Atossa Soltani Recorded January 2014

Transcription

1 Atossa Soltani Recorded January 2014 Amazon Watch, Oil and the Rights of Nature SILVER DONALD Atossa Soltani was born in Iran, raised and educated in Ohio, and she lives in California. But the driving passion in her life is protecting the integrity of the Amazon rainforest and of the indigenous people who live there. It s hard to realize that even today in this scrutinized, mapped, measured and exploited planet there are still groups of indigenous people living in virtual isolation in the dense woodlands of South America s Amazon basin. But there are. And they are a precious part of the human heritage. And their very existence is threatened by the industrial world s ravenous appetite for what we call resources: metals and minerals, oil and gas, hydro-electric power. 1

2 Atossa Soltani is the founder and board president of Amazon Watch, an activist organization created to support indigenous people in protecting their human rights, their territories and their cultures against the overwhelming power of international extractive corporations. She is a photographer, a filmmaker and a media strategist who documents, publicizes and resists the corporate assault against the indigenous people and their habitat. Amazon Watch also supports a school that teaches indigenous leaders how to assert and defend their rights and their lands. Atossa has organized several successful campaigns to persuade oil companies and other corporations to adopt more responsible environmental and social policies. She speaks Farsi, Spanish, Portuguese and, very eloquently, English. ATOSSA SOLTANI: (00:01:36) Amazon Watch is a non-profit organization that works with indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin to protect their territories and advance indigenous peoples rights. It has been running for quite some years now, right? SOLTANI: (00:01:51) Yes, it founded in 1996 and has been going on about 17 years. We work pretty closely with indigenous movements across the basin in the Amazon. In particular we are very focussed right now in Ecuador, Peru, Columbia and Brazil. There is a wonderful story about how it got its name. Tell me about that. SOLTANI: (00:02:14) (Laughter) Well, let s see. I had decided I was going to do this work in the Amazon. At the time I was working for another organization and it just so happened that the president of Brazil was giving a talk at Stanford, this was President Cardoso and because the consulate had invited the organization I worked for I wasn t allowed to use their name or do anything that might jeopardize the relationship between the organization and the consulate. So I showed up with a bullhorn, which I wasn t allowed to bring inside the auditorium. As I watched him give a speech I had been very upset about the way that the president had been rolling back indigenous rights and planning a series of mega-projects in the Amazon. So, the talk ended and I ran out to get my bullhorn. I decided it wasn t any use doing anything inside the auditorium, so I ran outside, climbed on top of this planter, grabbed my bullhorn and basically as he was walking by I confronted him about what he was saying inside and what he was actually doing in the Amazon. He happened to have brought with him a plane full of journalists it was an election year and there was also cameras from the Bay area and the Brazilian media, so as he is walking by I am confronting him and he stops and looks at me just long enough for the media to get the shot with us both in the frame. He gets in his limousine and leaves and leaves me with all of these journalists doing an impromptu press conference. So they said, Who are you and what is this about? I described what it was about. And they said, So who are you with? Then I took a deep breath and I said Amazon Watch! Just kind of made up the name at the time and the next day it was all over the newspapers: Amazon Watch Confronts the Brazilian President. And so, a few people called me who were actually mentors of mine and said, Now you have to do it. You actually have to start this 2

3 organization. I had already decided that this was my area of passion and what I wanted to do for the rest of foreseeable life. And so I went for it. That s a lovely beginning. You erect the roof and then you put the building under it. SOLTANI: (00:04:30) That s right. I think the Amazon was already calling me. If you believe that plants feel vibrations and emit energy, the Amazon basin, the largest tropical rainforest on the planet, I truly felt like I was being called by the forest. I had dreams about it. I kept finding myself in these dreams in the Amazon and thinking, gosh, I have to do something or I might go mad. And so I already had a calling and it was already part of my direction. It just so happened that action sparked a container for which this work has been. It was kind of a neat little pivot. So how did the Amazon come to be calling you? Had you spent a lot of time in the Amazon? SOLTANI: (00:05:14) Actually no. I grew up in Iran and migrated to the United States around the revolution when I was 13. I had been a political activist from the very beginning, watching a revolution going from nothing to overthrowing the dynasty. It really did make me believe in people power and political activism and so when I was in college my first year in college I had a beautiful housemate/friend who became one of my best friends and she was Peruvian. She was studying conservation biology and spent time in the Amazon. When she would come back from the forest and visiting these areas she would tell me what was happening. I just started to get literally, you could say possibly, obsessed about the forest. What it meant, the functions it served, the biodiversity. Then having these dreams, it just seemed like nothing could get me more excited and nothing could move me more than this place, the people, the biodiversity. It is really not only the lungs of the earth, but the Amazon is really the heart of the planet in the way that it creates weather, contributes to maintaining the ecological and climatological balance of the planet. I think it was something that resonated with me and got planted. It took me 7 or 8 years to figure out how I was going to make a difference in that field. In the meantime I read any book I could get my hands on and discovered the science of it, the ecology, and what was happening the issues. That prepared me for this work. Did you actually get to the Amazon during that period? SOLTANI: (00:07:09) I didn t! This is all happening at long distance. 3

4 SOLTANI: For about the first 8 years it was kind of the situation where I was a student, I had a student Visa, and I was in line for political asylum because of my family having to leave Iran. I couldn t leave Ohio. I was actually in Ohio and I couldn t leave Ohio for like 9 years while I waited for my Green Card. As soon as I got my Green Card and I am now a U.S. citizen but as soon as I got my Green Card the first thing I did was go to Peru and Brazil and have an amazing adventure a magical journey in the region. It is magical. It s a magical place. SOLTANI: (00:07:51) It is! One of the things that has often occurred to me, and I m just curious if this seems to be so to you is that, Amazonia suffers from the fact that it is in several different jurisdictions. If it were seen as a whole instead of fragmented into little pieces in Ecuador, and little pieces in Peru and so on, it might draw more of the attention that it deserves. SOLTANI: (00:08:10) Absolutely. If you look at the Amazon basin it is the size of the continental United States, so it is massive. And then you have 9 countries 9 political jurisdictions the Amazon expands across 9 countries, so you have all of these different policies and politics, different geopolitical priorities and so, yes, it is seen as a fragmented place. In fact a lot of the tracking that happens on deforestation in the Amazon primarily focus on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and fails to report deforestation across the basin. But yes, it is one huge watershed. That would be a big problem. Not only is there that, but there is also the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who obviously don t have any particular interests in those boundaries and must be crossing back and forth and interacting all the time. SOLTANI: (00:09:08) Yes. Absolutely. Ecuador is a perfect case example where, for about 40 years there was a war between Ecuador and Peru over territory and that meant that the border was cinched up and there was no movement across the borders. You really had a situation where the same people, same tribes like the Achuar, like the Schiwiar, like the Zaparo and Quechua, they were definitely divided across the political boundaries and unable to visit each other. So there was about a 40-year period until not too long ago where the same families had been split across the border and could not go back and forth without being called traitors and now that s changing but yes, it s an interesting reality. There is still a lot of border politics you could say. But more and more indigenous peoples are starting to organize their people across boundaries. Now, Amazon Watch runs a school for that, right? That trains indigenous leaders in how to confront some of the issues that they are dealing with? 4

5 SOLTANI: (00:10:16) We ve been involved in a number of training programs. One of our main theories of change is that it is about supporting, empowering and accompanying indigenous peoples in order to help them become better advocates for their own rights and for their own territories. In that sense we have been involved in a number of initiatives to bring training around media skills, working around communications, actually donation of equipment like ham radios or video cameras and laptops, GPS units. Helping indigenous peoples tell their own stories. We in fact trained one indigenous leader from the Quechua community of Sarayaku in developing not only camera skills but then using Final Cut to edit videos. He went on to become an amazingly accomplished filmmaker. Last year his film about his people and their struggle to fight against oil companies won number one film in the National Geographic All Roads Film Project, which was really a great achievement. So, yes, we have been helping indigenous peoples. Back then we were helping them to sign up for e- mail accounts, and we were supporting a school in Peru that is about bringing indigenous people s knowledge about their rights, their collective rights under national and international law; their ability to campaign to get their message out and their ability to speak to the media and help get their stories out. So that s an example of one of our training programs. The people who are here at the summit that we both just finished attending, there were some very, very impressive indigenous leaders and one of the things that struck me about them is how they are not shy, and they are incredibly articulate. Is this part of what the culture is in the first place or is this also the enhancements of this kind of training? SOLTANI: (00:12:20) Well, you know you can t totally generalize. In the Amazon basin there is some 300 plus, between 300 and 400 indigenous cultures and within those cultures you have a range, from very peaceful, quiet, soft-spoken indigenous communities, and you have the warrior tribes. Now we happen to be in Ecuador where the central southern Ecuadorian Amazon is home to a number of warrior tribes, which at one point were at war with each other and now are united and confronting the outside world in terms of oil companies and what have you mining. And so of course the other thing is that indigenous peoples have traditional systems of decision-making where they sit in assembly, and they are very much an oral culturea and everyone speaks until everyone has stated their opinion and a consensus is reached. You have a system of, an inclination towards democratic decision making where, again, there is a culture where everyone speaks their mind. So that s what you see here. There is a real value placed on being able to express yourself orally. SOLTANI: (00:13:40) Yes, in fact some of the leaders who make it to become regional or national leaders are the ones who have developed a real strong skill set in their articulation. The power of the word. (Laughter). 5

6 Now it seems to me, is it fair to say that throughout the region the major problems come from extractive industries. Is that a fair generalization? SOLTANI: (00:14:05) That is a great way to frame it. More broadly speaking it comes from this mind-set the development paradigm that is imposed by governments and regional authorities, I mean, often the Amazon is seen as an empty space full of natural resources to be exploited. Basically that s been the predominant framework around policy and governance has happened in this area. So yes, it is seen as empty space, which is not the case: indigenous peoples have occupied these spaces for thousands of years. It is seen as a place where the country can exploit these resources to basically fuel its national development. Of course, that has been tragic for the region and for the people. You have industries like oil and gas, and mining. You have large-scale infrastructure projects that aim to integrate and dominate and connect these interiors, these wild interiors. And so these are for example roads, waterways, river ways being dredged to create waterways. You have large-scale energy projects like large dams that block rivers and flood huge areas of the forest. You have massive agricultural projects, or agribusiness projects like plantations of palm oil and soybeans, and of course cattle ranching has been, in the lowland rainforest a huge, huge driver of deforestation, especially in Brazil. You say that the area is seen as being empty, with nobody there. That has actually been stated pretty blatantly and openly by a number of the people there, and it seems to me that it is fundamentally racist, isn t it? SOLTANI: (00:16:06) Yes, I mean it s basically seeing the tribes that live there as dispensable and expendable and often you hear some of the, even the as recently as a few years ago the former president of Peru said, These indigenous people are like guard dogs that are hording and protecting the garden and keeping the rest of the population in poverty. They want to hang out under the tree and not let any of us have the gold. That was his discourse. They should just assimilate into national society and let us get along with our development plans. So it is seen as very racist. The same thing that happened in Canada and the U.S. but it s happening now. You still have indigenous populations in really remote areas of the Amazon who have either no contact or very little contact with the outside world and they are defending their territories, which may be millions of acres of pristine rainforest. So, yes, it is definitely the battle to conquer these frontiers. What happened in Canada and the U.S. is still happening today in the Amazon basin. And in Canada and the U.S. We re still seeing that in a lot of the northern oil developments and the pipeline projects out of Fort McMurray in Alberta. Same story. SOLTANI: (00:17:35) That s right. Same story. If you look at things like biodiversity, which is the number of plants and animals you find around the world, and if you look at resources like oil and gas and mining and minerals, you basically could do an analysis across the world and it would show that somewhere around 80 percent of all of the biodiversity on the planet is found on indigenous people s lands. You are probably somewhere close to that when 6

7 you look at resources on Where is the last of the mineral deposits, oil deposits and the timber deposits. I hate to call them that because that is not what those places are. Those places are ecosystems that provide vital functions for the whole planet. And when you talk about territories you said that these tribes are defending their territories something else I would like to elicit there is that is not the way they would see that, right? They would see it more as habitat. They don t have a sense of property. Property is something that is imposed on these situations? SOLTANI: (00:18:46) They do have a sense of boundaries of their ancestral land. Most of these tribes see their land as living forest or living entities. They know exactly which mountains are sacred, where their ancestors are buried, where they get their timber, where they get their medicinal plants and the wood for their canoe and special medicinal plants for certain ailments. They walk these lands and they have stories. These are living landscapes, which have meaning to them. They know from this river basin to this mountain to this forest is their ancestral lands where many generations of their people have occupied and cared for and are in direct relationship. They perform ceremonies, they have an interaction with these forests. They know where to hunt the animals that they eat. They know where not to hunt to allow regeneration of those species. They do sometimes have common hunting and fishing grounds where a bunch of indigenous groups might share an area but for the most part they are living on these large areas in some ways as living indigenous nations. So, in the U.S. we call them tribal lands or we call them reservations. Here they call their lands their territories. Yes, but it is a very different sense from thinking that it s property that is bought and sold that is exclusively yours, you can do anything you want with it: the whole Western approach to what land and territory is. SOLTANI: (00:20:25) Absolutely. It is a collective concept. Families might have their own plot of garden that they cultivate and areas that they care for. But as a nation, as an indigenous nation there might be dozens of villages of the same indigenous group that look after an area that they see as their parents, and they see this area as their sacred lands. And it is a collective concept. It is not an individual concept. It is a collective concept. It is part of their identity of who they are. They were born from these mountains and these rivers. It s a whole different concept of relationship with the natural world and it s not something to be bought and sold. It s not property. Often they say, This is our mother. For us, extracting oil is worse than killing our mother. We re not going to accept it. You ve got two views of what it is to be human. In collision whenever you get one of these industrial developments in traditional aboriginal territories, indigenous territory, right? 7

8 SOLTANI: (00:21:35) Yes, if we all went back far enough maybe a couple hundred years, three, four, five hundred years we could definitely see in most of human civilization and most of society that this is how we lived; these were the values we engaged in. There was reciprocity, caring for the land, the land took care of the land, we took care of the land. We were part of this system. I have a chance to work with Amazon Watch in the Amazon basin but also with another organization called the Christensen Fund in other parts of the world, so I ve traveled to central Asia, and Papua New Guinea, and some of the other regions of the world to Kenya and Australia and have gotten to see indigenous peoples caring for their land and their way of life and it s very universal: this idea that we are part of the land, that we give to the land and we receive from the land. There is this infinite cycle of reciprocity. That is the way most people have lived communally. It s only in the last few hundred years that we have changed our ways to being individualistic: family units driven by growth and wealth accumulation and property accumulation. That s relatively recent in human societies. Then when the two collide, well, let s talk about the Chevron-Toxico case because there is a case where an oil company came into a previously untouched part of the rainforest and tell me what happened. SOLTANI: (00:23:12) So in the late 60 s Texaco was the first oil company to arrive in Ecuador and they went to the region of the Amazon where there were still un-contacted indigenous populations and lots of forest, no roads. They discovered oil and they basically signed an exclusive agreement with the Ecuadorian government to drill for oil, build a pipeline, and develop the whole oil industry for Ecuador. Over the course of 20 some years they basically drilled for oil using technologies back then that would have been illegal in the United States. Most importantly they made a decision to have the system just dump their toxic wastewaters into the rivers and streams instead of injecting it back into the formation where it came from. So you had something like 18 billion gallons of toxic waste flood the forest, the streams, plus continuous oil spills. Every time they drilled a well, there were over 900 wells drilled, every time they drilled a well they dumped the drilling muds and the toxic chemicals into these ponds. So you have an area three times the size of Manhattan that is completely polluted. And of course if this was an area in the United States, decades ago they would have put a fence around it and called it a toxic waste site and evacuated everyone. But here in the Amazon the tribes lived in this area. Five indigenous tribes were affected and other people came following the pipeline and the road into the Amazon. The settlers the farmers established their base across this region. They started to basically live along the pipeline, live along the road. In these areas where there was toxic waste in the rivers, in the water, in the groundwater, every time it rained the waste pits would flood bringing the chemical soups that basically flooded their gardens where they grow their vegetables and their crops and fruit trees. And so these populations, about 30,000 people 5 tribes and about 80 villages of settler communities are systematically poisoning themselves over the course of the last 30 some years. So Texaco left in 93, around 93, after extracting all of this oil they left, they said, Okay we re done Out of there. They left their decaying, polluting infrastructure to the Ecuadorian government. The case was brought in 93 in the United States against Texaco because Texaco made decisions in the United States to design this highly polluting system. 8

9 So since 93 Texaco was bought out by Chevron and the liabilities that Texaco has in Ecuador became the liabilities of Chevron. So the cases continued to go on for the first 10 years in the United States, and then Texaco and Chevron argued that the case should be heard in Ecuador. The case was brought back to Ecuador. In Ecuador it has been going on since It s gone through the district court, the highest court and recently the equivalent of the Supreme Court found Chevron guilty and it ordered the company to pay $9 billion in reparations for everything from bringing clean water to drinking water to the communities to helping remediate and clean up the soil, the waste pits, the streams, etc. This is an incredibly important case in corporate accountability. It is one of the most important developments in corporate accountability: holding a company accountable in a court of law, allowing every day people who have been harmed by this huge company with huge amounts of resources to basically have a claim for justice. Of course Chevron has continued to deny it is responsible. It has basically attempted to discredit and evade justice. It has brought counter lawsuits against the lawyers and the plaintiffs. It has attempted to silence the non-profit groups like Amazon Watch that are working on the case, and really it literally had 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers and paralegals fighting to basically evade justice. Most recently it brought cases attempting to say that against one of the key lawyers in the case in the United States in a court in New York saying, this case is fraudulent. But ultimately we believe that justice will prevail. And this case is actually coming to Canada where Canadian people can have an opportunity to themselves learn the truth about the case and form an opinion and call for justice in a very important case that is basically saying that a Canadian court recently ruled that the plaintiffs in Ecuador, the indigenous people in the farming communities, the 30,000 people can basically bring their decision of their Supreme Court to Canada and ask the Canadian court to opine on the validity of the case so that if the Canadian courts agree they can seize Chevron s assets in Canada to pay back the $9 billion that was the judgment from the case in Ecuador. This is significant. This is really maybe one of the ways that we can use this idea that transnational corporations attempt to be above government rule. They attempt to evade justice in one district, in one jurisdiction, and here banding together we can actually bring case in another jurisdiction to enforce the judgment. It is nice to see some push back against that abuse of corporate power that has been going on for so long. SOLTANI: (00:29:33) Yes. It has been a long road. This case has been going on for twenty years and it is incredibly demoralizing at times to see how much Chevron can distort the truth, how much they control the mainstream media, how much they have been controlling the courts in the United States. Pretty much, they have probably spent somewhere around $400 - $500 million just in recent years defending themselves and doing P.R. and ad campaigns. When you think about every day, how much that money could have actually gone to help bring justice to the communities, to the villagers who all have cancer, who have birth defects, who don t have clean water, who eat polluted fish Most of the tribes I don t know if you had the chance to visit the indigenous groups along the Aguaricó [River] but, the Cofán 9

10 for example, their rivers are so polluted that often you see them eating tuna fish in a can. They live on an Amazonian river that normally would have an abundance of fish and that would be the main diet of many of the indigenous groups. So it s pretty tragic and to see that the CEO of Chevron says, We re going to fight this case until hell freezes over and then we re going to fight it out on ice. It s pretty demoralizing. But at the same time seeing that there are courts that are willing to challenge corporate power, and hopefully the Canadian public and the media will get behind this case and allow for justice to actually be served, finally. Well they ve brought it to a country where there is lots of freezing, and lots of ice, so (laughter) so maybe they just came to the right place. SOLTANI: (00:31:27) Yes. Exactly! (laughter) The reason that they are fighting this so hard has to be that they are worried about the consequences. Not just the $9 billion, that s not such a big issue to an oil company their size but what s the ripple effect if this is successful? SOLTANI: (00:31:41) Yes, it would set a huge precedent for companies that have been polluting and dumping and leaving. In places like Nigeria, and other places where their companies have basically attempted to operate outside of public view, operating without the legal structure to enforce any environmental regulations. It is like the tobacco cases, the very first ones helped pave the way for a whole number of cases. I think that s what we are seeing. Holding these companies to account would have huge repercussions for other corporations. Also, it is already having an impact. Already it is almost like the industry has been studying this case and hopefully taking some lessons away. But I know that when we deal with the oil industry, in fighting the oil industry entry into other areas, this case comes up all the time in conversation. Well, we re not going to be like Chevron! We re not going to be like that! And of course, they make promises, which I don t believe because I ve never seen any kind of oil development in the Amazon region that didn t cause irreversible, permanent harm. Things like: opening roads into the forest that then lead to further deforestation; declining biodiversity; oil spills are a given: it s not a question of if it s a question of when ; there are pipeline ruptures; you re talking about an area where it rains 80 inches and more a year so you have flooded forests; you have huge mountains and landslides that happen often. Pretty much the entire forest, the Amazon forest, there is so much water, and so much movement it is almost like drilling offshore because these areas are so hard to get to and a spill would be impossible to clean up. So it s just a matter of time where these areas could get polluted with oil development. Unfortunately when you look at the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Peruvian Amazon, the majority between 70 and 90 percent of these forests have been slated for future oil drilling, either some of them are already going ahead with exploration and new production, and some of it is seen as the next decade. But it s unfortunate that such an important global biologically diverse place and such an important sacred land 10

11 to so many indigenous peoples, which has so many other ecological functions like regulating the global climate and being a storehouse for the world s biodiversity, home to species like the jaguar, home to majority of the species of plants and animals on the planet There are more species of fish in the Amazon River basin than in all of the oceans. There is more tree species in one square km of the Ecuadorian Amazon, one square km of the Ecuadorian Amazon has more tree species than in all of Canada and the U.S. combined. So here in this most amazing crucible of life, actually these areas like the Yasuní National Park, which is currently being threatened by oil drilling, were around during the last ice age, were a refugia for the world s species. Plants and animals that survived there then repopulated the outlying regions after the end of the ice age. So these areas are critical for the planet, they are critical for our weather system, for our hydrological cycle. In fact the amount of moisture vapor that rises over the Amazon basin the largest tree based land mass on the planet creates so much heat and vapor that that drives weather systems and rainfall it is like the planet s rain machine. And so much of the agricultural production even in the U.S. and Mexico depend on the rain vapor and moisture that is recycled by the trees of the Amazon basin. That s an amazing description of an obviously hugely amazing place. Let me turn to another area. It seems to me, in terms of fighting back, there is the kind of work that Amazon Watch and the indigenous people and others have been doing. But there is also the rights of nature movement that we have been paying so much attention to in the summit we have been at just lately. How much difference would that make, if we had rights of nature accepted as part of the legal system, say across the board? SOLTANI: (00:36:52) A huge difference. The rights of nature originates in the indigenous philosophies of natural law: original instructions. You often hear indigenous peoples talk about our natural law, or original law, which often has to do with the cycle of reciprocity and respect for the earth, their mother. And from that comes this concept of the legal doctrine of the rights of nature, where nature has a right to exist and flourish, and continue its vital cycles and be respected, and be a subject of law and not an object of law. In that sense it would be huge if a river had basically an identity, and allowed to stand in court just like any individual. And it s up to people and the rights of nature says, it s up to all of us to bring cases to enforce, to defend those systems: the sacred mountain, the river, the forest, the living forest. And I think that of course we were all incredibly, so incredibly inspired when President Correa first came into office and held a constituent assembly, Alberta Acosta was named the president of the assembly. He is one of the foremost advocates for the rights of nature. There was this huge convening, the whole country embraced the subject, the constitutional assembly basically adopted a new constitution that recognized the rights of nature in the constitution, as well as other principals like the goal of government, the goal of society is not wealth accumulations rather it is living in harmony and balance with nature: a concept from the Quechua, here in Ecuador Sumak Kawsay. And so the whole idea of the purpose of development, the purpose of society, the purpose of government and these rights of nature concepts were integrated for the first time by any country. That was a huge source of inspiration for all of us. We basically thought, Well it s going to get easier. We re going to have some ways of enforcing the protections of the forest and cultures. 11

12 However, in actuality this government has turned out to abandon it s commitments; to only pay lip service and in actuality be continuously developing these regions: handing out more concessions to oil companies, putting in large scale mining, building hydroelectric dams, prosecuting and harassing organizations and individuals for defending the rights of nature, and basically cracking down on anyone including the media who dare speak out against the government. So it has been really a disappointment. What about the broader movement? We had here people from, I don t know how many countries, but countries from all around the world for about a week talking about rights of nature and how to go forward with this whole movement. How do you feel about that? SOLTANI: (00:40:15) I think it s a really exciting development. Everywhere I go when I give talks to the university students or environmental organizations, the whole concept of rights of nature has incredible power people get very excited about it. It is akin to, you know at one point we thought slavery was okay. At one point we thoughts women shouldn t have the right to vote, at one point we thought human rights was not acceptable, and those things we changed. Over time our values shifted. We started to say, indigenous peoples have rights, human rights, women s rights. So I think it s only a progression to start seeing that nature has rights. But I think we have a long way to go. We are facing we are getting more and more people excited about the rights of nature. There have been some great strides on the local level in terms of local ordinances that recognizes a water shed or support the defence of a certain ecosystem. At the local level it has had an impact. We haven t seen an impact at the national and international level yet. But it is a powerful idea and I think give it 20, 30 years and we could see this as a frontier of rights. However I think what are we up against? Like you said earlier, it s that paradigm of the capitalist, global economic system that sees nature as raw materials for continued conversion to more wealth and the enrichment of a few who own the means of production, the means of capital. So that s one system that we re at odds with. The other system looks at well-being, looks at how you benefit, how your livelihood benefits from a forest, a living forest. An example would be you are enjoying the fruits of the trees but not actually cutting the trees that bear the fruit and that you live in harmony, and reverence, and respect and reciprocity and you think about the long term, like indigenous people say, in seven generations we want these forests to still be here, to still support biodiversity, to still have the same animals and to still be incredibly have their integrity maintained, and to still have the spirits living in them. A lot of the people that we work with talk about how these forests are not just full of animals and plants, but that literally the forest is a living being. It has a spirit. It is an entity and they see and interact with those entities. That is the big difference. I think that as we seek to address the planetary crisis of climate change and everything else we are facing right now, this debate is going to become more and more critical because it ultimately highlights the fundamental problems in our worldview as being separate from nature versus being interdependent. And seeing ourselves as dominating nature versus recognizing we are part of the web of life that ultimately, the primacy of the web of life is paramount and what keeps us alive. 12

13 One final point and that is how you would go about making the change that would return us to the original operating instructions as it were. You were part of, I think, a very imaginative way of doing that and that is the summit, or the tribunal at the end of the rights of earth summit. Tell me about that. SOLTANI: (00:44:17) That was one of the most powerful experiences I have ever been a part of. I could not hold back the tears throughout the whole thing. Here you were being charged with being judges for the rights of nature and thinking of nature and how nature was abused and destroyed and devastated and pillaged by these different cases. And you re sitting there and listening to these experts bring about the evidence of all the damage to the rights of mother nature, to the rights of nature being able to sustain itself: spills like the BP Oil spill, the Chevron-Texaco spill, the issues around the drilling in the Yasuní, coal mining threatening the entire barrier reef in Australia, the most productive marine ecosystem. And so you re sitting there and you re saying, Let me think as if I was the barrier reef, let me think as if I was the ocean, let me think as if I was the forest. And it was pretty emotional and amazing to be there and to basically say, this citizen s tribunal is going to think of mother nature and the rights of nature as paramount and through that lens we re going to look at not just environmental damage or environmental justice, but the rights of the species that live in these forests and the human populations that suffer as well. And the ecosystems in general and their health and well being and try these cases from that perspective. So, we had our first meeting. There were 10 judges, 9 cases. We plan on deliberating on these cases and issuing our rulings and judgments at the next big global gathering, which will be in Lima this December around the conference of parties on climate change. And I m very excited about this. It is something that could be replicated by other jurisdictions, localities. These kinds of tribunals, we ve seen them work well in the case of human rights violations and now we re looking at them from a perspective of the rights of nature. It s quite exciting and very inspiring. It allows the public to be part of a process of basic articulation and expression of our value system, a new value system. Can we just turn to the process for a moment. What you actually had there was almost a discovery session at a traditional criminal trial where a group of individuals brought the evidence that would justify a full out trial for let s say B.P. in the case of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the United States and I ve forgotten how a couple of those went, but they were very specific cases. Same thing with Chevron- Toxico. So the prosecutor SOLTANI: The earth prosecutor The earth prosecutor draws on expert testimony to say this is why these people should be sanctioned and should have to, or these organizations, and should have to make some kind of reparations for this and should suffer some penalties for it, and one of the things I thought was tremendously powerful was that this never happens if the case if big enough. Yes, there are some penalties for B.P. but they are trivial compared to the offense. And there is never a trial of this. So now you ve got all these cases accepted for trial by the tribunal of which you are a member and then the next stage is presumably to take them to trial and call the witnesses from the people who are accused, or the organizations that are 13

14 accused, and come to a determination, which means nothing in terms of power, but may mean everything in terms of influence. Is that it? SOLTANI: (00:48:15) Exactly, because you re talking about shifting societal perspectives and creating a popular understanding of rights of nature. I think the tribunal helps crystallize what are the rights of nature, why there are rights of nature, and helps to put yourself out of your anthropocentric framework of me human, human communities as dominating, to a perspective where you think about a species that is going to go extinct. You think about the turtles, you think about the sharks that were harmed in the B.P. oil spill. You think even about isolated, un-contacted tribes that are basically being displaced and facing ethnocide in the case of the Yasuní National Park where the isolated tribes were being driven away by oil companies. So yes, it is about, it is a powerful tool to help shift consciousness and get us to think outside of our anthropocentric world view, and it s an empowerment tool allowing communities to basically have popular trials that help expose whether it will have any power to actually force a judgment against a company is not the point. We re talking about laying the groundwork for a new legal framework and for a new understanding around, again the primacy of the web of life. (00:49:49) Amazon Watch strongly supports the indigenous plaintiffs in the famous Chevron-Toxico case against Texaco and its successor, Chevron. For a closer look at that story, please watch our Green Interview with Pablo Fajardo and Steve Donziger, the lawyers who have been leading that case. You may also want to view our interviews with Peruvian and indigenous leader Santiago Manuin Valera and with Ecuador s remarkable former energy minister Alberto Acosta. For The Green Interview, I m Silver Donald Cameron. Thanks for joining us. Total running time 00:50:37 14