Indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada and the Americas have experienced systematic and repeated violations by oil, gas, and mining industries infringing on our inherent right to protect our traditional lands and our treaty rights. These industries violate our human rights and create unconscionable destruction to traditional territories that have sustained us for time immemorial.
Oil and gas developments are neither sustainable nor renewable.
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IEN INFORMATION SHEET:
ENERGY: FOSSIL FUELS And Impacts to Indigenous Peoples
Statement of Fact on Energy Policy and its Impact to Indigenous Communities of North America Indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States and throughout the Americas hold valuable land and water resources that have long been exploited by the provincial, state and federal governments and by corporations trying to meet the energy needs of an industrialized world.
Indigenous peoples have disproportionately suffered impacts due to the production and use of energy resources - coal mining, uranium mining, oil and gas extraction, coal bed methane, nuclear power and hydropower development - yet are among those who benefit least from these energy developments. Indigenous peoples face inequity over the control of, and access to, sustainable energy and energy services. Territories where Indigenous peoples live are resource rich and serve as the base from which governments and corporations extract wealth yet are areas where the most severe form of poverty exists.
FACTS ON THE IMPACTS OF FOSSIL FUELS
Fossil fuels supply over 80% of the world’s energy needs. All fossil fuels, whether solid, liquid, or gas, are the result of organic plant materials being covered by successive layers of sediment over the course of millions of years.Human consumption of oil, gas, coal bed methane and coal (fossil fuels) increases the production of greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide (CO2) that is a major cause of climate change, global warming and changes in weather patterns.
Oil drilling and related activities fragment the landscape, leading to increased symptoms of neo-colonization, development, and deforestation. It also pollutes the land and water causing irreparable damage to fragile ecosystems. Read or print the rest of this document
Environmental Justice: Race, Displacement and Land, 2009
In light of the devastating reality of environmental destruction globally, there is an urgent and critical need to expose the root causes of environmental injustice as stemming from systems of domination. Predatory capitalist expansion and imperialist militarization has devastated the lands, resources, and communities of primarily people of colour locally and globally. Toxic industries are largely located on Indigenous lands and closest to people of colour communities. While people of colour communities are disproportionately victims of environmental degradation, they are often scapegoated as responsible for the environmental crisis and excluded from the leadership of the environmental movement.COLONIZATION AS ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION
Environmental degradation, with climate change as one obvious manifestation, is intimately linked to the forced displacement and migration of people. By the year 2050, an estimated 1 billion people will be displaced from their homes because of global warming and stated-sponsored climate terrorism.
Populations of the global South and indigenous communities in the North have been ravaged by centuries of colonial-corporate theft and environmentally-destructive “development”. Colonization brought with it not only the displacement and genocide of peoples across the world but also an exploitative view of the natural world. Early colonial imagery of nature presented it as something to be tamed, conquered and exploited; in the same way that indigenous peoples were.
The colonial project centred on gaining access to natural resources in order to fuel the growing capitalist industry. This continues today. For example the top five mining companies of the world are run out of the UK, Australia, Canada, Switzerland and the USA (with many of their headquarters in Vancouver). The mining industry is responsible for causing severe environmental devastation including loss of food supplies, flooding of entire communities, releasing lethal concentrations of acid into water supplies, and displacing millions of people.
Other industries such as fishing, cattle and dairy, farming, oil, and lumber are also responsible for displacement, the destruction of entire ecosystems, emission of toxic substances, and intensifying deadly natural disasters such as landslides, hurricanes and floods.
Within displaced populations, indigenous people – particularly women and children – are the most affected as their resources for survival, such as subsistence farming and hunting, rapidly disappear and they are driven to urban slums or refugee camps. For example in Canada, the Inuit who have lived harmoniously with nature in the Arctic North, are now facing reduction of their stocks of walrus, seals, and whales, and erosion of their coastline. In Mexico, farmers struggle to grow food as highly subsided US corn is dumped into their economy.
Yet the colonial and racist underpinnings of the nation-state system, is quickly revealed by the lack of response of those states who in reality have the most resources (as a result of theft) to protect environmental refugees. Indeed, these people are not even legally recognized as refugees. The borders of Western countries have remained tightly guarded against refugees of all stripes, and particularly so against those who have been displaced by environmental destruction.
This is despite the fact that such states hold the most responsibility for the global environmental crisis and hence the creation of soaring numbers of environmental refugees. For example, Australia, which has one of the highest rates of carbon emissions per capita in the world, refuses to open its borders to citizens of Tuvalu, a Polynesian island facing catastrophe from rising sea levels.
Racialized peoples in the First World are also victimized by this ideology, as witnessed in the handling of Hurricane Katrina. Most disgustingly, Katrina facilitated the government’s injection of funding into compliant NGOs to legitimize the current world order under the veneer of charity and awarded corporate contracts for “reconstruction”. Katrina made clear that beyond state lines, we are still thoroughly crisscrossed by borders of race, language, religion, gender, class, age, ability, sexual identity – borders that continue to be socially, politically, culturally and violently enforced to divide us and discipline us into believing that some lives are worth less than others.
GREENING OF HATE
Unfortunately within certain sectors of the environmental movement, we have seen a rise in the “greening of hate”. This ideology blames environmental degradation on poor populations of colour. ENERGY JUSTICE IN TURTLE ISLAND – NORTH AMERICA
Indigenous Message to Obama to Issue a Presidential Order to Halt All Processes for Approval of the Expansion of Oil Sands Pipeline Infrastructure Entering the United States and to Support Alberta First Nation Chiefs Demand to Canada for a Moratorium on all Expansion of Canadian Tar Sands Development.
The Indigenous Environmental Network and Rainforest Action Network produced this statement in response to a lobby effort in Washington DC by Treaty One Chiefs of Manitoba, Canada on January 8, 2008 regarding the Enbridge Alberta Clipper and the TransCanada Keystone Project. This statement that focuses on providing an Alberta First Nations perspective on the Tar Sands issue. Read the Story: Canadian Indigenous Community to Deliver Message of Oil and Human Rights to Preseident-Elect Obama
ENERGY JUSTICE IN NATIVE AMERICA AND THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION
Save the Planet from Capitalism - A Letter from President Evo Morales about Climate Change and the International crisis
IEN at the Americas Social Forum - Listen to Radio Interview
Two area uranium projects under review