Mitch Anderson: Join the Amazon’s resistance against oil expansion (Ep449)

Now is our opportunity to shut down this oil auction before it starts and win an important climate victory... This is a moment where we need the world to stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities on the front lines of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
— Mitch Anderson

The Ecuadorian government is currently planning to auction off 8.7 million acres of the Amazon rainforest to oil interests.

What is at stake — for the Indigenous communities of the Amazon, for people outside of the Amazon, and for the planet — with millions of acres of lively, intact rainforest being put on the line?

What can we learn from how the Waorani people won their historic legal victory in 2019 to protect 500,000 acres of rainforest from oil drilling? And how do we go about building solidarity across communities and borders, and between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous allies?

Today, Green Dreamer’s host, Kaméa, speaks with Mitch Anderson, who is, alongside Nemonte Nenquimo, the co-founder of Amazon Frontlines and co-author of We Will Be Jaguars.

Join us as we question economic incentives that narrow-mindedly privilege monetary currencies above other currencies of life, re-examine the concepts of “convenience” and “remoteness,” and more.

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Mitch Anderson is co-founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines, a nonprofit organization based in the Upper Amazon, which works hand-in-hand with Indigenous peoples to secure their guardianship of the Amazon rainforest. In 2011, he moved to Ecuador’s northern Amazon to start a grassroots clean water project with Indigenous communities living downriver from contaminating oil operations. Through building more than 1,000 clean water systems in over 70 villages, Mitch supported the formation of both Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance, an Indigenous-led nonprofit that won the prestigious UN Equator Prize. Amazon Frontlines’ work in partnership with Indigenous peoples has achieved some of the most significant victories for the Amazon rainforest and climate in recent times, inspiring millions of people worldwide. Amazon Frontlines is the recipient of the 2024 Hilton Humanitarian Prize and the first organization of Indigenous and Western human rights and climate activists to receive the Prize. 

Mitch is the co-author of the acclaimed memoir We Will Be Jaguars (US) / We Will Not Be Saved (UK), written with his wife and Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo, and published by Abrams in the USA and Wildfire in the UK.

Artistic credits:

  • Photo credit for Mitch’s photo: Christopher Fragapane / Amazon Frontlines

  • Song feature: Waorani song provided by Amazon Frontlines and Ceibo Alliance

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interview transcript

Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited for brevity and clarity as references only and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

Mitch Anderson: Since five years ago, we've had a little boy who was born in the heart of the forest in Nemonte’s ancestral lands. Our son, Sol, was born amid the pandemic. During the pandemic, I lived in the Amazon rainforest in Waorani territory. The whole world felt like it was collapsing outside the forest. But inside the forest, we still had food, fish, game, shelter, and the Elders had all the traditional medicines to heal the body. 

It was a moment where we hoped that the world would wake up to a system that is destroying the planet's life support systems, creating an unsustainable path forward. We hoped that the world would wake up to Indigenous wisdom and a more sustainable way of life. We now have a president in the U.S. saying, “Drill baby, drill.” And we have governments across the Amazon rainforest that are doubling down on extraction and mining.

Kaméa Chayne: Thank you for sharing this. One of my curiosities is, how a lot of people living in places where our lives are so deeply entangled with and dependent on big corporations, in a lot of ways, are realizing that we are complicit and we're empowering the very systems that are not good for us, just through our day to day lives. So a lot of people are increasingly trying to relearn how we can disentangle ourselves through boycotts and rebuilding more community-centered systems.

So I think I'm just curious, how deeply entangled or not entangled are a lot of the communities in the Amazon that you work with on the broader nation-state economies in terms of day-to-day living, food, survival needs?

And how much are people having to work jobs outside of communities to earn some monetary resources to be able to purchase some of the things that the communities need? What does this picture of entanglement or disentanglement look like in the Indigenous Amazon?

Mitch Anderson: So, over the last 15 years, I've been living in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and there are two different realities that Indigenous communities are facing. There are Indigenous communities, the Cofán, the Siona, the Siekopai, and many of the Waorani communities as well, that have been forced to live downriver from the oil industry for decades. Many of the communities have lost their source of fresh water. Rivers have been poisoned. The oil companies laid pipelines, they made roads. There was also massive colonization of African palm plantations and cattle ranching.

A lot of the Indigenous communities in Ecuador's northern Amazon have been surrounded by Western, industrial civilization, and because of that historical cruelty, they have been forced to have more dependencies on the towns, cities, and industrial supply chains. This is precisely because the fish have been poisoned. The wildlife they depend on has lost their habitat. The wild peccary and monkeys no longer survive in small islands of forests. And so there is a strong dependency that has been produced over decades.

One of the things that’s been so powerful over the last 15 years, living and working with these communities amidst ruin, is that from here, some of the strongest resistance and inspiration and decolonial processes have been born.

It’s the communities that have had to live for generations downriver from the oil fields that have the clearest vision that Western consumerism isn’t the path forward.

They are the ones leading processes to recover ancestral medicinal practices and ceremony are rebuilding their educational systems to create school environments for children that honor traditional wisdom, forest knowledge, and their ways of knowing and learning. And also [they are engaging in ways that] lift up certain aspects of Western society that they want to integrate and adapt into their culture, that they see as valuable tools for their advancement and their well-being.

Then there's the second reality in the Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Colombian Amazon, where there are many Indigenous communities, nations, that are still living in large, intact rainforest ecosystems without roads. They're living a very traditional existence, where the forest provides everything that they need, from water to medicine, food, protein, fruits, and clay licks. They build the canoes, shelter, houses and live a very traditional existence in a community. 

It is those communities that are most threatened because big oil and mining interests, internationally and locally across the Amazon, are hell-bent on extracting resources from the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples. Governments and multinational corporations are still thinking about short-term profit and political cycles, and the threats are mounting, from oil auctions to the government illegally granting mining concessions.

The threats are also mounting because of global climate change around the world, as well as changing weather patterns locally, affecting rainfall and creating droughts across the Amazon. And so there are communities that are still deeply in touch with their ancestors, their spirituality, traditional food systems, and communities that are fighting to protect what they love and what gives them life—the Amazon rainforest.

Kaméa Chayne: Thank you for highlighting the nuance in this picture. It's so dependent on where communities are located and the specific context, histories, and ongoing resistance they're facing.

As we speak, the Ecuadorian government is trying to auction off almost nine million acres of the Amazon rainforest. So what can you share about this specific current event, and what has been playing out?

Mitch Anderson: Across the upper Amazon, the geologists and the multinational corporations suspected that there was oil under the forest. They suspected that back in the 1940s and 1950s, because millions of years ago before the Andes range rose, the Amazon River flowed west. And when the Andes rose up, the water became this massive inland delta, or estuary. And all that organic matter over millions and millions of years was compressed down into these deep reservoirs beneath the forest and then turned into oil.

Many Indigenous communities and cultures here call the oil the blood of their ancestors.

It wasn't until the 1960s that Texaco, a US-based multinational oil company, was granted a 26-year oil lease by the Ecuadorian government.  It struck oil in 1967, only two miles from where we're having this interview. It was a big gusher in the tradition in Texas or California, with oil spurting out and spewing everywhere in the ancestral home of the Cofán people. [It also affected] Mauritia palm swamps, the palm fruits which nourish all of the animals. It's what the animals time their reproductive cycles to. And so it's the traditional Cofán hunting grounds.

Over the next 26 years, Texaco created a massive environmental and public health disaster, deliberately dumping roughly 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater across the rivers and streams, all to save a couple of dollars per barrel of oil produced. They spilled roughly 17 million gallons of oil because of shoddy infrastructure and pipelines, and because this is a seismically active area over the Andes. And they created massive colonization.

The Ecuadorian government basically said, “Okay, the big multinational has opened up the roads. Now all the farmers from across Ecuador living in other regions, whatever you guys can cut down is yours,” because the Ecuadorian government wanted to colonize the border between Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Because they wanted to protect the border, they created a massive cultural and human rights crisis for Indigenous communities.

Since the mid-60s, oil companies from around the world, from Spain, China, and other American oil companies such as state oil companies from Argentina, have been producing oil in the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples. Ecuador thought that when oil was discovered, they had finally achieved “El Dorado” [a mythical city of gold supposedly located somewhere in South America.] They had finally reached this glorious place of finding the mysterious wealth of the Amazon, but through black gold. 

Instead, they fell under the resource curse of high levels of corruption, inequality, violence, sexual violence, prostitution, environmental ruin, and cycles of debt. Today, the two biggest oil-producing provinces in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Sucumbíos and Orellana, which are the ancestral homeland of many Indigenous nations, also have the highest rates of poverty.

And now these oil fields in Ecuador's northern Amazon, which have been producing for about 50 years, are running dry. We're in the midst of a climate crisis, where Indigenous peoples and global climate scientists have been saying for decades that burning fossil fuels is creating climate chaos. If we continue to burn fossil fuels, then we are going to heat the planet and we’re going to essentially create an unlivable planet for future generations.

The upper Amazon is a carbon sink. The forest is just drawing in carbon every moment. And yet the Ecuadorian government is chomping at the bit to raise the South Central Ecuadorian Amazon. The Ecuadorian government has auctioned off 8.7 million acres of the Amazon, 16 oil concessions and the ancestral lands of six Indigenous nations. We think that they're going to be doing bilateral agreements with multinational companies, Chinese companies and state oil companies.

Indigenous communities of Ecuador’s northern Amazon that have lived downriver from the oil fields have invited Indigenous community leaders, activists, and Elders to see the destruction for themselves, so that they can look the government and the oil companies in the eye and say, “We don’t believe your promises.”

We've heard from our brothers and sisters whose lands have been despoiled, whose soils have been contaminated, whose rivers have been depleted of fish, who've lost culture, lost language, and the communities are mounting a resistance. And it's powerful.

My organizations, Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance, have been supporting the communities of the South Central Amazon, helping to organize territorial assemblies and building out a powerful legal and advocacy and communication strategy to support them in their resistance, to block this upcoming oil auction, essentially to protect their ancestral homes and a forest that sustains life on Earth.

Kaméa Chayne: It's hard for my mind to wrap around or process nine million acres. That's a huge portion of the Amazon rainforest. So, to not just reduce it into a statistic, you already started touching on this, but what is really at stake here? As in, this conversation can't even do that question justice, but to just start maybe chipping away at it. What is at stake and what would the loss of these nine million acres be for communities in the Amazon and also outside of the Amazon?

Mitch Anderson: The first thing that comes to mind when you ask that powerful question is I'd like everybody listening to be able to come visit someday. I think that's what it takes to understand truly what's at stake.

Over those thousands of years, the Waorani have developed knowledge, spiritual connections, and a way of life that has helped contribute to the biodiversity and richness of the very forest that they call home.

They've learned how to live a happy and healthy life in the middle of the forest. There was an Elder whom I drank ayahuasca with many nights over the years, and he passed away recently. He went out with a group of ethnobotanists who wanted to know what he knows. And they walked around in the woods for just a couple of weeks. He was able to identify over a thousand plants, roots, resins, vines, barks, with their names in his language, Paikoka and with their uses. Not only the anthropomorphic uses, but also how the insects, animals and and plants function in this ecosystem.

In that very same track of land, a Chinese oil company put together an environmental impact statement. They wanted to exploit oil there. And they identified, with all of their experts and resources, five useful plants and trees. And they said that this area is worth about $20,000. That was what they were going to compensate the Siekopai people. The Elder who passed away is [named] Delfín, and he carried with him the knowledge of thousands of years that his ancestors had passed down. Now he's in a canoe in the afterlife. He knew how to heal sicknesses that Western medicine hadn't learned how to heal.

If the Ecuadorian government and the international oil companies are successful in winning 20-year leases over the nine million acres of Indigenous ancestral lands in Ecuador, South Central Amazon, what will happen is that pipelines and roads will be gouged into the deepest parts of the territory. An extreme amount of environmental disaster and pollution will impoverish the soils and affect the rivers. There will be colonization along the roads, since 90 percent of all deforestation occurs along roads. So, wherever there's a road, you get massive colonization and this economic incentive as well. It's hard to resist to begin deforesting and cattle ranching, and bringing resources to market.

And you get cultural erosion. So, whole centuries of a way of looking and seeing, feeling, and knowing in the world will slowly become eroded.

A lot of the potential remedies and medicines that the world needs to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other sicknesses could be irretrievably lost.

And these are some of the most biodiverse forests on the planet.

So, what you have is not only this decision to suck up the oil from underneath the earth and burn it, contributing to a worsening climate crisis, but you're doing so in a rainforest ecosystem that is our ally. It's drawing down the carbon. You're essentially creating even more carbon pollution through the deforestation of swaths of territory. 

We're at a crossroads on planet Earth and civilization where we have a choice to make. It's either continue down this awful and reckless path of destroying the source of life, destroying Mother Earth, and creating an unlivable planet for future generations, or learning from the past and learning from communities that are on the front lines, that have a lot to teach and that can show us the way forward.

If the government and the companies were successful in auctioning off these lands and destroying nine million acres of forest, it's just one more step down the wrong path for our planet. The Amazon rainforest is the heart pump in the lungs of the earth, and it's suffering and it's fragile. It's approaching an irreversible tipping point.

If we continue to create localized deforestation and belch carbon pollution worldwide, we're going to hit that vicious feedback cycle within the next 10 to 15 years, which means that the rainforest will no longer be producing sufficient rain to sustain itself. The rainforest itself will begin a process of conversion into a savanna which will result in an ecocide of one of the greatest tropical forests on the planet, and a genocide for Indigenous cultures who have called this their home for thousands of years.

Kaméa Chayne: I'm both so inspired by the Elder that you mentioned and also so angry at the hubris that people have to just come up with these sort of ecological impact assessments that are so reductive, when they don't share, not even close to, the same level of intimacy with place and that level of knowledge that the Elder had. And that many Elders continue to have to this day, who are are being threatened by all of these extractive forces coming in. 

What comes to mind for me is thinking about how reductively the mainstream economic system defines wealth, because they might look on paper and say, "This Indigenous community in the Amazon, the average wage per person is $0.2 a day” or something. They might then look at another community where oil extraction is actively taking place, so maybe people are being monetarily compensated a little more because of that. They might be on paper earning $5 a day. I’m just making up random examples.

On paper, they might look like they're earning more financial currency than a different community. But their quality of life can't be reduced to that number because a community whose livelihood is still deeply embedded within and enabled by intact, healthy rainforest communities is different from a community that has had its lands stripped, drilled and extracted from. 

So they may earn more money and be wealthier in monetary terms than another community, but that's not taking into account all of the different forms of wealth that exist in the land.

Mitch Anderson: Yeah, I agree. It's been powerful for me to travel with Indigenous youth and Elders, both men and women, to Europe and the United States, and to try to see Western industrial civilization and Western society through their eyes. And it's powerful because we've gone to fancy hotels, condos, and apartments in New York or London.

Indigenous Elders from the Amazon have 2.5 million acres of forest, which is their ancestral home, and where they have gardens, and where they wake up in the morning, and have firewood that they make their fire, cut their firewood, go to the garden, and harvest the food. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are all with them playing around, learning how to fish. Every day, everybody comes back from the woods.

Some go to the garden and bring back manioc [cassava] and plantain, and others are in the forest and find that a certain fruit tree is fruiting and have spent the day having an adventure climbing up the fruit tree and bringing back these delicious fruits that only fruit once a year for one week. Others have gone to the creek, bringing back a basket full of fish, and everybody cooks up a meal together, and everybody tells stories. And there are five generations in the house.

That's abundance, that's wealth, that's what it is to be rich and alive and happy. Visiting a nursery in the United States is incredible. We’ve been to these nurseries where you see little saplings and flowers, and everything costs $2 or $3. They’ll say, "Oh, this little tree is a two-year-old and it costs $15." Meanwhile, back home, we’ve got trillions of trees. And then you look at people living in condos, stacked on top of each other, and wonder, "How do they live like that?"

It’s a different perspective. I grew up in the cities and suburbs of California, never planted food, or went hunting or fishing when I was young. I would go to the supermarket, drive my car, and fill up the tank with gasoline.

I started living with Indigenous communities from the south of Mexico to the Amazon, where I truly felt the possibilities of life, the depth, richness, and expansiveness of what’s possible in this one sacred life that we have to live.

I've learned a little about the possibilities of joy and happiness with Indigenous communities and living close to the land.

Kaméa Chayne: I live pretty rural, and people tell me, “I could never do that, you live in the middle of nowhere, it's so remote.” And they say, “I need to be in the city because of the convenience of being there.” And, when I'm in big cities now, I feel far from everything that speaks to my heart. So for me, being in cities feels isolating, in a sense. That makes me feel remote from the things that I have deep relationships with.

It's like our gauges of convenience change when our relationality with the world around us changes.

So, the Indigenous Elders might be in a forest that they have such deep ties to, and feel like this is so convenient for me because I have everything at my fingertips. I know exactly where this thing is, I know where that medicine is, I know where this food source is.

But in a city, all these things that I know and have deep relationships with, those things are so remote for me. So this might feel like the middle of nowhere for me. Just to reiterate that with these terms of “remote” villages, or “convenient” cities, I think we have to start to peel back the meaning embedded in these words as well, because we reinforce certain worldviews when we throw these words around as if they are accepted truth.

Mitch Anderson: I love that. I agree. I started off the conversation speaking about the pandemic. And as I said, Nemonte and I were living in the middle of the forest in Nemonpare before Sol was born. And it was powerful because as the whole world seemed like it was collapsing and shutting down, we had everything in the heart of the forest. We had waterfalls and trails and food, fish, and our gardens. And it was powerful because I think one of the greatest threats to the Amazon rainforest, beyond the global climate crisis and the extractive industries invading the territories and destroying the forest, is the loss of culture.

Indigenous peoples are the ancestral owners of nearly half of the remaining standing wild forests of the Amazon.

As this young generation becomes the leaders of these nations that are governing these vast rainforest territories, many of the youth are looking to the cities. Just like you're saying, it's like the place of the future, the place of meaning, the place where we can get things. And it was that moment in the pandemic where the cities and Western civilization were faltering.

Young people started to realize, its the old-timers, it's my grandpa and grandma who have all the knowledge of the forest that I haven't been paying attention to. Now I need to learn about that. Now I need to learn how to survive in the forest and learn about all the plant medicines. And so, that was powerful. That is something that has rooted very deeply in the hearts of mind of young people in the Amazon.

And I think that a lot of those deep understandings and learnings have taken root very deeply in the hearts and minds of a lot of youth across the Amazon.

[Musical intermission]

Kaméa Chayne: I want to shift into the “how to” in terms of supporting resistance efforts, given everything that we just discussed so far being at stake, and so much more as well. 

I know five years ago, the Waorani people won a historic legal victory protecting 500,000 acres of rainforest from oil drilling. And I know that sometimes land defense efforts can feel futile in the face of legal systems that seem to favor commercial interests.

What can you share about the key factors that led to this victory, and what did it take to achieve this sort of historic outcome?

Mitch Anderson: We had been working with the Nemonte, the Ceibo Alliance, and Amazon frontlines with the Waorani people of Pastaza province for many years, because the Elders told us that the outsiders want to destroy what they don't understand. And they think that the Amazon rainforest in our territory is this vast, empty place where they can come and extract, that it’s somewhere no one lives. They can turn it all into commodities and resources to make a profit.

In their maps, they see our territory as a sea of green, and our communities are these little dots across this vast 500,000 acre forest. So we worked with the Elders and the youth for several years to build these territorial maps that showed the connection that the Waorani people have with their land, their sacred sites, how they use the land, where the stories reside, and where their ancestors are buried.

The Elders shared their mental maps and created this collective understanding of the richness and importance of the forest for the future generations of the Waorani.

And it was during that process of creating territorial maps from 2016 to 2018 when we learned that the Ecuadorian government was once again trying to auction off the South Central Amazon to the international oil industry. They were trying to say that they had already consulted with the Waorani people and other Indigenous nations in 2012.

Because we had created these maps and because there was this collective sense of resistance and sense of protecting their home, between generations, and because Nemonte and other women were leading the people, we were able to develop communications, advocacy, and legal strategies that were effectively able to shut down the oil auction in 2019. We were able to prove to the Ecuadorian courts that the Ecuadorian government had violated the Waorani people's rights to free prior and informed consent.

Because we were able to do that, we were able to essentially create a legal spearhead that shut down the oil auction and shut down the government's attempts to auction off, which, at that point, was around seven million acres of rainforest. We knew that the Ecuadorian government was going to come back at some point. We began building out with the Waorani, with the Ceibo Alliance and the powerful women's leadership from Nemonte.

We created an educational program within the Waorani communities to decolonize the government assimilation programs, and to recreate an educational system that honors the Waorani people's traditions, customs, and ways of learning. We worked to recover traditional food systems and create food sovereignty in the territory, precisely to dismantle any kind of dependencies that had been created over decades between the cities and the towns. And work to build out land patrols and a guardia, a governance system and a territory defense system, to protect against illegal miners and illegal loggers over the last five years.

The Waorani people's legal verdict in 2019 has now reached the Ecuador Supreme Court. It's at the Constitutional Court, and we are pressuring the Constitutional Court now to create constitutional jurisprudence about Indigenous peoples' rights to decide what happens on their land. We're going to win this battle.

We have this powerful tool at the Supreme Court, that can establish a precedent for Indigenous rights to free prior informed consent, and can ensure that the Ecuadorian Congress creates a law that ensures free prior informed consent, which would be a buttress against oil and the mining lobby and all of that. We're now working with Indigenous communities across the South Central Amazon, all of whom supported the Waorani people's legal battle and their resistance, and all of whom say the Ecuadorian government did the same thing with them in 2012.

It was a sham consultation. They flew into the territory on these single-engine Cessna planes, convinced some random people in the communities to sign documents, giving them food and soda and promising clinics and schools. But the communities didn't know what they were signing. Now we're going to be filing a wave of lawsuits at the provincial court to jam up the oil auction.

We're looking to build up, once again, a global movement of solidarity and visibility to support the Indigenous peoples in a battle for the future of the Amazon, to stop the climate crisis, and to change the extractive paradigm. And this is all happening right now. We think that over the next four to six months, the government is going to be engaging in bilateral negotiations with various oil companies over roughly 16 blocks and 8.7 million acres.

So now is our opportunity to shut down this oil auction before it starts and win an important climate victory at a moment where there's a lot of climate despair, because in the halls of power, we have men shouting, “Drill baby drill.” And they're going to drive us off a cliff.

This is a moment where we need the world to stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities on the front lines of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Kaméa Chayne: We're speaking right now at the end of March 2025. So, this is context for the timeline of when people should pay attention to what's going on here.

I'm curious to learn more about your personal experience helping to build partnerships between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous allies, because sometimes outsiders with the best of intentions can do things that end up perpetuating harmful dynamics. Or, [things that are] just not helpful to the cause.

What can you tell us from your own experience and from Amazon Frontlines’s model of collaboration that was recently recognized with the Hilton Humanitarian Prize?

Mitch Anderson: Thank you, it's a really important question, and it's a question that I've dedicated a lot of my life to thinking about, and I'm constantly learning. Firstly, I think that there's tremendous power in collaboration between Indigenous communities living close to the land, speaking their languages, their way of life, their way of perceiving the world and organizing, and activists and human rights defenders, technologists, and people from around the world who also have a lot to share and a lot to learn.

I think what's been most powerful about Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance, which is an Indigenous led nonprofit organization that we helped to found, is that it's this authentic, humble collaboration between folks who know that we're in this together and folks who know their role. Activists from around the world have moved here, because Amazon Frontlines is a front lines organization, roughly 35 people on our team from all over the world, bringing a whole set of diverse skills from mapping technologies to legal skills, communication skills, to filmmaking, community enterprise and entrepreneurship, women's empowerment, pedagogy and education. 

The first step is listening. It takes a great deal of courage and humility to break down your constructs about solutions. What we truly need is to pause deeply and listen. I don't think that our current fast-paced, consumer-based society is promoting deep listening. But Amazon Frontlines has cultivated a culture of deep listening and respect for the vision, wisdom, and strategies, as well as the perspectives of Indigenous communities.

And it's a responsibility as well because Indigenous communities are making decisions over their homes, cultures, territories that they're gonna have to live with. And I think that a lot of activists, progressive activists, are very clear about decolonising.

Sometimes we don’t realize that our pace, intense workaholic behavior, or sense of urgency about everything is colonial and creates situations where we’re not listening.

We're not listening, and because we're moving too fast, processes and agendas can be imposed on communities or nations. Ultimately, any imposition means that there isn't the right foundation, there isn't the right roots for a territorial process, an education process, for a community-based enterprise to truly succeed and to truly become autonomous and independent. 

I think that's what I've learned in the deepest way and the most nuanced way. That’s what we constantly need to do as activists from the cities or rural places from around the world. Or from rural areas from around the world that have moved to the Amazon that are working on the front lines that want to be useful, that want to support Indigenous autonomy, that want to build bridges.

We might have a lot of great ideas. But until we learn how to truly listen, we're never gonna be able to co-create something more powerful and transcendental that will last beyond our lifetimes. And so what we're trying to focus on at Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance is creating that possibility that is extraordinarily powerful, intriguing, pervasive, invidious, and seductive.

And they're also up against legal frameworks and investment and financial frameworks that at each turn threaten to dispossess them of their land, threaten to dupe them and trick them, or manipulate them into signing paperwork, signing documents, receiving some kind of benefit. Then suddenly they've lost part of their territory.

Indigenous communities are also seeking powerful, authentic, and honest allies who will stand with them, sharing what we know about the world and how these systems work. What’s been so powerful about our model with Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance is that we have an organizing center outside an oil town in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. There, over 75 full-time Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists live and work, building processes across millions of acres of territory in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia.

Together, we’ve achieved some of the most significant legal, political, and climate victories of the last decade, while also engaging in quiet, beautiful, and powerful organizing in the territory, focusing on women's empowerment, education, and filmmaking, as well as land defense, and repurposing technologies to truly support Indigenous autonomy. Or, creating communication infrastructure that helps bridge between communities so they can be more organized to defend against the assault of the extractive industries. So it's a powerful model, and I think based on humility, respect, listening and mutual trust.

Kaméa Chayne: I appreciate your invitation for us to slow down, because as urgent as a lot of our different crises are, they do kind of encourage us to just constantly go, go, go. And yeah, I think it's important to see the ways that we might embody the values that we're trying to fight against, and recognize the need to slow down and expand our capacities for deep listening.

So as we close off, I’d like to invite you to share how people can best support your work and what final words you have for Green Dreamers?

Mitch Anderson: At Amazon Frontlines, we're working in partnership with Indigenous communities across Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru. It's the front lines of the upper Amazon under threat. Multinational oil companies, mining interests, timber interests, narco-trafficking, and governments are hell-bent on turning Indigenous territories into commodities, into profit. 

Indigenous nations across the Amazon have asked us and given Amazon Frontlines a mandate to be a bridge and to help them communicate their stories, their strategies, and their perspectives with the world, and in doing so, build a global movement of concerned, loving, and courageous citizens around the world that want to and can stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples that are battling to protect what they love, battling to protect their home, and ultimately battling to protect our climate.

The first thing that folks who are listening can do is sign up to join the Amazon Frontlines. Join our email list, follow us on Instagram and Facebook, because that's where we're helping Indigenous communities and supporting Indigenous communities to tell their stories, and building out campaigns that are ultimately strategically focused to stop the most severe destruction of the Amazon.

We look to make a difference by stopping an oil auction that's going to threaten 8.7 million acres, or we look to stop mining leases across the Ecuadorian or Peruvian Amazon. We also need resources. So join us at www.amazonfrontlines.org. You can become a monthly donor.

Everyone who has a car driving around, filling up their gas tank, maybe it costs $50 to $75 to fill up their gas tank. A lot of this oil is coming from the Amazon. Roughly 70 percent of the oil produced in the Amazon rainforest from within Indigenous territories ultimately gets shipped up to California to be refined.

If oil companies were to extract every single drop of oil beneath the Ecuadorian Amazon, it would only last for 10 days.

The industry and the governments are willing to destroy cultures, the most biodiverse forests in the world, the most important carbon sinks, to bring this heavy crude oil to the market, and burn it and worsen the climate crisis in the process. So instead of filling up that $75 tank of oil, become a $75 monthly donor to Amazon Frontlines so we can keep that oil in the ground, protect Indigenous cultures, protect the most biodiverse forests in the world, and create a new world, transform this world.

Right now, in March 2025, we're going to be launching a campaign to stop an oil auction over 8.7 million acres of Indigenous territories across the Amazon. We're going to be coming out with opportunities for all of you to send messages directly to the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, directly to Ecuador's next president, and also directly to the international oil industry and investors.

If they can't wake up their consciousness, if they can't think with their heart, at least they can think with their pocketbooks. And if they invest money in the Ecuadorian Amazon and Indigenous territories, they're going to be met with a wave of lawsuits, the tip of Indigenous spears and a communications and advocacy game plan that is going to cause serious reputational harm to their companies. They're going to lose their investment and they're going to cause massive harm in the process.

So you can join us as well in supporting Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous territorial defense by joining us at amazonfrontlines.org.

Kaméa Chayne: Beautiful. And any closing words of guidance you'd like to leave people with?

Mitch Anderson: I've heard a lot of people talk about losing hope. As if hope is a fleeting emotion or a thought that escapes. But hope is something that we build. Hope comes with action and determination. Hope is born in resistance and love.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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Abby Reyes: Engaging ‘the slow work’ in the face of urgency and crises (Ep450)

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Nemonte Nenquimo: Listen to the voices of the Amazon Rainforest (Ep448)