Let’s take just one example. Back in the 1980s, there was a great deal of buzz about a “mitochondrial Eve”, the putative common ancestor of our entire species. Granted, no one was claiming to have actually found the physical remains of such an ancestor, but DNA sequencing demonstrated that such an Eve must have existed, perhaps as recently as 120,000 years ago. And while no one imagined we’d ever find Eve herself, the discovery of a variety of other fossil skulls rescued from the Great Rift Valley in east Africa seemed to provide a suggestion as to what Eve might have looked like and where she might have lived. While scientists continued debating the ins and outs, popular magazines were soon carrying stories about a modern counterpart to the Garden of Eden, the original incubator of humanity, the savanna-womb that gave life to us all.

Many of us probably still have something resembling this picture of human origins in our mind. More recent research, though, has shown it couldn’t possibly be accurate. In fact, biological anthropologists and geneticists are now converging on an entirely different picture. For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannas, as previously thought. Instead, our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope. Some of those populations remained isolated from one another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed, so that early human populations appear to have been far more physically diverse than modern humans. If we could travel back in time, this remote past would probably strike us as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past.

Ancestral humans were not only quite different from one another; they also coexisted with smaller-brained, more ape-like species such as Homo naledi. What were these ancestral societies like? At this point, at least, we should be honest and admit that, for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea. There’s only so much you can reconstruct from cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint – which is basically all we have.

What we do know is that we are composite products of this original mosaic of human populations, which interacted with one another, interbred, drifted apart and came together mostly in ways we can only still guess at. It seems reasonable to assume that behaviours like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more.

Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that modern humans first appeared in Africa. When they began expanding out of Africa into Eurasia, they encountered other populations such as Neanderthals and Denisovans – less different, but still different – and these various groups interbred. Only after those other populations became extinct can we really begin talking about a single, human “us” inhabiting the planet. What all this brings home is just how radically different the social and physical world of our remote ancestors would have seemed to us – and this would have been true at least down to about 40,000BC. In other words, there is no “original” form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making.

Over recent decades, archeological evidence has emerged that seems to completely defy our image of what scholars call the Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,000–15,000BC). For a long time, it had been assumed that this was a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. But the discovery of evidence of “princely” burials and grand communal buildings has undermined that image.

Rich hunter-gatherer burials have been found across much of western Eurasia, from the Dordogne to the Don. They include discoveries in rock shelters and open-air settlements. Some of the earliest come from sites like Sunghir in northern Russia and Dolní Věstonice in the Moravian basin, and date from between 34,000 and 26,000 years ago.

What we find here are not cemeteries but isolated burials of individuals or small groups, their bodies often placed in striking postures and decorated – in some cases, almost saturated – with ornaments. In the case of Sunghir that meant many thousands of beads, laboriously worked from mammoth ivory and fox teeth. Some of the most lavish costumes are from the conjoined burials of two boys, flanked by great lances made from straightened mammoth tusks.

Of similar antiquity is a group of cave burials unearthed on the coast of Liguria, near the border between Italy and France. Complete bodies of young or adult men, including one especially lavish interment known to archaeologists as Il Principe (“the Prince”), were laid out in striking poses and suffused with jewellery. Il Principebears that name because he’s also buried with what looks to the modern eye like regalia: a flint sceptre, elk antler batons and an ornate headdress lovingly fashioned from perforated shells and deer teeth.

Another unexpected result of recent archaeological research, causing many to revise their view of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, is the appearance of monumental architecture. In Eurasia, the most famous examples are the stone temples of the Germus mountains, overlooking the Harran plain in south-east Turkey. In the 1990s, German archaeologists, working on the plain’s northern frontier, began uncovering extremely ancient remains at a place known locally as Göbekli Tepe. What they found has since come to be regarded as an evolutionary conundrum. The main source of puzzlement is a group of 20 megalithic enclosures, initially raised there around 9000BC, and then repeatedly modified over many centuries.

The enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are massive. They comprise great T-shaped pillars, some over 5 metres high and weighing up to 8 tonnes, which were hewn from the site’s limestone bedrock or nearby quarries. The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

The creation of these remarkable buildings implies strictly coordinated activity on a really large scale. Who made them? While groups of humans not too far away had already begun cultivating crops at the time, to the best of our knowledge those who built Göbekli Tepe had not. Yes, they harvested and processed wild cereals and other plants in season, but there is no compelling reason to see them as “proto-farmers”, or to suggest they had any interest in orienting their livelihoods around the domestication of crops. Indeed, there was no particular reason why they should, given the availability of fruits, berries, nuts and edible wild fauna in their vicinity.

And while Göbekli Tepe has often been presented as an anomaly, there is in fact a great deal of evidence for monumental construction of different sorts among hunter-gatherers in earlier periods, extending back into the ice age.

In Europe, between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago, public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Kraków to Kyiv. Research at the Russian site of Yudinovo suggests that “mammoth houses”, as they are often called, were not in fact dwellings at all, but monuments in the strict sense: carefully planned and constructed to commemorate the completion of a great mammoth hunt, using whatever durable parts remained once carcasses had been processed for their meat and hides. We are talking here about really staggering quantities of meat: for each structure (there were five at Yudinovo), there was enough mammoth to feed hundreds of people for around three months. Open-air settlements like Yudinovo, Mezhirich and Kostenki, where such mammoth monuments were erected, often became central places whose inhabitants exchanged amber, marine shells and animal pelts over impressive distances.

So what are we to make of all this evidence for princely burials, stone temples, mammoth monuments and bustling centres of trade and craft production, stretching back far into the ice age? What are they doing there, in a Palaeolithic world where – at least on some accounts – nothing much is ever supposed to have happened, and human societies can best be understood by analogy with troops of chimps or bonobos? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some have responded by completely abandoning the idea of an egalitarian golden age, concluding instead that this must have been a society dominated by powerful leaders, even dynasties – and, therefore, that self-aggrandisement and coercive power have always been the enduring forces behind human social evolution. But this doesn’t really work either.

Evidence of institutional inequality in ice age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place. After all, if any of these ice age “princes” had behaved like, say, bronze age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralised power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling “states”.

To understand why the early record of human social life is patterned in this strange, staccato fashion we first have to do away with some lingering preconceptions about “primitive” mentalities.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many in Europe and North America believed that “primitive” folk were not only incapable of political self-consciousness, they were not even capable of fully conscious thought on the individual level – or at least conscious thought worthy of the name. They argued that anyone classified as a “primitive” or “savage” operated with a “pre-logical mentality”, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind.

Nowadays, no reputable scholar would make such claims: everyone at least pays lip service to the psychic unity of mankind. But in practice, little has changed. Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as “egalitarian”, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different “bands” being different from one another – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness among such people is seen as impossible.

And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in “bands” at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from “simple” to “complex” hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilisation. But they are still caught in the same evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not. Certainly, it rarely occurs to anyone to ask what sort of worlds they thought they were trying to create.

Now, admittedly, this isn’t true of all scholars. Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.

One of the few mid-20th-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of “neolithic science” as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. Less well known – but more relevant to the problems we are grappling with here – are some of his early writings on politics.

In 1944, Lévi-Strauss published an essay about politics among the Nambikwara, a small population of part-time farmers, part-time foragers inhabiting a notoriously inhospitable stretch of savanna in north-west Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Nambikwara then had a reputation as extremely simple folk, given their very rudimentary material culture. For this reason, many treated them almost as a direct window on to the Palaeolithic. This, Lévi-Strauss pointed out, was a mistake. People like the Nambikwara live in the shadow of the modern state, trading with farmers and city people and sometimes hiring themselves out as labourers. Some might even be descendants of runaways from cities or plantations.

For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition, they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose “some basic functions” of political life that “remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government”. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who “unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward”.

Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much, because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely different social and ethical systems, which existed at different times of year. During the rainy season, the Nambikwara occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practised horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the “nomadic adventures” of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner. Then, in the rainy season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. They cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.

How should we think about these chiefs? They were not patriarchs, Lévi-Strauss concluded; neither were they petty tyrants; and there was no sense in which they were invested with mystical powers. More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need. What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. And in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters-gatherers to farmers and back again.

Nambikwara chiefs were in every sense self-conscious political actors, shifting between two different social systems with calm sophistication, all the while balancing a sense of personal ambition with the common good. What’s more, their flexibility and adaptability enabled them to take a distanced perspective on whichever system obtained at any given time.

Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of “inequality”, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings. The adolescent boys in Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice had pronounced congenital disfigurements; other ancient burial sites have contained bodies that were unusually short or extremely tall.

It would be extremely surprising if this were a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record. We can’t know much about the day-to-day lives of Palaeolithic individuals buried with rich grave goods, other than that they seem to have been as well fed and cared for as anybody else; but we can at least suggest they were seen as the ultimate individuals, about as different from their peers as it was possible to be.

This suggests we might have to shelve any premature talk of the emergence of hereditary elites. It seems very unlikely that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarves. Second, we don’t know how much the treatment of such individuals after death had to do with their treatment in life. Another important point here is that we are not dealing with a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods and others being buried with none. The very practice of burying bodies intact, and clothed, appears to have been exceptional in the Upper Palaeolithic. Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts. (In general, Palaeolithic people were clearly much more at home with human body parts than we are.)

The corpse in its complete and articulated form – and the clothed corpse even more so – was clearly something unusual and, one would presume, inherently strange. In many such cases, an effort was made to contain the bodies of the Upper Palaeolithic dead by covering them with heavy objects: mammoth scapulae, wooden planks, stones or tight bindings. Perhaps saturating them with such objects was an extension of these concerns about strangeness, celebrating but also containing something dangerous. This too makes sense. The ethnographic record abounds with examples of anomalous beings – human or otherwise – treated as exalted and dangerous; or one way in life, another in death.

Much here is speculation. There are any number of other interpretations that could be placed on the evidence – though the idea that these tombs mark the emergence of some sort of hereditary aristocracy seems the least likely of all. Those interred were extraordinary, “extreme” individuals. The way their corpses were decorated, displayed and buried marked them out as equally extraordinary in death. Anomalous in almost every respect, such burials can hardly be interpreted as proxies for social structure among the living. On the other hand, they clearly have something to do with all the contemporary evidence for music, sculpture, painting and complex architecture. What is one to make of them?

This is where seasonality comes into the picture. Almost all the ice age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another. True, they didn’t gather to plant crops. Rather, the large Upper Palaeolithic sites are linked to migrations and seasonal hunting of game herds – woolly mammoth, steppe bison or reindeer – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests. This seems to be the explanation for those hubs of activity found in eastern Europe at places like Dolní Věstonice, where people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs. In western Europe, equivalents would be the great rock shelters of the French Périgord and the Cantabrian coast, with their deep records of human activity, which similarly formed part of an annual round of seasonal congregation and dispersal.

Archaeology also shows that patterns of seasonal variation lie behind the monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Activities around the stone temples correspond with periods of annual superabundance, between midsummer and autumn, when large herds of gazelle descended on to the Harran plain. At such times, people also gathered at the site to process massive quantities of nuts and wild cereal grasses, making these into festive foods, which presumably fuelled the work of construction. There is some evidence to suggest that each of these great structures had a relatively short lifespan, culminating in an enormous feast, after which its walls were rapidly filled in with leftovers and other refuse: hierarchies raised to the sky, only to be swiftly torn down again. Ongoing research is likely to complicate this picture, but the overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established.

Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture. They may be key to understanding the famous Neolithic monuments of Salisbury Plain in England, and not just because the arrangements of standing stones themselves seem to function (among other things) as giant calendars. Stonehenge, framing the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, is the most famous of these monuments. It turns out to have been the last in a long sequence of ceremonial structures, erected over the course of centuries in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles at significant times of year. Careful excavation shows that many of these structures were dismantled just a few generations after their construction.

Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: they abandoned the cultivation of cereals and returned, from around 3300BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer.

All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way. We’ll never know how such a decision was made, but Stonehenge itself provides something of a hint since it is built of extremely large stones, some of which (the “bluestones”) were transported from as far away as Wales, while many of the cattle and pigs consumed at Durrington Walls were laboriously herded there from other distant locations.

In other words, and remarkable as it may seem, even in the third millennium BC coordination of some sort was clearly possible across large parts of the British Isles. If Stonehenge was a shrine to exalted founders of a ruling clan – as some archaeologists now argue – it seems likely that members of their lineage claimed significant, even cosmic roles by virtue of their involvement in such events. On the other hand, patterns of seasonal aggregation and dispersal raise another question: if there were kings and queens at Stonehenge, exactly what sort could they have been? After all, these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders. If they possessed the means to marshal labour, pile up food resources and provender armies of year-round retainers, what sort of royalty would consciously elect not to do so?

Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply “given”, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention. The case of the British Neolithic – with its alternating phases of dispersal and monumental construction – indicates just how far such intervention could sometimes go.

The political implications of this are important, as Lévi-Strauss noted. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities.

It’s easy to see why scholars in the 1950s and 60s arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organisation – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – did not know what to do with Lévi-Strauss’s observations. They held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilisation. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. Other groups would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. In other words, they threw everything askew.

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either “simple” or “complex” types of social organisation, since what have been identified as the features of “complexity” – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognise that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgment has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.

Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last ice age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like Nambikwara. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.

With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the “princes” and “princesses” of the last ice age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairytale or costume drama. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the ruling clans of Stonehenge, just for a season.

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, perhaps the question we should ask is: how did we get stuck? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?

In truth, this flexibility, and potential for political self-consciousness, was never entirely lost. Seasonality is still with us – even if it is a pale shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter “holiday season” in which values and forms of organisation do, to a limited degree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what’s really important, and that to give is better than to receive.

Among societies like the Inuit or the Kwakiutl of Canada’s Northwest Coast, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes, these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers. In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety. In the European middle ages, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest, and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at “turning the world upside down”. In carnival, women might rule over men and children be put in charge of government. Servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, “carnival kings” could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of bacchanalian chaos.

What’s important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasise about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at “turning the world upside down” would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals. Now, perhaps, we begin to understand why. Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility.

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Adapted from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity – by David Graeber and David Wengrow, published by Allen Lane. To order a copy, go to Guardian Bookshop

source: The Guardian

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Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene.

From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society’s flawed concept of “humanity” — that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please.

To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way.

Reviews:

“Ailton Krenak’s words, expressed with the visceral intensity of one of those peoples who ‘still consider the need to stay attached to this land, ‘ … fill me with hope. Amid the successive catastrophes we experience today, he surprises us once again by teaching that the fight for a better world, a world that can be called home, involves not only explicit activism, but dance, music, the stories we tell at night.” — Aparecida Vilaça, anthropologist and author of Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia and Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia

About the Contributors:

Ailton Krenak was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the Krenak homelands along the Doce River Valley, a region where mining operations have severely affected the ecology. A socio-environmental activist and campaigner for Indigenous rights, he organized the Alliance of Forest Peoples, which unites riverine and Indigenous communities throughout the Amazon. He has consistently been one of the best-known campaigners in the movement set in motion by the Indigenous Awakening in the 1970s and was a key figure in the formation of the Union of Indigenous Nations (UIN), which brought together 180 different Indigenous groups across the country in a unified front to push for rights. In his capacity as a journalist, producing videos and making television appearances, he has pursued an educational and environmental agenda. His struggles in the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in the inclusion of Chapter VIII of the Brazilian Constitution (1988), which guaranteed Indigenous rights to their ancestral homelands and traditional cultures — on paper at least. He was co-author of the UNESCO proposal that led to the creation of the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve in 2005, and remains a member of its managing committee. He was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the President of the Republic in 2016, and holds an honorary doctorate from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. He is the author of two previous books, and was recently featured in the Netflix documentary series Guerras do Brasil.doc (Wars of Brazil).

Anthony Doyle was born in Dublin, Ireland. He holds a degree in English Literature and Philosophy and a master’s degree in Philosophy from University College Dublin. He has been living in Brazil since 2000, where he works as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction. He is the author of a children’s book in Portuguese entitled O Lago Secou, published by Companhia das Letras.

____________________________

Ideas to Postpone the End of the World

by Ailton Krenak,

Translated by Anthony Doyle

10/6/2020, paperback

Anansi International

SKU: 9781487008512

more info and order here

The post Ideas to Postpone the End of the World- a book by Ailton Krenak appeared first on Void Network.

Bouachrine wrote fierce editorials attacking the royal autocracy and what he calls Al Istibdad (despotism). In 2011, he was a leading partisan of the Arab Spring, during which he criticized Islamic leaders for their opposition to the protests. Pro-regime loyalists burned his newspaper in the streets and sought to fan the flames of division between Islamists and leftists. In 2017, Bouachrine was arrested a few months after he roundly criticized the king for having “ruled for eighteen bittersweet years” and being absent for much of his reign. After Bouachrine criticized and mocked Saudi crown prince Mohamed Bin Salman, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi warned him through WhatsApp that he had crossed a line and could be murdered. Instead Bouachrine was arrested on February 23, 2018 and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment. Khashoggi was brutally killed in the Saudi Turkish consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018.

Bouachrine is one of nearly a thousand Moroccan political prisoners facing Orwellian surveillance and repression. Female journalist Hajar Raissouni who also wrote for Akhbar Al Yaoum was recently sentenced to one year in prison for “having an illegal abortion and sexual relations outside marriage” despite the fact that she never had an abortion (with evidence backing her up).

Professor Maati Monjib, co-founder of the journalist rights NGO, Freedom Now, has endured more than a decade of political persecution. Political police agents continue to follow him and publish false private information that has made it increasingly difficult for him and his family to live in Morocco. His job at the university has also been threatened. In 2015, Monjib was one of seven people accused of helping create Storymaker, an app that gives citizen journalists the ability to publish content anonymously. Amnesty International reported that he is accused of threatening national security in an ongoing trial that has been postponed 17 times in four years. On September 16, 2015, authorities briefly held Monjib at the Casablanca airport, where he was informed of the travel ban against him. Two days before, he had been summoned by police because of his human rights activities. Monjib undertook a 24-day long hunger strike to protest illegal travel restrictions forbidding him to leave the country. Finally, on October 13, 2015 he was admitted to the hospital as a result of his fast. In October 2019, Monjib announced that one of the world’s premier cyber-mercenary firms, the Israeli NSO Group, had planted spyware on his phone. According to Amnesty International , Monjib and human rights attorney Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui were sent texts containing links to secretly install surveillance software able to monitor even encrypted Signal chats.

Lakome (For You) editor-in-chief Ali Aznouli was arrested on September 17, 2013 and falsely charged under the Anti-Terrorism Law, specifically for “providing support for carrying out a terrorist crime.” His arrest came after attacking what he called the king’s repeated, extended absences. In 2014, Aznouli explained that…“the arrest and charges are politically motivated, and have to do with Lakome’s independent editorial line and the series of articles and investigations that exposed the corruption within the Moroccan state and criticized the real ruling powers in the country and how they have handled major issues.” The police took advantage of Aznouli’s arrest to cut access to his newspaper’s web site, forcing him to develop a new, but similarly named site. Released on bail, Aznouli’s trial has been postponed repeatedly for five years continually putting him in a position where he feels jeopardized and insecure. Nonetheless, he continues to publish truthful exposes, such as, “Fifteen years of Mohammed VI’s rule has proven that the government has no political will to liberalize the public media and guarantee independent journalism, the economic basis of which has been eliminated. The government has yet to put in place a journalism code, to ensure access to information, and to protect the freedoms won so far in the field of journalism, expression, protest, and opinion. These freedoms have been won at a heavy cost, and to continue to benefit from them, one must be ready to pay it.”

These examples of prominent intellectuals kept in a constant state of insecurity are part of the reason why Freedom House rates Morocco poorly, and why Reporters Without Borders’ 2015 report ranked the country 130th in terms of press freedom, trailing countries like Afghanistan and South Sudan.

Most Moroccan political prisoners are from the Rif region, where nationalist ambitions were evident in the many Rif flags at a May 2019 protest in front of parliament. Mothers of prisoners traveled hundreds of miles and converged in the streets, many wearing all black from head to toe. Although the police presence appeared to be minimal, cameramen from all sides took images continually.

Beginning on October 28, 2016, the killing of a fish vendor by police was the spark that led to a wave of protests unmatched since the 2011 Arab Spring. In more than 40 cities, protesters called for an end to repression in solidarity with the oppressed. On June 11, 2017 a million people marched for “freedom, dignity and social justice” and solidarity with Rif prisoners, particularly movement leader Nasser Zefzafi. In many cities, demonstrators also waved the flags of the Amazigh, Morocco’s Berber community.

At the far reaches of both European and Arabic civilizations, Morocco is a unique combination of historical survivalisms. Combined with stunning natural beauty in mountains, beaches, and deserts that have become exotic tourist destinations, Morocco is the most stable country in North Africa and a close USA ally against Islamic radicalism. On the surface, new train stations and modern airports stand beside modern highways and high speed trains. Luxurious villas and tourist resorts with beautiful pools and golf courses witness steady streams of expensive cars. Dozens of palaces adorn the countryside, but at least 15% of the population live in abject poverty. About forty percent of Moroccans live on less than four dollars a day. As the king’s autocratic decisions have become increasingly repressive, the country’s future stability becomes increasingly questionable. The monarchy responded to the 2011 Arab Spring by making limited reforms, but the new waves of protest in 2016 and 2017 have been met with harsh measures. The regime continues to divide Islamic opposition from leftists, thereby isolating key figures who can then be targeted without unified opposition. Whether or not its divide and rule strategy will succeed depends on many factors, none no more important than the multifarious opposition’s capability to unite into a powerful movement.

_______________________

George Katsiaficas has been active in social movements since 1969 when he participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement. A target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program (Counterintelligence), he was honored to be classified “Priority 1 ADEX”.  For 11 years, he worked in Ocean Beach, California (as described at the end of Andre Gorz’s book Ecology as Politics) in a radical countercultural community that fought against war.  After living in Berlin for 1 1/2 years and learning first-hand about the autonomous movement there, he wrote about that movement (The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life). For years, he was active for the cause of Palestinian rights. A graduate of MIT and UCSD (where he studied with Herbert Marcuse), he wrote his dissertation about the global movement of 1968 (published as The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968). He has been teaching at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. In 2001, he did research at the May 18 Institute at Chonnam National University in Kwangju South Korea, especially focusing on the 1980 uprising. For 6 six years, he was editor of New Political Science and brought many unknown issues into public view, with special issues on the Sudan and one on the Black Panther Party (published as a book by Routledge–Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party–coedited with Kathleen Cleaver.) A peace advocate by nature, he is also unwilling to tolerate injustice and work incessantly for the realization of his ideals.

MORE INFO:

Moroccans protest prison sentences of anti-poverty activists

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Registration & more info: www.taalahooghan.org/iac

Schedule & workshop/discussion descriptions: www.taalahooghan.org/iac-workshops/

We welcome Indigenous, Black, People of Color for this gathering.

From the base of Dóókoosłiid we call for those also seeking a fulfilling life free from domination, coercion, & exploitation to gather around this fire.

For those sickened by fascinations with dead white-men’s thoughts (and their academies and their laws), reformist & reactionary “decolonial activisms”, and the uninspired merry-go-round of leftist politics as a whole.

For all those ungovernable forces of Nature, we invite you to gather as we fiercely push, pull, gnash our teeth, sharpen our claws, and dig deeply, so that we can find each other and see what comes from the circles around our fires.

Please register (even if it’s one name for your group) as our venue has limited capacity.
If you have any questions or issues with the online form please email us at taalahooghan@protonmail.com.

Indigenous Anarchist Convergence
Workshops

All Colonizers Are Bastards: Towards a World Without Prisons or Police
1h 30m | Open discussion
From community response networks that intervene in ICE raids, to transformative and restorative justice practices, this will be a facilitated discussion for participants to share stories and practical actions for a world without prisons or police.

Autonomous Organizing Against Borders 
2h | Presenters: O’odham Anti-Border Collective, Contra Viento y Marea, Tornillo the Occupation, Hecate Society, Casa Carmelita, Food not Walls and No Más Muertes/No More Deaths
This is a necessary discussion and presentation if you have been asking yourself How do I support border resistance? What is it like on our southern border dealing face to face with the imperial machine? How do I get involved? What is going on? 
Nellie Joe David from O’odham Anti-Border Collective will address Indigenous Mobilization, Convergence, Education, and Action to Protect O’odham Sites. She will also discuss mobilization to stop the border wall and tower construction. 
Representatives from the Border Resistance Tour will provide first hand accounts from QTBIPOC grassroots organizers about the last 8 months of Direct Action and Mutual Aide in the Border towns of Juarez/El Paso and Tijuana/SanDiego.
This will be broad and strategic discussion on how folks can plug into work that is actually working towards dismantling concentration camps and US-funded genocide.

Another World is Possible: an Indigenous Governing Council and Zapatista Proposal
1h 30m | Presented by the Semillero Collective
This workshop deconstructs Indigenous Philosophy and practice. We discuss the importance of an Indigenous concentrated approach to organizing and autonomous living vs. the western, liberal lens that often co-opts movements for liberation and continues to replicate colonized standards and norms. We center our conversation around collective resistance and our natural inheritance to the land.

Autonomous Foods & Medicine
1h | Presented by Rez Family Farms/Red Ink
This workshop will help Indigenous peoples to better understand how to interact with their own landscapes to harvest foods and medicine. We will address how to safely approach working with the landscape, responsible food and medicine harvesting, and sharing both stories and samples of foods/medicines.

Autonomously & With Conviction: A Metis Refusal of State-led Reconciliation
1h | 
Jaydene
This workshop will address Canadian state-led reconciliation, why it’s fucked up to support it, and why anarchism holds the only true solution for decolonization.

BIPOC, Geographies of Struggle, & the Relevance of Decolonial Anarchy
2h | La Selva Collective
This workshop session will be held with a few members of a new decolonial anarchist media and writing collective called La Selva. Part of the workshop will be devoted to an introduction to the group, as to why they felt the need to organize as a group and produce content they feel is missing in the broader revolutionary sphere. Another part of the workshop will be a small presentation on the possibilities of spatial struggles outside of the metropolis, and into racially and economically marginalized spaces where few efforts are rooted in. This will then transition into a wider discussion facilitated by the collective on questions pertaining to the moment and needs for action.

Harm Reduction for the Community
1h | Presented by Sonoran Prevention Works
Marginalized communities have been disproportionately impacted by the drug war and have fewer resources to treat Substance Use Disorder and blood-borne diseases like HIV and Hepatitis. We must often be our own first responders, so overdose recognition and response are critical, life-saving skills. In this workshop we’ll discuss stigma and harm reduction strategies to minimize the negative consequences associated with substance use, how to support our relatives struggling with addiction, and learn how to use naloxone to reverse opioid overdoses. Participants will receive free naloxone and fentanyl testing kits.  

Against Settler Colonial Politics
1h 30m | Presenters: Little Black Cart crew & TBA
This is a discussion for those who revel in rousing leftist tensions. A good space to attack Marxism and other European leftist ideologies, a bad space for people who vote and think politicians will save them.

Locating an Indigenous Anarchism 
2h 30m | Panelists: Aragorn!, Amanda Lickers, Louise Benally, Rob Los Ricos, and more TBA.
What is meant, and what is not meant, when we assert “Indigenous Anarchism?” 
This panel will be initiated by Aragorn! who wrote Locating an Indigenous Anarchism in 2005, it was one of the first pieces of writing that articulated an Indigenous Anarchism.

Organizing Indigenous Radical Spaces
1h 30m | Presenters: Táala Hooghan Infoshop & Ké’ Infoshop
There are two Indigenous infoshops located in so-called Arizona, Táala Hooghan was founded in 2007, Ké’ was founded in 2017. Join collective members of these projects to explore the fun and challenges with organizing, sustaining, dealing with conflicts, strategies, and other shenanigans with these spaces. We will also be discussing a proposal for a Southwest editorial collective for Black Seed, an Indigenous Anarchist paper.

Solidarity Means Action, Anti-colonial-Struggle Means Attack!
2h | Open panel with representatives from Protect the Peaks, Haul No!, and more TBA
From Big Mountain to Palestine, Charlottesville to Ferguson, Mauna Kea to Standing Rock, the San Francisco Peaks and beyond, this is a critical discussion on meaningful solidarity, strategies and tactics, and proposals.

The post Indigenous Anarchist Convergence 16-18/8/2019 – Flagstaff USA appeared first on Void Network.

The post SPOTLIGHT ON CRIMINALISATION OF LAND AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENDERS- by Global Witness appeared first on Void Network.

The stories and intent are the same, a policy to annihilate the people considered the enemy of those in authority. Describing the horrifying methods used in these countries to eliminate people by state-sponsored activity is mind-boggling.

The genocidal activities of the colonial government of Indonesia against the people of West Papua is benign to the level of subjugation and will take time to achieve maximum effect but will produce the same result, the obliteration of the Papuan people.

The program is called Operasi Tumpas or Operation Annihilation. Spearheaded by the military, it is an operation of total obliteration of not only the people but also the resources that sustain their existence as a social unit. In the long run these methods will alter or destroy the social infrastructures that maintain the existence of the people.

The current military operations in Nduga District in the Highlands of West Papua (West New Guinea) is yet another “tumpas” because there have been many during the past 57 years.

Infrastructure decimated

Whenever an area is declared a DOM (an area of military operation) no one, not even family members and churches are allowed to enter the area to deliver humanitarian assistance. It is strictly off limits to international contact.

The people have grown used to this cycle of military operations. That is why whenever it happens the whole population abandons their villages to the safety of the cold mountains and the jungle. They move with full knowledge that when it is safe to return there will be nothing left for them to return to. Their homes, churches, schools, clinics, including crops and animals will have been destroyed. While in hiding, exposed to the elements, many of their members, especially the young and the old, will die from exposure and malnutrition.

Military operations are a major factor, but there are other contributing factors, such as colonial settlers called transmigrasi. They arrive every week in their thousands, facilitated by the authorities to occupy traditional lands and marginalise Papuan owners.

Other contributing factors include poor health and less education. The people have demanded improvement in these areas but instead the government has put infrastructure, including road construction, as its priority to mainly benefit its military operations and colonial settlements.

Permanent military operations have been Indonesia’s legacy in West Papua for years and are the reason why the international media is banned from the territory. Direct requests for fact finding missions by the Pacific Islands Forum and the Melanesian Spearhead Group have been flatly denied for this very reason.

Calls for Indonesia to end human rights violations by the United Nations Human Rights Council and major international agencies such as Amnesty International, the Red Cross, World Council of Churches, Franciscan International and others, including governments, have all been ignored. Meanwhile human right abuses continue to be more devastating than ever, with the use of chemical weapons.

Crimes Indonesia wants hidden

It is well established that there is an undeclared war of resistance against Indonesian occupying forces.

The indiscriminate use of chemical weapons dropped from helicopter gunships against fleeing Villagers of the Nduga region in the Highlands of West Papua indicates the intensity of the war. The colonial army is using these banned weapons in desperation to terrorise the Papuans and reduce resistance. The tactics are well rehearsed. If the resistance does not create an incident the army will produce one as a pretext to launch a major operation.

Such pretexts have included, firstly, the death of so-called “civilians”. It is well-known that the TNI (Indonesian National Armed Forces) has long been involved in businesses in West Papua. This is part of their strategy to monitor and defeat the OPM (West Papua Independence Movement). Dressing as civilians is part of their concealed strategy to secure success.

Secondly, the people in the Nduga area are opposed to the decision by Indonesian President Joko Widodo to grant a permit to a TNI contractor to build the Trans Papua Highway. The highway will run through Nduga District — a stronghold of the TPN (West Papuan Liberation Army).

Tensions have been high since they entered the area and conflict of this magnitude was bound to happen. In late November the contractor was advised in writing by the regional commander of the TPN to cease activities on December 1 [the anniversary of the first raising of West Papua’s flag of independence, the Morning Star] and advising that employees should not interfere with the activities of people celebrating December 1, including the flag-raising ceremony.

In spite of this advice, a company employee made a video of the flag-raising ceremony — an action considered very serious by the TPN. The people asked him to stop and even followed him to their camp demanding that he delete the video, but he refused to do so.

The action by TPN troops on December 2 was a surprise to the people of Nduga but they accepted the rationale of self-defence by the TPN, because the video would have been used by the military as evidence against the people. The making of the video proved beyond doubt that employees of the company are members of the military. Some even carry weapons.

Tensions in this district have remained high ever since the massacre in Mapenduma in 1996. In the Mapenduma case, TPN commander Kelly Kwalik reached agreement with church leaders to release hostages, including foreigners, which were being held by his group. The people came together to witness a traditional ceremony on the day of the release. People, especially children, gathered excitedly to welcome the Red Cross helicopter that they thought would be bringing an official to receive the hostages. But there was no official, instead the military arrived with machine guns blazing, mowing down unsuspecting women and children. The incident was documented in a 1999 ABC Four Corners report, “Blood on the Cross”.

Repressive military operations are a government policy of annihilation. Whether armed or not, Papuans must be eliminated.

UK-based Amnesty International documented in its 2018 report, Don’t bother, just let him die: Killing with impunity in Papua; the abuses, arbitrary arrests and unlawful killings that have been carried out by members of the Indonesian military against the people of West Papua. This has been going on for the past 57 years and with the current instructions issued by the president, who is the highest commander of the armed forces of Indonesia, we are expecting the worst.

[Rex Ramakiek is the Secretary of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.]

originally published Green Left Weekly

WEST PAPUA: THE GENOCIDE THAT IS BEING IGNORED BY THE WORLD

If you need evidence that politicians and the mainstream media pick and choose which oppressive conflicts to cover in order to further geopolitical ambitions, you need only Google “West Papua.”

Ever heard of it? Have you ever been sitting at home watching CNN, BBC, or Fox News and heard the news anchor mention West Papua?

It’s strange that this oppression receives little to no media coverage considering a recent fact-finding mission conducted by the Brisbane Archdiocese’s Catholic Justice and Peace Commission reported that West Papua was experiencing a “slow motion genocide.” The report warned West Papua’s indigenous population is at risk of becoming “an anthropological museum exhibit of a bygone culture.”

When you learn what fuels the conflict in West Papua, it becomes clear why this issue receives hardly a blink from our peace-loving politicians and media establishment.

West Papua is home to one of the world’s largest gold mines (and third largest copper mine), known as the Grasberg Mine. Grasberg is majority-owned by the American mining firm Freeport McMoRan. It has reserves worth an estimated $100 billion, and the company is Indonesia’s biggest taxpayer.

Money and geopolitics usually beat out human rights. Since the Suharto dictatorship of Indonesia annexed West Papua in a 1969 U.N. referendum – largely viewed as a land grab – an estimated 500,000 West Papuans have been killed fighting to achieve independence.

Freeport McMoRan was given rights to Grasberg when the Indonesian government signed the right to extract mineral wealth from the site in 1967. In order to preserve this quite literal gold mine, the Indonesian military uses brute force against the local indigenous population. Benny Wenda, a native Papuan who has campaigned his whole life for independence, details the kinds of experiences the local population has endured at the hands of the Indonesian military:

“Now, every morning on the way to their gardens, Benny and his mother and aunties would be stopped and checked by Indonesian soldiers. Often the soldiers would force the women to wash themselves in the river before brutally raping them in front of their children. Many young women, including three of Benny’s aunties, died in the jungle from the trauma and injuries inflicted during these attacks, which often involved genital mutilation. Every day Papuan women had to report to the military post to provide food from their gardens, and to clean and cook for the soldiers. Violence, racism and enforced subservience became part of daily routine.” [emphasis added]

Australia, a country with a cozy, albeit confusing relationship with Indonesia, plays its part in destroying any decent discussion on this horrifying issue. In November of last year, the Indonesian government asked Australia to put pressure on the Pacific nations who have begun to show support for West Papua’s campaign for independence, effectively stopping these tiny islands from “interfering” in Indonesia’s affairs. Australia has been quite complicit in this issue to date, even providing the Indonesian military with the equipment necessary to wreak havoc on the local population.

Lately, however, there has been some progress. The two countries suspended military ties after an Indonesian military official found “offensive” material at an Australian military base, including homework that suggested West Papua was part of Melanesia and should be given independence.

Regardless, Papua has the highest poverty rate in Indonesia. It is nearly three times the national average. It also has the highest infant, child, and maternal mortality rates in Indonesia, as well as the worst health indicators and the lowest literacy rates.

Imagine how greatly the West Papuans could improve their standard of living if they were allowed to control their own resources without the Indonesian military forcibly destroying their lives.

Meanwhile, an American mining company continues to make hundreds of billions of dollars at the expense of innocent natives.

Originally published January 18, 2017 / The Last American Vagabond

SEE ALSO:

The post West Papua: The genocide continues appeared first on Void Network.

The Longest Walk: We Shall Continue has been initiated to address the major threats to American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and Nations. This is a spiritual Walk for all Indigenous Peoples and our allies. In 1978, The Longest Walk came about as a way to confront eleven (11) anti-Indian bills in Congress. This included a bill that proposed abrogating all Indian treaties. In 2019 we are facing a renewal of serious threats to our children, women, lands, waters, sovereignty, and even our Indigenous Knowledge. Our Entire Environment is being attacked constantly.

The post The Longest Walk: We Shall Continue 2019 / American Indian- Indigenous Peoples and Nations in action appeared first on Void Network.

Οn 1 January, Jair Bolsonaro will be sworn in as Brazil’s 38th president. He has expressed open disdain for the indigenous peoples of Brazil, and it is no exaggeration to say that some of the world’s most unique and diverse tribes are facing annihilation. Genocide is defined by the UN as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Large-scale mass genocides rightly receive global attention, yet countless others go unreported and unpunished because the victims number only a few hundred, or even a few dozen.

Right now, deep in the Amazon rainforest, a small tribe of survivors is on the run. They are the Kawahiva, an uncontacted tribe of just a few dozen people, the victims of waves of horrific attacks which have pushed them to the brink of extinction. We know almost nothing about them, except that they are fleeing chainsaws in a region with the highest rate of deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil’s first ever investigation into the genocide of an uncontacted tribe was launched in 2005, and 29 people suspected of involvement in killing Kawahiva were detained but later released, including a former state governor and a senior policeman. The case stalled for lack of evidence.

The Kawahiva’s territory lies near the town of Colniza, one of the most violent areas in Brazil, where 90% of income is from illegal logging. Survival International, the global movement fighting for the rights of tribal people, has recently called for increased police protection for the team responsible for protecting the Kawahiva’s land. FUNAI, Brazil’s Indian Affairs Department, has been prevented from properly carrying out its work in the area due to violence from illegal loggers and ranchers, leaving the tribe exposed.

Preventing a genocide of uncontacted people is not a priority for Bolsonaro. He once said: “There is no indigenous territory where there aren’t minerals. Gold, tin and magnesium are in these lands, especially in the Amazon, the richest area in the world. I’m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for Indians.”

Indigenous peoples are frequently regarded as obstacles to the advance of agribusiness, extractive industries, roads and dams. As more rainforest is invaded and destroyed in the name of economic “progress” and personal profit, uncontacted tribes become targets – massacred over resources because greedy outsiders know they can literally get away with murder. These are silent, invisible genocides, with few if any witnesses. The news often only emerges months, if not years, later.

The UN convention on genocide came into force 70 years ago, yet entire tribes continue to be exterminated by the dominant society in order to steal their land and resources. Symbolic of this is the “last of his tribe”, a lone man living in a patch of forest in Brazil’s western Amazon region. We know nothing about him except that he rejects all contact, and survived waves of attacks carried out in the 1970s and 80s against his people and his neighbours, the Akuntsu tribe – of whom just four survive. No one has ever been prosecuted for these genocides. This impervious mentality harks back to the wild west of the 18th and 19th centuries, when Native Americans in the US were slaughtered by the colonists. Indeed, Bolsonaro himself has declared: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.”

The majority of the world’s 100 or so uncontacted tribes live in the Brazilian Amazon. They are aware of the outside world, use and adapt outside goods for their own purposes and may engage sporadically with contacted tribes nearby. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyles require vast and acute botanical and zoological knowledge. With this unique understanding of sustainable living, they protect some of the largest and most biodiverse forests on Earth.

Uncontacted people make homes, love their families, tend the landscape, and, like any of us, want to live well and in peace. Where their rights are respected they continue to thrive, but all face catastrophe unless their land is protected.

The largest area of primary rainforest under indigenous control is the Yanomami territory, which straddles part of the Brazilian border with Venezuela. It is home to around 32,000 Yanomami, including some groups who are uncontacted. A “epidemic” of goldminers have illegally invaded the territory to pillage its riches, bringing disease and death to the tribe.

In May, Yanomami reported that two uncontacted members of the tribe had been murdered by miners. FUNAI had closed its protection post in the area due to a lack of funds and, while prosecutors have ordered the post to be reopened, the authorities have not yet investigated the killings.

Bolsonaro opposed the creation of the Yanomami territory in the 1980s, calling it a “crime against the motherland”, and a “scandal”. He affirmed his beliefs in 2017, saying he regarded the creation of the reserve as “high treason”, and there are murmurs that this is an area already in the crosshairs of the new administration.

Bolsonaro intends to take FUNAI out of the justice ministry and into a newly created ministry for women, family and human rights. This is a move sure to weaken the department’s efficacy and clout – it has already been undermined by huge budget cuts. Bolsonaro has appointed Damares Alves as the new minister, an evangelical preacher and congressional aide who co-founded Atini, a controversial group that evangelises in indigenous communities and is subject to an investigation by public prosecutors for inciting racial hatred against indigenous peoples.

The post The uncontacted tribes of Brazil face genocide under Jair Bolsonaro – by Fiona Watson appeared first on Void Network.

BBP resistance is a continuation of our fight in Standing Rock, and furthermore a continuation of the centuries old fight to protect sacred stolen territory. But unlike the NoDAPL sacred fight, this camp must be smaller and more vetted, because of the fragile ecosystem, the surveillance, and the sacred wishes of the people of this land.

If you are interested in stopping the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, make plans to come to Louisiana NOW.

Because of the urgency of the situation, we are pausing the application process to join Camp and instead are asking all protectors to come to Camp as soon as possible. Please email us at resist@nobbp.org with your name, phone number, why you want to come to camp, when you will be arriving and how long you plan on staying. We will respond with the directions to camp and what to bring.

** Please note that if show up to camp without emailing us first and without receiving an email invitation, you will not be allowed to enter camp. **

In the face of ETP’s escalated tactics, for 38 consecutive days we disrupted and stopped construction in the Atchafalaya Basin on the water, on the ground and in the air. The more protectors here on the ground, the more we can stop construction.

Join us.

CLICK HERE TO EMAIL US NOW

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The Bayou Bridge Pipeline is the final stage of a scheme to bring fracked-oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota to export facilities in Louisiana. Construction on the pipeline is under way, but frontline communities are resisting. This resistance is being led by the L’eau Est La Vie Camp. More about the Bayou Bridge Pipeline from NoBBP.org:

Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the very same company behind the notorious Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) , is trying to build a 162 mile crude oil pipeline across Louisiana called the Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP). BBP will pollute our water,crossing an astounding 700 bodies of water including Bayou LaFourche, a critical reservoir that supplies the United Houma Nation and 300,000 Louisiana residents with clean, safe drinking water. BBP violates indigenous sovereignty.Along its path of destruction, BBP would impact sacred mounds and threaten drinking water of the United Houma Nation, a tribe that has been seeking federal recognition for decades. Neither the United Houma Nation nor any tribe of the gulf south has been consulted nor given consent for the construction of this pipeline. BBP will destroy our coast. Wetlands are sponges for floodwaters. The BBP will destroy 150 acres of wetlands in its path and will “temporarily” impact 450 more acres. Wetlands are vital to a resilient Southern Louisiana, and already because of climate change and development, Louisiana is losing an average of one acre of coastal wetlands per hour. The State of Louisiana is frantically trying to figure out how to save our coast, but building the BBP will make the situation worse. BBP will destroy our economy.Existing oil pipelines have already created enormous problems for our crawfishing industry. BBP will only make these problems worse, creating dams in the Atchafalaya Basin dozens of miles long that irreparably damage the ecosystem and make fishing for crawfish impossible. The crawfishing industry supports thousands of good jobs in Louisiana. BBP will only create 12 permanent jobs. BBP will increase flooding. The loss of wetlands also means increased flooding. When flooding is worse, our communities suffer. Our homes our damaged, our crops are destroyed, our infrastructure is eroded, our families get sick, and our economy is harmed. BBP is a climate disaster. It will create the carbon equivalent of 30 new coal plants. The BBP is not compatible with our global mandate to limit climate change to 1.5℃. Our growing network of impacted landowners, tribal members, environmental justice communities, and fisherfolk have submitted comments, spoken out at hearings, and demanded proper environmental reviews and that our concerns will be taken seriously. None of this has happened. ETP has swindled landowners, bought our politicians, and refused to address any of the community’s needs. Enough is enough. If our leaders won’t stand up to stop this pipeline and protect our water, then we the people of Louisiana will. We are building the L’eau Est La Vie camp to protect our water and our way of life from the Bayou Bridge pipeline.

The No Bayou Bridge solidarity campaign takes its leadership from the frontline, indigenous and POC led resistance to the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. We are committed to supporting this frontline resistance until the Bayou Bridge pipeline is defeated.

Please feel free to contact the solidarity campaign with any questions, or if you need any support organizing an event or action: actions@nobayoubridge.global.

source: https://www.nobayoubridge.global/about/

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The Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP) would impact numerous communities across Southern Louisiana. The pipeline would lead to more fracking for oil in the shale fields of North Dakota and further the global dependence on climate change-causing fossil fuels. 

The oil moving through the Bayou Bridge Pipeline will come from North Dakota via the Dakota Access pipeline before connecting with another pipeline that heads south. Ultimately the oil that will be shipped through BPP will be exported overseas.

There are a host of concerns about BBP and reasons why it must not be built. Some of these concerns are detailed below:

• Threats to Wetlands and the Environment
• Threat to Bayou Lafourche Drinking Water
• Public Interest and Safety Concerns
• Environmental Justice issues in St. James

Threats to Wetlands and the Environment

The Bayou Bridge Pipeline presents a significant threat to Louisiana’s invaluable and treasured wetlands. This 162-mile long crude-oil pipeline will cross the largest contiguous wetland area in the country, permanently destroying some 150 acres of forested wetlands in its path and “temporarily” impacting more than 450 acres of wetlands. Moreover, the proposed pipeline’s 75-foot buffer along the right-of-way will permanently destroy 940 acres of wetlands.

The Atchafalaya Basin contains the largest contiguous bottomland hardwood forest in North America. The largest river swamp in North America, and one of the most productive wetlands in the world, the Basin’s 885,000 acres of forested wetlands provide habitat for an expansive array of mammals, fishes and amphibians. Situated at the mouth of North America’s most important flyway, the Basin supports half of America’s migratory waterfowl (more than 300 bird species), and provides the most important habitat for neotropical migratory land birds in the Western Hemisphere. The proposed pipeline will contribute to the existing harm left behind by oil and gas activities in the Basin. In addition to concerns regarding spills and malfunctions of the pipeline, the installation of the pipeline as proposed presents significant harm to the invaluable wetland ecosystem of the Atchafalaya Basin.

Prior backfilling activities in the Atchafalaya Basin along the very same right-of-way that Bayou Bridge Pipeline proposes to use have drastically reduced the environmental integrity of the Basin. Previous pipeline projects through the Basin have left spoil banks of dredged material adjacent to the pipelines, dramatically altering water flow and sedimentation patterns along the pipeline routes, impairing water quality, negatively impacting wildlife habitat and disrupting local crawfishing communities. The spoil bank runs along the pipelines on an east-west trajectory and diverts and impedes the natural north-to-south water flow, altering the direction to an east-west flow pattern. Because the water is laden with sediment, the change in the natural flow creates sedimentation along the spoil banks, which further impairs the north-to-south flow of the water. If BBP is authorized to install its pipeline into existing spoil banks it will be authorized to permanently impair water flow, making it impossible to restore the Basin to its natural hydrology. Prior to authorizing installation of any additional pipelines in the Basin, regulators must require pipeline companies, including BBP’s majority owner Energy Transfer Partners, to restore the rights-of-way for existing, out-of-compliance pipelines for which these companies are responsible.

Finally, as the state will likely continue to experience frequent flood events, the value of the wetlands for flood attenuation should not be underestimated. Reducing flood storage throughout Acadiana by filling wetlands and constraining north-south flow with a pipeline right-of-way aggravates flooding issues. The Atchafalaya Basin is critically important for flood control, yet the ability of the Basin to move flood waters is severely diminished due to the increase in accretion of sediment in the Basin floodway. Pipeline canals, illegal spoil banks and the lack of enforcement of the terms of pipeline construction permits greatly contribute to the accretion process in the Basin. It is critically important for the sustainability of the Basin floodway that pipeline canals are brought back into compliance before any new permits are granted to use the rights-of-way.

Threat to Bayou Lafourche Drinking Water

Bayou Lafourche is the sourceof drinking water for 300,000 people, including the United Houma Nation and residents in Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, and Lafourche Parishes. Consolidated Water District No. 1 which provides water to residents in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parish is becoming increasingly dependent on Bayou Lafourche to provide 80% of its water supply (approximately 4 billion gallons per year).

Bayou Lafourche has also historically counteracted subsidence in the area by introducing fresh water, sediments, and nutrients from the Mississippi River. To counteract coastal land loss, Louisiana’s Coastal Wetlands Conservation and Restoration Task Force has been working since 2015 on a project of year-round pumping and siphoning to divert more water into Bayou Lafourche near Donaldsonville, in addition to bank stabilization and dredging.

The Bayou Bridge Pipeline will carry fracked crude oil of various viscosity through a 160 mile stretch of Louisiana, including 54 miles of the Louisiana Coastal Zone. The pipeline could transport up to 13,000 gallons of crude oil per minute when operating at full capacity.  In 2016, Bayou Bridge Pipeline, LLC. (a company of Energy Transfer Partners), applied to the Bayou Lafourche Fresh Water District (BLFWD) for a permit to run a 24-in crude oil pipeline 40ft underneath Bayou Lafourche for a distance of 129ft. In October 2016, the BLFWD unanimously approved the permit without discussion.

Things to Know about the Bayou Bridge Pipeline Impact on Bayou Lafourche

Inconsistent – The Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP) is placed only 40ft deep which is inconsistent with the standard depth in other areas in Louisiana and other projects.

1. 1. Bayou Bridge will pass 170 feet underneath the West Atchafalaya Guide Levee and 140 feet underneath the East Guide Levee.
   2. If the pipeline met the safety standard of 140 feet below the ground for Bayou Lafourche, the projected risk for Bayou Lafourche would be lowered.
   3. The basic drinking water needs and coastal protection value of Bayou Lafourche is just as important as in any other area in Louisiana and should therefore receive the same or greater protective standard – i.e. at least 170 feet underneath Bayou Lafourche.

Unrealistic – The proposed BBP crosses underneath Bayou Lafourche in Louisiana’s Coastal Zone, but the depth does not account for Louisiana’s expected coastal land loss

1. Louisiana’s coast is eroding at an alarming rate: 25-35 square miles of land are lost every year due to land subsidence and rising sea levels. According to a study done by Louisiana State University and the Rand Corporation, more than 610 miles of pipeline statewide could be exposed over the next 25 years. The Bayou Bridge Pipeline along with other pipelines in the state will not be exempt from the effects of sea level rise, sinking land, and coastal degradation as the land in Louisiana keeps disappearing.
2. With coastal land loss, sections of the pipeline along the coast, such as the section under Bayou Lafourche, should be placed even deeper than elsewhere in Louisiana in order to account for the risk of future exposure.

Dangerous to Public Health – The 40ft proximity of the pipe to drinking water makes it more likely that a leak from the pipeline could contaminate Bayou Lafourche.

Serious contamination could include:

1. 1. If there is a breach in the pipe under Bayou Lafourche, up to 13,000 gallons of crude oil per minute could contaminate the water
   2. Bayou Bridge Pipeline, LLC claims that BBP will use “state of the art technology” and is safe due the fact that “most pipeline incidents are the result of ‘older, unregulated pipelines’”.  However, all pipelines have the potential to fail, even newer and more “technologically sound” ones.  Parent company Energy Transfer Partners and its various subsidiaries have been involved in at least six pipeline ruptures or injurious safety violations since 2012. One such incident, on October 21st 2016, spilled an estimated 55,000 gallons of gasoline into Wallis Run, PA, a river that feeds the Susquehanna River. The Permian Express II, Energy Transfer’s crude oil pipeline constructed in 2016, had to be shut down in September after a failure that released 33,600 gallons of crude oil near Sweetwater, TX.
   3. Energy Transfer’s BBP is made of the same technology as their pipelines that have failed elsewhere: a 24-in crude oil pipeline with 0.406-inch wall thickness, coated in Fusion bonded epoxy coating (FBE) that was constructed in 2014. These pipelines have proven that they can fail, even with the most technologically sound pipes.
   4. Furthermore, the “state of the art technology” used in this particular pipeline still has the potential to leak and contaminate. According to the GeoEngineers technical memorandum, it is stated that the pipeline’s leak detection system can shut down pumping of oil within three minutes of the problem. However, with the pipeline’s ability to pump an upwards of 446,000 barrels of oil a day, 13,000 gallons of crude oil per minute, and a moderate leak estimate of only 1%, that still leaves potentially 390 gallons of crude oil released in that three-minute time frame. Even with this conservative estimate, there is still a very real threat to the people of Bayou Lafourche and their drinking water supply.  Despite BBP’s emphasis on the relative safety of the permitted pipeline, malfunctions at newly constructed and operating pipelines, still happen and have disastrous consequences.

Public Interest and Safety Concerns

Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP) contends that its proposed 162-mile long crude oil pipeline is in the public interest. The company asserts that the pipeline will support energy independence, increase employment opportunities and add to manufacturing sectors. Touted as a $670 million investment, the project is advertised as contributing significant funds to the local, regional and national economies and workforce through construction jobs and spending on materials for construction. However, BBP fails to take into account the true costs of its proposed pipeline in the form of environmental degradation, impacts to local industry and costs to communities in the event of pipeline spills, leaks or other incidents.

First, the impacts to valuable wetlands will be significant and detrimental. An estimated 150 acres of wetlands will be permanently destroyed and some 450 acres “temporarily” impacted. What BBP neglects to consider is that the pipeline will have to be placed inside illegal spoil banks existing along the proposed right of way, making it impossible to restore and resulting in permanent impacts to thousands of acres of wetlands. In addition to the plethora of wildlife habitat at risk, the culture and livelihood of communities dependent on these wetlands likewise face harm. The existing labyrinth of piled-up, dredged spoil from prior pipelines has already contributed to increased water stagnation and impaired water quality, which has devastated the local Cajun crawfishing community. Reliant on the wetlands of the Atchafalaya Basin, this community has experienced first-hand the ills of sloppy pipeline construction and failed enforcement. BBP’s owners, Sunoco Logistics and Energy Transfer Partners, are responsible for some of the existing harms and authorizing this new project will permanently transform the Basin’s landscape, devaluing the crawfishing industry that this local community relies upon.

Second, the terminus of the pipeline will be in St. James where a local community already faces a frightening industrial network of storage tanks and chemical facilities that threaten their health, property values and culture.

Finally, all communities, towns and wildlife in the path of the pipeline face significant threats of pipeline failures, leaks, malfunctions and major spills. Despite the many assurances by BBP that its pipelines are constructed using “state of the art technology” and in consideration of spill prevention systems and response capacity, history tells us that spills happen and response readiness ignores the harm of the occurrence of a spill in the first place. Considering the loss to impacted communities and ecosystems, coupled with the costs of clean-up, BBP’s account for the “public interest” is severely overestimated.

BBP is a joint venture of Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco Logistics, two companies with one of the worst spill records in the nation responsible for 317 pipeline incidents in the past 11 years (an average of 28 per year). Sunoco Logistics (“Sunoco”) and Energy Transfer Company (“Energy Transfer”) together operate 9,162 miles of hazardous liquid (i.e. crude oil) and gas pipelines. According to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) Sunoco and Energy Transfer had 317 pipeline incidents from 2006 to April 18, 2017, causing $64,328,190 in property damage.

From 2006 through September 2013 alone, Sunoco:

• Paid $1.2 million in penalties for safety issues.
• Caused property damage costing almost $42 million.
• Spilled 16,075 barrels of hazardous liquids, over half of which was never recovered.

From 2006 through October 2016, ETP:

• Caused property damage costing $ 9.67 million, but paid only $24,400 in penalties.
• Spilled 9,577 barrels of hazardous liquids with only 30 barrels recovered and 99.6% remaining in the environment.

More recently, ETP’s Rover natural gas pipeline spilled over 2 million gallons of drilling lubricant in 2 separate pristine Ohio wetlands, which smothered fish, insects and other wildlife.Ohio EPA has fined them $431.000 for multiple air and water pollution violations resulting from the spill. On May 10, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ordered Rover to cease new drilling until environmental concerns are adequately addressed.

BBP presents the following imbalanced interests: on the one hand, unidentified and uncertain economic gain; and on the other hand, the concrete and quantifiable risks to human health and safety and destruction of wetlands, which are recognized by Congress, the Corps and EPA as valuable public resources that are vital to recreational, environmental and aesthetic integrity of Southern Louisiana. When faced with the true costs of this project, BBP is undoubtedly not in the public interest of the communities in its path.

Environmental Justice issues in St. James

The proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline is an environmental justice threat to the community of District 5 in St. James parish. Environmental injustice refers to the siting and expansion of unwanted hazardous waste facilities in low income communities and communities of color and the associated threats to health and human safety that these communities disproportionately shoulder. The proposed Bayou Bridge pipeline would carry fracked crude oil 160 miles across Louisiana, impacting more than 600 acres of wetlands and 700 bodies of water. The pipeline would end at at a terminal in St. James parish, a community of color already saturated with oil and gas facilities. The proposed pipeline would carry up to 13,000 gallons of crude oil per minute through the parish. At the end of the main pipeline, a second lateral pipeline 1.12 miles long would begin. This creates an increased risk of hazard within a community already facing unreasonable risk. The particular community of Burton Road experiences additional vulnerability to disaster as they lack adequate evacuation resources and access. The siting of the terminal within St. James parish and lack of evacuation plan in the case of an emergency exacerbates the environmental justice issue in St. James. Members of the community are opposed to the pipeline’s siting within their already “full” community where they already suffer the negative affects oil and gas facilities and infrastructure.

Burdens a disproportionate overburdened population 

First, the St. James community is home to an especially vulnerable population. Environmental justice concerns the unnecessary risk born by vulnerable communities, especially low income, minority or the elderly. Over 20% of people in St. James District 5 live below the poverty . The neighborhood along Burton Road is a majority-black community of mostly elderly residents. The residents above the age of 50 have limited physical mobility, making evacuation in a disaster event especially difficult. All of these factors limit the political power of the community to oppose a pipeline that is not in their best interest.

Exacerbates existing unmet public health concerns

Second, the community currently faces unreasonable risks to the health its residents. The proposed Bayou Bridge pipeline will only increase health concerns. The Burton Street community lies between the Nustar, Capline and Marathon facilities. The community has been hurt by the excessive health risks associated with living near hazardous facilities. Residents report losing unusually high numbers of community members to respiratory failure and cancer. Beyond increased numbers of cancer and respiratory illnesses, the residents of this neighborhood experience bad allergies, evening smells, visibly oily water and headaches when it rains. Further, when incidents that further jeopardize the health of the community do occur, they are not adequately informed. In March 2017, Plains Pipeline reported an oil spill of more than 12,000 gallons into the local ditches. Marathon then reported of hundreds of gallons on its property miles north of the Plains Pipeline leak. Residents of the community were not informed and unknowingly continued to breath the hazardous emissions from oily waters surrounding their homes. The two square miles south of Burton Lane have the highest density of accidents (34) in the PHMSA database for the state of Louisiana. Existing facilities have released tens of thousands of gallons into local drainage. Major releases have happened twice a year since 2009 This the disproportionate rate of incidents and the lack of communication by local facilities exemplifies the burden already placed on this community. Adding another pipeline would only increase the risk of an accident in St. James

Inadequate emergency plan for a frontline community

The community is under undue safety risk, a problem intensified by the extremely limited ability to evacuate in the case of a disaster event. Increased pipeline and rail infrastructure and private ownership of surrounding lands by industry has limited access to Burton Road down The community currently has only one road of access in or out from Burton Street to Highway 3172. This currently leads to access problems for emergency vehicles. The added mobility problems faced by residents of the neighborhood leads to fears that in an emergency event wheelchair bound citizens would not be The Proposed Bayou Bridge pipeline will further hinder access by medical personnel and evacuation routes as the pipeline is planned to pass directly under Burton Road. At the community meeting in march where residents voiced their opposition to the pipeline, one resident shared a particular instance where during a heart attack emergency vehicles were delayed for an hour waiting for a fence at a neighboring facility to be opened. An incident of any kind with the pipeline under that road or any construction activity would totally block the only evacuation route for the neighborhood. The increased health risks associated with the hazardous facilities surrounding the community is severely exacerbated by the limited access of emergency vehicles to residents that need additional health services.

The burden of these health and safety concerns falls disproportionately on this particular community, but they will not receive the benefits of the proposed pipeline. The community of District 5 remains encircled by oil storage and transportation infrastructure while the majority white community on the other side of the river was bought out and relocated. The $670-million-dollar investment is framed as a boost to local Louisiana economies from twelve construction jobs and spending on construction materials. There is no concrete evidence that any of these economic benefits will be felt in the community. The private benefits of the pipeline for the company and its investors are even further removed from the residents of St. James. While these benefits of the pipeline will not be felt in this parish, the increased burden of the hazard of leaks and spills in a community already facing uncommonly frequent incidences of accidents and health problems will be felt directly in St. James.

While this pipeline represents a multi-faceted threat to the state, the specific demographic vulnerabilities and current hazards in the community of District 5 in St. James parish as well as their opposition to the citing of the pipeline in their community creates an environmental justice issue. The current saturation of hazardous storage facilities and transportation infrastructure surrounding Burton Road, Freetown Paul Nelson Rd. and the resulting increased risks to health and safety already characterize environmental injustice, and the additional vulnerabilities that this pipeline would impose exacerbate the issue. The members of St. James are being asked to bear the risks of an additional pipeline in their district, and yet do not receive any benefits from the project. Further, the lack of attention by the company to the evacuation difficulties and health impacts to this low income and minority community created by the project reflect a lack of concern for the environmental injustice impacts of the project.

source: http://nobbp.org/about/bayou-bridge-pipeline/

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Statement from the Indigenous Environmental Network: 
“L’eau est La Vie camp is opening in resistance to the Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP) another Energy Transfer Partners project. BBP is the tail end of the Dakota Access Pipeline that weaves from the Bakken to the fragile wetlands of Southern Louisiana. Once again Indigenous communities are being put in harm’s way and over 700 bodies of water will be threatened by one of the worst environmental offenders known to date. We stand with the Water Protectors here in southern Louisiana to protect these critical wetlands that serve as protection for the people of this region from floods and storms.”

source: http://indigenousrising.org/

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L’EAU EST LA VIE: THE FIGHT AT STANDING ROCK CONTINUES IN THE BAYOUS OF LOUISIANA

from Sam Vinal- Mutual Aid Media on Vimeo.

Energy Transfer Partners—the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock—is trying to extend that pipeline through the largest US wetland swamp in Louisiana, the Atchafalaya Basin.

L’Eau Est La Vie (Water is Life) Camp is fighting the pipeline despite facing state violence, police that are moonlighting for the pipeline and courts that are protecting corporate interests over public good. The fight for water and life continues!

“If our leaders won’t stand up to stop this pipeline and protect our water, then we the people of Louisiana will. We are building the L’eau Est La Vie camp to protect our water and our way of life from the Bayou Bridge pipeline.”
-L’eau Est La Vie Statement

To Learn More: nobbp.org

Support the Camp: gofundme.com/nobbp

The post L’EAU EST LA VIE: THE FIGHT AT STANDING ROCK CONTINUES IN THE BAYOUS OF LOUISIANA appeared first on Void Network.

Jimmy Nelson has traveled to the world’s most hidden corners to photograph indigenous peoples. In 2013 he published his first book ‘Before They Pass Away’, with which his lifelong dream, to create awareness about the world’s unimaginable diversity, became reality.

Mask dancers, Paro, Bhutan, 2016

Ganges, Haridwar, India

Himba, Epupa falls, Namibia, 2014

Huli Wigmen, Ambua Falls, Tari Valley Papua New Guinea, 2010

Korcho Village, Omo valley Ethiopia, 2011

Likekaipia Tribe Ponowi Village, Jalibu Mountains, Western highlands Papua New Guinea, 2010

Miao Village, Liu Pan Shui, Gui zhou, China, 2016

Mount Bosavi waterfall, Papua New Guinea, 2017

Ndoto Mountain Range Kenya, 2010

NI Vanuatu Men Rah Lava Island, Torba Province Vanuatu Islands, 2011

Paro Pass, Bhutan, 2016

Perak women, Thikse Monastery, Ladakh India, 2012

Samburu tribe, Kenya

Tangge Village, Upper Mustang Nepal, 2011

Tarangire, Rift Escarpment, Tanzania 2010

Te Aroha Mikaka & Sky Bay of Islands, Haruru falls, North Island New Zealand, 2011

Uramana clan, Amuioan, Tufi, Papua New Guinea, 2017

Vaioa River, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, 2016

Yang Shuo Cormorants, China, 2005

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all photos by Jimmy Nelson https://jimmynelson.com/

The post HOMAGE TO HUMANITY – amazing photos from unknown tribes by Jimmy Nelson appeared first on Void Network.