By Alex Grossman, Digital Marketing Specialist
UPDATE: On Sunday December 4, the Army Corps said it will not approve an easement necessary to permit the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe in North Dakota. This is a monumental victory for those who have been standing in protest of the pipeline.
Headlines about the Standing Rock Resistance and protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline have graced the front page of every major news outlet in North America.
Here at Global Greengrants Fund, we stand in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux and commend their courage in raising their voices against corporate interests. This is a crucial moment in the larger struggle for environmental conservation and indigenous leadership, bringing these important issues into the public eye.
We applaud the indigenous community, climate activists, and landowners who have joined together to protest the construction of the pipeline, bringing national attention to the environmental and cultural costs of a large-scale infrastructure project.
For the Standing Rock Sioux, an indigenous tribe that lives less than a mile from the proposed pipeline, the threat of the construction not only carries a high likelihood of contaminating their drinking water and an increased potential for oil spills, but also the destruction of a sacred burial ground.
Around the United States and the world, indigenous communities are all too familiar with cases like this one, where corporations extracting natural resources and seeking profit cause environmental destruction, challenge traditional lifestyles, and violate the rights of the communities who call these places home.
Take the infamous Chevron oil spill. 18.5 billion gallons of toxic waste and crude oil was dumped into the waterways of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador by the oil-giant Chevron. The contamination has already killed or sickened thousands—that’s not to mention the devastating toll a spill of that magnitude wreaks on the natural landscape. Even after decades of legal action, 300,000 indigenous people continue the fight to hold Chevron accountable.
At Global Greengrants Fund, we make modest grants to grassroots leaders around the world to protect the environment and human rights. Many of our grantees are taking on major corporations that plan to or are already negatively impacting the environment, homes, and livelihoods of the local communities, not unlike the situation faced by the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota.
While some of the situations our grantees strive to address are well known, such as the Chevron oil spill, many of these struggles play out behind the scenes, and most definitely not on the front pages of national or international media outlets.
For example, local farmers in western Ghana were swindled when a Canadian mining company offered them financial compensation to build a mine on their lands. The farmers formed a coalition to demand adequate compensation, and with $4,000 from Global Greengrants, the group paid for a year of court expenses and won the case. However, the case received no media attention, local or otherwise, and very few people outside of the local community were aware of the farmers’ struggle.
Indigenous communities across the globe engaged in similar battles fight their battles more or less alone, struggling to have their voices heard. These leaders are agents of change, and we can all do our part by giving them a loudspeaker to elevate their voices and call for the rights to land, water, and life.
Many of these communities are taking on American corporations.
Oil, mining and energy companies that choose to operate in developing countries rich in natural resources and poor in environmental regulations, increasing the gap between operating costs and profit. The battles go on for years, sometimes decades, before any kind of resolution is achieved. And these resolutions rarely go in favor of the indigenous without support from a broader network.
This is why our work is so important. Standing together, growing the movement, bringing awareness to the issues at hand.
You might stand with the Standing Rock Sioux because the struggle is close to home, and you’ve potentially heard of the tribe and their homeland of North Dakota.
But it’s important to remember that as this battle takes the limelight it has the potential to bring increased awareness to similar struggles taking place around the world, growing a powerful movement of collective action.
Across the United States and the planet, we need to work together in a global effort, not just to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline, but to move away from a dependence on oil altogether. When we stop the construction in North Dakota, the companies don’t stop extraction – they move on to a new location, in the United States or elsewhere to take advantage of another disenfranchised community. And this is the issue we need to address.
Photo Credit: United Church of Christ/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0