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When an indigenous tribe wins in court against an oil company in the Amazon, the victory is not only for the people in the courtroom. It is for the forest.
– Robert Coulter, Métis elder
Dear Reader,
Dot has long been frustrated by the media’s far-too-often framing of climate-related events as either “wins” or “losses” for environmentalists. A government approves a new pipeline to transport oil? A “loss for environmentalists,” the front pages of newspapers declare. An old-growth forest gains legal protection? A “win for environmentalists,” the social media posts insist.
But do environmentalists live on a different planet from everyone else? Isn’t a “win for environmentalists” a win for everyone? Robert Coulter, who posted the above on LinkedIn, went on to write that this win for an Amazonian tribe against an oil company was a win “for the rainfall that the forest produces. For the carbon it stores. For the species that live nowhere else on earth. For the water systems that communities across South America depend on without necessarily knowing that the Amazon is why those systems exist.”
And of course it is. It is a win. Period. Even for those oil company execs who must breathe clean air to survive, who must have access to clean water, who must also endure disrupted ecosystems and their attendant impacts.
This win happened, Coulter wrote, “because a community built a legal case, found representation, navigated a court system that was not designed with them in mind, and won on the merits of a rights framework that recognized what oil company ambitions do not always choose to acknowledge: That this land is theirs. That it has been theirs. That the plants and rivers and soils and skies of a territory that an industry sees as a resource extraction opportunity are the living context of a culture and a people who were there first.”
Collectively,
Dot
The less light, the better for birds at night, especially during migration season.
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