Fridays for Future Activists Fight Oppression of Indigenous People in Europe & Arctic

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• Fridays for Future Digital, part of the global Fridays for Future movement inspired by Greta Thunberg, Polluters Out, and Extinction Rebellion are launching a campaign to defend the remaining indigenous people in Europe, fighting against the fossil fuel industry’s infraction on indigenous lands. This is part of their massive 8-week digital Defend the Defenders campaign, which focuses on defending the rights of environmental defenders and indigenous people.
• The activists are pressuring the Russian government to prevent an oil spill like the Norilsk from happening again through a tweetstorm Friday. They are additionally highlighting the Innuit people’s struggle for survival due to rapidly melting ice, the Sámi’s plight in the face of a unique vulnerability to rising temperatures and mining projects that threaten and exploit their lands.
• Toolkit with more background on our actions can be found at bit.ly/dtdtoolkit
• Pictures and other assets for stories: bit.ly/dtdassets.

Fridays For Future Digital, part of the global Fridays for Future movement, and Polluters Out are starting a massive digital campaign across the European continent as part of its Defend the Defenders Campaign. The activists are working alongside indigenous communities and organizations as well as environmental defenders to highlight their struggles and uplift their voices.

Activists are launching a massive tweetstorm against the Russian oil giant Norilsk Nickel Friday, which is responsible for a massive 350 km2 oil spill in the Arctic.

“Norilsk had a terrible environmental situation before the oil spill, and such city-forming corporations usually do whatever they want, and no one can do anything. We hope that the situation there will get better after this incident, but it is difficult to change anything without structural changes,” activists from Fridays for Future Russia said.

Of the 180 indigenous peoples in Russia, only 40 are legally recognized. And without the concept of free, prior and informed consent, indigenous people’s lands are being exploited without their consent, activists say. In Siberia, indigenous people have to rent their own land from the Russian government while it sells the land out to logging companies. These logging companies burn waste, which can have detrimental effects like with the 2019 Siberian Taiga wildfires, which destroyed 33–90% of the forest the indigenous people rely on.

The Norilsk oil spill. (Photo via Russian Marine Rescue Service)

The Sámi people inhabit northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. They are among the most vulnerable to the climate crisis, with the temperature in Jokkmokk, Sweden, already being 2.0° above pre-industrial levels. Mining projects are exploiting the Sámi’s lands. In nearby Gállok, for example, British mining company Beowulf Mining filed for permission to open an iron ore mine, devastating the ecosystem and further restricting the herding grounds for the Sámi’s reindeer. Many more projects like it threaten their lands and the activists are pressuring Nordic governments to stop the projects through petitions listed on their toolkit.

“The Sámi people have already seen the devastating effects that ‘development’ projects have brought to the Sámi homeland: waste, deforestation and extinction,” organizers from No mines to Sámi Homeland in Northern Finland said. “We do not accept mining projects to continue on the ancient Sámi homeland!”

Melting glaciers in Disko Bay, near Ilulissat, Greenland, in July 2015.

Greenland, meanwhile, is losing ice at an astonishing rate: During the summer of 2019 alone, 600 billion tons of ice were lost, enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters in 2 months and exposing 12 million more people to coastal flooding around the planet. The indigenous Innuit people rely on the Arctic Ocean for food, but overfishing has caused a massive reduction in the Greenland cod which the Innuit rely on for food. The increasingly drastic ice melting means that the Innuit are losing access to their homes and their hunting grounds. The activists are pushing for action through a petition to the chairman of the Venstre party, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen. The activists are also fighting the opening of an open-pit uranium mine in Kvanefjeld Plateau, located in southern Greenland, where Australian mining company Greenland Minerals and Energy would dump the radioactive material in a nearby natural basin. It claims a layer will prevent the radioactive material leaking, but the activists have their doubts, pointing out that even a little ionising radiation could cause cancer and threaten the Inuit and the coastal villages’ way of life.