A little more than a decade ago, activist Joan Carling from the Cordillera region of the Philippines lost three colleagues in the space of a few years — all murdered in one of the world’s deadliest nations for land rights defenders.
Then came her turn — a relative in the military told Carling’s father that his daughter’s name was on the “order of battle,” the Philippine military’s list of people, including activists, who are deemed enemies of the state.
“When you are on the order of battle, you are an open target for extrajudicial killings,” 53-year-old Carling said.
“There was a time [when] suspicious men or motorbikes were following me and I was advised to stay in the office,” she said in an interview.
She kept her head down, hired a bodyguard, then spent several months at a US university having won a fellowship for front-line human rights defenders.
For decades, Carling has been at the forefront of the fight for land and the environment, which London watchdog Global Witness calls “a new battleground for human rights,” with communities worldwide locked in deadly struggles against governments, large companies and criminal gangs exploiting land for products such as timber, minerals and palm oil.
Last year, more than three people a week were killed defending land, forests and rivers against industries, Global Witness said.
Of the 185 murders it documented in 16 nations, the Philippines ranked among the most dangerous, with 33 deaths last year alone.
In many parts of the world, the biggest impact from extractive, agricultural and infrastructure projects is felt by people living in remote, resource-rich areas and lacking land titles or knowledge about how to defend themselves against multinationals, international banks and government officials.
Carling, of the Kankanaey people of the northern region of Cordillera, grew up on a logging concession where her parents ran a shop.
She got her first taste of protest in the mid-1980s while studying at the University of Philippines in Baguio.
She spent two months with the Kalinga protesting against four World Bank-funded dams along the Chico River, which activists said threatened to inundate 16 towns and villages, and displace an estimated 85,000 people.
The World Bank ended up withdrawing its funding for the dams, which were never built, and the episode prompted the bank to develop its Aborigines policy, she said.
In the early 1990s, Carling then immersed herself in mountainous tribal villages in the Cordillera and worked with the Cordillera Peoples Alliance fighting for land rights, until the day she fell sick and had to be hauled out on a stretcher.
“My blood was too contaminated with malaria. I could not take more,” Carling said.
Four men took turns — two at a time — carrying her out on a blanket slung between two bamboo poles, hiking for half a day, then driving for five hours to the capital of Kalinga province.
“They had to give me coconut [water] intravenously, as sugar, because of my diarrhea,” Carling said. “I felt like a pig — they were carrying me tied like a pig on bamboo.”
After medical treatment, she went straight back to her duties, hanging her dextrose IV bag on the walls of a building in the town center, where she met people from remote areas who shared their grievances about alleged land grabs.
After working with the Cordillera Peoples Alliance to help people at home, she moved on to a regional stage and nearly eight years ago became head of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), based in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Through her work with the AIPP, she has helped build a network among Aborigines in nations including Taiwan, Indonesia, Nepal and Japan — helping them to feel less isolated.
She has turned her attention to the impacts of climate change and solutions such as hydropower, which often have a negative impact on Aboriginal communities.
Carling expressed concern about the “narrow conservation approach” of taking people out of the environment to protect the environment, instead of allowing people to protect the resources and watersheds on their ancestral land.
“Indigenous people are actually the natural conservationists because it’s part of our being — to protect and conserve our natural environment because we need to pass it on to future generations,” Carling said. “That is the wisdom of the indigenous people — we only use what we need.”
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