Planet protectors: The Indigenous activists on the frontlines of climate and health

Conservation, as well as the overall health of the forest, are intrinsically linked to Laetania Belai Djandam’s identity as an Indigenous person. The 20-year-old Indonesian environmental activist and medical sciences student was born in Java to Dayak parents and spent her youth traveling around the country, meeting and learning from Indonesia’s Indigenous groups.

“When we protect the forest, we are protecting our source of life, culture, and identity,” Djandam said. “I believe the foundation for all of these things is our source of health. So what it means is that the health of the forest becomes the health of the people.” The forest is a source of medicine for communities, as well as providing emotional and psychological nourishment, Djandam explained.

What’s less well understood is how poor health among communities can actually lead to the ill health of the forest, Djandam said. She saw this firsthand while volunteering with nonprofit Alam Sehat Lestari, or ASRI, which works with forest communities in Indonesia.

By utilizing an approach called radical listening, which prioritizes community knowledge over top-down “solutions,” ASRI discovered that logging had become a way to make money fast in order to pay for expensive health care treatments. “When I was there, I heard about the story of a man who had to cut sixty trees in order to pay for his wife's cesarean section,” Djandam. “That was something I never thought of. I knew that healthy forests lead to healthy people, but I didn't think that the cost of not having health is actually ecosystem destruction.” Together with its sister organization, the NGO Health in Harmony, ASRI addresses this by providing affordable health care, as well as training in organic farming to give community members an alternative to logging.

Djandam was also part of a team of advocates that in 2019 supported the Dayak Iban of Sungai Utik, a customary community living in West Borneo, to gain their land rights after a 40-year battle.

Having secure land rights has enabled the Dayak Iban of Sungai Utik to protect their culture and way of life, build resilience within their food systems, and create livelihoods, Djandam said. 

“They have been setting up an eco-tourism package where people can come into the village to learn from the community and the culture, and experience the customary forest that they've taken care of all their lives,” she said. Without land rights, the project would not be sustainable, Djandam continued, because it could be taken away at any time.

Djandam stressed the importance of shifting power back to frontline communities by allowing them space in negotiations. Funding also needs to be made more accessible, she said, both through training communities on how to navigate funding platforms and making direct funding mechanisms simpler and less bureaucratic. 

“A lot of the time, [funding] is top-down, where we dictate what the communities need and want and where the money should go, when in reality, we are investing in communities because they know how to manage the resources,” Djandam said. “On a larger scale, it really is about decolonizing the systems that we operate in.”

Mayan communities living in the forests of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula have practiced beekeeping for at least 3,000 years. “Honey is medicine for us,” said Emma Pineda, program officer for Latin America and the Pacific region at the Pawanka Fund, an Indigenous-led NGO which provides direct financial support to community-led organizations.

Yucatán honey has medicinal properties and is used by Mayan communities to treat ailments like laryngitis, typhoid, and eye infections. But in the past few decades, deforestation and the increasing use of agrochemicals have threatened this ancient practice. “The bees start to die,” explained Pineda, who herself comes from a Mayan community in the Yucatán. 

The use of agrochemicals has also had other negative impacts on health. Pineda said that Mayan communities, who for centuries have grown and eaten a diverse mix of crops — a system known as milpa, with a diet consisting primarily of corn, beans, and squash — are facing more health problems such as cancers and skin diseases since switching to growing genetically modified corn and using pesticides. Studies have cited increasing rates of diabetes and hypertension due to the change from a traditional to an industrialized diet. “The quality of our health is really dependent on the food that we eat,” Pineda said.

According to Pineda, communities need access to both Indigenous and modern medicine to address the types of health problems they are now facing, but access to health services remains a challenge. “We have the knowledge to access [Indigenous health care] regarding minor illnesses, but we also have the right to access [Western] medicine when we need a surgery or something like that,” Pineda said. It can take five or six hours to be transferred to a city hospital from the rural areas where most of the Mayan communities live, said Pineda. In addition, governments need to recognize the value of Indigenous medicine in order to make sure traditional knowledge isn’t lost, she said. 

Pineda sees support for Indigenous ways of life as a crucial part of sustainability efforts. “We have been living sustainably for many years. Before colonization, before the creation of countries in Latin America … We have this knowledge, and it needs to be supported.”