![]() When he and I worked together in Cambodia, he was investigating illegal logging. That former colleague was a man called Chut Wutty. ![]() When the words did come, I learned that one of my former colleagues in Cambodia – a member of the team I was part of there some years before – had been killed. But she was struggling to form the words she wanted to say. A colleague came and called me out of it to give me a message. Message from our CEO, Mike DavisĪlmost exactly ten years ago, I was in a meeting at our office in London. To get angry on their behalf, and then to act. In 2021, 200 people were killed protecting their homes and their rights. And of course it means all of us continuing to shine a light on these stories, not just to remember those who have fallen but to continue their urgent work by telling the world exactly why they are dead. It means companies ensuring their operations do not cause harm. It means governments ensuring protections for defenders, including reporting and investigating their murders as a means to access justice. That means national and supranational governments committing to report and investigate these murders, and ultimately to serve justice on the culprits. And it’s why they, more than anyone, deserve protection. It’s why they are prepared to risk everything to defend these places. These are the people who understand, at the most fundamental level, how the fate of humanity is entwined in the fate of the natural places they are defending. That’s why it’s so important to support the call, made in this report by Global Witness, for real protections to be afforded those on the frontline of this ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. The future of our species, and our planet, depends on it. They don’t just deserve protection for basic moral reasons. We are in the foothills of the sixth mass extinction, and these defenders are some of the few people standing in the way. The final, saddest truth is that this viewpoint has brought us to the brink of collapse. As this report shows, nearly all of the murdered environmental and land defenders are from the Global South, and yet it is not the Global South that reaps the supposed economic ‘rewards’ of all this violence. ![]() It matters that this viewpoint originated in the West. This is a viewpoint with its roots in the Western industrial revolutions of the 19th century, or even further back in the scientific theory of the Western so-called ‘Enlightenment’. We were confronting a whole viewpoint – a way of seeing nature as something not to be cherished and protected, but to be conquered and subdued. And so we put ourselves in the way of the commercial deforesters.īy doing so, we weren’t just putting ourselves in danger. We knew, intimately, that the value of the Himalayan forest was not to be found in the price of its timber, but in the way its extraordinary, abundant diversity sustains all forms of life – not least our own. Industrial logging was destroying the ecosystem in which we as humans were intertwined. ![]() It started for me in the Garhwal Himalaya in India, where my father was a forest conservator and my mother a farmer. I have been surrounded by land and environmental defenders all my life, and indeed I am one of them. It's important to picture these victims as the real people they are. Each killed defending not only their own treasured places, but the health of the planet which we all share. Each of them considered expendable for the sake of profit. Each of them a person loved by their family, their community.
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