Purpose of this Website & Ways to Use It
This website is aimed at promoting awareness and allyship for land-based struggles, including the experiences, perspectives and proposals of both women land defenders and their allies.
With the support of an artists, translators, a team of web designers and volunteer speakers we have elaborated a multimedia collage, introducing the topic of land defense in the Americas and visualizing some of the conflicts and threats experienced by land defenders, but also some of the creative solutions proposed.
In this way, we want to generate an understanding for land-based struggles in the context of resource extraction and infrastructure construction amongst a diverse, global audience.
This bilingual, educational website is designed, firstly, for people who encounter the issue of territory, land defense and other life projects in the face of large-scale resource extraction and invasive infrastructure construction for the first time; and, secondly, for people who want to find out more about what is going on in terms of territorial conflicts and defense in the other America, and get access to websites, podcasts and social media by the collectives and movements that are actively involved.
Despite the seriousness of the topic that might leave one hopeless regarding the scope of life and policy changes necessary to enable other relations with the earth and nonhuman beings, we wanted this site to be beautiful and generate positive affect among the users. In particular, it is aimed at promoting proactive allyship and solidarity with those who fight those struggles.
Our landing site confronts you with six threats to territories to indigenous, afrodescentent and peasant communities, which intend to live other collective lives and practice other relationships with the earth and nonhumans than the ones imposed by colonialism and capitalism.
Opposing those threats on territories you will also find six ways of resisting that are based on the experiences, knowledges and strategies of women land defenders.
This is not meant to be a complete depiction of all threats that communities in the Americas face, nor representative of the voices of women or land defenders. Instead, we aim to amplify interest in the protection of territories and cultural diversity, and channel it towards the actors and movements themselves, and thereby encourage knowledge exchange and engagement.
This site includes a glossary that explains terms that are relevant to understand the problems and issues that communities that strive to protect land and water currently face in the Americas.
We thought that brief definitions might help those unfamiliar with them to bridge a north-south, but also English-Spanish language divide, and ultimately enable a dialogue of cosmovisions and/or other life projects.
Consult our links section to find ample information on social movements, collectives and organisations involved in land-based struggles, as well as read their blogs and listen to their broadcasts.