Grants in 2012

|

Federation of the Achuar Nationality of Peru

$4,5000 to support the relocation of an Achuar community to a new location at the heart of their ancestral territory in the Peruvian rainforest near where oil company Talisman Energy planned to begin production drilling as a means of trying to keep their territory free from new oil exploitation. Also supported an inter-ethnic congress to discuss the threat posed by Talisman and form a common position to defend ancestral Indigenous territory. Talisman subsequently announced in September that it would cease all oil exploration activities in the Peruvian Amazon.

|

United Farmers of Jambi

$3,000 to support a project working with farmers in Sumatra, Indonesia who lost over 17,000 acres seized by Asia Pulp and Paper in 2001. Through helping to establish a rubber tree seedling nursery in the conflict area and facilitating a mediation process, PPJ helped the farmers re-secure control over more than 10,000 acres.

|

Pueblo Kichwa de Rukullakta

$2,500 to support workshops to solidify opposition in all Rukullakta communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon and lay the groundwork for outfacing activities to prevent Canadian company Ivanhoe Energy’s potentially environmentally and socially devastating plan to deploy highly questionable technology to attempt to recover and convert heavy, tar sands-type oil to lighter crude for export.

|

Indigenous Environmental Network

$2,500 to support the participation of several Indigenous leaders from Canada and the United States in the massive two week White House Tar Sands Action sit-ins calling on President Obama to not approve the planned Keystone XL pipeline.

|

Campa̱a AmazonĚ_a por la Vida

$2,000 to support grassroots efforts to pressure the national government to commit to its proposed plan to keep oil under the ground in YasunĚ_ National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon, which would result in preventing 407 million tons of CO2 emissions and help protect one the most important biological areas on the planet that also includes territory of the Huaorani people, as well as two other Indigenous tribes living in voluntary isolation.

|

Radical Action for Mountain People’s Survival (RAMPS)

$2,150 to support trainings to prepare community members and activists in Appalachia for a mass nonviolent direct action that temporarily shut down the largest mountaintop removal site in the United States in order to increase political pressure and help build and embolden grassroots efforts to ban all forms of strip mining in West Virginia.

|

Yayasan Wahana Bumi Hijau (WBH)

$4,500 to support field work, mapping and research to produce a study and short video to provide a detailed understanding of suppliers, potential impacts on forests, and local peoples’ perspectives related to a major new pulp mill that would be one of the world’s largest requiring an estimated 1.5 million acres of forest to feed its operations, planned for South Sumatra, Indonesia.

|

Maya Leaders Alliance

$2,500 to support Maya Leaders Alliance, an organization that has helped secure major land rights victories in recent years and is now defending that progress and challenging a potential oil drilling project through a major 2 month grassroots mobilization incorporating 38 Maya communities consisting 21,000 people living within a region covering 500,000 acres of forested frontier in southern Belize. MLA is informing communities about plans for oil drilling and gathering leaders to re-articulate a collective position in favor of safeguarding land rights and the environment.

|

Conservacion, Naturaleza y Vida

$2,500 to ĺĘsupport mapping and physical demarcation of boundaries for Majé Cordillera in Panama to obtain collective land title recognition of 20,000 acres of rainforest territory for an Embera community to help protect rainforests from loggers that have been extracting cocobolo trees for export to high-paying markets in Asia.

|

Confederación Indígena del Oriente Boliviano

$1,500 to support a delegation of Indigenous leaders from Bolivia’s National Park and Indigenous Territory Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS) to attend 6th Pan Amazon Social Forum, taking place in Bolivia. Communities from the TIPNIS region have been fighting a major road that would threaten their territory and the Forum provides an ideal platform for threatened communities from throughout the region to strategize and strengthen their collective territorial defense and forest protection efforts.