CASILLAS, Guatemala — Evelin Cante got involved in the protest camp right from the start. Her village isn’t far from the Escobal silver mine in southern Guatemala, and she was…
When the Indigenous villagers of Tebing Tinggi agreed to give control of their ancestral land to a palm oil company in 1995, it promised to transform their fortunes. The Suku…
BARINGO COUNTY, Kenya – Last December in the town of Marigat, in Kenya's central Baringo county, Paul Chepsoi had to excuse himself from a dinner of nyama choma (roasted goat)…
MINDANAO, Philippines – Legislators in the southern Philippine province of South Cotabato moved this week to overturn a 12-year-old provincial ban on open-pit mining that has for years stalled the…
In 1835, a rebellion broke out in the Lower Amazon region, in what was then the state of Grão-Pará, Brazil. The vast majority of the population was composed of Afro-Brazilians,…
“Recover Citatah Karst, Make People Prosper.” That’s the call printed in red letters on a huge white banner pinned on a limestone cliff in Indonesia’s West Java province. “We put…
After being stripped of her post for vigorously opposing mining in her community, a local official in the Philippine province of Palawan is heading back to City Hall following a…
Ban Khao Mo, THAILAND — Standing in the house where she has lived since she was born 45 years ago, Premsinee Suntornthammathat points to the temple where her grandparents took…
Adiela Jineth Mera Paz wakes up every morning with only one thing on her mind – protecting her land in Puerto Asis, Putumayo, on the Colombia-Ecuador border. However, this is…
JAKARTA — An independent initiative in Indonesia has mapped Indigenous lands covering an area half the size of Germany since it began in 2010, nearly a third of it in…
Based on the best scientific data available, the unprecedented Amazon Water Impact Index draws together monitoring and research data to identify the most vulnerable areas of the Brazilian rainforest. According to the index, 20% of the 11,216 Brazilian Amazon microbasins have an impact considered high, very high or extreme; half of these watersheds are affected by hydroelectric plants.
Ida Yellowman stood at the top of Muley Point, seeing memories in every cardinal direction. To the north was Bears Ears and the Abajo Mountains, rock-strewn landscape where she first…
JAKARTA — A court in Jakarta has rejected a lawsuit by a remote island community against a gold-mining operation that overlaps onto their villages, in a ruling deemed “problematic” by…
Illegal miners operating insider the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon are coercing Indigenous girls as young as 11 into sex work, as well as inflicting violence and disease…
On Feb. 28, a landslide of earth and waste from mines in Myanmar's Hpakant township engulfed dozens of miners and scavengers looking for jade in this remote, mountainous region. Official…
Before Jair Bolsonaro took office as Brazil’s president in 2019, Canadian investment bank Forbes & Manhattan was facing problems with its business activities in the Brazilian Amazon. The situation began…
Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is a sanctuary for half of the world’s remaining population of endangered mountain gorillas, alongside forest elephants and many other species. But two road projects…
In early 2022, the public in Labuan Bajo, the gateway to Indonesia’s popular Komodo National Park, was both pleased and dissatisfied with the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry’s decision…
Legal restrictions meant to protect Brazil’s Indigenous territories from outside threats are failing to deter illegal deforestation and cattle ranching, fueling fears for the safety of uncontacted and isolated Indigenous…
For the past decade, an association of small farmers has been growing vegetables amid a strip of filao trees that grow on the sand dunes along the coastline in the…
MAKOKOU, Gabon — In August 2020, the Massaha community in northeastern Gabon made a formal request to the government to declassify a logging concession allocated to a Chinese company, Transport…
A new investigative report details human rights abuses committed against Indigenous Batwa people between 2019 and 2021 in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park (KBPN) located in eastern Democratic Republic of the…
KATHMANDU -- On the evening of March 27, as residents of the settlement of Kusum Khola, on the fringes of Nepal’s Chitwan National Park, were preparing dinner, they heard footsteps…
JAKARTA — A palm oil company whose permit was revoked at the start of the year and which was ordered to halt operations is allegedly continuing to clear forests in…
The central Purus River Basin is one of the best-preserved regions of the Brazilian Amazon. But deforestation here, in the state of Amazonas, could clear an area larger than England…
JAKARTA — An area of natural forest a tenth the size of Seoul has been cleared by a subsidiary of South Korean paper giant Moorim in Indonesia’s Papua region, a…
In November 2018, Earthsight published an in-depth investigation in collaboration with Mongabay into the Tanah Merah oil palm project in Papua, on the Indonesian half of the island of New…
Organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah have filed a complaint with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples about a once-secretive deal aimed at locking up…
As thousands of people protested in Brazil’s capital against a “death package” of bills deemed anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous, the lower house of Congress agreed to fast-track one of those bills,…
Three young women from the Munduruku Indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon run an audiovisual collective that uses social media to raise awareness about illegal invasions of their territory. “Many people no longer believe what we say, they only believe what they see,” says Aldira Akai, who, at 30, is the oldest member of the collective.
