Bulletin articles

In 1969, at the age of 3 my parents were forced to move from the home in which I was born, in a neighbourhood of people of all colours, ethnicity and even class, to a sand dune cleared of all its vegetation and left naked except for poorly constructed block houses with no internal electricity, plaster or ceilings and crowned with an asbestos roof.

Despite India’s National Green Tribunal statement on early April affirming that POSCO’s Environmental Clearance is valid only up to 19th July 2017, the case has not been closed and it will have another hearing on early May of this year. Meanwhile, the state police have turned the area in to a repressive colony.

“Environmental racism” is a concept it's hard to imagine environmentalism ever having done without. It names a reality that can't be tackled “before” or “after” environmental campaigning, but has to be confronted every day in building movements against the ways oppressive societies organize nature.

What is the Indigenous Environmental Network?

It would be both ahistorical and apolitical to not firmly locate the roots of the western concepts of nature conservation to the colonial era. Political ecologist and eco-feminist Dr. Vandana Shiva makes this relationship very clear in her book, ‘Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India’, when she states that,

If they touch our blood, they touch the earth If they touch the earth, they touch our blood Motto of the Women of the Xinka Peoples (Guatemala)

“The goal is to transform environmental legislation into tradeable instruments” Pedro Moura, founder of Ecosecurities, a carbon offsets company, and creator and director of the “Bolsa Verde Rio”, Brasil’s green exchange stock market (1)