CliDef Founder Featured on Climate One Podcast
Climate One recently interviewed four climate activists who refuse to be silenced, including CliDef’s Alfred Brownell, Laura Furones of Global Witness, Nicole Figueiredo de Oliveira of Instituto Internacional Arayara, and Dr. Sarah Benn.
November 23, 2024
Listen to the full podcast on Climate One
FULL SHOW DESCRIPTION:
Climate advocacy is a dangerous business. According to Global Witness, every week, somewhere in the world, between three and four environmental activists are killed. And that’s just from the numbers that are reported, it is suspected that those deaths are undercounted.
Alfred Brownell is president of Global Climate Legal Defense. He was born in a small village in rural Liberia and went on to get his law degree in the United States. Then he returned home to help write the country's environmental laws. But advocating for the enforcement of those laws soon became dangerous.
In the early 2000s, the Liberian government began leasing forest land to foreign companies to clear cut and replace with palm oil plantations. These tropical forests weren't far from where Alfred had grown up.
“The destruction was unbelievable. I mean, just the huge amount of timber that were being destroyed, the rivers, the secret sites, the burial grounds, the traditional areas, the impact on the communities, the impact on food security, just the brutality of local officials against the communities was despicable,” says Brownell
Alfred Brownell worked to stop the destruction, trying to enforce the laws he helped write. In the process, he says his own government put him under surveillance, and monitors the palm oil industry sent to see the destruction left. Then, Brownell says he was ambushed…
“We were ambushed along the road. The company, private militias and securities and some of their employees set up a massive roadblock. And when we arrived at the roadblock, they were looking for us,” says Brownell. “There was about a hundred plus of them. And they had machetes. Some of them had guns in their hand.” Then came a really chilling moment, “They lit the bonfire. They put a pot on the fire and said, we're going to cook you. And they pointed to the fire.”
The local chief decided he did not want Brownell killed on his land, which started an argument among the men and allowed Brownell and his crew to escape alive.
Alfred Brownell moved with his family to Boston. He's now teaching human rights at Georgetown Law in Washington, DC. His ordeal prompted him to found Global Climate Legal Defense in order to provide legal support to people protesting environmental injustice, even other lawyers, like himself.
So how does violence like the kind Alfred Brownell and other climate defenders face get perpetuated? “The truth is that typically the large majority of cases result in no consequences at all,” says Laura Furones, Senior Advisor at the Land and Environmental Defenders Campaign for Global Witness.
In 2020, Brazil granted the Turkish company Karpowership permission to bring in four offshore gas fired power plants. When these massive, floating power plants started showing up in the Sepachiba Bay, local fishermen were worried.
That’s when Nicole Figueiredo de Oliveira stepped in. She's a lawyer and the executive director of Arayara, a Brazilian non profit with the mission of stopping fossil fuel expansion in Latin America. Figueiredo de Oliveira was able to get a court order suspending Karpowership’s operations in the bay. In return, the Karpowership sued her for defamation. The lawsuit is still in progress.
Dr. Sarah Benn was sentenced to 32 days in prison for participating in a sit-in infront of the Kingsbury Oil Terminal in the UK. Perhaps worse than the jail term, a medical tribunal determined that her actions brought “disrepute” to the medical profession and suspended her registration. Dr. Benn is still fighting this charge. She says, “The climate emergency is a health emergency, not just in the global South, but all over the world..”