EarthRx is a biweekly column that highlights the people, organizations and discoveries solving today’s most pressing environmental and public health problems. Although the landscape is complex, many of these solutions are surprisingly simple and rely only on tapping into the power of community, ingenuity, natural abundance and good ole love to save the day.
The U.S. discovered at Standing Rock that giant energy corporations hell-bent on exploitation can be stopped in their tracks when we gather together and stare down the machine. But down here in the Amazon rainforest, where I have been based as a writer for years, that good fight is a daily routine. Indigenous people are always on the front line of environmental destruction simply because they live on that line. Now that we have formally entered the era of a true Grinch presidency, environmental activism in the U.S. also needs to step up the game and become a way of life.
A couple of days before Christmas this year, the indigenous Achuar Federation released a statement through the non-profit Amazon Watch that banned GeoPark, a Chilean oil corporation, from entering their lands in the Peruvian Amazon. This is the fourth or fifth time since the 1990s that they’ve taken the stance because Block 64, an oil concession created by the Peruvian government that contains an estimated 40 million barrels of oil, overlaps their ancestral territory. Oil companies have pursued that light crude like vultures after a meal. The good news is that the Achaur Federation have beaten them back every time.
It’s a similar story across the Amazon. In 2014, the Munduruku Tribe occupied and auto-demarcated their land in defiance of the Brazilian government’s construction of the São Luiz do Tapajós mega-dam, which would have flooded their homes and the surrounding rainforest. After two years of struggle and direct resistance, the tribe now celebrates victory as the government finally canceled the project, admitting that it would have disastrous consequences on indigenous Amazonian communities and the environment.
As scientists warn that exploitation is pushing the world’s most biodiverse eco-system past the point of no return, these small victories are the only thing keeping the Amazon from full-on destruction. The indigenous have been on the front line for 500 years, standing on this rock of a planet, and despite massive losses, they have held it down. It’s time we joined them.
Oil dependence is a vicious cycle. Just 20 miles from my hometown of San Francisco, the poster child of environmentally conscious America, lies the Richmond Chevron oil refinery. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of Amazonian oil is processed there on a daily basis, sometimes catching fire and blacking the East Bay sky. The surrounding communities of El Sobrante and North Richmond, which are primarily made up of people of color, suffer from some of the highest asthma and cancer rates in the country. This is also the front line.
In fact, it’s all connected. Chevron is also responsible for dumping billions of gallons of oil and toxic waste in the Ecuadorian Amazon, seriously damaging local indigenous communities and destroying the rainforest for miles around. But Chevron still denies responsibility, despite the fact that an Ecuadorian court has ordered them to pay more than $9 billion in damages. The whole world has become the front line.