![]() ![]() ![]() 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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