Everything you need to know about the treaty protecting environmental defenders in Latin America.
In 1988, threedays before Christmas,Francisco “Chico” Alves Mendes Filhowent to take a showerin his yardwhen he was assassinated by local cattle ranchers with a .22rifle.
Mendeshad been a Brazilianleaderof the rubber tapper workers’ union, who advocated for Indigenous people’s rights and defended the Amazon rainforest against exploitation. The cattle ranchers who’d killed him were rural landowners, hoping to continue deforesting it. This wasn’t the first killing of an environmental defender in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and it wouldn’t be the last. In 2016, almost 30 years after Chico Mendes's murder, Berta Cáceres,a HonduranIndigenousenvironmental defender, was killed by sicarios for her opposition to the construction of a dam in the Gualcarque River. Two different causes, two different countries, and two different times, but one motivation: to silence those who fought and defended the environment in Latin America.
Environmental defenders have contributed to halting 11% of environmentally damaging projects across the planet. However, the role comes with a high cost to their safety: Constant threats, violence, and hundreds of assassinations make their work incredibly dangerous. These attacks are mainly related to land disputes and environmental damage, and 70%are for defending forests.
Chico Mendes and his wife, Ilsamar, in 1988. Courtesy of Miranda Smith / Wikimedia.
The UN defines environmental human rights defenders as “individuals and groups who, in their personal or professional capacity and in a peaceful manner, strive to protect and promote human rights relating to the environment, including water, air, land, flora and fauna.”They use non-violent methods to protect the environment, contributing to preserving biodiversity and Indigenous rights. In 2000, the Human Rights Commission established the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, which included promoting environmental defenders' protection within their mandate. In 2019, the UN General Assembly recognized the contribution of environmental defenders to ecological protection and sustainable development,urging states to develop and appropriately fund protection initiatives for human rights defenders.
But this has proven tricky in Latin America. According to a 2021 Global Witness report titled “Last Line of Defence,” 165 environmental defenders were killed in LAC in 2020,a frightening number that illustrates how vulnerable activists are in the region. In addition, these attacks made up 73% of all attacks against environmental defenders in the world, making Latin Americaan especially hazardous area to protect the environment. The reason behind the frequency of these attacks is closely related to the region’s long history with extractive industries as a means of economic development. LAC is largely made up of developing countries, and many have opted to prioritize economic growth over environmental regulation. Vulnerable populations, such as Indigenous communities and poor local communities, have suffered the impacts of this the most, and in parallel, also act as the last line of defense when it comes to protecting the environment.
The regional response for protecting environmental defenders: The Escazú Agreement
Even though environmental regulations in Latin American countries have progressed in recent years, activists are still being murdered and attacked, and regional cooperation is required to ensure their protection. In 2012, a collective of LAC nations decided to draft an agreement implementing Principle 10 of the UN’s Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,with the goal of creating the LAC version of the Aarhus Convention. The agreement was adoptedon March 4, 2018, in Escazú, Costa Rica—giving the treaty its name: the Escazú Agreement, or Acuerdo de Escazú. On April 22, 2021, nearly a decade after discussions first began, the Escazú Agreement went into effect, becoming the first environmental treaty in LAC.
The primary purpose of the treaty is to improve and guarantee the procedural human rights of access to information, public participation, and justice. Latin America is a region with severe economic inequalities that directly affect the political participation of the most vulnerable populations, excluding them from most decision-making processes. The Escazú Agreement, acknowledging this exclusionary situation and the numerous socio-environmental conflicts across the continents, sets new human rights standards, guaranteeing the most vulnerable communities are involved in environmental decision-making.
Concerning environmental defenders, the Escazú Agreement also seeks to change the dangerous circumstances they suffer across Latin America. First, the treaty states in Article 9 that “each [signing] party shall guarantee a safe and enabling environment for persons, groups and organizations thatpromote and defendhuman rights in environmental matters” In practice, this allows environmental defenders to act freely and safely, without fear of threat or harm.
The treaty also indicates that signing countries “shall take adequate and effective measures to recognize, protect and promote”the human rights of environmental defenders. This clause focuses on civil and political rights, reinforcing their right to life, freedom of opinion, freedom of movement, personal integrity, and peaceful assembly, among others. In addition, due to the historical impunity of the criminals who have perpetrated crimes against environmental defenders, the treaty reinforces due process for preventing and punishing attacks or threats made against them.
To further effectively protect environmental defenders, in April, the first Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Escazú Agreement established an ad hoc working group to create an action plan to be presented at the next COP. According to the initial COP, this working group would allow for significant public participation, “endeavouring to include persons or groups in vulnerable situations,” especially Indigenous people and local communities. This could mean that environmental defenders who have experienced attacks or threats themselves can now be a part of creating the action plan to prevent more attacks from happening in the future.
The purpose of all these rules is to protect the legitimate political work of environmental activists across Latin America. This progress is essential for making LAC more democratic and ecological; and indeed, defending those who risk their lives to protect the environment is vital for continually improving our democracies.
The problem, however, has been getting signatories to ratify it.
The vital need to adopt the treaty
Twenty-five countries have signed the Escazú Agreement so far, but only 13 have ratified it. Some have resisted signing it based on reasons of sovereignty or the vagueness of the treaty’s obligations. For instance, before Chilean president Gabriel Boric ratified the treaty, the former government of Sebastian Piñera decided to not sign it because he believed specifically protecting environmental activists would affect equality before the law.
Colombia, however, might be the most notable country to have not yet ratified the treaty, despite having the world's highest number of murdered environmental defenders (65)in 2020. Hopefully, the newly elected President, Gustavo Petro,will ratify Escazú,complying with his campaign promise to do so;because as long as countries continue not to honor it, the murders will continue to happen. Months ago in Brazil—another country that has not ratified the treaty—two environmental defenders were murderedin the Javari Valley: Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira,a Brazilian Indigenous rights defender. Since Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2019, environmental regulations have diminished in the country, as the Brazilian president continuously opens Indigenous reserves for commercial purposes, triggering environmental conflicts and putting defenders at risk. In addition, Bolsonaro's government legitimized armed land grabbers dedicated to attacking Indigenous and local communities and deforesting the Amazon by weakening all the environmental institutions focused on protecting the environment and Indigenous rights.As a result, the biggest country of LAC has aligned itself with extractive interests over human ones.
Although the situation with environmental defenders in LAC is critical, right-wing political parties and economic groups see Escazú as an obstacle to economic development. For decades, they have rejected increasing protective measures for those who oppose extractivist expansion. Political negotiations and effective treaty implementation by state parties are crucial elements for incorporating more nations into Escazú. One way to help do this is by increasing awareness of the treaty’s existence, and the goals it hopes to accomplish.
Courtesy of Camilo Freedman / APHOTOGRAFIA / Getty Images.
The Escazú Agreement: An example of defending the defenders
Following the Escazú Agreement's example, the interest in strengthening protections for environmental defenders is expanding to other continents. For example, Asia and Africa do not have any regional treaties to protect environmental defenders, but have organized cooperative networks to defend the defenders on the ground. In Africa, Natural Justice is supporting a powerful initiative, African Environmental Defenders,which aims to protect environmental defenders though an “emergency fund” to support their work. In Europe, environmental defenders are also taking priority. In 2021, the EU Parliament called its member states to take action to protect environmental defenders' human rights,showing that the threats and attacks on these activists are not only happening in the Global South.
As we face the ever-growing climate crisis, protecting the environment and our delicate ecosystems is crucial. Globally, the role of environmental defenders has been vital to stopping the ecological degradation of the planet. However, their silent and voluntary work is not recognized, despite risking their own lives to preserve the environment for the benefit of present and future generations. Therefore, it is fair and necessary to protect them and stop the impunity of those who abuse and attack activists for exploiting the environment to make a profit. By establishing the Escazú Agreement, Latin America contributed to showing an institutionalized path for protecting environmental defenders, a priority that every government should have—not only to protect the environment, but also democracy itself.
Additional fact checking by Sophia Cleary.
You Should Give a Sh*t About is an ongoing column highlighting local stories with a global impact.
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Meet Cole Bush, the shepherdess battling fire season with goats and sheep.
One morning last summer,Cole Bush was high up on a ridge in North Los Angeles County, shepherding her “flerd”—a mixed flock of sheep and herd of goat—from one paddock to another. Normally, this maneuver was routine; but something was wrong. When she turned around, in the distance far below, she spotted a hundred of her goats and sheep: They had slipped off into a high school parking lot and were eating the median. People were already gathering around them. Bush and her team ran down the steep hillside as quickly as they could and found a football coach surveying the scene. She began to explain what was going on: Her animals, now munching away on tufts of grass, weren’t just a prank gone awry. They were there to protect them from fire.
This answer likely surprised him, but Bush—who goes by BCB—explained that the animals were on the clock. Based out of Ojai Valley, in Ventura County, California, Bush’s business, Shepherdess Land and Livestock Co., is a for-hire grazing outfit that focuses on fire prevention and vegetation management. The work they do is tantamount to creating protective force fields; shepherding the flerd to eat brush, weeds, invasive plants—would-be fuel—so that fires won’t move as quickly or get as hot. The grazing is not to eradicate fires, but to ensure they’ll be smaller, more manageable, and to create defensible space.
Of course, the animals have no idea they’re rushing against time to prevent the destruction of property, livelihoods, and a potential great extinction. They’re just animals doing animal things; curious, hungry, and content to roam. They have good days and bad depending on the elements; on a hot day they might move more slowly. If there are interesting landscaped yards—or football fields—nearby, they might wander over to get a taste.
Still, they’re highly effective. As they roam, their hooves aerate the soil, making it healthier. They digest plants and turn them into food for the soil when they shit. “Their bodies know so much,” says Bush. From the womb, their gut biomes are prepared as their mothers introduce them to the local weeds and brush. From birth, they begin learning what they need and how to exist with the land; and when they stray, their shepherdess guides them home.
If it seems like an underreaction to employ goats and sheep to combat an ever-expanding fire season, that’s part of the point of Bush’s project. “We have a culture of fear around fire,” she says, when we need to feel empowered against it. And to feel powerful against an element that turns us into shut-ins, that paints the sky otherworldly colors and sends residents fleeing from their homes every year, Bush says, requires us to first re-examine our relationship to the land it ravages.
“A lot of our work is this idea of bridging, of the translation piece,” she says. “We’re at war with the earth when in fact we need to see that we’re a part of it.”
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Bush grew up in San Diego, the chaparral region of California, a fire-prone ecosystem. In middle school, her family moved to a house in Elfin Forest, just north of the city, which they could afford because the forest itself had burned down.
In the barn, a young Bush could see the smoke stains on the stucco walls. “We lived in the shadows of the aftermath of fire,” she remembers. Even then she understood on some level, despite the ash and the charred remnants of trees, that fire was not a combative element. “How [the ecosystem] has evolved with fire is so important. But the way that we have not actively stewarded or tended to our landscapes has created the devastation of mega wildfires.”
It would be a long road before Bush would realize her place was among the “flerd.” Raised in the Church of Latter-Day Saints, she knew two things by the time she was 20: that she was queer, and that she had to leave the church. Still, she remembers an idyllic childhood. Her family would cross the border to Rosarito almost every Sunday, driving workers from her dad’s LED business home. In Mexico, they’d join them for community dinners, where Bush remembers not wanting to go back to the suburbs, back to the States, where neighbors lived close, but seemed to be strangers to one another.
As Bush began breaking away from the church, she became increasingly hungry for understanding what made groups—and cultures—cohere and thrive. She thought that built environments were the answer. She’d dropped out of college, but returned to school to take classes on the history of civilizations. “All of them c[a]me down to the same demise,” she learned, “which is lack of resources or depletion of resources.” Pivoting her focus, Bush began to gravitate towards agroecology and environmental studies. It was there that she learned about what would later be called regenerative agriculture. Now it’s a buzzword—a shell for many things, often conflated with sustainability—but for Bush, regeneration was tied to the idea of “ancient futures,” of taking lessons and traditions from the past and adapting them to a future sorely in need of change.
And then she met Becky, a border collie who worked at Star Creek Ranch in Santa Cruz County, California. When Becky’s owner had to leave town, Bush adopted her and started working at the ranch alongside her, taking photos of the goats and sheep Becky herded. She began to see the animals’ personalities emerge. The goats were the “bad kids on the block,” and the sheep did, indeed, prefer to stick together. They were also surprisingly sweet with their young. Bush was hooked. The ranch opened a grazing business, called Star Creek Land Stewards, and when it landed its first big contract in 2012, Bush became the project manager. She was 27, in charge of organizing thousands of acres of prescribed grazing.
When the owner wanted to retire and sell the ranch in 2014, Bush helped track down a family that traced its lineage back to European Basque shepherds to buy and run the business. Through them, Bush was helping to reinvigorate a shepherding tradition that had waned after WWII, when demand for wool and mutton fell, followed by another decline in the '60s, as synthetic fibers continued to gain in popularity. In addition to grazing, she started selling high-end hides—repurposing waste from the lamb industry—and began calling herself “a modern-day urban shepherdess.” She had found her calling.
Soon, she took off for Spain and France, where she studied not just shepherding but also the systems that allow young people to become shepherds. She was following in the footsteps of a tradition that had existed long before her; exploring what makes a shepherd a shepherd, and what might attract more people to the work—questions posed by respected researchers like Fred Provenza and Michel Meuret in books she’d studied. She was now certain that she had “sheep and goat in her blood,” and dreamed of a grazing school in California. She created a curriculum and developed a project called The Grazing School of the West despite having no students yet. Someday, she thought, it would be a place where people could work the land with each other, with a community supporting them as they experimented with a vocation that might end up being a life calling, like it was for her. “This ancient vocation somehow persists in contemporary times and will always be a part of humanity,” explains Bush. “Domesticating animals and agriculture is what allowed us to grow as a species on Earth.”
Now, she hoped those same tools might be used to help the species survive.
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In 2017, the Thomas Fire raged through Southern California, burning nearly two-hundred and ninety-thousand acres of land over the course of a month. The city of Ojai was surrounded by flames, and though they never fully breached its perimeter, they destroyed more than seven-hundred and fifty homes in nearby Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. At the time, it was the largest fire in California’s history—and for Bush, it served as a wake up call.
Ojai Valley was a place Bush felt close to; she’d visited often and found herself more connected to nature there. She saw, too, that Southern California was in need of a new approach to fire, one that would not perpetuate the tropes of fear and flight, losing and winning, burning and rebuilding. It needed something different, something radical but not experimental, something reliable and time-tested. It needed goats, sheep, and shepherds. So, when she opened up her own prescribed grazing outfit in 2020—Shepherdess Land and Livestock Co.—she did it in Ojai.
At the time, she knew she was choosing to “be a part of this crazy capitalist system, go out and make money and create jobs for people so that I can pay them.” It was a risky path, but the goal was always to use the grazing company not only for fire prevention but also to subsidize training for a new generation of shepherds. Bush thinks that there is a boom coming in the U.S.; a wave of people who will be eager to dedicate themselves to the land. But they won’t have the same social safety nets, like shepherds in Europe, to help them as they learn. They’ll need to get paid. Last year, The Grazing School of the West welcomed its first cohort of eight trainees. This year Bush is training six, paying them a livable wage. She hopes to continue to expand the program to include twelve shepherds each year.
When trainees see the flerd for the first time, there is a high-frequency buzz of excitement in the air. When the first goat or sheep wanders off, they panic, thinking they’ll lose the animal. And at some point, the weight of being responsible for so many lives washes over them and the true nature of the work becomes clear. In her letter preparing interested would-be shepherds for the job, Bush warns that the work “will be the HARDEST work you could possibly imagine.” It’s mostly fence-building in one-hundred-degree heat and practicing patience with people who sometimes don’t know the difference between a sheep and a goat. Since it’s rare to be grazing far from private property, Bush has to invest in liability insurance for her flerd—in case they destroy landscaping or wander into the wrong yard or, in the worst case scenario, onto a highway. Not everyone is cut out for those realities, which Bush admits don’t appear on her social media, and leads to a swath of applicants who have never done manual labor but have done a lot of Instagramming. “I made it look way too beautiful and cool,” she says. “And I'm looking at some applicants, and I'm just like, Oh, no, this is an issue.”
Still, Bush is also turning away applicants who would be good fits. “[Prescribed grazing is] a huge burgeoning industry, and the biggest bottleneck is a skilled and trained workforce,” she says. She doesn’t have the resources to expand her program, and no one else seems to either. In Bush’s experience, young folks do want to become shepherds. But she’s left wondering, “What is the barrier to getting these people trained for more businesses and more hands on the ground?” The David vs. Goliath framing, made so common by climate change, leaving smaller actors feeling impotent, weighs on her. “I would say pretty regularly I am overwhelmed with emotion because I just wish I could do more faster,” she says. Twelve new shepherds a year is not going to solve the chaos that’s already happening. And it’s frustrating when there are plenty more than twelve people who want to and could become shepherds.
Lately, with a team she can trust on the ground, Bush has been taking more time away from the day-to-day operations and focusing on education. Usually, and especially with fire, we wait for a fight to make itself plain and then send out the troops, sparing no expense. But there is another way—and Bush is trying to build bridges to decision makers who can help push structural change. In order to scale ideas, it’s all about getting funds from the state level to specific, grassroots level grazing projects, she says. One of her most radical ideas would be to bring goats into prisons, instead of sending inmates to go out and fight fires, a dangerous and grueling task. “Why don't we train inmates to learn how to manage and work with livestock?” Bush asks. “To do the same work that we're doing and also have such incredible healing components with working with animals?” These are the types of ideas she hopes to bring to the table; to prioritize prevention over fear and connection over combativeness.
The numbers don’t seem to be in Bush’s favor, nor does time, as fire season continues to expand; 2.5 million acres of land in California burned in 2021 alone. But that’s the thing about a calling: Once you answer it you have to find your way forward. If a few meetings with assembly members go well, if a few more shepherds learn quickly, then Bush might be able to shift just a few more people’s perception of fire, of animals, of the land. In turn, the path might open a bit wider for the boom of ecological doctors and modern-day shepherds that she sees coming.
With every successful connection made and bridge built, Bush stays hopeful. In the high school parking lot, as she handed the football coach her card and talked to the observers, she quickly diffused a potentially fraught situation. By the end of the day the onlookers were spreading the word that the “flerd” was in the neighborhood with a purpose, and that if anyone found animals suddenly roaming alongside them, they didn’t have to panic; they were exactly where they needed to be.
In the end, Bush considers herself a herder of humans as well as animals. And if nothing else, humans need to figure out how to give ourselves more time, so we might have more chances to adjust. As she writes in her closing line of the letter she sends to prospective shepherds, “It's a daunting world in society these days and the Earth is throwing out all kinds of loud cries for humanity to get a grip. We can do our part even if small and maybe we can herd on together for some time.”
Additional fact checking by Elizabeth Moss.
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*The Footnotes
Editor’s Note: At The Conversationalist, we understand that no story exists in a vacuum, and every story is built on the work of others before us, whether in ways big or small. We are likewise dedicated to spotlighting the voices of those who have been or continue to be oppressed, disregarded, and/or otherwise silenced, in an effort to reverse centuries of often intentional erasure. Because of this, we have opted to include “footnotes” on certain stories to give readers additional context and reading material where it feels relevant and beneficial.
