Modern western culture has only been in existence some 200 years and it’s clearly unsustainable, according to Lee Davies, a board member of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN).įor 20 years GEN has helped thousands of villages, urban neighbourhoods and intentional communities live better and lighter on the Earth. “Living well is all about keeping good relations with Mother Earth and not living by domination or extraction,” says Victoria Tauli Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions due to human activity have increased the global average temperature 0.85 degrees Celsius and will go much higher, threatening human civilization unless emissions are sharply reduced. In the past four decades alone, the numbers of animals, birds, reptiles and fish on the Earth has declined 52 percent 95 percent of coral reefs are in danger of dying out due to pollution, coastal development and overfishing and only 15 percent of the world’s forests remain intact. Worse, it’s a system that is unsustainable, and has produced global threats including climate change, and biodiversity crises. Ecovillages: a step towards an indigenous lifestyleĭespite their long history all indigenous and local communities are under intense pressure to be part a globalised economic system that offers some benefits but too often destroys their land and culture.
“Indigenous peoples will continue to work in our communities to strengthen our cultures and resist exploitation of our territories,” Enomenga stressed.Īlthough Ecuador has ratified the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which grants communities the right to consultation on extractive projects that impact their customary land, organisations say that mining and oil drilling projects have cast doubt on the government’s commitment to uphold these rights, and spurred protests by indigenous peoples. No one knows how long they existed before the first encounter with Europeans in the late 1600s. The Waorani are an Amazonian indigenous people who live in eastern Ecuador, in an area of oil drilling activity. For them, taking the oil out of the ground is like taking blood out of their bodies,” Moi Enomenga, a Waorani who was born into an uncontacted community, told IPS.Ī Waorani family moment. “There are two uncontacted communities near my home but there is the threat of oil exploration. The march of progress means that efforts are being made both to extract the resources on which these communities rely and to ‘mainstream’ indigenous groups by introducing Western medical, educational and economic systems into traditional ways of life.
Between them, they speak over 5,000 languages.īut as the fingers of economic development reach into ever more distant corners of the globe, many of these communities find themselves - and their way of life - under threat. A few remain completely isolated from modern society.Īccording to United Nations estimates, upwards of 370 million indigenous people are spread out over 70 countries worldwide. Scores of these largely self-sustaining traditional communities continue to this day in remote jungles, forests, mountains, deserts, and in the icy regions of the North. In the course of human history many tens of thousands of communities have survived and thrived for hundreds, even thousands, of years.
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