Let the rivers flow: Celebrate the International Day of Action for Rivers

by Jeff Conant, senior international forests campaigner

Today, March 14, is the International Day of Action for Rivers — a beautiful moment to stop and reflect on the value of rivers in our lives and our ecosystems. Tragically, the murder of Berta Cáceres in Honduras on March 3 brutally reminds us of the price that many activists have paid for defending their rivers.

As our friends at International Rivers tell us, this week, all over the world, people are gathering together to celebrate their rivers, and we hope that many of you who may live close to free-flowing fresh water will take a little time this week to sit by your nearest river or creek, and give thanks for the gift of life that flowing water brings. Given the political price that activists like Berta have paid defending rivers, we’d also invite you to take a moment of silence today to remember that our free-flowing waters don’t flow free without a lot of care and attention from river keepers everywhere.

As the tragic killing of Berta demonstrates, the stakes have never been higher for rivers or the people who fight to protect them. This is why, on this the 19th annual Day of Action for Rivers, we ask all of our friends and supporters to help us seek justice for Berta Cáceres, and ensure liberty for anti-dam activist Gustavo Castro — still detained in Honduras — by supporting Friends of the Earth’s demand for independent oversight for the investigation in to Berta’s killing.

A wave of media attention has focused on Berta’s killing, including this article in The New Yorker, this op-ed in The New York Times by Berta’s nephew Silvio Carillo, this hard-hitting piece in The Intercept, and the Washington Post’s opinion piece noting that the State Department has a good deal of responsibility for the current violence in Honduras.

Since the 2009 coup, Honduras has witnessed a huge increase in dams and other megaprojects that would displace the Lenca people and other indigenous communities.

Almost 30 percent of the country’s land is earmarked for mining concessions; this in turns creates a demand for cheap energy to power the future mining operations. To meet this need, the government has approved hundreds of dam projects, among them the Agua Zarca Dam on the Gualcarque River — a project that will cut off the supply of water, food and medicine to hundreds of Lenca families. In other words, these dams are not being built to provide electricity to poor communities, but to power extractive industries that will further degrade the environment and undermine human rights — hence the mass opposition to these projects.

In April 2013, Berta Cáceres and COPINH, the organization she founded, organized a road blockade to prevent the construction company’s access to the dam site. For over a year, the Lenca people maintained a heavy but peaceful presence, rotating out friends and family members for weeks at a time, withstanding multiple eviction attempts and violent attacks from militarized security contractors and the Honduran armed forces.

After COPINH’s co-founder Tomás Garcia was shot and killed during a peaceful protest at the dam office in July 2013, his killing led Sinohydro, the world’s largest dam-builder, to pull out. Now, in the wake of Berta’s killing, people around the world, including U.S. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, are demanding that the Agua Zarca project be cancelled. And, awareness is growing of the profound threats facing environmental and land defenders in Mesoamerica (indeed, this list of the threats towards Berta is a chilling look at what they face).

Signing a petition, cleaning up a creek or rallying for a river may seem like small gestures given the weight of problems facing the world. But small gestures can have big impacts. I love what International Rivers says:

For too long, we humans have favored the big, the grandiose, the over-blown. But right now rivers need us to slow down and notice them. To find them, hidden away amid the concrete in our urban environments. To clear the miasma of trash obscuring their faces. To free them from concrete structures silencing their voices — silencing those wordless river songs that do us so much good to hear.

Today, take a moment to send some love to our rivers and their defenders — support justice for Gustavo Castro and COPINH and help stop the construction of the Agua Zarca dam.