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Bernadette Demientieff, Gwich’in Steering Committee
This week there was a momentous piece of good news for conservation — one of the largest and most powerful and influential U.S. banks, Goldman Sachs, said it will not fund projects that drill for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is huge — between 2016 and 2018, Goldman Sachs invested $59 billion in fossil fuels, the industry’s 12th biggest banker. The Gwich’in Tribe has been working on changing minds about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge since 2018 — Bernadette and other leaders met with officials from JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, UBS, and Citi to explain the risks financing oil and gas exploration there would pose. And this week Goldman Sachs sided with the Tribe.
She also took her arguments straight into the heart of the fossil fuel industry. In an op/ed in the Houston Chronicle last summer she wrote:
“The Arctic Refuge is not just a piece of land with oil underneath. It’s the heart of my people and our food security, our way of life, and our very survival depends on its protection. It’s time for ConocoPhillips to publicly affirm that they take the concerns of the Gwich’in Nation and the millions of Americans who stand with us seriously and that they will not drill on our sacred lands.”
Sierra Club and the Rainforest Action Network supported the Tribe’s efforts, but when it came to leading the charge, Bernadette led the way and gave voice to the rights of her people, and indigenous people everywhere. And for that, she is our hero.
by Miro Korenha, co-founder/publisher Our Daily Planet As ABC6 reported, yesterday, “declaring “America is back,” President-elect Joe Biden introduced selections for his national security team Tuesday, his first substantive offering of how he’ll shift from Trump-era “America First” policies by relying on foreign policy and national security experts from the Democratic establishment to be some […]
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by Miro Korenha, co-founder/publisher Our Daily Planet Yesterday, President-elect Joe Biden named former Secretary of State John Kerry as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, also announcing that he will sit on the National Security Council. As the Biden transition team wrote in a press release announcing the appointment: “This marks the first time that the […]
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A study published last week in the journal Nature provides a new view on the extinction crisis — that most of the planet’s species are not in decline and the ones that are in deep trouble are “clustered.”
Why This Matters: Is the glass half empty or half full? It all depends on how you look at it. These scientists argue that “the way global averages were being estimated could be strongly influenced by a small number of populations that were experiencing extreme declines, even if most were stable.”
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