By Bill Kovarik
They were abbots, nuns and priests. They were journalists, union members, teachers. They were farmers, villagers, teenagers.
And now they are all but forgotten.
Once in a while, some of the murders provoked international outrage. Chico Mendes (1988);Ken Saro-Wiwa (1995); Dorothy Stang (2005); José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo, (2011); Berta Caceres in Honduras (2018).
Yet most died in total obscurity, shot in their cars, stabbed in the remote jungle, beaten to death in back alleys. They were killed by shadowy figures serving the timber tycoons of the Amazon, the mining moguls of Mindanao, and the oil-mad dictators of Africa and the Middle East.
Most of the murders have never been seriously investigated, much less solved.
You can look down the list and see the names, and the monumental horror of it all hardly even registers. Who was “Boy” Billanes? We know he backed the idea of “Genuine Development” in the Philippines. We know he was shot in Koronadal City market. But who was he? What did it take for him to stand up and say that the environment, and the people, had suffered too much?
Who was Father Fausto Tentorio, the Italian priest killed in the Philippines? Who was Phra Supoj Suwajano, abbot of a Buddhist monastery killed in 2005? Who was Wilson Pinheiro, who was killed defending the Amazon rain forest in 1980?
They are among a list of hundreds of murdered environmental leaders. It’s a sobering list, made even more disturbing by a now-visible growth rate.
The question is: Does this represent a new artifact of international communication, as distant parts of world becomes more transparent and accessible to each other? Or is there another trend? Are environmental leaders being picked off in the last rush for the world’s remaining resources? Both explanations, it seems, might be true.
Louis Pasteur once said:
“Two contrary laws seem to be wrestling with each other… The one, a law of blood and death, ever imagining new means of destruction and forcing nations to be constantly ready for the battlefield — The other a law of peace, work and health, ever evolving new means of delivering man from the scourges which beset him.”
Pasteur confessed apprehension about which law would ultimately prevail, but he was determined to extend the law of humanity.
That same determination should guide our actions today.
Human rights groups and religious organizations are trying to keep track of the murders of environmental leaders, but their efforts are not enough. Interpol has a division of environmental crime, but they do not investigate crimes against humanity. We need a serious United Nations backed international investigation.
Something more is needed than UN’s hopelessly weak the Defenders Policy. People who stand up for their rights are being murdered.
There are those who would like to see this problem through the lens of an extreme right-wing notion painting the environmentalists as the killers. It’s because they aren’t using DDT, or nuclear power, or because they try to enforce minimal environmental standards, that they (somehow) are responsible for holding back development, and that (somehow) kills people. This idea is sometimes known as “green power, black death,” and it is, flatly, a grotesque lie.
In fact, the ones dying are the heroes. They are struggling to save what is left of the environment and their homes, and they deserve to be remembered with honor and in sorrow.
Imagine what these environmental leaders might have been able to achieve if they were not cut down by the dam-builders and the oil merchants and the loggers and the land grabbers. Imagine the deep historical significance of the cause for which they sacrificed. Imagine, as well, that someday this will be appreciated.
And with that in mind, perhaps we should also imagine a monument at United Nations plaza in New York. The medium would be something durable, maybe Amazon timber or Philippine gold or Indonesian copper. Cover it with crude oil from Africa and sprinkle it with stock certificates from New York, London, Zurich and Hong Kong. And carve every name in stone.
We all need something to remind us, and every politician in every capital of every nation in the world, what the people and the environment have suffered, and what we all must learn if we are to avoid forever repeating this painful history.
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Bill Kovarik is a journalist and a professor of communication. He has created a list of slain environmentalists for the Environmental History Timeline.