October 2022 Networker:
A Pipeline of Violence |
| Volume 27 (8), October 2022 |
| “Every time… it never gets easier, it hurts every single time.”
These are the words of Trisha Etringer of the Great Plains Action Society, during a recent webinar, described in this Networker, referring to her work on missing-person cases involving Indigenous people.
One national database, the FBI's National Crime Information Center, recorded 9,571 Indigenous people missing across the United States in 2021—but there are gaps in data collection, such that the crisis is also referred to as a data crisis. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) movement responds to this ongoing emergency of targeted violence, aiding victims’ families and advocating for appropriate attention and response by governments. The movement also contributes to the elucidation of the complex influences and causes of the high rate of violence against, and disappearances and murders of, Native people. There is strong evidence that a risk factor in the MMIR epidemic is the influx of men arriving from other regions to work in extractive industries, such as oil and gas, in proximity to Indigenous communities. It was even established in Minnesota government documents that Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline construction would increase sex trafficking and sexual abuse. The fracking science Compendium highlights research and reporting on the links between fossil fuel operations and crime and violence—particularly against women—in the United States and Canada. You can read a summary in this edition of the newsletter.
The webinar we link to in this edition features MMIR advocates working within this ongoing reality in the Midwest and Upper Midwest United States. They do so while preparing for the next possible wave of “man camps” to house those who will construct a massive network of CO2 pipelines, should the fossil fuel and ethanol industries succeed in their plans. Meanwhile, we are also paying close attention, beyond the United States and Canada, to another unfolding chapter of violence inflicted on Indigenous communities by the oil and gas industry. In fact, it is a Canadian company, ReconAfrica, that is taking advantage of everything from weak enforcement of laws protecting Indigenous peoples’ rights to the COVID-19 epidemic to push their oil and gas plans in remote, vulnerable, and ecological precious areas of Namibia, in southwest Africa. Through our colleagues at Frack Free Namibia, we learn that the targeted areas are Namibia’s poorest, with approximately 200,00 inhabitants, many of whom are subsistence farmers, and include the ancestral lands of San First Nations Indigenous groups. In an appalling example of the oil and gas industry’s dangerous and patronizing practices, ReconAfrica is reportedly “donating” its toxic waste drilling fluids to local farmers, calling it a good fertilizer for their crops. Both the fossil fuel industry’s toxic releases and its toxic business practices impact Indigenous peoples disproportionately worldwide. SEHN partners with groups responding to these injustices, collectively using law, ethics, and science to forge effective tools for action, lifting up their voices and leadership. Thank you for reading, and for following up through your allyship with the causes and organizations described in these pages, as you are able.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN |
Resources to Share: Extractive Industries, “Man Camps,” and Violence Against Women and Indigenous Peoples |
| On September 19, 2022, the Great Plains Action Society hosted an important webinar addressing the severe and violent effects that temporary workforce housing (“man camps”) for fossil fuel extraction, mineral mining, and large construction projects can have on Indigenous communities. Organizers point out that, years ago, James Anaya, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples stated, “Indigenous women have reported that the influx of workers into Indigenous communities as a result of extractive projects… led to increased incidents of sexual harassment and violence, including rape and assault.” Five years later, in 2019, Sikowis Nobiss, founder and executive director of the Great Plains Action Society, delivered a United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UN PFII) Intervention on Man-Camps and Violence in Indigenous Communities, appealing to the UN and its member states to adhere to all of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and end the Indigenous Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives crisis on Turtle Island. The impacts and the threat continue. The webinar features Indigenous experts on these matters, speaking as a new threat looms: the construction of CO2 pipelines, which will bring thousands of transient workers into the Midwest to build a massive, spiderweb-like system traversing both BIPOC urban centers and tribal nations.
Continue Reading |
Frack Free Namibia: Advocating for the Most Marginalized as Government Welcomes Canadian Oil and Gas Exploration in the Kavango Regions |
| In September 2020, the world learned about planned oil and gas explorations in the Kavango regions of Namibia, home to the biodiversity-rich Okavango River Basin which includes Botswana’s Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Environmental activists, local communities, NGOs, and even members of the Namibian cabinet were not privy to an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process that was completed and signed off by the Ministry of Mines and Energy in 2019. Similar secret negotiations took place in Botswana, where the Canadian oil company Reconnaissance Energy Africa (ReconAfrica) bought an exploration license bordering the Namibian license areas including Tsodilo Hills, another UNESCO World Heritage Site adjacent to the Okavango Delta. In total, ReconAfrica was granted a 13,200 square-mile license area, 70 percent of which is in Namibia and 30 percent in Botswana. The Kavango regions are Namibia’s poorest, with approximately 200,000 inhabitants (from a total population of 2,646,000 nationwide) who mainly derive their livelihood from crop and livestock farming as their primary agricultural activities. Mahangu (pearl millet) is the dominant crop, planted on about 95 percent of all cultivated land and a staple of the Namibian diet. About two-thirds (63 percent) of all rural households report farming as their main source of income. ReconAfrica was promising investors riches from a supposed massive unconventional (fracking) oil and gas development in Namibia and Botswana. In September 2019, the company stated that their long-term plans included, “100s of wells and modern frac stimulations.” However, after a Namibian newspaper broke the story of possible fracking, the Minister of Mines and Energy issued a statement denying that fracking was planned. ReconAfrica has also been scrubbing their website, removing any mention of fracking. The company sailed through the EIA process for exploratory boreholes drilling on communal and conservation lands with little community engagement, and no critical list of Interested and Affected Parties, in contravention of Namibia’s Environmental Management Act 7 of 2007. A 1996 amendment to the Nature Conservation Ordinance of 1975 devolved rights to communities over natural resources, which includes wildlife, and enabled them to set up and operate tourism enterprises through communal conservancies. Communal conservancies are self-governing, democratic entities, run by their members, with fixed boundaries that have been agreed upon with adjacent conservancies, communities, or landowners. The early, pioneer conservancies established the model for economic survival and growth in harsh rural settings. As legal entities with wildlife utilization plans, residents on communal land who had hunted game before independence and were treated as poachers, were allowed to hunt freely in the conservancies. To date, there are 86 in total, covering almost 20 percent of Namibia’s territory. Community forests are like conservancies, and they often overlap because they control grazing and natural resource extraction rights in forest areas. Continue Reading |
Looking Back at the San Juan Generating Station and Those Who Fought Against It
Toxic Pollutants a Growing Concern for Pregnant Mothers and Babies
The remarks of SEHN Board member Bhavna Shamasunder, associate professor in the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College, were featured in a Capital & Main article about the state of the science of environmental exposures and maternal health outcomes. “There’s a complex set of exposures that we have to think about that have genetic and environmental and long-term health implications that shape your life…” The Disinformation Machine: The Strategy Behind the Koch Network’s Climate Denial Campaign
The second story in the Orion Magazine series, “Deny and Delay: Inside the Climate Disinformation Machine,” edited by SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber, appeared this past month: “The Disinformation Machine: The strategy behind the Koch network’s climate denial campaign,” by Nancy MacLean. After 60 Years, ‘Silent Spring’ Is Still Changing the World
Burning Fossil Fuel in Our Buildings Harms the Health of New Yorkers
Electeds, Health Professionals Push Electrification
Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY), a program of SEHN, co-coordinated a sign-on statement declaring the health harms of continuing to power and heat buildings with fossil fuels. The statement was unveiled during a coalition press conference, where Dr. Kathleen Nolan represented CHPNY, and was covered in Politico. Commentary: Hype Aside, Gas is Anything but Clean
CHE Cafe´: Cancer & the Environment
SEHN Science Director Ted Schettler participated in a rich conversation hosted by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment with other scientists who, like him, have been deeply involved in the science of environmental contributions to cancer and in elucidating opportunities for prevention: “CHE Café: Cancer & the Environment” |
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