This is going to be a collaborative event between Ungeirr Umkveraasenaar, or the Icelandic Young Environmentalists, and the Indigenous Environmental Network. Maybe we can go around and you guys can give a little introduction about yourselves. Sure.
Huang’a a’ka, pang’a’anang naka pang’a’u yu, huang’a a’taka, a’anatirma, naka kirstinuga pás, huang’a sivunga rumi. I come from St. Lawrence Island. I’ve been with IEN since 2021, and I work on organizing against climate geoengineering.
Kweyanaipaplusi maunga, huang’a a’akaluk, ungelaksirmiu runga, angayukang maktaklu Charlie. I a’anukwa’apu’a makigaklu anaktiyuk asii, janililu Charlie, chinirmiu, ungelaksirmiu. Thank you everyone for welcoming us here today.
I’m Adrienne A’akaluk Blatchford. I’m from Unalakleet, Alaska, which is up on the Northwest Coast in the passageway to the Arctic. We’re right on the coast of the Bering Sea in the heart of the Norton Sound.
And I work with Indigenous Environmental Network as a geoengineering outreach organizer with a focus on Alaska and the Arctic. Hello, thank you for having us as the host.
My name is Thomas Joseph. I’m a Hoopa Valley tribal member from the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California. I am also Shoshone Paiute from the Sierra Nevadas. Paiute is what we call it, the land of flowing water.
I’m down there by Yosemite and the Half Dome area. I am here with the Indigenous Environmental Network as their carbon pricing educator. And again, thanks for having us.
Yá’át’ééh. My name is Talia Boyd. Older women from my community who love to have the time of their lives shared with me.
Greetings, everyone. My name is Talia Boyd. I’m the mining organizer for IEN.
I’m based in New Mexico, originally from Arizona, and I hail from the Navajo Nation in the Southwest. And I’m very honored to be here with y’all and share this space and time. Thank you.
Awesome. And a little bit about me for any of you who don’t know me. My name is Isla.
I’m originally from Wales and I’ve been living here in Iceland for over five years and I’m the education representative for the Icelandic Young Environmentalists. So how about we just go straight into things and you guys can give us a little bit of an oral presentation about your work and everything that you do and then we’ll get started with the panel Q&A afterwards. Sounds good.
Thank you. So I want to kind of do a little bit of an introduction on who is the Indigenous Environmental Network. Over 30 years ago the United States, we’re kind of seeing that return back to that, was having a really hard time addressing the mining operations of uranium in the southwest and the Indigenous people came together as they were the ones that were being directly affected by these mining operations that was being used for the production of uranium for the purpose of war.
And so the Indigenous peoples from that region rallied together to try to protect their communities against the high rates of cancers and other issues that was plaguing their communities to no avail. The state governments wouldn’t listen to them. The national governments wouldn’t listen to them and so they seen that it was in their best interest to take this fight to the international space of the United Nations and that’s when the Indigenous Environmental Network was formed with the purpose and intent of taking the struggles of the mining and the struggles of the health impacts of mining to a global positioning.
The Indigenous Environmental Network has been active in the United Nations space since then and in various different causes pertaining to the Paris Climate Agreement, water issues, mining issues, also very active in the Convention on Biological Diversity and we continue to play a role of Indigenous networks across Turtle Island. So we come from impacted communities of Indigenous peoples. Frontline community is another term that’s often used from across Turtle Island of communities that are faced with deforestation, faced with dams, faced with any type of harm that we see against our Mother Earth.
In these past 30 years IEN has now expanded its network to be globally and so we have Indigenous organizations that we work with across the globe and in North America we have a strong positioning on mining operations which is Talia Leeds and geoengineering and carbon pricing which I do but we also do a lot of other work pertaining to just transition and many other things that you can find on our website at IENEarth.org. Thank you. Great. I wanted to share a little bit about the two histories Thomas talked about.
The duality that we have to keep in mind, the recognition that the history of why we are in this work and what our priorities are in terms of the Arctic and climate change and then the history and the purpose behind the Arctic Assembly which is the meetings that we are attending. So I come from St. Lawrence Island and Akula comes from very nearby and their community also experienced a lot of the same things we did. The history that we carry is around colonization and how the purpose behind colonization was always resource extraction, resource extraction happening from Indigenous people’s lands and waters and to the detriment of our health, our welfare, the health of our ecosystems and as a violation of the sacred or the original instructions that we have carried forward through millennia.
And particularly this was done through military tactics and the military has also harmed our communities by creating bases on or near our communities or where we practice subsistence activities and other cultural activities and those bases have contaminated our lands and contaminated our waters and so we suffer the health effects and so we see all of these as connected because the military was used to colonize and the purpose behind colonizing was resource extraction. So we always come back to that and we see those issues like permeating throughout all of the issues that we’ll talk about today including carbon markets, carbon pricing, geoengineering, mining, even in the energy transition. But I was going back as I do whenever I come to the Arctic Assembly and looking at the web archives of when they first formed and some of the stuff on here is interesting.
I just wanted to read some of the wording. The Arctic is the fastest warming place on earth. This is from their website in 2013.
As a result it is moving to the center of the geopolitical stage and is playing an increasingly important role in globalization, economic development, energy exploration, environmental protection, and international security. So it’s just kind of environmental protection is just kind of sprinkled in there a little bit but the priority is clearly economic development. And if you look at the articles like I could go you can go and look at who created it, who was on their first board, who was on their first panel, but some of the articles that they attached.
Could Western Alaska become the new Panama Canal? Energy, indigenous communities, and the Arctic Council. Arctic climate change opens new shipping routes. So these are the articles that they cited as the foundation of the initial meetings that they were having and I wanted to read one excerpt just to kind of give the context of what the purpose was behind this meeting and like holding that reality in the messages that they appear to be spreading versus what is actually being done.
Owing to the vast economic opportunities and environmental, social, and geopolitical challenges it presents, the Arctic is an emerging as an important topic of debate. With an estimated 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves, and with climate change making shorter maritime routes through Arctic waters possible, the rewards of successful economic development are plentiful. Like that’s how they started out.
And then this is really interesting. They say, however, the remote pristine frontier is home to some of the world’s harshest conditions making energy development, maritime trade, and tourism increasingly difficult and dangerous. The Arctic is also home to indigenous communities whose livelihoods are likely to be challenged by both the effects of climate change and increasing external human activity in the region.
So those are just, yeah, a couple of things that I wanted you to keep in mind and I wanted to hand it back to Thomas to look at the history of carbon pricing. Thank you, Pananga. I remember my first time here in the Arctic region.
I was invited up here by Pananga Pagawi and other indigenous peoples from Greenland and the Alaska region because they told me, they came the year before, and they told me that there is a lot of talk and dialogue that’s being discussed in this Arctic circle pertaining to carbon markets and the continued commodification of our Mother Earth. And this is something that I have specialized with the Indigenous Environmental Network for quite a few years now. And when we look at the CDMs on where carbon markets came from, which is the Clean Development Mechanism, which was created out of the Kyoto Protocols, which is basically the foundation of the Paris Climate Agreement.
And so when we go that far back, we have to also understand that it was the strong arm of Al Gore at the time, who was the Vice President of the United States, that really forced these governmental nations into accepting a clean development mechanism or a carbon market mechanism, which we see as indigenous peoples is just the continuation of commodifying our Mother Earth for the profitable gain of the elite few. We also see it as a mechanism to continue colonization and white supremacy, as that’s what these northern global nations are pushing and addressing. The world did not want clean development mechanisms.
They didn’t want to put a price tag on carbon because they didn’t think that that was the route to go. But because of the strong arm of the United States, they were able to get clean development mechanisms into the Kyoto Protocols. And so we see a shift now, how the United States is not even a signer of the Paris Climate Agreement, and they have pulled out.
So their influence in that space has dramatically changed, but yet it is the foundation of how the world is addressing climate change. We now see in Article 6 of the Paris Climate Agreement and market mechanisms as a way to, how they see in their eyes, bring carbon out of the air, because we know that greenhouse gases are real. We know that that’s what’s warming our planet, and that is what is causing climate change.
But instead of reducing gases at source, or reducing the burning of fossil fuel, they’re simply offsetting it. So they’re saying that they could do offsets through RED, which is reducing emissions through deforestation and forest degradation, and RED Plus, which even expands that into nature-based solutions and other products. But that’s still just a continuation of commodifying our Mother Earth.
And now if we look at climate change, one of the root causes of climate change is capitalism, is that we continue to see our Mother Earth as something that we can make profit of, that we can continue to separate ourselves from, and think that it is here just for the profitable gain of a select few, and not that we’re in relationship with our Mother Earth, not that that relationship is reciprocal, like Indigenous peoples believe. And so when we look into even biodiversity offsets that are now being pushed, it calls that relationship into question. As humanity, are we going to continue to move forward with the desire of just raping and plaguing our Mother Earth? Are we going to try to find some type of balance and reciprocal relationship with her, so that she can heal, and that we may be able to move forward and not experience this climate chaos that’s coming our way? We see that in Nepal.
We see that with the mega El Nino that’s going on right now in California. So we will continue to experience this. Even the Secretariat has said, we have reached 1.5, we will start experiencing mega catastrophes with climate change.
But yet, what we’re seeing is just us doubling down on mechanisms that has caused climate change. I brought up colonization earlier. When we look at the world’s biodiversity, 80% of the world’s biodiversity is in the tenure of Indigenous peoples.
And so for these global elite countries to be able to maintain their economic growth, to be able to maintain their markets, they need to gain access to these unceded territories of Indigenous peoples. And that’s how they do it, is through carbon markets, through biodiversity offsets, through the 30 by 30 initiative, which is being pushed through the CBD, the Convention on Biological Diversity. And so, you know, this is just continuating the ability to access unceded Indigenous lands and further colonize Indigenous peoples, and move us away from an understanding that what we really need to do is rebuild our relationship with our Mother Earth, not to see her as a commodity just to be used, but understand that our reciprocal relationship with her is vital, and not just the humanity of humans, but in all things living.
And so when I came up here to my first Arctic gathering, I seen what they were telling me about. I seen how these Arctic nations were lifting up examples from all across the world, not even the Arctic, from New Zealand, on mangroves that are being introduced as carbon offsets in the New Zealand area. And we see how Nepal and that region is being considered the third Arctic for the purpose of offset projects on sprinkling, these guys will get more into that, but sprinkling basically fiberglass on top of the ice.
And so it’s just a continuation of us continuing to commodify our Mother Earth and not understand that we really need to address root causes, which is capitalism, which is colonization and patriarchy, and the continuation that we always need to develop new market mechanisms or new systems to gain wealth. So we need to have that system change. But when we keep on focusing on false solutions like direct air capture, which is alive and well here in Iceland, we’re not going to be able to really focus on keeping the fossil fuels in the ground, and making sure that we’re limiting the amount of carbon that’s being burnt and not simply offsetting it.
Thank you. I’m just going to snowball off of what Thomas said, because before I get into what I’m going to talk about with geoengineering, he said something really profound one time that just kind of made carbon markets and these schemes that they are implementing within our governance systems, these colonial governance systems. When you think about the world’s forest and the oceans and the rivers and Mother Earth, and we see these climate disasters, she’s already struggling to breathe, right? We already know that.
We’ve exceeded 1.5. And these carbon market schemes and these false solutions make it sound like they’re putting a new forest, or there’s a new emerging ocean, or there’s these rivers that are already leaching things like mercury, because of the melting permafrost in them, that all of a sudden they’re appearing out of nowhere for these carbon markets, right? And that’s not what’s happening. We’re seeing extractivism continue to grow. We’re seeing this sort of monetary wealth through this extractive industry pile more, right, to do business as usual on top of all of it.
And that’s led us into from fossil fuel dependency into a tech regime that has emerged from false solutions like geoengineering. And when we think about geoengineering, it’s such a far-fetched concept when you’re first learning about it, right? It’s like a sci-fi movie. There’s two different types that are really focused on, especially in the Arctic, with solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal.
And Thomas had just mentioned, you know, we have the facility right out here, just out of town. And when these false solutions first started popping up here in the Arctic, we seen a lot of the focus on the Arctic is melting, we need to save the Arctic, because we know that the rest of the world depends on this ice cap and this old ice, right? When you think about the Arctic Ocean and where the passageway comes up through and the world perceives it as this frozen place all the time, well, it took a millennia for that ice to form, and it’s taken a hundred years for it to melt because of extractivism, because of colonialism, because of after imaginary wealth, when you think of money and the way that it is focused in our lives. The villagers have been speaking from us.
They feed us all these lies about you need daycare, you need childcare, you need education. We’ve always had those systems within our communities, within our social systems of wherever we come from, right? And so this colonial practice has led us to these false solutions, saying that if we can introduce a way to control the climate, then we can keep the world at a critical level. And so that’s when folks that started doing these carbon capture projects, the marine carbon dioxide removal, the solar radiation management, I’m sorry, is there a T-next in here anywhere? Sorry, guys, I’ve been really sniffly all day.
I went from the latitudes to the seas, and the Arctic has caught me again. But geoengineering has been a huge focus at Arctic Assembly for years. The first year that we had attended, we had gone in and they were talking about a solar aerosol injection project, and they have this huge, beautiful display, and PhD candidates, so much PhD candidates, doctorates, scientists, renowned university folks that had come in, and they’re from Ivy League colleges that are standing there saying, yeah, we’re going to spray sulfur dioxide over the Arctic, and once we deploy, it’s going to have to happen for 100 years, and 5% of the world’s population is going to perish doing it, but it’s going to be a sacrifice to the rest of the world.
And we’re sitting there, and you’re saying, and by the way, the 5% will be Indigenous people, marginalized communities, and the majority of it will be in the Arctic. Not even a blink of an eye. And this is an international platform where there are decision makers from the pan-Arctic coming here to talk about saving the world by spraying toxic chemicals into the atmosphere to literally kill people, animals, ecosystems, so they’re well synthesized.
And then we see projects like the Arctic Ice Project, which was formerly known as Ice 9-11, which is a, the idea was to increase the surface albedo of the ice by sprinkling glass beads, microscopic glass beads, which were formed by scientists at 3M who had previously worked for Chevron, and NHP as an engineer, and she has over 300 patents, came up to the Arctic, and without required consent, without proper processes processes to assess the environment that she was going to be introducing huge amounts of new substances to, had no connection to anybody in the Arctic, just came in and started doing it on their own free will, and hiring local Indigenous students at a college up north. And when we got wind of this project, we immediately saw red flags. We started pushing back, but we found that a lot of these geoengineering projects, these fossil solutions that are rooted in extractivism, are crowd-funded and have huge hedge funds that come in as a guide, as nature, they’re going to conserve nature by introducing these projects in the world to keep being, continue doing business as usual.
And so the science is rooted in all of the things that Thomas has talked about, and the foundation of the Arctic Assembly is been based on the sacrifice zone, creating new sacrifice zones, not only in Arctic Indigenous lands, but lands worldwide, because what happens in the north is going to impact the rest of the world. And so once we started organizing around, pushing back on these projects, Thomas’ family had joined us all the way down in California in Menlo Park, where Leslie Fields, one of the founders of the Arctic Ice Project, had organized a fundraiser and a golf course, a very prestigious golf course in Menlo Park. And so a group of Alaska Native folks had gone down, a delegation that IAN Kavanaugh had put together with IAN and Thomas’ family joined us.
Yeah, yeah, so we bought this, we spent thousands of dollars on purchasing a VIP ticket, and immediately they denied our entrance and said that it was still, that it was already at capacity. So we got some folks that we were working with down there, and they also applied and got in immediately. And so they went in and were able to infiltrate this fundraiser.
But it didn’t last long, and they caught on with the folks that were with us outside when we were picketing and protesting. And they came out and wanted to try to see, so the police showed up and said, sorry, we can’t do anything, this is legal here, and tried to have us removed. So we continued that, but it brought attention, right? That’s where we started, and we continued for five years.
No, 19 to 25, yeah, six years. 24. So yeah, five years, we continued to push back against this project that had moved, started in the Bay Area and then Minnesota on Indigenous lands, on a lake there, and all the way up to a camp which we had deployed, and then we started attacking on Arctic, like Arctic species of fish, and yeah, and birds, and was doing false reporting.
And it comes here to the Arctic Assembly without false reporting. And the guys, of course, that were giving this case to the Arctic, I watched Al Gore’s, her claim was, I watched Al Gore’s documentary, touched my heart, it made me want to save the world. So these projects continue to not only allow them to do business as usual, but create sacrifice zones in other Indigenous communities, not only in the Arctic, but the rest of the world.
And so geoengineering is another dangerous way for the elite to continue doing what they do, by extracting, and stealing, and killing Indigenous people throughout the world. We see that within our communities. And it isn’t only the impacts of the introduction of all of these foreign substances, but it also is our mental health, right? Without our connection to the land, and without our way of being, since we always have our mental health struggles, we have suicide clusters, we have cancer clusters, we have autoimmune diseases that are unexplained.
We have experiences at such a high level that we’re in a constant state of grief as Indigenous people. And so it isn’t only what we’re seeing on the surface, but also the subsurface of who we are. And so this geoengineering, these fossil solutions, these carbon market mechanisms, all of these different ways that they’re claiming a way to advance science, to save the world, is a shield and almost like a blind for them to continue doing what they want to do in our land.
And so we recognize that, and we continue to push for free pirate consent, and meaningful government-to-government consultation. And when we say that, we’re not talking about these colonial governments that we see, but also our traditional government systems, because that’s how we function within our community. So I’m going to leave it there, below air, if she wants to.
Yeah, just add a couple things. So as we feel continued, she left our fifth ice project. I think they figured her out because she had done the experiments outdoors.
And so then they changed their company name and said, we’re not doing outdoor experiments. And they started doing like all those experiments on those species. And then she formed her other, another company, called Wheel.
