Combating climate change: lessons from the world’s indigenous peoples

When I arrived at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in late last year, the firs thing that struck me were environmental activists braving the freezing weather to voice their disappointment at being locked out of the largest ever international meeting on climate change. Inside the conference, I realized that Bolivia was in a position similar to that of the protesters outside. We, the representatives of the majority of the world’s peoples, were effectively being left in the cold while a tiny group dominated by a few rich governments met in private to produce an unacceptable compromise (similar to the approach J. Bradford Delong supported in his April 22 Times Op-Ed article). When asked to add our signature to the badly named “accord,” my government would not compromise its dignity and refused to sign.

As an indigenous leader from Bolivia, I know what exclusion looks like. Before 1952, my people were not allowed to even enter the main squares of Bolivia’s cities, and there were almost no indigenous politicians in government until the late 1990s. In 2006, I entered the presidential palace in the main square of La Paz as the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Our government, under the slogan “Bolivia Changes,” is committed to ending the colonialism, racism and exclusion that many of our people lived under for many centuries.

This is why Bolivia will not accept an agreement reached between the world’s biggest polluters that is based on the exclusion of the very countries, communities and peoples who will suffer most from the consequences of climate change. In fact, some scientists tell us that the Copenhagen Accord could lead to temperature increases that would threaten much of humanity. This is why I said in Copenhagen that if governments could not come to an agreement because of self-interest or ideology, it is time for the people to decide.

We put that call into action