COP30 Discovers Indigenous People Exist, Shockingly.
Al Jazeera reports that Indigenous protesters 'stormed' the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, clashing with security. This framing conveniently sidesteps the decades, if not centuries, of environmental devastation, resource extraction, and corporate-state violence inflicted on these very communities. They're not 'storming' a building; they are defending their ancestral lands from the very
same extractive industries given VIP passes to these summits. (Perhaps 'indigenous people' are just a phase for these conferences, like 'diversity panels' that yield no actual change.) These are the people disproportionately impacted by deforestation, mining, and agribusiness—the very industries whose lobbyists help craft the toothless climate accords. When these vital voices are excluded from
decision-making, while corporations responsible for ecological collapse are invited to the table, what else is a 'summit' for but performance art? One might wonder how many more 'dialogues' we need before acknowledging the original land stewards have had enough of being politely ignored while their world burns.