Let’s be clear: all exploitation of resources by our industrial society depends on exploitation of the people within whose lands and territories those resources lie.
Since 2012, BlackRock has had 15 chances to vote in favor of shareholder resolutions to halt deforestation. One hundred percent of the time, it voted against action on deforestation.
As we face this crisis, there are important lessons we can learn to build the future we want to see as we recover. One of those lessons should be that transforming our relationship with the natural world may be our best bet for safeguarding our future.
Our violent disregard for biodiversity and our own part in the web of life has generated a perfect storm of global proportions. When the world returns to normal – if the world returns to normal – let’s use this time to think about which parts of normal we want to return to.
Who wants to retire into a world blazing with wildfires, raging with floods, and boiling over with mass discontent?
TIAA, Harvard and the other institutions buying up farmland in Brazil and elsewhere around the world must stop pretending that their practices are sustainable.
BlackRock, the $6.5 trillion Wall Street asset manager, has quietly released a statement on the company’s approach to engagement in the palm oil sector — an industry notorious for its role in destroying the planet’s last forests.
The palm oil industry is responsible for destroying some 24 million hectares of Indonesian rainforest since 1990, much of it through burning. But because huge areas of Indonesia’s vast peat bogs have been drained and dried out to make way for the plantations, the industry has also unleashed flooding in places like Sumatra’s wetlands — flooding that claims lands and lives in a way that is largely invisible.
Since 2017, Morales has been engaged in a battle against the U.N. commission, which was investigating his alleged violations of campaign finance law as well allegations of corruption by many of his associates, including close family members. The commission has also helped the Guatemalan attorney general bring charges against Guatemalan military leaders for massacres of indigenous peoples, as well as for acts of corruption by Guatemala’s former president, Otto Perez Molina, and several business executives…
If you look at BlackRock’s actual investments, you could be forgiven for thinking that their purpose is to drive civilization off the climate cliff while profiting from the wreckage.