Protect Indigenous Rights. Watch Avatar.

Saturday 19 December 2009

I think I ran myself into the ground over the past two weeks. I woke up feeling not so good and spent the day sleeping a cold off. We went to see Avatar this evening. Avatar was surprising pertinent to COP15. Meg came along which facilitated particularly interesting discussion since Meg's topic was about Indigenous people.


Avatar the movie provides insightful commentary on the struggle of Indigenous people to have their rights to the forests recognised. Sounds like something else I've been learning about!

Avatar is about a planet which humans want to mine however there are Indigenous people who live in the forests. Some of the issues raised in the film related to issues raised during the COP15 about Indigenous peoples' rights, whether there should be a Declaration of the Mother Earth (like Bolivia suggested), reasons to protect the world's forests, how greed seems to corrupt developed societies. It made me think about how Indigenous people have lived off the land and the forests for hundreds of thousands of years and now we want to pay them to do so because they need to sell their forests for monetary gain. It made me think about how agriculture requires non-forest land. It made me think about how most developed countries have cut down almost all their forests and now expect developing countries to save their forests in order to sequester carbon and help curb global emissions. Oh the inequality!

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