HR AND ENVIRONMENT STUDY RELEASED

[worldwatch@xxxxxxxxxxx]

                                                  HOLD FOR RELEASE
                                                  6 P.M. EST
                                                  Saturday, December 9, 1995

WORLDWIDE REPRESSION OF PEACEFUL ENVIRONMENTAL PROTESTORS 
SPURS NEW COALITIONS WITH HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

The joint movement finds that guaranteeing basic civil rights
 such as free speech and free assembly is the best defense
 against both violent repression and environmental damage. 

     The recent execution of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa for the "crime"
of organizing an environmental campaign tragically underscores the findings of
a new study from the Worldwatch Institute--that the ravages of environmental
exploitation are often backed up by brutal human rights violations. 
Documented cases not only in Nigeria but also in the United States, Brazil,
Kenya, the Philippines, China, and many other countries reveal a systematic
sweeping aside of communities and individuals who suffer from and then protest
environmental damage.
     The report, Eco-Justice: Linking Human Rights and the Environment, by
Worldwatch Research Associate Aaron Sachs, also reveals that the most common
victims of environmental and human rights abuses are impoverished minorities
who already face societal discrimination, and who have limited resources for
mounting protests.
     "The Ogoni people of Nigeria," Sachs stated, "whom Ken Saro-Wiwa
represented, are just one of hundreds of marginalized communities around the
world who are losing their livelihoods, traditional cultures, and even their lives as    
loggers, ranchers, and oil drillers cash in on their environments.  And all too often,
as the Nigerian tragedy demonstrates, when people organize to defend themselves
and to request compensation for lost jobs and deteriorating health, their appeals are
met with harassment, beatings, imprisonment, or even murder."
     Fortunately, Sachs reports, new and dynamic coalitions of human rights
activists and environmentalists are beginning to challenge this pattern of
environmental exploitation.  By guaranteeing basic civil liberties--such as
free speech and assembly and the right to due process--activists can help
local people get more involved in development plans and thus prevent both
social inequities and ecological harm.  
     Sachs lists several examples of environment-related human rights
violations, among them--
    ##  The 1988 assassination of Chico Mendes, leader of the protest against
    Amazon deforestation--just one of more than 1,000 land-related murders in
    rural Brazil documented by Amnesty International in the 1980s.

    ##  In 1992, a group of women peacefully protesting the imprisonment of
    several other environmentalists were beaten unconscious by Nairobi
    police.

    ##  In 1994, a journalist in Cambodia was found dead two days after being
    warned by police to stop investigating the military's illegal involvement
    in the country's timber industry.

    ##  In 1995, a bomb blew up the office of an environmental organization
    in the coastal city of Zakynthos, Greece, a few hours after a local
    politician announced that he wouldn't mind "throwing all ecologists out of
    town."  The  environmentalists, one of whom was injured in the blast, had
    been lobbying  peacefully to protect the nesting area of an endangered turtle
    from damage by tourism.

     The activists who suffer such human rights abuses are almost always
engaged in broader struggles for the health of their communities and their
local environments.  Community-level campaigns for environmental justice
include:

    ##  In Nigeria, the Ogoni are fighting the government-sponsored ravages
    of the Shell Petroleum Development Company; of Shell's oil spills over the
    last decade in the 100 or so countries where it operates, 40 percent have
    occurred in Nigeria.

    ##  The Udege forest people of Siberia are taking on Russian, Japanese,
    South Korean, and U.S. logging firms, whose operations have destroyed the
    Udege's resource base and caused severe soil erosion and siltation of river
    systems.

    ##  The Yami people of Orchid Island, Taiwan, are protesting the
    government's storage of nuclear waste in rusting metal drums in a facility that
    the tiny ethnic minority never agreed to allow on their lands.

    ## In China, both environmentalists and human rights activists have been
    fighting the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which is expected to
    displace at least 1.4 million local farmers and villagers--adding to the
    80- 90 million people around the world who have had to make way for large
    infrastructure projects just over the past decade.    

     At the local level, environmental justice campaigns have linked human
rights and environmental activists for years, from China to India to Brazil to
the United States.  Perhaps the best-known result of such collaborative
campaigns is the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve in the Brazilian rain forest. 
This reserve, half the size of the state of New Jersey, permits rubber tappers
and indigenous peoples to live their lives unhampered by loggers and ranchers. 
Other successes include:

    ##  In southern India, a local development society helps organize
    communities of women villagers to establish credit programs, cultivate and
    use medicinal herbs, incorporate multi-cropping systems into local agriculture,
    and plant trees.

    ##  In the Peruvian Amazon, the Yanesha Indians maintain a sustainable
    forestry co-op that protects the rain forest from clear-cutting by
    ranchers  and developers while the Indians earn a living exporting forest
    products to Europe and the United States.

    ##  In Burkina Faso, a program targeting 240 marginal farming villages
    and emphasizing community participation managed to transform the average
    family's food deficit of 645 kilograms per year into a 150-kilogram surplus--
    thanks to small-scale dryland agriculture projects the farmers designed and
    implemented themselves.

    ##  In northern Australia, Kakadu National Park is co-managed by the
    government park service and the aborigines who have inhabited the region
    for 50,000 years.  Together they have fostered effective nature conservation,
    the preservation of traditional communities and cultures, and a tourist
    industry that provides income.

     Sachs suggests that achieving social justice and making development
environmentally sustainable will require the human rights and environmental
movements to join forces not just at the grassroots level but also at the
regional and international levels.  Together, the two groups of activists
could continue to devise creative, community-based conservation and
development schemes, and they might also be able to convince policymakers to
enshrine in international law each person's right to a healthy and healthful
environment.  As the late Ken Saro-Wiwa once wrote, "The environment is man's
first right." 
     Perhaps the most effective strategy for guaranteeing a healthy
environment, the Worldwatch study argues, is to adopt the human rights
approach and protect the basic civil liberties that allow communities to
defend themselves.  As Sachs states, "If all the vulnerable members of
society--the impoverished, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, women,
children--had access to environmental information and could exercise their
right to free speech, then potential polluters and profligate consumers would
no longer be able to treat them as expendable, and would have to seek
alternatives to their polluting activities and their overconsumption."  Human
rights activists have taught environmentalists that confronting the dumpers
with the dumped-on may well be the best way of protecting the right of the
next generation to inherit a planet worth inhabiting. 

     
                                   -- END --

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