How to be a Friend of the Earth

- Learning from the indigenous ways of understanding and treating the Earth as the Friend.

For indigenous Adivasi people of Orissa in India, like also for various other indigenous heritages, the Earth is the Mother, who carries all what lives on it and gives growth to all.

How Mother belongs to all her children, Earth also belongs equally to all living beings; plants, animals, trees, people, who are sisters born from the same Mother.

For indigenous people the way how land is their land, means that how they belong to the land - rather than that how land would belong to them as property which could be exchanged.

So Dongria and Kutia Kondh Adivasis in Orissa, Central India can not exchange the life of the wild forest near Niyamgiri mountain, to which their life is adapted and which is sacred and unique for them. Who live the life of the land, find in Earth's regeneration a renewable source for what signifies their life.

Earth's friends live with the Earth and its wild growth, without displacing Earth's own growth and the access which it provides for wide diversity of life to its soil, forest, water and air as to our indigenous home of life.

As displacement of Earth's own wild growth by the modern constructs accelerates the global crisis, we need to learn from the indigenous communities how to live with and within wild biodiversity regeneration without displacing it.

While modern home, cultivation, production and culture displace wild forest and Earth's own wild growth, indigenous people use wild forest as their home, cultivation, livelihood and culture.

In Orissa near the Niyamgiri mountain, the life of Dongria and Kutia Kondh Adivasis has been adapted to the hill's biodiversity. Now Sterlite-Vedanta corporation, has however built a factory to produce bauxite from the hill up to 3 million tonnes per year for needs of car industry and plastic-like wrappings of chocolate bars etc.

The Supreme Court judged that mining is allowed to destroy Kondhs' unique, sacred ancestral mountain, which is for them the God of Law. Is the value of the Law-setting God of tribals now 10 % of the bauxite profits of its displacement – like the Court suggested as 'tribal development' ?

World's deposits of many minerals and extractive/energy resources are searched, examined and found mostly in indigenous peoples' territories. Corporates invest millions to make calculations to show how their mining, extractive & energy industries are good for nature and for climate change 'mitigation' - to take away the last areas from sustainable indigenous ways of life, which cause much less climate change but have no calculations on that.