Glossary

E - Environmental Defenders/Mother Earth Protectors

Environmental Human Rights Defenders/ Mother Earth Protectors are people who speak up to protect rights associated with protecting land, territory, water, forests, biodiversity, animals and the rights of communities to serve as stewards of those resources.

Others refer to them as Mother Earth Rights defenders, environmental and land defenders, or environmental activists.

They are often collectives of local community leaders and members, indigenous community leaders, environmental activists, advocates, and others acting to protect the rights and the well-being of their communities, especially by looking after their homes, air, water, land, territory and forests from destruction or contamination. Many of them are Indigenous People.
Their work concerns us all because it carries huge global significance. Being an Environmental Human Rights defender/Mother Earth Protector has deadly consequences, making it among the deadliest types of activism.

According to the NGO Global Witness, in 2017, the latest year for which it has data, almost four environmental defenders were killed each week for protecting their land, wildlife and natural resources. Around 40-50% of all victims come from indigenous and local communities who are defending their lands, and their access to the natural resources their communities depend on for survival and livelihoods.

Environmental Human Rights Defenders/ Mother Earth Protectors speak out and organize against the industrial exploitation of natural resources and usurpation of traditionally-held land. They oppose large-scale mines, oil drilling, and other dirty energy projects, large hydroelectric dams, biofuel plantations, cattle ranches, new highways and railways, logging operations, and other types of harmful industrial development. Such persons face countless non-lethal attacks and threats, including smear campaigns, death threats, physical attacks, hacking and spying, and harassment by way of intelligence and judicial systems.



G - Global North

In the 1980s, the Brandt Line was developed as a way of showing the how the world was geographically split into relatively richer and poorer nations.

According to this model: Richer countries are almost all located in the Northern Hemisphere, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand. More impoverished countries are mostly located in tropical regions and in the Southern Hemisphere.

Disparities of wealth, housing, education, digital media access and numerous other factors underscore the power and privilege enjoyed by the Global North, while the Global South, home to the majority of natural resources and population, is relatively marginalised In economic terms, the North—with one quarter of the world population—controls four- fifths of the income earned anywhere in the world.

The North is home to the richest and most economically powerful nations on earth, this includes all the members of the G8 and includes the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and Russia.



G - Global South

The Global South as a critical concept has three primary definitions.

First, it has traditionally been used within intergovernmental development organizations- primarily those that originated in the Non-Aligned Movement - to refer to economically disadvantaged nation-states and as a post–Cold War alternative to “Third World.”

However, within a variety of fields, the Global South has been employed in a post-national sense to address spaces and peoples negatively impacted by contemporary capitalist globalization. In this second definition, the Global South captures a deterritorialized geography of capitalism’s externalities and means to account for subjugated peoples within the borders of wealthier countries, such that there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South (i.e. Souths in the geographic North and Norths in the geographic South e.g. position of Indigenous peoples, Afrikan Americans and Latinos in Northern Abya Yala, or the position of Aboriginal people in Australia.

It is through this deterritorial conceptualization that a third meaning is attributed to the Global South, in which it refers to the resistant imaginary of a transnational political subject that results from a shared experience of subjugation under contemporary global capitalism



G - Glocal

Glocal means integrating global knowledge and actions with the local i.e. taking a global issue/concern and making it meaningful and relevant to communities and society at the local level. It encapsulates the concept "think globally, act locally"



I - Internationalist Solidarity

Internationalist Solidarity is working interconnectedly together, with due respect for Decolonisation, Self-determination and Intersectionality in various parts of the World in concerted defence of human, peoples'; and Mother Earth rights in such ways and manners as to ensure the emancipation of one oppressed community of people somewhere contributes to the total Liberation of peoples everywhere in order to stop Ecocide, redress damages in mutually beneficial cooperation, and thereby enhance the progressive transformation of our entire Humanity; in ecological harmony with all in our planetary home to advance Planet Repairs towards holistic Global Justice for all.



P - Pluriversality

A World view that recognises our planetary home of Mother Earth as a multipolar Global Village World of many Worlds, where each people have in the treasure-house of their own indigenous Knowledge system their own universal Cosmovision for best articulating their own particularity in organic link with the generality of all Life forms and everything else in Nature, all of which interconnect and interact to creatively harmonise into a pluriversal World outlook of our full Humanity in its beautiful Ubuntu richness of equitable Unity in Diversity as a One Love whole!



S - Self-Determination

All peoples have the right to self-determination. Essentially, the right to self- determination is the right of a people to determine its own destiny. In particular, the principle allows a people to choose its own political status and to determine its own form of economic, cultural and social development. It follows that self-determination is where a group of people have the power, resources and ability to make decisions about their own lives, free from the interference of others.



W - White Supremacy

White supremacy is a historically based, institutionally perpetuated political and socio-economic system where white people enjoy structural advantage and rights that other racial and ethnic groups do not, both at a collective and an individual level. It consists of beliefs, attitudes, ideologies, policies and practices that benefit white people (the dominant group) and gives them power over non-white people by maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege.

White supremacy comes from the belief that white people are better, more intelligent and more important than people of other ethnic and racial backgrounds. Sometimes even non-white internalise this belief themselves. This results in people of Afrikan, Afrikan Caribbean, Asian heritage and other ethnicities being treated unfairly, including being discriminated against (racism), attacked and denied the equal opportunities.