Anchorage, AK – Alaska Natives will be joining with allies from around the world to call for the strongest possible protective language in a statement to be released Friday at the Indigenous People’s Global Summit on Climate Change. The statement will be a formal position of indigenous peoples regarding climate policy, the result of a week of intensive negotiations and information sharing, to be used at the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen.
Members of REDOIL, Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands, along with delegates from the Indigenous Environmental Network, will highlight the disproportionate impacts of climate change and the fossil fuel industry on indigenous peoples while upholding previous language calling for a moratorium on new fossil fuel development on indigenous lands. This position has garnered enormous support at the grassroots and community levels.
“The current impacts of climate change on Alaska’s Indigenous peoples are perpetuated by the incessant demand for energy to feed the high consumption appetite of America. Current energy policy disproportionately targets our homelands and continually puts our subsistence way of life at risk,” says Faith Gemmill, Executive Director of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigneous Lands (REDOIL). “The sovereign authority of Alaska Natives is undermined as our ancestral ways of life and homelands are imperiled by devastating proposals for further resource extraction of fossil fuels such as the current threat of offshore development of 83 million acres within the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, Bristol Bay and Cook Inlet. These proposals are compounded by climate change and vice versa.”
As global warming, resource wars, increased demand on diminishing supplies, and the people’s demand for a cleaner future bring an end to the age of oil, Alaska Natives will be left with devastated lands, fractured cultures, and a broken economy.
“The link between unsustainable energy consumption in the Americas and the destruction of Indigenous homelands and culture is undeniable,” says Clayton Thomas-Mueller, REDOIL advisory member and Tar Sands campaign organizer for Indigenous Environmental Network. “As Indigenous Peoples, we reject the proposition that our traditional lands should be sacrificed at the altar of irresponsible energy policies.”
The REDOIL network is committed to a moratorium on all new exploration for oil, gas and coal as a first step towards the full phase-out of fossil fuels with a just transition to sustainable jobs, energy and environment. The position is based on concern over the disproportionate social, cultural, spiritual, environmental, and climate impacts on indigenous peoples.
Impacts of climate change already observable in Alaska include greater precipitation, thawing permafrost, melting sea ice, receding glaciers, increased instance of spruce bark beetle infestation, increased forest fires, disrupted migration of subsistence animals, habitat disruption, and migrating and declining fish populations. Communities are struggling with the need for forced relocation as coastlines no longer protected by sea ice erode.
The REDOIL Network is an Alaska Native grassroots organization with members of the Inupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Tlingit, Gwich’in, Eyak and Dena’ina Athabascan tribes, that addresses the human and ecological health impacts brought on by unsustainable development practices of the fossil fuel and mining industry and the ensuing effect of climate change. REDOIL strongly supports the self determination rights of tribes in Alaska, as well as a just transition from fossil fuel and mineral development to sustainable economies and sustainable development.
