Across the world, an alarm is sounding. Through record-breaking temperatures, through warming oceans, through swelling forest fires and torrential rains, our planet is offering us a language of warning.
The message is clear: we need to take urgent action across the world to confront the climate crisis and stop the accelerating loss of biodiversity. Unless we radically question our practices of overconsumption, reorient our economies away from extractivism, and transform our cultures to be in deeper relation with the Earth, we risk stealing the future from current and future generations.
On this year’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day, our invitation is to listen: to hear the languages of the Earth, to heed the warnings of Indigenous peoples, to attend to the territories we call our home. By listening, we can imagine our way to a better future, for all of us.
To mark this day, we’d like to offer some recent reflections about what it means to take action for the Earth by Waorani leader and Amazon Frontlines co-founder Nemonte Nenquimo:
“Today we are talking about climate change all over the world, from the Amazon to the Global North. But most people are only listening to what’s happening at a surface level – there is no immediate action being taken.
As an Indigenous woman, here’s what I want to share. To really protect the Earth, to really stop climate change, it has to start from what you consider here, from your community. It means building consciousness, not polluting, taking action, and at the heart of it, it means healing. Healing where we are.
We need to heal to protect, and we protect when we understand we are connected. Communities in the Global North consume and consume and consume. That’s affecting my territory, my river, my earth, my wind, my culture, my people, and the animals. So for me, as an Indigenous woman, my message is we have to start from where we are, from our community. Harmonizing, organizing ourselves, being in dialogue with others. It means asking: how can we consume differently and less, to be in alliance with Indigenous peoples?
Mother Earth is crying, telling us to listen. As an Indigenous woman, I feel that this is a warning in her language, urging us to respect, to react. As Indigenous peoples, we are at the forefront of listening to the Earth, of feeling its language. We need others around the world to understand this, listening and embracing too.
And we also need to dream. What do we want our territories to be? How do we want to care for our children? How do we protect the spaces that ancestors have protected for thousands of years?
This is something all of us around the world need to understand. To listen, to offer tenderness, to take care of and respect the Earth.”
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we invite you to reflect and step into the small actions that can generate transformative changes in your community. Although you may be far away from a rainforest, all our ecosystems and waters are intrinsically connected. What happens in the Amazon ripples across our planet, and vice-versa.
Please share this important message from Nemonte with your community.
