On September 12, delegates attending the World Conservation Congress in Jeju, South Korea, voted overwhelmingly to approve a motion aimed at strengthening protection for sacred places. The congress is convened every four years by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and represents governments, NGOs and environmentalists focusing on global issues. Ten thousand people…
As the sun set on the annual Taos Pueblo Powwow in Taos, N.M., on July 14, representatives of the Taos Land Trust, surrounded by dancers and tribal members from across the country, officially returned a sacred hot springs property to the Taos Pueblo Tribe. The Ponce de León Hot Springs, just south of Taos, is…
A standing-room only crowd of indigenous leaders, NGOs and U.N. representatives previewed Sacred Land Film Project’s forthcoming film series Standing on Sacred Ground at a side event of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York on May 9. It was the first of two successful May screenings of the four-part series, which…
As bulldozers began clearing the site of a new wind-energy facility in the desert of western Imperial County, California — ripping up forests of ocotillo cacti, damaging sensitive wildlife habitat and threatening ancestral graves of the Quechan Tribe — tribal members and their allies stood outside the La Jolla corporate offices of Pattern Energy on…
Each summer, the Winnemem Wintu, whose home is the McCloud River watershed in northern California, hold a four-day coming-of-age ceremony on the river for the tribe’s young women. But this sacred ritual has, in recent years, been threatened by the presence of outsiders drinking alcohol and shouting threats and racial slurs as they travel on…
For more than 12,000 years, native people inhabited several villages clustered around the roar of Wyam of N’ch-iwana — Celilo Falls on the Columbia River — the center of a vast salmon-based fishing and trading economy and the nucleus of many sacred sites, petroglyphs and burial grounds. Celilo Falls was a natural wonder, by volume the largest…
A court in Papua New Guinea this week cleared the way for the Chinese state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. to proceed with a $1.5 billion nickel-mining project, which had been blocked by injunctions over the environmental impact of the company’s plan to dispose of mine tailings in the ocean. The long-awaited decision denied a petition for…
Two thought leaders with clashing viewpoints on the future of environmental stewardship will be going head to head on the topic of whether technologies like nuclear power can be used to foster sustainability, at 7 p.m. on July 21 at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, as part of Earth Island Presents. Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe)…
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar yesterday announced a six-month extension of the moratorium on new uranium mining claims in a million-acre buffer zone around the Grand Canyon. The temporary ban — enacted in July 2009 and due to expire next month — will now be in effect until December of this year, while the Bureau…
Earlier this month, leaders of Peru’s indigenous Q’eros people effectively blocked geneticists from collecting DNA samples from their community as part of National Geographic’s ongoing Genographic Project, which has been gathering DNA from people around the world. Members of the Genographic Project had planned to arrive on May 7 to begin collecting samples from several…