Thank you to all our friends and supporters who joined us at our 20th Anniversary Gala on Wednesday in San Francisco, where we shared food, music, dancing, and inspiring words about our last 20 years and our vision for the years to come supporting indigenous peoples and protecting the Amazon.
We recently completed a 4-year strategic plan that builds on our work over the last 20 years to strategically tackle the Amazon's gravest threats. Considering that indigenous lands hold 80% of global biodiversity, it is no surprise that extractive industries want their resources. If left to them, the Amazon's Sacred Headwaters would become one big...
Peace is more than the silencing of guns, and that the peace accord will not address all sources of violence in the conflict. To that end, we share with you this guest blog from Bogota-based activists working with our partners of the U'wa Nation in Colombia, recounting the U'wa's recent struggle to recover their ancestral territory from oil...
The Sioux fight is representative of other fights around the globe. If Standing Rock wins this, we will win other fights for social and environmental justice. We all need to work together to build this global justice movement around the globe.
"Whatever fine print comes out of the World Conservation Congress, Amazonian indigenous women will continue to protect our Living Forest." Paty Gualinga, the powerful spokeswoman from Ecuador's Kichwa indigenous community of Sarayaku, inspired the attendees at one of the world's largest gatherings of environmental organizations and...
With the recent centennial of the National Park Service, we've seen much publicity in favor of national parks within the United States. The idea of natural protected areas is viewed as a general good among popular opinion. Who could be opposed to the conservation of nature?
A delegation of 25 powerful indigenous leaders from around the world will attend the quadrennial IUCN World Conservation Congress (WCC) in Honolulu, Hawai'i, from September 1 to 10. The WCC is the world's largest recurring conservation event attended by government, corporate, nonprofit and academic leaders, among its many influencers.
For decades, the U'wa indigenous people of Colombia have been an inspiration to others around the world, including everyone at Amazon Watch. With vision, persistence and courage, they have repeatedly demanded their rights and overcome the daunting forces arrayed against them.
By entering and occupying the actual Gibraltar gas extraction site, the U'wa are taking their nonviolent direct action to a new level, even given the risks they run.
"Today, I’m here sharing this with you but my people are once again mobilized. We are on Zizuma, the sacred mountain where many sources of water originate – lakes and rivers which bathe our territory and serve as an important source of water for Colombia."
"Berito taught Colombia's indigenous people and the world the importance of the globalization of resistance, how to defend the beloved Earth and how to fight against climate change."
"These are very serious accusations providing a political rationale for a violent paramilitary repression against the U'wa," said Andrew Miller, Advocacy Director at Amazon Watch. "The notion that the U'wa are associated with an armed group is absurd. They are actually radical pacifists by culture."
The U’wa, who call themselves the people who know how to think and speak, consider themselves the Guardians of Mother Nature, and large tracts of land inside their territory have become biological reserves for jaguars, spectacled bears, as well as a kaleidoscopic array of endemic plant and bird life that do not appear anywhere else on the planet.
There is no legitimate rationale for using violence against the U'wa. They are extreme pacifists by culture (considering the mere presence of weapons in their territory as violence) and have always been transparent about their actions. In this case, they are protecting an ecologically fragile and spiritually significant part of their own territory...
Taking direct action to defend their territory is a deadly serious proposition for Colombia's indigenous peoples. As such, the current mobilization of the U'wa Indigenous Guard to stop tourists from entering the sacred snow-capped mountain peak of El Cocuy has grabbed national and international attention.
As an organization that works to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin, we were thrilled when Kimberly Todd and Valerie Robert, two talented and socially conscious teachers, reached out to us with their curricula and resources for parents and students to take action. They created these unit plans...
Twenty years ago today, our founder Atossa Soltani stood face to face with Fernando Cardoso, then the president of Brazil. Atossa knew then that while indigenous peoples represent only four percent of the world's population, they are the guardians and stewards of 80 percent of the world's biodiversity. That's why she founded Amazon Watch on March...
Amazon Watch works to protect the rainforest by advancing the rights of indigenous peoples. We work closely with indigenous leaders to help amplify the calls to keep the oil in the ground and stop mega-dams in the Amazon to avoid climate chaos. Defending indigenous rights, territories, living forests and flowing rivers are demonstrably effective...
The Amazon rainforest can seem unimaginably vast. Similarly, the fight to defend it from the onslaught of industrial-scale threats like oil drilling, logging, and huge dams can appear overwhelming. But across the region, local indigenous peoples and our work to support them is making the difference and protecting the lands they have known for...
As negotiators butt heads in Paris over the fine print of a new United Nations climate treaty, one issue they will need to address urgently is the fate of the Amazon.
In 2015, several indigenous peoples announced important advances in their decades-long struggles to defend their sacred homelands. The Achuar people of the Northern Peruvian Amazon and the U'wa people of the Colombian cloud forest both embody the power of grassroots resistance in the face of multi-billion dollar corporations.
What becomes of places like the Amazon Basin that don't have major oil reserves, but are vital for the regulation of the earth's climate, house 20% of the planet's fresh water, and one in ten of the world's known species?
We are deeply appreciative for the honor of collaborating with indigenous peoples, organizations, and activists, from around the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere. It is extraordinary to find common cause in high-stakes human dramas that, we believe, will help shape the future of the entire planet.
On one side of the table a group embodying integrity, legitimacy, humility. Across from them on the other? The personification of cynicism, obfuscation and arrogance. That was the scene in Bogotá yesterday where the U’wa people took their fight into a meeting with the Colombian government, calling on it to live up to previously negotiated...
The U'wa are an extraordinary people, paralleled by the amazing territory they call home. With this photo gallery – featuring images taken by the U'wa themselves – we hope to take you on a visual journey into the majestic lands they are defending. Not only are these breathtaking landscapes, each of these places holds a profound...
The Guardian | The indigenous U'wa people living in north-east Colombia have won what observers call an "historic" and "decisive" victory after state oil and gas company Ecopetrol dismantled a gas drilling site in their territories.
The Achuar and U'wa indigenous peoples have me in awe of the immense power of grassroots resistance in the face of multi-billion dollar corporations. Years after graduating from university, I find myself once again a student. Throughout my tenure at Amazon Watch, I have been honored to "informally apprentice" under our wise and humble indigenous...
Indian Country Today | I live in a country which spends a third of my tax dollars on the military, so I do not know actually how peace is found. So say that you wanted peace. How would that work out?
"The U'wa people would like to inform national and international public opinion that the Magallanes gas exploration block has been completely dismantled. Ecopetrol has removed all the machinery that had been found there in a demonstration of respect for our rights as an indigenous people."
