What Happened When the Climate Justice Movement Came to Ponca Tribal Lands
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Photos from the Frontline Oil & Gas Conference
Empowering communities to write new rules.
Providing organizing and legal support, we assist communities confronted by harmful projects to pass new laws that place the right of residents (and ecosystems) above corporate profit.
Building a vibrant movement for the Rights of Mother Earth.
Through savvy media campaigns, deep education and organizing, we are leading advocates recognizing legal standing for nature.
Advancing Indigenous rights and traditional knowledge.
Our organizing, research and reports highlight and advance the leadership role of Indigenous peoples in the transformation of culture and law toward ecological balance.
The growing global movement for Rights of Nature — or the Rights of Mother Earth as some cultures prefer — seeks to define legal rights for ecosystems to exist, flourish, and regenerate their natural capacities. These laws challenge the status of nature as mere property to be owned and dominated by humans, and provide a legal framework for an ethical and spiritual relationship to the Earth. While recognizing legal rights of nature doesn’t stop development wholesale, it can stop the kind of development that interferes with the existence and vitality of ecosystems. In the last decade, four countries and dozens of US communities have passed laws recognizing “legal standing” for ecosystems.
Today’s Indigenous warriors, are Frontliners. They face off with private security dogs, are imprisoned in dog cages, and experience militarized psychological warfare at Standing Rock #NODAPL. They hold horrifyingly sad signs bearing the images of missing or murdered loved ones at rallies and hang haunting dresses symbolizing the emptiness of a body that once filled it, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and People #MMIWGP. Frontliners are sometimes the obvious water protector, opposing Line 3 in Minnesota or a quieter language, revitalized teaching lessons to their tribal children in Oklahoma. Frontliners can also be the lone academic in a university trying to learn the enemy’s ways. Frontliners, while often isolated from each other in everyday battles, share bonds of brother and sisterhood. Their lives are often put in high-risk areas, some losing limbs and others losing organs from unconstitutional military attack on peaceful resistance[…]