While Indigenous peoples represent just 5% of the world’s population, they make up 40% of environmental defenders killed worldwide. Recent reports estimate that Indigenous peoples safeguard 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity on their territories, protecting all forms of life from industries like mining, crude oil extraction, agribusiness, and palm oil. One could say that Indigenous and local populations are thus the best guardians of biodiversity and the most important care-takers of the future, of everyone’s future. In times of an extreme, anthropogenic climate crisis and a massive loss of biodiversity, one would expect environmental defenders to be valued and safeguarded as crucial actors in the survival of our species. But not only are they unprotected; we are failing them.
Defending nature is an extremely dangerous endeavour; every week, about several environmental defenders are killed and many murders go unaccounted for. Many more defenders suffer death threats, torture, and arbitrary detentions. Women endure gendered forms of violence and are at risk of sexual violence, rape, and attacks on their families. Mining is responsible for most documented killings; half of all crimes against environmental defenders in Uganda are connected to mining. Agribusiness is the next greatest threat in Uganda and many of the defenders’ deaths are attributed to the agribusiness sector.
Women and Communities are putting their lives on the line because they have no choice. For them, defending nature is not just about taking an ecological stand; it is a matter of survival. If local communities lose the ecosystems upon which they depend, they not only lose their land but also their entire way of life. When nature faces extinction, so do their livelihoods. They know, all too well, that there is a continuum from ecocide to genocide, as when ecosystems disappear, the societies which inhabit them disappear along with them. Indigenous and local lives are at stake, and so are their cultures, languages, and knowledge systems.
Water is Life, water is community, water is knowledge
The phrase “water is life”, means that to destroy water is to destroy oneself, one’s home, one’s family, and one’s territory. Water is life. Water is community. Water is knowledge. Environmental defenders are, essentially, water protectors. When Indigenous and local people say that water is life, they mean it. They mean: we are water, and we are all intrinsically connected. We are made of the same water that nourishes rivers and forests, the same life that breathes through nature. Women Environmental defenders are at risk because they challenge powerful structures, a combination of state and corporate interests that treat their territories (and their bodies) as a resource, ‘cheap’ nature up for grabs. They stand against extractives which self-arrogate the right to appropriate land. They challenge the authority of a state to treat nature, and therefore life itself, as property, unmasking an illegitimate world system. That is why both state and capital target them with such brutal violence.
Conservation for whom, and at what scale?
At the same time, nature defenders are also confronted with large environmental organisations who force communities out of their ancestral territories in the name of conservation. Against all evidence, Indigenous lands are being stolen in the name of conservation. Since its early colonial origins, what we call ‘fortress conservation’ has relied on the enclosure of nature through the forced displacement of local communities. Conservation programmes seeking to protect untouched ‘wilderness’ by separating nature from humans are often complicit in regimes of dispossession and the brutal silencing of environmental defenders. This conservation conflict has been ongoing for more than one hundred years, to the point of creating a phenomenon of ‘conservation refugees. Uganda is perhaps the most extreme case of conservation-based displacement and dispossession, with millions of forest-dwellers, the Batwa, and other tribal peoples who were evicted under a law.
In nature reserves across Uganda, park rangers use intimidation tactics and violence against local and Indigenous peoples defending their territories. Cases of rape, torture and even murder linked to the implementation of conservation have been reported across Uganda. Indigenous peoples have resisted dispossession by empires claiming civilisation; by modern nation-states promising development; and by NGOs seeking to protect biodiversity. We urgently need to decolonise conservation and move away from colonial methods of protecting nature, which are too often based on racism, violence, and intimidation, and instead support community-based conservation that includes, as a baseline, local consent and ownership.
