that transformation is what makes successional agroforestry so fascinating, so powerful and so adaptable, because you can apply it to any context, any product in any ecosystem and in any soil.”

I ask Rodrigo what is the first advice he gives to communities to appease them that syntropic agriculture is in fact an economically viable method?

“Firstly I tell them to keep working with the crop that they are already selling, to keep that focus. Let’s say I meet a corn producer, if he owns a monocrop plantation he needs to use chemicals to maintain production because monocultures degrade the soil. So every year it is more difficult for him to produce and the corn has more and more diseases. The established discourse here is that they now need to buy more pesticides and fertilizers to maintain production, right? So, my first piece of advice is for them to start learning agroecological literacy, because that has been lost…

“Second we show them that through this method they can also feed their families and achieve food sovereignty. So we ask them what they like to eat and help them study what type of plants grow well next to corn. Essentially to diversify their production. Because if you have a rich ecosystem, then you have rich people, and if you have a poor ecosystem, you have poor people. So the more abundant the space where they are harvesting is, then the less misery they will have.”

We continue talking, and I ask if you’re planting a forest that also produces water, eventually you don’t even need to irrigate it, right?

“Yes, you can even measure the water production by analysing the water retention capacity of the soil as the forest keeps growing. You could eventually prove that thanks to the food forest there is more water entering the ground and being stored in underground aquifers.”

I ask Rodrigo if a person plants a forest, they are giving back to the water cycle as well as becoming independent from state water? He nods.

“And that’s not all you are independent from a lot of other external factors too. For example oil-based fertilisers or potassium fertilizers that are mainly produced in Ukraine and Russia. Conventional agriculture farmers are tied to the globalised economy and its problems too. The war in Ukraine right now is affecting them and the increase in oil prices too. It’s in the industry’s interest for farmers to lose their independence and become dependent on them for simple processes like fertilisation. Essentially, conventional farmers have lost their autonomy and have become completely dependent on a rotten system.”

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This reminds me of one of the lessons from the course in Ibiza, where Rodrigo had mentioned how tlacuaches (Mexican oposums) were not pests in their farm but actually ate the fruit that was rotting, becoming helpers instead of enemies. I mention this to him.

“We see pests as messengers, not problems. In conventional agriculture we’ve made all other beings into enemies. All other living beings are working to make the system more abundant whereas farmers now seem to be the main reason for biodiversity loss. It’s almost as though we’ve been working in a method of agriculture that declares war against life, whereas we are proposing an alternative, an agriculture of peace, a method that reconciles with life, making life an essential element that enhances production. So in this sense a mouse, an opossum, or an insect is not necessarily bad, they are fulfilling their function within a system, and if the system is sick then they will show us this. 

“Each time I learn more about syntropic agriculture in practice, I see that Ernst was absolutely right about this: all living beings are fulfilling a function moved by the internal pleasure of fulfilling that function, every being is thus equipped with the necessary tools to fulfill its function. And its whole life is guided so that this function is fulfilled, right? So a hummingbird with its long beak is able to enter specific flowers and pollinate them, a jaguar is equipped with sharp fangs to do population management of large herbivorous animals. So, what we are observing is that from the ant, to the termite, to the snake, all living beings, even the ones that today are considered pests are fulfilling their life function. So when they visit us they are actually leaving us messages.

“Plagues occur when we are not working in alignment with nature. Nature has highly developed principles and technologies. And if we get out of these technologies, there are imbalances, then those messengers come to say that there is an imbalance, right? So for us there are no pests, there are no diseases. There are only signs of a mistake that we as farmers made. I mean, a forest doesn’t have pests? Have you ever heard of a forest being destroyed by a plague? There is no such reality.

“Yes, there is this reality in the monocultures where pests end up destroying everything. And somehow the system claims that the problem is the pest? But perhaps it’s the system itself, the monocultures, because those insects and animals also live in the forest, yet don’t destroy it. It’s not that they disappeared and only exist in monocultures, they came to the field to fulfill a specific function. It’s nature sending a signal that monocultures should not exist.”

This makes me think of how in western society we seem to have forgotten what our function as humans is within nature. What’s beautiful about agrosyntropic farming is that it returns this function to human beings as well, our role within nature’s harmony. We can create more abundance and more life, just as we can also destroy it. I ask Rodrigo to expand on this topic.

“This is the result of a society that was shaped by industrial growth, right? And how it was losing that connection with the processes of nature. But if we look at ancestral cultures, they had that awareness, they knew that their intervention could be positive. Now under the pressure of the western world they are often losing these practices, but the reality is that we humans have many positive functions eg: micro-climate regulation, multiplication of biodiversity, seed dispersal, forest management, pruning.

“For example, pruning trees is necessary for the forest to renew itself and remain dynamic. If I look at the forest that covers Tepoztlan’s mountains it’s screaming for a prune, but it’s a national forest so I’m not allowed to prune the trees. Of course, this is a great law because it protects the forest from illegal loggers, however these laws are only seeing humans in a negative lens.

“Institutions need to update the way they see humans and our ecosystems and update regulations too. For example they could reward people who are doing positive things, not just ban the ones who are doing bad things. This way we could encourage a positive management of ecosystems in conservation areas.”

Classical conservation methods in the west don’t have a role for humans. They create these artificial boundaries between national parks and areas with human settlement. This is a clear demonstration of the inherent problem with the western worldview: humans are seen as separate from nature. It’s almost as though we’ve become tourists in our own homes. It doesn’t have to be this way, we can change our imposed worldview, learn from ancestral cosmovisions and have positive impacts on nature instead. This is why indigenous peoples represent only 5% of the world population yet protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity: they fulfill their life function. 

I ask Rodrigo what gives him hope in his line of work.

“For me syntropic agriculture provides a socio-economic solution as well as an environmental one. It brings economic opportunity to rural communities that are being pressured into cities. Often they are blindsided when they leave, they sell their land, go to the city, spend a couple of years there until their little money runs out and then they have neither land nor a place to stay in the city. And being poor in a city is much worse than being poor in the countryside. They survived without money and now they need money to survive, making them dependent on the system again. Agrosyntropy gives them their freedom back.”

Syntropic agriculture is empowering communities by giving them an economic alternative that not only feeds their families, but can feed the world too. All while reforesting, replenishing aquifers, regenerating soils and bringing back biodiversity. But ultimately it’s realigning humans with their life function: relearning how to be the good gardeners of the forest.

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

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Zack Sanders grew up in the small town of Chester in Connecticut.  “Everyone knew each other, it was the kind of place you could walk into somebody’s home and it was totally fine.” Growing up in Chester made Zack what he calls “a community oriented person”, and when he left his hometown to study urban planning, Zack found community working as a bartender.

“You meet a lot of people working behind a bar, a lot of people who need to pay rent, a lot of people who lost their jobs… It is definitely a place where people go to find community when you don’t have family support or you don’t have that traditional connection.” I’d always appreciated a bar as a kind of meeting place to connect with friends or family, but I’d never visited one to meet people for the first time, even though I was meeting Zack for the first time, as we sat at the bar of De La O Cantina in Guadalajara. Zack was part of a delegation of Los Angeles-based bartenders — Zack and Max Reis from Mírate; Matthew Belanger from Death and Co.; and Edwin Rios, who works at both venues — that took over De La O for one night, to serve cocktails with Mexican produce and to connect with Guadalajara’s hospitality community. I was invited by one of De La O’s owners, Pedro Jiménez Gurría. 

I met Pedro in 2018. I was in Guadalajara to learn Spanish and my teacher recommended I visit De La O. I sat at the bar and raised my eyebrows while smiling at one of the bartenders who came over and introduced herself, “yo soy Karla”, and then asked what I wanted. I tentatively used my newly acquired Spanish, “puedo poder un mezcal?” Karla smiled, “Inglés?” I nodded. She told me I had come to the right place as one of the bar’s owners, Pedro, ran a not-for-profit called Mezonte. She turned around and took a bottle from one of the shelves behind her and placed it on the bar in front of me. The glass bottle was adorned with a simple red and white label: big letters in the middle spelled “MEZONTE” and “JALISCO” was printed in smaller text at the top. 

“A not-for-profit mezcal company?” I’d never heard of such a thing. She smiled and nodded and asked if I wanted a “coppa”. I didn’t know what that was, but figured it was a cup. “Sí!” Karla placed a small shallow dish on the bar, it was made with a material that resembled wood. She noticed my curious eyes, explaining “this is what the communities traditionally drink mezcal from, it’s made from cuastecomate” as she poured the liquid from the bottle into the coppa and small bubbles or pearls appeared on the liquid’s surface. I looked up at her, she raised her eyebrows, “salud”. 

She turned and entered my order into an iPad as I picked up the coppa and sipped: different layers of flavour graced my tongue as a warm heat descended down my throat and suspended in my chest. It was a unique experience distinct from my memories of drinking tequila. While savouring the taste in my mouth, I considered this concept of a not-for-profit alcohol company. Karla’s eyes met mine and again I raised my eyebrows while smiling. She walked over. “I’ve never heard of a not-for-profit alcohol company. How does Mezonte work?” She smiled. “You should meet Pedro. He conducts tastings close by, there is one tomorrow.”

The next day, I visited Mezonte, a small tasting room close to the Mercado Juárez in Colonia Americana. I knocked on a closed wooden door and was greeted by a tanned bearded man. “Pedro?” He nodded. I introduced myself, explaining the conversation I had shared with Karla the night before and the curiosity it sparked within me. “Come in, come in.” He guided me to a stool at a small bar and introduced me to his two friends already seated there. América and Rico both worked with mezcal: América as a researcher focused on agave management, Rico in a bar in San Francisco. The four of us tried different mezcales as Pedro shared the stories of their producers. I asked him when did he start Mezonte? “I started Mezonte when we started Pare de Sufrir.” 

Pare de Sufrir is a bar next door to De La O. “I had just moved to Guadalajara and I was very into mezcal… It was at the beginning of the 2000s when there was more access in Mexico City to traditional mezcales through La Logia de los Mezcólatras, this group of biologists, agronomists, sociologists, all types of people, obviously producers too, that were gathering in different places to talk and taste traditional mezcales. It started to create this awareness of this type of mezcales, because most of the places that were selling mezcal weren’t selling the traditional ones, but the first commercial mezcales. And I got hooked, I was really happy that the city where I was living finally had access to really good mezcales, but then I decided to move to Guadalajara, and when I arrived here, there was nothing… So every time that I went to different places in Mexico for work”, Pedro was working in film production, “I would go and ask for any spirits that they had in that place and brought them back to our house. It was surprising for me, because obviously Guadalajara is a place of tequila, but I didn’t know that a lot of people didn’t know about mezcales, not even tasted them, and I was like wow, we have to do something about this.” 

So with his partner at the time, Monica Leyva, they started doing tastings at their house. Initially for friends, around ten people would join, but soon their friends wanted to invite their friends, and suddenly these small tastings attracted fifty or sixty people. “It was too much.” So Monica and Pedro decided to create a small mezcalería, and in 2009 they opened Pare de Sufrir.

“When we started Pare de Sufrir it was about making a lot of tastings and talking about the producers and how they produce this beautiful spirit… We were aiming for a very small, quiet place, somewhere to appreciate the mezcales… But that’s not what people needed… At the time, a lot of the bars were really hip, they were focused on their decor, like it had to be really fancy and you had to wear certain clothes to get into that place and so on. Pare de Sufrir was like we don’t care, you have fun with good music and good mezcales and that’s it… It quickly became something completely different from what we planned, a place of party… And we were like just have fun, dance if you want, don’t dance if you don’t want, just enjoy yourself while you’re here, stop suffering.”

Despite the success of Pare de Sufrir, Pedro and Monica still wanted a small tasting space, a place where the mezcales were the focus.

“We decided to open another place where it was only and exclusively to taste the spirits and talk more about it and the importance of the surroundings of the making of these mezcales or agave spirits, to create that awareness. And that’s our belief that if people get more information and get to know all what is surrounding the making of these spirits, they will appreciate it more and will try to preserve it as we do.”

This is the focus of Mezonte, which is dedicated to preserving and disseminating the biocultural values ​​of traditional mezcales. Discussing these values extend to Mezonte’s production costs, which they openly discuss on their website to increase consumer awareness of traditional mezcales and what is necessary for their existence. In 2018, while sitting at the bar with América and Rico, the threats to traditional production were less severe than now, in 2023, as I sat with Zack at De La O, and the popularity of this spirit continues to grow, with a significant proportion of demand emanating from the USA. In 2023, agave spirits — tequila and mezcal — are set to become the best-selling spirits category in the USA, and its growing significance is reflected in Zack’s relationship with mezcal: despite working in bars for most of his adult life, his interest in mezcal developed over the past twelve months.

“I was a big rum head, I had worked in whisky bars for years, so I had a lot of experience in those fields, and I knew that agave was a weak point of mine. And probably like four months before I moved,” Zack moved from Washington DC to Los Angeles last March, “one of my friends and I were like we don’t know enough about mezcal. So we pooled our mezcal collections, we had like fourteen different bottles, and that tasting set a seed, and by the time I got out to LA, that seed was blossoming into something bigger.” During the first few months of his life in LA, Zack met Max Reis, who leads the bar program at Mírate. “I was like, this guy’s a pro, I need to work with him, he is intimately connected with the producers, with the curators, he is intimately connected with the tension that is a white man selling Mexican spirits, and as soon as we started talking I was like, oh you, I can relate to you.” I looked over to Max, who was behind the bar mixing a version of a Paloma that was designed specifically for the pop-up. He was busy, so I waited until after the event to speak with him. 

Max was born and raised in California. He was a musician, so he was drawn to the restaurant industry due to its empathy for his death metal band’s touring schedule. Initially employed as a server, he shifted to bartending on his 21st birthday. He lived this double life — touring and bartending — for a few years, until he felt a shift.

“A lot of my friends in music, I would see them pick up a guitar and people would be like, oh my God you’re amazing, you’re a natural, you were born to do this kind of thing, and I was always like shit, I want to pick something up for the first time and just have someone go, oh my God you’re so good at that, you know? And eventually I had gotten to bartending and I was better than people and more creative than people years older than I was… And I remember realising that I was enjoying bartending more than my band… And eventually I went man, I want to play music for fun, because I enjoy it more when it’s not my career, and so I decided to make the transition to bartending full time.”

With all of his energy now focused on life as a bartender, Max’s career gained more momentum and he was offered a job at Gracias Madre. It was here that he fell in love with agave.

“I had already been very spirit obsessed for a while, but I started getting more and more exposed to agave spirits, which is why I came over to Gracias Madre, as it had an extremely high reputation for their agave selection at the time. Mezcal was very new, like very very new, and for years there was just like Chichicapa, you know, and there was not a lot on the market. So I took the job at Gracias Madre, I was learning.” 

As his knowledge and awareness of mezcal and its production developed, Max began to question Gracias Madre’s bar program.

“The agave spirits selection we were curating was pandering to the neighbourhood. It was a vegan organic restaurant, where they were all about ethics and ethical sourcing, but then at the end of the day, we were one of the top accounts in the United States for Casamigos and Clase Azul. The restaurant cared so much if there were additives in the food and it was supporting the farmers, but when it came to alcohol, we were just like everyone else you know?” 

Max felt he needed to further his education, and though he continued working at Gracias Madre, he took a job at Republique, splitting his week between the two venues.

“I was drawn to Shawn Lickliter’s program at Republique, I was amazed at how ethically driven he was. It wasn’t an agave spirits bar, but it was all about different rums and whiskies and not carrying things you didn’t like because people liked to buy them. It was about educating our audience by taking control of what we were selling.” 

It was through this period that Max met Pedro, as he continued to deepen his relationship with mezcal, often traveling to Mexico to do so. It was also when Max was offered the job to lead the drinks program at Gracias Madre, and when he truly started “going down the agave rabbit hole”. 

“I remember going down to Mexico and coming back and I went to the owners of Gracias Madre, and I said hey guys I want to pull Casamigos and Clase Azul and all these brands off the shelf that I think are unethical and here’s why, and they told me no because it was too financially ingrained within the program. So I put my head down and went back to work and went down to Mexico again, and came back and said hey guys, I think we should pull these things off and they said no again.

“And then I remember I came down to Mexico, I was with David Suro”, the founder of Siembra Spirits, “at a hotel in Morelia, and we had a conversation about ethics, and I talked about what I believed in and he was asking me details about how I was running my program. At the time I had negotiated a pretty amazing deal with Pueblo Viejo, and we were getting litre bottles of mezcal for $10.20, and then David broke down the math for me, and he was like, listen, in order to get a litre of agave distillate into the United States it costs $16, so if you’re buying it at $10, where do you think that money comes from? And we had a whole conversation about it, I remember we were both tearing up and getting very emotional. So I came back and I said, hey guys, it’s me or the shitty tequila, and they said we’ll do it, but you have to make it make sense financially… I put my head down and got really focused on what I believed in, which was ethical spirits and educating based around that, and the rest is kind of history. I turned that program from a Casamigos factory into what was one of the top earning agave bars in the country, like top three, and we were only selling ethical spirits, like private batch mezcal that we sourced for the restaurant, and nothing with additives.”

Max has since left Gracias Madre and is now leading the bar program at the newly opened Mírate.

“The whole idea behind Mírate is a bar full of lots of special items, things you can’t get somewhere else, and every single bottle on the back bar is something we’re excited about… I wanted to create a more focused, ethically sourced bar program with fewer items that we know exactly where they are coming from, and go education forward.”

After hearing Max mention the word many times, I asked him what makes a mezcal ethical?

“Have you ever visited any producers?”

I shook my head, “not yet, but Pedro is taking me tomorrow.”

“That will be amazing, he will show you.”

I went to sleep then woke and met Pedro at La Trompada Caligari, a small cafe next to Pare de Sufrir. We drank coffee and ate tortas then got into a small van and drove south toward two towns, Canoas and Chancuellar. As he drove, Pedro explained that these towns are in “a region where there are a lot of producers, but very few stick to the traditional way of making mezcales.” Recalling my question to Max regarding ethics, I asked Pedro what makes a mezcal traditional?

“It’s basically the real ones, like the first ones that were produced in regions that had the tradition to make mezcales for several generations. They don’t use any kind of chemicals, like from when they are planted, they don’t use any agrochemicals, pesticides, herbicides or anything like that. They cut only the mature agaves when they’re ripe or capon, as they say. The agaves are cooked in an underground oven, then they crush the agave and ferment it naturally, without any accelerators, which a lot of brands now use. And they use just natural water, like spring water, well water, something like that. And then they are distilled in a very traditional way… And those mezcales are a cultural element in their communities, they are produced to satisfy cultural purposes like weddings, baptisms, funerals and religious ceremonies. And some of that production is sold, but it’s mostly made for the local people.

“The difference from traditional to artisanal or industrial mezcales is that artisanal or industrial mezcal is produced to satisfy an external market. So it can actually be done by a traditional producer but for commercial purposes. Traditional producers are known in the community because they make the best mezcales for that community, and both the community and the producer decide what type of flavours and aromas they like, what they call gusto historico. So it’s a thing that they are known for, and they know how to make that mezcal and how it should taste. They do it for themselves, and if people from other places don’t like it or don’t want to buy it, they don’t care, it’s just for their consumption. But now things have changed and they’re open to other markets, there is a need to preserve those traditional flavours and profiles, the way the producers have been making these mezcales in the old way.”

While listening to Pedro, I looked out of the window as we passed the many greenhouses that lined the highway. We then started to ascend, leaving the valley to climb the nearby mountains. The landscape passed by our windows as the greenhouses made way for agave plantations. Row after row of what looked like blue agave, the necessary ingredient in the production of tequila. I ask Pedro, “that’s blue agave, right?”

“It is. It really worries me. We’re in a moment of growth that is overwhelming all the fields in Mexico, and there’s a possibility that this will become a bigger ecocide than it has already been.”

“An ecocide? Because of agave?”

“Well, Carlos Lucio wrote about the four horsemen of the apocalypse: blue agave, avocado, berries and hortalizas.” Hortalizas are the many vegetables grown in the valley, particularly tomatoes. “And the increase in popularity of tequila and mezcal is creating massive plantations of agave, deforesting mountains, which changes the soils and plants, it’s crazy. You can see right now how the landscape is changing so fast, and this is happening because we’re only thinking about the land for commercial purposes and commercial value. We’re just thinking of the value of money instead of the other things that are at stake like biodiversity, and not only agave diversity, but different types of trees, different types of bushes, different types of cactus. There’s a whole desert forest, as they call it, between Puebla and Oaxaca, that has already been devastated, losing specimens that have been there for hundreds of years because they’re shaving the whole landscape to plant more agaves to make more mezcales, and it’s just like how far do we have to go?

“Like climate change is not a joke and for us to be contributing to that, like adding more danger and heating up more soil and making a lot of changes that actually doesn’t help the earth… There’s a lot of things to be worried about and what we’re trying to do with a whole network of Mezonte – because it’s never a single person, it’s always a lot of people working – is to at least protect the ones that are making it right, they’re doing it, taking care of the balance of the ecosystems. And they care about not only the plants but also the animals that live in those ecosystems. Because you’ll see, the lands that surround those of the traditional mezcaleros, they are filled with intensive plantations of agave, so there’s no trees left for squirrels and birds or bushes for different types of rabbits and deers. But in the properties of the traditional mezcaleros there are dozens of different species of animals, and in a kind of a beautiful way, they are taking refuge where the mezcaleros are. And though I say that it’s beautiful, if you go back to the reason why they are there, it’s not pretty, they’re being pushed away. And if these traditional mezcaleros don’t preserve these refugee islands, I mean I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The further into the mountains we drove, the more agave plantations appeared. It was like Pedro had described, monoculture farms, rows and rows of agave without the biodiversity that once inspired these plants to grow.  

“In the USA, which is the biggest market for agave spirits and particularly mezcal, there is now the trend of making and buying artisanal mezcal or traditional mezcal, so all of the new producers and new companies who are focused on that market, they have to reproduce this idea of artisanal mezcal. So what they do is to create the same scenario, oh you have to do it in a pit to make it artisanal, okay we will do 20 pits to make our mezcal, and for those 20 pits you’ll need probably 40 tonnes of wood, and for those 40 tonnes of wood you’ll have to cut a whole forest. So what’s the point? I mean it’s not helping at all, it’s just like wasting more wood and wasting more water, because you also need a lot of water to ferment and to distill… And then they are producing five to ten thousand litres per month, which is not artisanal mezcal. So there’s a lot of hazard in how to read these things, it has become a marketing tool instead of representing the real nature of an artisanal or traditional mezcal.”

Pedro turned down a dusty road and up a dusty driveway. He stopped the van, lifted the hand brake and turned off the engine, as I asked him “what makes the producers that you work with different from those marketing themselves as artisanal?”

“I’ve met some great producers of mezcal and some of them are even traditional producers, but their only goal is to make money, they don’t care about preserving certain things that are surrounding the making of mezcal, like the ecosystems, the biodiversity or diversity of agaves and other species that grow in the same place where the agaves grow. So we wanted to work with people that were really fond of the places where they grew, and where they learn how to have this balance of making mezcal and making other things from the soil, from the earth.”

He nodded towards the front of the van, towards a small open air structure ahead of us.

“You’ll see.”

We got out of the van and walked towards the structure where two men were standing next to two steaming tree trunks. I was told later that these are Filipino style of stills: a copper dish buried below a hollowed out parota tree, on top of which sits another copper dish filled with water. Inside the trunk, a wooden spoon made from a tescalama tree carries the liquid toward the trunk’s base, where a tube of agave leaves release a stream of distilled mezcal into a large earthen vessel waiting below. 

I was introduced to Santos and Ricardo Juárez, father and son. Pedro immediately asked how the distilling was going and Santos walked us over to one of the stills. He sat down on a stack of empty buckets and picked up two cow horns from the ground. Santos placed a horn under the stream to catch the mezcal, filling it to the brim, and then transferring the liquid into the horn in his left hand. Pedro leaned towards me, “he’s cooling it down”. We watched Santos: left to right, right to left, left to right, pouring mezcal between the horns before. He offered Pedro a horn filled to the brim. Pedro enjoyed a few sips of freshly distilled mezcal before passing it to me. I took a sip as Pedro explained Santos observes the strength of the mezcal through trying the “puntas”, the head or the beginning of each distillation. This was the “puntas” of the second distillation and Santos would continue distilling the mezcal, tasting throughout, until he decided the strength was appropriate and the flavour represented both his family’s methods and the community’s taste.

While we passed the horn between us, we watched Ricardo get into a bulldozer parked on a hill behind the stills. Santos explained they were excavating the land, looking for stone fermentation vats that a local woman believed had been buried by floods and landslides. Not knowing they were definitely there, Santos and Ricardo hired the necessary equipment to begin the resurrection process. Santos gestured for Pedro and I to follow him as we walked down the hill, passing Ricardo in the bulldozer. We climbed a small mound of earth and four stone wells became visible. Santos believes these fermentation vats are over 400 years old, he explained there could be another eight still buried.

We walked back to the stills and Santos asked Pedro if we had eaten lunch, he shook his head. Santos told us to drive to his house, so we got back into the van and Pedro drove along a dirt track to a bridge that crossed the Armería River. We ascended a hill on the other side as the landscape shifted from rocks and dust to a beautiful garden of trees and plants. We parked the van next to a chicken coop, opened a gate and entered the garden where we were met by Santos’ wife Ilda, who welcomed Pedro and I with open arms. “Are you here for lunch?” Pedro nodded and Ilda led us to a table on the house’s verandah, indicating for Pedro and I to sit. She served a jug of aqua jamaica, and when Santos eventually joined us, he placed a tall glass of mezcal beside it. Ilda then placed a stack of tortillas, salsa, salad and chicharron on the table and Santos began serving himself. Pedro and I followed. The meal was one of the best I have eaten in my many trips through Mexico.

Once we finished, Pedro walked to the van, returning with large plastic containers. “These are necessary for the bumpy road back to Guadalajara.” Santos brought out three 10 litre glass bottles filled with mezcal that Pedro transferred into the empty containers. “Once I am back in Guadalajara, at the warehouse, I will immediately transfer the mezcal into glass bottles that are waiting there.” This process took about half an hour, and when they finished, Pedro and Santos sat down at the table, each with a notepad to document the transaction. Pedro and I then carried the heavy containers of mezcal back to the van and followed Santos’ truck back to the stills where we said goodbye to him and Ricardo.

We drove twenty minutes to Chancuellar. We parked in the town square — a church characteristically at its apex — across the road from a small shop. A man emanated from the shop’s door, waving at us. “There’s Tomás”. Pedro got out of the van, embraced Tomás and then introduced him to me. We then walked across the road, through the shop door, through to the back room and into the family’s kitchen. There, I was introduced to Tomás’s wife Guadalupe and his son Jesús, as we sat at the kitchen table.

Tomás is the son of Lorenzo Virgen, or Don Lencho, an 87 year old mezcalero that Pedro has been working with since first starting Pare de Sufrir. As Lorenzo ages, Tomás assumes more and more responsibility for the family’s land and the making of their mezcal, with support from his son’s Jesús and Rodrigo. Tomás, Jesús and I sat at the kitchen table, listening, as Pedro discussed the events of our day and explained why I was accompanying him, “Anton wants to tell a story about Mezonte. But Mezonte is just the story of the producers, our story is your story, it’s your father’s story, it’s your family’s story.” Tomás smiled at me, raised his eyebrows and then started laughing. “Of course you don’t need to share any stories if you don’t want to, but please share anything you feel to.” This sentence and its sentiment was not represented by my limited Spanish vocabulary, so I asked Pedro to translate. Tomás nodded and then asked, “do you want a mezcal?” I said “yes”, Pedro said “of course”. Tomás stood, took a bottle and three cups from a nearby shelf, and then filled the cups he had placed in front of Pedro, Jesús and I.

With my basic understanding of Spanish, I listened as Pedro and Tomás talk of Lorenzo, how he used to live and how he makes mezcal.

“I was so inspired by his way of working that to date we are doing the same… It feels the same to the ear, the eye, the smell. Not much has changed, but let’s say that we are industrialized because now we are producing more, much more… But other changes, no.”

Tomás has remained true to his father’s values despite the many changes to the community and industry that surround him.

“People are taking advantage of the fact that mezcal has gained a value that it did not have before. Before, if they distilled a mezcal, it was for us to drink, the community. And if you offered it for $100 it was an offense to sell it. In other words, nobody was going to buy it. Now people are seeing the opportunity that everything is a business. Now over there, there is a new mezcalero… Even though they have no idea what a mezcal is, they are already selling a mezcal with their brand. They are good at selling. In other words, they want money, they are no longer interested in how it is done, how it is supposed to be done. Where does that plant come from? How did it grow? They don’t care… You can bring them anything and they’ll think it’s a good mezcal…

“Everyone thinks they can do it, but can they? They think ‘yes yes just tell me how to do it and I’ll figure it out’, but behind that, there are things that even I myself don’t know. I mean saying I want to make a good mezcal and actually making a good mezcal are different things. These people will say that it is a good mezcal for fear of not being sure of what they are selling, that is, because they have never seen how good mezcal is made. They do not know what is behind a good mezcal. So then what they want is, I repeat, money…

“Each distillation for me is like having a child… And it is your child, you see it grow and it does not look like any other. And it will not be repeated in time or years, because I put 2019 on this bottle. When am I going to make a 19 again? I will never in my life make a 2020, 2021, 22, 23, 18, it goes by… And these are things that cannot be explained so easily, it is a feeling that, as I say, the days do not repeat themselves.”

As the conversation deepened, it focused on the changing landscape. Not the landscape of mezcal, but the landscape that creates mezcal.

“My future are my lands. I don’t have many, I have five hectares. I want to see them with a lot of local mezcal.”

In this moment, when Tomás says mezcal, he is referring to the plant. When driving, Pedro had explained that in this region mezcal is the name of the plant; vino de mezcal, or sometimes just mezcal, is the name of the spirit; mezcal also means cooked agave; and mezonte is the heart of the cooked agave.

“This is what I want my sons to learn, I want them to see what I have, to keep my lands full of mezcal, and not tidy mezcal, I want it in random places. And over there, a different tree, local trees, and also animals like rabbits and quails, they can all live here, this is how I see my place.”

I sipped the remaining mezcal from my cup, appreciating how its complex flavour reflects a moment in time, like Tomás had explained, but how it also represents the biodiversity of his land.

“I have to do something different from what is being experienced around our land. It’s good to hope that this spreads, because you have to lead by example. Hopefully more people understand why it’s being done like this here… Because right now, the truth is, it is a very difficult time, things are getting very critical, there is climate change and there are elections and there are horrible politics, and there are wars and there is everything, like the outlook is pretty ugly. But how to redevelop oneself, to live one’s life?

“Here my world is very different, because I do not live in a city, I live in Chancuellar. Here we live at ease, not that we are calm, but we live without stress, we do what we like to do. I mean, I can’t change the world, I can’t change people, but I can do what I want and do it with pleasure. I don’t live in the city, I live here, this is my reality, it is very different from the people there, in the city, in a different world. It looks different every single year, it keeps changing by leaps, and they bring us new things that we don’t even know about. I mean yeah, it’s worrying, it is very worrying, but” 

Tomás noticed that we had all emptied our cups of mezcal.

“Please, help yourselves.”

He poured us all another cup. 

“Please, enjoy!”

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

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