17 May 2020 Media Development 2020-2 online magazine and pdf

[caption id="attachment_23088" align="alignleft" width="190"] MD 2020/2[/caption] Media Development 2020-2 Traditional Knowledge and Climate Change: Bridging the Gap Traditional knowledge held by Indigenous Peoples may provide essential responses to the current climate crisis. It is crucial, therefore, to work in solidarity with often vulnerable and marginalized Indigenous communities to assure our collective future...

17 May 2020 MD 2020-2 Editorial

By Philip Lee Many believe that an essential element of ways of responding to the current climate crisis lies in the traditional knowledge held by Indigenous Peoples. The way they think about life and death, natural resources, and the intimate and intricate relationship they have with land, ought to offer pertinent answers to pressing questions of mitigation, adaptation, and survival.

17 May 2020 Tending the garden

By Lila Pine All my relations. The land. The songs. The language. The stories. The people. The dances. The plants and the animals. The sun and the moon. The water. The earth. The climate changing. To understand these things from Indigenous perspectives it is necessary to begin at the beginning. The Creation Stories. 

17 May 2020 Why traditional knowledge holds the key to climate change

By Gleb Raygorodetsky The very identity of indigenous peoples is inextricably linked with their lands, which are located predominantly at the social-ecological margins of human habitation – such as small islands, tropical forests, high-altitude zones, coasts, desert margins and the circumpolar Arctic. Here at these margins, the consequences of climate change include effects on agriculture, pastoralism, fishing, hunting and gathering and other subsistence activities, including access to water.

17 May 2020 Indigenous Peoples’ efforts to impact global climate agreements

By Linda Etchart Following the adoption in 1997 of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, Indigenous Peoples’ representatives began to push for engagement in climate change agreements, but they have continued to be side-lined. One of the sources of their frustration has been that the grounds for their involvement were that indigenous communities were affected by climate change, giving them the status of victims, rather than their being viewed as potential actors in the quest to combat climate change.

17 May 2020 Environmental practices of South Africa’s Indigenous ‡Khomani Bushmen

By Julie Grant From Australian bushfires to the melting of polar icecaps – the climate emergency is on everyone’s lips. Daily reports proliferate from media houses, through newspapers and websites, while civil society distributes its own nuanced interpretations. Whether there is in fact a climate emergency is also being debated as are the best ways to address the situation- including how to contain the sustained damage while minimising future damage. 

17 May 2020 Comunicación para una vida alegre, sencilla y sostenible

Por Oswaldo Martínez Flores El Pueblo Xidza se encuentra ubicada en la región del Rincón de la Sierra Juárez de Oaxaca, en el Suroeste Mexicano y se ha caracterizado por un gran contraste, contar con una riqueza natural, cultural y humana, pero con una pobreza material vista desde la “modernidad”.

17 May 2020 The heartbeat of Southern African Indigenous peoples

By Shaldon Ferris As an Indigenous rights radio coordinator for Cultural Survival, an Indigenous peoples’ rights organization, my daily activities include setting up interviews with people from all over the world, with the aim of producing radio content for broadcast all over the world. This provides me with an informal barometer reading on communications in Africa as compared to communications in other parts of the world. Because our work is mainly with Indigenous peoples, it is pertinent to narrow the reading down to the 476.6 million strong, and growing Indigenous people.

17 May 2020 For water justice, Churches ought to become “blue communities”!

By Dinesh Suna Would you ever buy a sandwich for USD 10,000? I guess no one would, even if he or she were a billionaire. Because it’s insanely expensive for a sandwich. About 2000 times more expensive, assuming the sandwich costs about USD 5. However, most of us have paid the equivalent of that “10,000 dollar-sandwich” for – guess what? A bottle of water!

17 May 2020 Fatal fault line in Catholic Church governance

By Robert Carey The culture in the Catholic Church of covering up the sexual abuse of minors by clergy has come into sharp focus in Australia during the recent trial of its cardinal, George Pell. Pell boasted of having implemented best practice in the Church’s response to sexual abuse in the Church. When he was Archbishop of Melbourne (1996–2001), he introduced the “Melbourne Response”, a set of policies for the compensation of abuse victims. The model is now discredited, with some saying the Melbourne Response was Pell’s way of ensuring the Church’s handling of sexual abuse complaints was not transparent and that any response to victims remained firmly under the control of the Church and of Pell himself.