Interviews series with women scientists who work closed with indigenous communities on climate change issues.
Our Laura Grassi, Source International's Project Manager, has been interviewd by The Science Zone to talk about her experiences.
Over the last century, humanity has seen an explosion of scientific progress and commodities production.
Correspondingly, part of the world population experienced an improvement in living conditions. This transformation happened and still does, at the expense of people and territories located far from the urban metropoles, where most resources are consumed. In these remote places, countless living organisms have adapted in equilibrium with their ecosystems. So did indigenous human populations.
Ancestral communities thrived for centuries, living in harmony with Nature, depending on it in respectful and sustainable relationships. The abrupt changes that Earth faces today threaten ecosystems survival as well as indigenous populations life and legacy.The contemporary and exponentially increasing technological power originates from and is boosted by scientific knowledge and progress. It allows extracting resources at extremely fast and unsustainable rates. The price to pay for such a seemingly unlimited growth is poverty and inequity for the largest part of the global population, together with environmental degradation, pollution and anthropogenic climate change.
Indigenous populations and rural communities living in close contact with Nature pay the highest price for contemporary development. They are the most vulnerable and exposed to the effects of climate change, resource predation, and unsustainable growth. These people are forced to change their lifestyles, resettle, relocate and even migrate or die because of their homes and living sources being compromised and disrupted by the greed of post-industrial economic powers.
In this scenario, science can become a transformative force if used in cooperation and respect of traditional knowledge. Decolonizing science is a crucial step in a long way to environmental and social justice.
In this interviews series, we speak with women scientists and activists that work every day in close contact with indigenous populations.
Their work aims to make science and law be an instrument to achieve environmental, gender and social justice. Women who live in the first person the risks and the damages caused by resource predation and anthropogenic climate change. Women who fight every day for human and environmental rights to stop the extractive machine.
All interviews have been carried out by The Scienze Zone within the European project Boosting Green Education at School and edited by Laboratorio Fujakkà.
