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Since 1974, World Environment Day has been celebrated annually every 5th of June and is the United Nations' principal vehicle for encouraging awareness and action for the protection of the environment.
It is no coincidence that when the World Wildlife Fund listed the top 200 areas with the highest and most threatened biodiversity, 95% were in Indigenous territories. It is estimated that Indigenous territories contain 80% of the earth’s biodiversity and Indigenous lands also hold unquantified megatons of sequestered carbon as 11% of the planet’s forests are under Indigenous guardianship and stewarded through their ancestral knowledge. “The traditional knowledge about biodiversity protection exists in Native languages. If we lose those Native languages, the knowledge will disappear with them,” says Galina Angarova (Buryat), Cultural Survival Executive Director. These regions are already experiencing climate change and a rapid loss of biodiversity, resulting from the fossil fuel-based industrialized global economy and natural resource extraction.
Indigenous Peoples are calling for a shift in mainstream consciousness. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that we need to focus on collective well being over profit and greed. "The simplification of wealth has led to the belief that money is the only solution, but there are multiple solutions to holding our space on this planet and being in a relationship and in equilibrium with it. [We value] having a multitude of relationships. That's why when we pray, as Indigenous Peoples, we pray for all of our connections and relations in the world. We pray not only with human beings but with the natural world. We do not objectify nature—animals, stones, birds, and rivers are our participants in this life, and they have a direct relationship with us," says Galina Angarova.
8 Things to do on World Environment Day:
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