After #COP15, Violet Matiru speaks up for Kenyans & others in the global south
06/01/23
Violet Matiru, ex- United Nations insider, global activist and independent environmental consultant from Kenya, has publicly lambasted the ‘Westernised’ and colonialist UN for negotiating what could be the largest co-ordinated land grab in global history, disregarding the rights and traditional territories of indigenous peoples and pastoralists in the global south.
The undemocratic land-grabbing practices in the global south by global north dominated NGOs -ostensibly in the name of ‘conservation’- and the corporations with which they partner, as well as their EU and US funders, has long been documented by the likes of Survival International -a gem amongst the rough of what some term a global ‘NGO industrial complex’.
Matiru is particularly concerned with raising the alarm about what is happening in Northern Kenya at the hands of the EU and US funded ‘NGO’ The Nature Conservancy and its creation, the Northern Rangelands Trust.
’30 by 30′, ‘Nature Positive’ & the ‘New Deal For Nature’
At COP15 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Earth-wide land-grabbing practices have just been given the go-ahead to accelerate under the so-called ’30 by 30′ plan, associated with other corporatised NGO slogans such as ‘New Deal for Nature’ and ‘Nature Positive’, referring to the ‘global’ (read, colonialist ‘Euro-American’) initiative to ‘conserve’ 30% of the Earth’s land and 30% of oceans by 2030, in an effort to mitigate both biodiversity loss and carbon emissions from human activities (by maintaining and growing the natural carbon sinks which absorb C02). This 30 by 30 plan, hashtagged #30×30 on social media, whilst responding to very real problems, is a top-down, eco-authoritarian, opportunistic and colonialist approach which disregards the democratic rights of peoples indigenous to the global south, including traditional farmers. On the African continent, many pastoralists have already been evicted from supposed conservation areas; moreover the approach has highly questionable validity in general as to positive impact on human and non-human communities.
Violet Matiru & Epic Tomorrows
For more information, see the Epic Tomorrows interview series with Violet Matiru. The most recent section, in which Violet gives insights as to the history of so-called ‘conservation’ on the African continent, particularly in Kenya, and also insights as to the symbiotic relationship between traditional agriculture and indigenous wildlife conservation in Kenya –before the colonizers came along– is linked below.
