Humanity’s Last Chance Saloon: Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and Custodianship

The destruction of circular economies in pursuit of wealth and their replacement by extractive models of systemic exploitation have brought humanity to the brink of survival. Enlightened policy design and implementation are vital for an urgent reversal. However, international decision-making processes’ ingrained bias towards institutional rather than planetary preservation and their continued privileging of large-scale commercial interests are major obstacles.

Changing behaviour requires bespoke plans for locations driving the crisis, embedding new standards, and framing deterrence crimes around inter-generational wealth transfer, reparation for unjust enrichment and ecocide. To safeguard the future, the task requires sincere reach-out to nature’s most effective custodians: listening, learning, synthesizing and scaling-up time-honed environmental solutions from well beyond the limited but still dominant realm of western models of development.

In the spirit of this, after a brief introduction to climate mitigation and adaptation issues as viewed by indigenous communities, this event will focus on the central role of indigenous traditional knowledge in safeguarding the environment. Drawing on the experiences of four indigenous spokespeople from around the globe, alternative models for sustainable environmental custodianship will be suggested with a clear call to action rooted in indigenous peoples’ rights and backed by climate science.

Moderator: Joshua Castellino (Minority Rights Group)

Panelists:
• Nonette Royo (The Tenure Facility)
• Vicky Tauli-Corpuz (Tebtebba Foundation)
• Archana Soreng (UN Secretary General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change)
• Oula-Antti Labba (Saami Council)

More info: https://minorityrights.org/stockholm50/