Dozens of activists for the rights of nature who traveled to the United Nations to participate in a high-level meeting were unexpectedly barred from speaking on April 22nd, Earth Day, due to a supposed “security breach.”
The attendees, each of whom was personally invited by the Bolivian Foreign Minister, had previously been cleared by UN security personnel and issued access passes. Many had traveled thousands of miles — coming from Brazil, Poland, Canada, the UK, Germany, Netherlands, France, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Colombia — to attend the meeting.
Callie Veelenturf, a rights of nature advocate and Executive Director of The Leatherback Project, one of a handful of the attendees who was allowed to speak, observed during the meeting that the silencing was ordered by the President of the UN General Assembly. She also observed handwritten notes indicating that pressure from unnamed Republicans may have been involved in the last-minute cancellation.
According to Maria Mercedes Sanchez, the retired 30 year head of the United Nations Harmony with Nature Programme, powerful elements within the UN and the United States are strongly opposed to the rights of nature. “There are many indications that they want this to fail,” she stated after the event.
Hans Leo Bader, an organizer with the Citizens’ Initiative for the Rights of Nature in Bavaria, was blunt in his message to supporters after the meeting. “Don't trust international summits and diplomatic showpieces,” Bader said. “Real change grows from below.”
Ben Price, Education Director at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and author of the first rights of nature law passed in the United States in 2006, was planning to speak about a new rights of nature law his organization helped draft which is currently in the New York State legislature. But even as a major story of the rights of nature movement that highlights the New York bill was published in Rolling Stone magazine that day, Price’s opportunity to speak was cut short.
He says that UN dialogues like this are mostly a waste of time, and combined with state and federal efforts to pre-empt local decision making and undermine democracy, are one reason why his organization is shifting its orientation towards direct resistance activities in addition to bottom-up rights of nature campaigns.
“This UN program has been locked in cyclical bureaucracy for nearly two decades,” Price says. “At a certain point, in the face of failure to make progress and direct slaps in the face like this, we have to give up on these institutions and focus exclusively on grassroots action.”
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About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.
