Activist about the environment: “We have general responsibility”

TAZ: Miss Karling, will we have to become indigenous in the West again?

Joan Carling: This will help. Law -Propromy, inequality, census, climatic crisis -in the center of all these problems, I see the lack of understanding of our means of existence as people.

TAZ: What do you mean?

Carling: I’m in Denmark now. When I ask a little child here: “Where does your food come from?”, Then he says …

TAZ: … from a supermarket.

Carling: Exactly. This is a problem. This is a department from your own environment, from the country and the people around you.

TAZ: What do the indigenous peoples know for you?

Carling: A local person lives in connection. Communication with your own culture, your own country, other people. And this connection leads to mutual relations, respectful giving and acceptance. We care about nature and at the same time we care and protect them. I myself am from the people of Kankanai in the north of the Philippines. For example, we have a special connection with sweet potatoes. For us, this is food, whose fruits we eat, the leaves of which we eat pigs from which my grandmother made flour. As a child, I sang songs that celebrate and thank the viability that sweet potatoes gives us.

TAZ: So it is about the best sense of how we are built into our environment?

Carling: Yes, and at the same time it is much more. The main thinking of indigenous peoples is that we do not exist alone. We exist as part of the community, as part of the clan. Our dances, our music, our resource management: they work only in the team.

TAZ: How did your childhood go? Of course, it is very different with someone, who grows in a large German city.

Carling: Well, first I ran 3 kilometers to school every day. It may sound diligently, but we have always been on the road with several children, and basically it was fun. On weekends, we collected pine cones in the forest and sold them to the nursery to get pocket money for sweets. And when he threatens, we returned to the forest to collect mushrooms. In the summer we collected guamen and played on the river. This inner freedom, which I experienced in childhood with my friends in nature, still accompanies me today.

TAZ: When did you realize that this lifestyle is under pressure?

Carling: I was politicized by the struggle of indigenous tribes against the dam Chico on the Northern Island of the Philippines. At that time, the government wanted to leave her to build a dam to extract electricity. The dam would flood their rice fields and villages. Departure from indigenous peoples from their country is a way to get fish out of the water. Without their country, they lose their personality, nothing more than people who are.

TAZ: How did the population react to plans?

Carling: At that time, the tribes touched postpone their years of conflicts and demonstrated together against the project. From another project, the dam nearby they knew that their future was put on the map here. Because in the previous project, the indigenous population was moved to the island, where many of them died of malaria. And nothing of the electricity in the surrounding trunks.

TAZ: How did the conflict end?

Carling: At the end of the month, they won the campaign: the World Bank revoked their funding for the dam, and people could continue to live in their country. Despite the threats of the company and government, they defended themselves and fought for their culture and survival. It inspired me.

TAZ: In fact, it sounds like a conflict that is still held around the world today. We are talking about sunny hands, mines …

Carling: … wind farms, tourism, agribusiness.

Pilgroup: Dilemma: Especially rare earth lands and renewable energies are urgently necessary for the energy transition.

Carling: I understand that raw materials and areas are necessary. Throughout the world, more than 50 percent of critical minerals urgently necessary for technical products are located on the territory of indigenous peoples. It cannot be that we do not have the right to vote in how these raw materials are broken and how they are used. For example in Norway. There, the government provided the concessions of the windmill in the traditional country of grazing of moist deer in the seeds of 2010. The seeds were protected and asked: why don’t you build wind farms outside Oslo? But large windshields near the capital: you did not want to expect people there. The systems were built. In 2021, the Supreme Court then declared them illegal. But only after young seeds were protested during the year before the parliament can fight for a compromise with the government. History shows that the interests of indigenous peoples are often donated by governments in the first place. For me, this is an expression of deeply sitting racism.

TAZ: What can Western societies from the indigenous methods of thinking learn?

Carling: First of all, taking resources only by nature that you really need. We also fall into our forests to build our homes and furniture. But we do not accept more than we really need. And, above all, we plant three new trees for each tree that we have. Whatever you accept, you fill it again. This principle one principle will greatly change with production and consumption. In fact, the question is whether we are doing business to make a profit or take care of us well. Factory agriculture, short flights, cryptocurrencies – what really? In the end, the local path will also be those who go hand in hand with a simpler life.

Taz: From our current consumer society, such a way seems to be difficult to imagine.

Carling: People in Germany consume three times more resources than the Earth, are able to regenerate. We do not come to stability without giving up. Especially in the world north, where the upper and middle class lives with privileges based on the operation of the global south. I recently asked the lecture: “Which of them wears a gold ring?”

TAZ: And then?

Carling: Almost all married people proudly contacted each other. But none of them knew that the gold ring caused almost eight tons of toxic garbage. That most gold mines benefit from child labor or the exile of indigenous peoples. But if we really understand this relationship, we can build real solidarity with each other.

TAZ: Is it really just an understanding? Fast fashion, mobile phones, laptops – most people know that such things are done in operating conditions. Changing your own behavior is still difficult.

Carling: It is not only about a separate refusal, this is also about interrogating the people of their government and company: do you adhere to human rights? Do you work within the stress of our land? And when we look at the story, I still find absurd that rich middle classes in Europe have no readiness for small equipment. Their wealth is based in centuries of colonial exploitation.

TAZ: Currently, we are on the slow path to green capitalism, which supports economic growth and profit -orientation, but we are trying to become climatic. In view of the time of the pressure of the climatic crisis: is this path no more realistic than the desire to convert the entire system?

Carling: This is not a stable way for me. With it, we adhere to the exploitation, robbery of the Earth and inequality. If we switch from the fossil to renewable energy sources, we will release many people from these injustice. We bear the overall responsibility for changing this system.

Taz: In the concepts of the nature of the protection of the nature of Western countries, such as Germany, for a long time it was assumed that nature develops best without people. What do you think about this idea?

Carling: I think this is a dangerous nonsense. We see where he leads in Tanzania, where 82,000 indigenous Masai should be sold from the Ngororo crater preservation zone. Presumably, to protect nature there. Studies show that their nomadic breeding of cattle leads to a higher biodiversity, because they hold invasive species. We see similar processes in Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia, where the indigenous peoples are criminalized because they beat or hunt their traditional forests. Instead of questioning your own business, the alleged preservation of nature is created here due to marginal groups.

TAZ: At the conferences of the United Nations, indigenous peoples are sometimes called “springs” …

Carling: … Oh, how I hate this word.

TAZ: This means that indigenous peoples love to speak on the panels decorated with them. But that decisions will be made somewhere else.

Carling: There is this type of tokenism in which people bring on stage to present themselves inclusive, while our interests are ignored. But over the past few years, we have also been able to fight for rooms at the international level at which we set the tone. Ultimately, the success of our movement measures what we use on the spot. We want a good life in harmony with nature and our brothers. Only when this right is realized for all of us, we have reached our goal.