Who Are Environmental Defenders?

Environmental defenders assisted by EDLC are courageous people in developing countries around the world who are fighting against harm to their environment. Many are individuals who suffer direct and often severe violations of their fundamental human rights as the price for their advocacy for the environment and for their affected communities. And communities themselves act as environmental defenders when they fight for the health of their families and their land, their culture and way of life, and even their very survival.

Environmental defenders are men and women, young and old, and come from all walks of life. Most live in remote and pristine lands that their ancestors have used for countless generations. These are people who never dreamt they would become environmental activists, let alone embattled spokespeople for their communities and for the environment.

What all these individuals and communities have in common is a shared belief that people cannot survive without a healthy environment, but that neither can a healthy environment exist without the actions of committed citizens willing to fight to defend it. For EDLC and the lawyers and law firms with which it works, defending the rights of these environmental defenders is both a duty and a privilege.

EDLC helps environmental defenders through its law firm pro bono program, its special projects program, and its consulting program.

Environmental defenders helped by pro bono lawyers and EDLC to date include:

• Local farmers jailed in Mexico on fabricated criminal charges because they opposed illegal logging of their communities' old growth forests.
• Thousands of Mayan indigenous people in Guatemala seeking reparations for the loss of their land, their way of life, and even their loved ones, as a result of the construction of a huge hydroelectric dam.
• A professor of toxicology in the Philippines sued for defamation because he published the results of his studies of pesticide poisoning of rural villagers.
• Eleven indigenous communities living in a remote mountainous jungle region of Panama struggling for recognition of their right to lands they have traditionally occupied.
• Environmental organizations in Peru challenging a law aimed at clamping down on their opposition to destructive mining projects.
• The family of a seventy-three year old American nun murdered in broad daylight in the Brazilian Amazon for fighting deforestation by powerful ranchers and loggers.

If a messenger from the sky came down and guaranteed that my death would strengthen our struggle, it would be worth it. But it's not with big funerals and motions of support that we're going to save the Amazon. I want to live.

- Chico Mendes, from an interview December 9, 1988, published posthumously.