An environmentalist is a person who is concerned with and/or advocates for the protection of the environment. An environmentalist can be considered a supporter of the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities". An environmentalist is engaged in or believes in the philosophy of environmentalism or one of the related philosophies.
The Trail of Tears was an ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of approximately 60,000 people of the "Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. As part of the Indian removal, members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to newly designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The Cherokee removal in 1838 was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.
Winona LaDuke is an American economist, environmentalist, writer and industrial hemp grower, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development.
The Indian Removal Act was signed into law on May 28, 1830, by United States President Andrew Jackson. The law, as described by Congress, provided "for an exchange of lands with the Native Americans residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi." During the Presidency of Jackson (1829–1837) and his successor Martin Van Buren (1837–1841) more than 60,000 Native Americans from at least 18 tribes were forced to move west of the Mississippi River where they were allocated new lands as part of an ethnic cleansing. The southern tribes were resettled mostly in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). The northern tribes were resettled initially in Kansas. With a few exceptions, the United States east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes was emptied of its Native American population. The movement westward of the Native American tribes was characterized by a large number of deaths occasioned by the hardships of the journey.
Environmental racism, ecological racism or ecological apartheid is a form of institutional racism leading to landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste disposal being disproportionately placed in communities of color. Internationally, it is also associated with extractivism, which places the environmental burdens of mining, oil extraction, and industrial agriculture upon indigenous peoples and poorer nations largely inhabited by people of color.
Environmental justice or eco-justice, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor and marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed.
The Standing Rock Reservation lies across the border between North and South Dakota in the United States, and is inhabited by ethnic "Hunkpapa and Sihasapa bands of Lakota Oyate and the Ihunktuwona and Pabaksa bands of the Dakota Oyate," as well as the Hunkpatina Dakota. The Ihanktonwana Dakota are the Upper Yanktonai, part of the collective of Wiciyena. The sixth-largest Native American reservation in land area in the US, Standing Rock includes all of Sioux County, North Dakota, and all of Corson County, South Dakota, plus slivers of northern Dewey and Ziebach counties in South Dakota, along their northern county lines at Highway 20.
The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) is a coalition of indigenous, grassroots environmental justice activists, primarily based in the United States. Group members have represented Native American concerns at international events such as the United Nations Climate Change conferences in Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2016). IEN organizes an annual conference to discuss proposed goals and projects for the coming year; each year the conference is held in a different indigenous nation. The network emphasizes environmental protection as a form of spiritual activism. IEN received attention in the news as a major organizer of the fight against the Keystone Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
Panhe was one of the largest Acjachemen villages confirmed to be over 9,600 years old and a current sacred, ceremonial, cultural, and burial site for the Acjachemen people. The site of Panhe is now within San Onofre State Beach, San Diego County, California, located at the confluence of San Mateo Creek and Cristianitos Canyon, approximately 3.7 miles (6.0 km) upstream from the Pacific Ocean.
The Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, also called by the hashtag #NoDAPL, began in April 2016 as a grassroots opposition to the construction of Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States and ended on February 23, 2017 when National Guard and law enforcement officers evicted the last remaining protesters. The pipeline runs from the Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota to southern Illinois, crossing beneath the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as well as under part of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Many members of the Standing Rock tribe and surrounding communities consider the pipeline to be a serious threat to the region's water. The construction also directly threatens ancient burial grounds and cultural sites of historic importance.
LaDonna Tamakawastewin Brave Bull Allard was a Native American Dakota and Lakota historian, genealogist, and a matriarch of the water protector movement. In April 2016, she was one of the founders of the resistance camps of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, aimed at halting the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
Water protectors are activists, organizers, and cultural workers focused on the defense of the world's water and water systems. The water protector name, analysis and style of activism arose from Indigenous communities in North America during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Reservation, which began with an encampment on LaDonna Brave Bull Allard's land in April, 2016.
A land defender, land protector, or environmental defender is an activist who works to protect ecosystems and the human right to a safe, healthy environment. Often, defenders are members of Indigenous communities who are protecting property rights of ancestral lands in the face of expropriation, pollution, depletion, or destruction.
We Are Water Protectors is a 2020 picture book written by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Michaela Goade. Written in response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the book tells the story of an Ojibwe girl who fights against an oil pipeline in an effort to protect the water supply of her people. It was published by Roaring Brook Press on March 17, 2020. The book was well received. Critics praised its message of environmental justice, its depiction of diversity, and the watercolor illustrations, for which Goade won the 2021 Caldecott Medal, becoming the first Indigenous recipient of the award. The book also received the 2021 Jane Addams Children's Book Award winner in the Books for Younger Children category.
Jasilyn Charger is a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, from Eagle Butte, South Dakota, USA. Charger is a land activist, water protector, community organizer, and advocate for Native American and LGBTQ rights, and a youth founder of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. They have also protested against the Keystone Pipeline, and were arrested for their non-violent civil disobedience in November 2020.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker is an American academic, journalist and author, who studies Native Americans in the United States, decolonization and environmental justice. She is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. In 2019, she published As Long as Grass Grows.
Environmental racism is a form of institutional racism, in which people of colour bear a disproportionate burden of environmental harms, such as pollution from hazardous waste disposal and the effects of natural disasters. Environmental racism exposes Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Hispanic populations to physical health hazards and may negatively impact mental health. It creates disparities in many different spheres of life, such as transportation, housing, and economic opportunity.
Environmental defenders or environmental human rights defenders are individuals or collectives who protect the environment from harms resulting from resource extraction, hazardous waste disposal, infrastructure projects, land appropriation, or other dangers. In 2019, the UN Human Rights Council unanimously recognised their importance to environmental protection. The term environmental defender is broadly applied to a diverse range of environmental groups and leaders from different cultures that all employ different tactics and hold different agendas. Use of the term is contested, as it homogenizes such a wide range of groups and campaigns, many of whom do not self-identify with the term and may not have explicit aims to protect the environment.
The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) or Bakken pipeline is a 1,172-mile-long (1,886 km) underground pipeline in the United States that has the ability to transport up to 750,000 barrels of light sweet crude oil per day. It begins in the shale oil fields of the Bakken Formation in northwest North Dakota and continues through South Dakota and Iowa to an oil terminal near Patoka, Illinois. Together with the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline from Patoka to Nederland, Texas, it forms the Bakken system. The pipeline transports 40 percent of the oil produced in the Bakken region.
Recognition justice is a theory of social justice that emphasizes the recognition of human dignity and of difference between subaltern groups and the dominant society. Social philosophers Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser point to a 21st-century shift in theories of justice away from distributive justice toward recognition justice and the eliminating of humiliation and disrespect. The shift toward recognition justice is associated with the rise of identity politics.
