Defend Mother Earth: March to Demand Action on Climate! | Amazon Watch
Amazon Watch

Defend Mother Earth: March to Demand Action on Climate!

September 11, 2014 | Leila Salazar-Lopez | Eye on the Amazon

Graphic by Favianna RodriquezOn September 21st, world leaders will descend on New York City for a UN summit on the urgent climate crisis convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has called on the world to support an ambitious global agreement seeking to dramatically reduce global warming. With the world watching and our shared future on the line, we’ll join thousands taking to the streets in the People’s Climate March from New York to Rio de Janeiro to demand a world safe from the perils of climate change, to demand immediate action by global decision makers.

Join us! On Sunday, September 21st march in New York City or in your community to demand action for climate justice, for Mother Earth, for our shared future. To change this dangerous trajectory we’re on – to bend the course of history – we need everyone on board.


Amazon Watch and our partners are gearing up to head to New York with a delegation of indigenous and civil society allies from Ecuador
and beyond to launch a global call to keep oil in the ground from the Amazon to the Arctic. We can no longer ignore the International Energy Agency’s call to keep two thirds of fossil fuel reserves in the ground in order to avoid a higher than two-degree Celsius global temperature rise. We must act now to avoid irreversible, catastrophic changes to the planet.

These events in NYC present a timely opportunity to send a clear and united message to world leaders and to the fossil fuel industry that continuing to invest in expansion of the fossil fuel frontier makes no sense in the face of the climate reality. Rather than investing $500 billion annually in developing more fossil fuel reserves we can’t even afford to burn, we must identify priority regions where oil and coal reserves should be kept in the ground. The Amazon and the Arctic are critically important starting points. Such sacred lands should be where we begin an ecological U-turn, leaving oil in the ground. Biodiverse places like Yasuní National Park and the Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon in the Napo-Marañon basin – the sacred ancestral territories of the Kichwa, Zapara, Waorani, Achuar and others – are dangerously threatened by new oil drilling plans and should top the list of critical zones for keeping oil underground.

With the whole world watching NYC in September, we plan to generate greater awareness and support for the critical importance of the Amazon rainforest in maintaining and stabilizing our global climate, and to help expose the key contributions indigenous peoples make in protecting this critical organ of the earth’s life support system. Our partners believe this is a key moment to build linkages between indigenous, environmental and climate justice movements in the north and south leading up to the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP 20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) this December in Lima, on the road to the UNFCCC COP-21 that will take place in Paris in December 2015.

Amazon Watch will be accompanying a delegation of indigenous and civil society allies from Ecuador, including:

An updated list of key events in New York City can be found here.

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