Yesterday’s News 2026-11-08

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

The central square of a Sarayaku village in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador. Credit: Rodrigo Buendia/AFP via Getty Images

Katie Surma @ Inside Climate News:
The Amazonian Community That Beat Big Oil Is Sharing Its Secrets

Indigenous leaders challenging Brazilian oil projects traveled to Ecuador to learn how the Sarayaku people fought back and helped reshape laws around the globe.

SARAYAKU, Ecuador—The canoe motor rattled against the current as Guisel Marworno and Wagner Karipuna traveled down the Bobonaza River. The Brazilian Indigenous leaders had come seeking help.

Last year, state-owned Petrobras began exploring for offshore oil near their coastal territories. The prospect of an oil boom is already reshaping the nearby city of Oiapoque, where new settlers are ratcheting up pressure on Indigenous lands also facing threats from pollution and climate change.

Across the Amazon basin, such forces are bearing down upon Indigenous territories, with governments imposing oil and gas concessions over some 31 million hectares of those lands, an area roughly the size of Poland.

Projects like these—fundamentally at odds with many Indigenous communities’ cultures and spiritual philosophies—often arrive as foregone conclusions. Companies arrive armed with high-powered lawyers, investment dollars and promises of economic growth. Communities, with far fewer resources, are forced to navigate unfamiliar legal systems while trying to hold their communities together under mounting pressure.

(Katie Surma @ Inside Climate News   more…)


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *