Latoya Abulu

Abuelos de Tajín, spiritual guides from Totonac communities in Mexico, say people are losing their traditional beliefs and ancestral knowledge as their connection with a fast-degrading environment rupture.

HARARE — By 6 a.m. on Sunday, the line at a water well in Harare's Budiriro suburb is already long. It snakes all the way into a nearby street, and some people have begun fighting over who should get water first. If they're lucky, they get clean water once a week. In other suburbs of Zimbabwe's capital, it can take weeks or months.

YAQUI VALLEY, Mexico – More than a decade after a court ruling that an aqueduct violated the Yaqui tribe’s rights, the Mexican government has done nothing in response, say locals. The Independencia Aqueduct, which supplies water to several cities in the state of Sonora, is one of several projects the government has constructed along the […]

DAVAO CITY, Philippines — To his fellow tribal members, Datu Julito Ahao is jokingly called matanglawin, which literally means “having an eye of an eagle.” Aptly so. Under the watch of the 64-year-old chieftain, more than a dozen critically endangered Philippine eagles, the country’s national bird, have hatched and survived in the wild since the […]

From Oct. 21 to Nov. 1, Indigenous and local community leaders from around the world will gather at the latest U.N. biodiversity conference, or COP16, which delegates say is poised to be a “historic” conference that could mark a turning point for both biodiversity and those who protect it. Ahead of the talks, several delegates […]

The world’s leading conservationists will flock to Cali, Colombia, this October for the U.N. biodiversity conference, COP16. Within Cali’s bustling urban environment, it’s easy to forget that the city lies at the foothills of Los Farallones de Cali, a major biodiversity hotspot and national park in the Andean mountain range. Migratory birds fly overhead and crystal-clear streams flow into the urban environment. The city is crisscrossed by several rivers and has one of the greatest bird diversity in the country. But the beauty of the region produces a blissful ignorance. At the conference, attendees will not be exposed to how antiquated conservation tactics have resulted in antagonisms between the state and the locals who reside in this Andean paradise right beside them. Nor will they see how these conservation methods have been unable to solve the complexities of economically insecure locals engaging in illegal gold mining. Biologist Valentina Paz Aramburo near Peñas Blancas, Los Farallones de Cali, Valle de Cauca, Colombia. Image by Alex Reep. When the national parks system (Parques) arrived to declare Los Farallones a national park in the 1960s, many locals say that the state adopted a hostile approach to conservation by imposing borders around the park zone, halting construction within, seizing farms, and removing people from their land. Their tactics reflect fortress conservation, a conservation model that assumes biodiversity is best protected by creating areas with zero human disturbance. This model views humans as separate from nature, often displacing Indigenous groups and long-term locals, even if…This article was originally published on Mongabay

SANTA MARTA, Panama — Mauricio Martínez was convinced he was going to die. The year was 2021 and Martínez, gravely ill with COVID-19, struggled to breathe, walk and swallow food. As his condition deteriorated, he decided that instead of being intubated in a hospital in the nation’s capital of Panama City, he’d prefer to pass […]

Although 17% of all forest carbon and 39% of global lands in good ecological condition are managed or governed by Indigenous Peoples, just a tiny

Across the world, Indigenous and other communities embedded in nature have articulated, as part their resistance to external domination, an inseparability of nature from all human activity.

Carlos Andrés Ascué Tumbo, a 30-year-old Indigenous land guardian and educator, was the 115th social leader killed in Colombia this year.