Review by Ben Leather
“I want to live, there are many things I still want to do in this world. I take precautions, but in the end… When they want to kill me, they will do it.”
As midnight approached on 2 March 2016, Berta Cáceres lay dying in her friend’s arms. Gunmen had broken into her bungalow and shot her three times, before attempting to murder her fellow environmentalist Gustavo Castro too.
Berta’s prophecy had come true. But how? Who murdered her? And which political and economic interests had conspired to leave this inspirational leader — who only months before had collected the world’s most prestigious environmental prize at a glittering ceremony in San Francisco — dead in her Honduran home at the age of 44? …
Every week, we are each ingesting a credit card’s worth of plastic, a recent study suggests. Plastic waste has invaded every corner of the planet — including our bodies. And here’s an ugly truth: We cannot recycle our way out of this problem. Tackling the crisis of plastic pollution means taking on the industry that props up plastics: Big Oil & Gas.
We have a serious plastic problem. More than 9.2 billion tons of plastic have been produced since 1950 — that’s more than one ton for each living person on Earth. …
In many parts of the world, standing up for the environment is a deadly undertaking.
Few places are more dangerous than Honduras. It was four years ago that Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated for protecting her ancestral land from the construction of a hydroelectric dam. Despite the international outcry that followed Berta’s murder, the Honduran government is consistently failing in its duty to protect its own citizens. In fact, land and environmental defenders in the Central American state face more lethal and non-lethal threats today than they did in 2016.
On 2 March 2016, armed men broke into Berta’s home in the middle of the night and shot her dead. She had dedicated several years to protecting her community’s land in Intibucá, western Honduras, from the construction of the dam which threatened a vital and sacred water source for the indigenous Lenca people. Less than a year before her death, Berta had delivered a moving address to a packed auditorium as she was presented with the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for exceptional bravery in environmental activism. She dedicated her award to “the martyrs who gave their lives in the struggle to defend our natural resources.” Berta said, “Mother Nature — militarised, fenced-in, poisoned — demands that we take action.” …
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