To defend the defenders of the Amazon Rainforest. The lungs of our earth

Regenerative farming is the answer to so many of our problems and the problems faced by Original People’s. It can provide food sovereignty and economic security while healing the soil! Love the work of Chaikuni Institute, please support!

Fungi are essential to our existence on this planet! And yet we have only documented 6% of all species - meaning so much potential to be discovered in terms of fungal medicine and technologies. Plus it can provide food sovereignty while regenerating the soil!! Love fungi! 

Empowering indigenous peoples around the world is my passion! 

To help resource the defenders of the Amazon against big corporations and extractive industries!!

Now more than ever it is important that we protect and increase our heritage seeds for the future and for our communities. Much of the diversity of seeds is being lost as fewer people are planting the original seeds, as modern agriculture has turned to genetically modified and patented seed to produce our crops.

Because EarthRights are defending the rights of indigenous people around the world, being their champions in the justice system. 

Protecting the Amazon rainforest and our climate in solidarity with Indigenous peoples

Since 1996, Amazon Watch has defended the Amazon rainforest and our climate in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. Long-term partnerships with Indigenous, forest, and traditional peoples — the best stewards of the rainforest — are the foundation for Amazon Watch’s campaigns for climate justice, corporate accountability, and the permanent protection of the rainforest.

The Amazon is home to more than 500 distinct Indigenous peoples. As our planet’s largest tropical rainforest, it stabilizes our global climate and an immense amount of Earth’s biodiversity and flowing freshwater can be found there.

This vital ecosystem and the Indigenous peoples who have stewarded it for centuries face grave threats from deforestation, resource extraction, land grabs, and destructive development projects. The Amazon is facing a tipping point and won't be able to sustain itself as a rainforest if we remain on our current path of destruction.

To move to a turning point, Amazon Watch is advancing the Indigenous-led proposal to permanently protect 80% of the Amazon by securing Indigenous rights to their ancestral territories, challenging the major drivers of rainforest destruction, and mobilizing solidarity funds directly to Indigenous Earth Defenders throughout the Amazon Basin. Their work combines on-the-ground legal, advocacy, and communications expertise and long-term trusted partnerships with Indigenous peoples and organizations.

🌳Amazon Watch’s Amazon Defenders Fund (ADF) provides direct solidarity funding to Amazonian peoples and organizations free of bureaucratic barriers. The ADF supports Indigenous-led initiatives including community organizing, women’s leadership, communal economies, protection of Earth Defenders at risk for resisting destructive development, and crisis response including to wildfires and oil spills. The ADF is built upon a multi-decade track record as a trusted partner among Indigenous nations. You can learn more at amazonwatch.org/get-involved/amazon-defenders-fund.

Amazon Watch

Be Chaikuni, Protect the Amazon. Empowering a life affirming movement.

“Our name invokes the Amazonian legend that tells of invisible protector spirits of the forest, called the Chaikuni by the indigenous Shipibo-Conibo people.”

The name of The Chaikuni Institute has its origin in the tradition of the Shipibo-Conibo indigenous people, and honours indigenous traditions and promotes mechanisms to protect cultures, cosmovisions and indigenous territories in the Peruvian Amazon.

Shipibo-Conibo mythology tells of the Chaikuni, beings who committed themselves to the protection of the rainforest and to life itself as they transitioned into the spirit realms. According to ancient knowledge, these Rainforest guardians live in invisible communities and can appear and disappear at will. The modern-day Shipibo still see the Chaikuni, feel their presence and hear them passing by at certain times of the day.

For indigenous peoples, their territory is their world and their way of life is intimately connected with other beings in the forest. Through mythology, ancestral teachings and knowledge are transmitted. Indigenous peoples’ cosmovisions – a particular way of seeing the world and of being connected with other beings, are key to understanding the present and formulating a common future.

“It is with deep respect for the Shipibo people that we have named our organisation The Chaikuni Institute. The Chaikuni, ancestors of the indigenous Shipibo people and spiritual guardians of the Peruvian Amazon, actively serve the well-being of this great rainforest on energetic and spiritual levels that are not recognized by the modern world. In community with the spirits of the plants, trees, and, animals, they provide a priceless repository of spiritual, medicinal, and ecological services not only for local tribes but for the rest of the world. We are honored to be aligned with and guided by the Chaikuni in our service to the source of creation.”

– Matthew Watherston, Founder of Chaikuni Institute & Temple of The Way Of Light

Chaikuni Institute

Preserving, repatriating and restoring ancestral homelands to revitalize Native culture, habitat, health and spirituality.

The Native Conservancy was established in 2003 to empower Alaska Native peoples to permanently protect and preserve endangered habitats on their ancestral homelands. We strive to maintain and secure titles to Native lands in conservation trusts to strengthen our inherent rights of sovereignty, subsistence and spirituality.

Native Conservancy

NDN Collective is an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power.

DEFEND
We must continue to defend our people, communities, and nations against negative resource extraction that poisons our people, pollutes our water, destroys our land, contributes to climate change and violates our human rights. Doing this through organizing our communities, making our voice heard, and utilizing a wide variety of tactics is imperative in shifting the political and financial systems that are impacting our communities.

DEVELOP
We must continue to develop Indigenous communities in a regenerative and sustainable manner based on our values and connection to land, culture and identity. We need to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. We are doing this through regenerative community development, renewable energy investments and social enterprise development.

DECOLONIZE
We must continue to decolonize our minds, communities, and sovereign nations. The decolonization of our communities and people is directly related to our ability to prosper. Through the revitalization of our Indigenous ceremonies, culture, languages and life ways we will continue to strengthen our identity, and break free from the oppressive systems that disconnect us from achieving the healing growth and connection to spirit that is integral for us as Indigenous people.

NDN Collective 

The Fungi Foundation is a global organization that works for the Fungi, their habitats, and the people who depend on them.

Launched in 2012, the Fungi Foundation is the first NGO dedicated to the fungi kingdom. Since its inception, it has achieved numerous milestones while dedicating itself to exploring the fungi world in view of increasing knowledge of their diversity, educating about their applications, and recommending public policy for their conservation. As part of our ongoing 3F initiative, the foundation played a key role in enabling Chile to become the first country in the world to include protection of fungi in its environmental legislation. More recently, the foundation proudly announced the Fantastic Fungi Education Curriculum, the world's first mycological set of courses designed for schools.

In short, the Fungi Foundation envisions a healthy planet in which Fungi are recognized, protected, and embraced as the interconnectors of nature; a mission that would be impossible without the essential support of our kind, engaged donors.

Fungi Foundation

Defending indigenous rights to land, life and cultural survival in the Amazon rainforest.

Coronavirus has reached indigenous rainforest territories in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Indigenous populations are extremely vulnerable to disease due to persistent inequality, exclusion and discrimination in general access to public services, as well as their geographic isolation. New cases are reported daily, and indigenous elders, guardians of thousands of years of ancestral knowledge about the Amazon rainforest and how to protect it, are dying with COVID symptoms. 

Hundreds of indigenous communities  that relied on these rivers for food and fresh water are facing food scarcity, and COVID-19 national lockdown has cut off options for outside provisions. Parents are reporting the appearance of skin rashes and irritation on their children who must bathe in contaminated water. Sadly, the government’s response has been woefully inadequate and lacking transparency.

Amazon Frontlines is working with indigenous organizations to provide humanitarian aid to indigenous communities affected by both the COVID-19 crisis and the oil spill. Alongside the Ecuadorian Alliance for Human Rights, Ecuadorian Amazon’s regional indigenous organization CONFENIAE, regional Kichwa peoples’ indigenous federation FCUNAE, and several affected indigenous families, we have also filed a lawsuit demanding the government and oil companies carry out urgent environmental remediation, provide relief for affected peoples, and repair or relocate the pipelines to avoid future spills. 

Amazon Frontlines

We are Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples. We’re fighting for their survival around the world.

We are Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples. We’re fighting for their survival around the world.  More than one hundred and fifty million men, women and children in over sixty countries live in tribal societies. They’re mostly self-sufficient and depend on their land for their health and wellbeing. To tribal peoples, land is life.

Tribal peoples are our contemporaries. They’re not primitive. They have technology, laws, education, religions, and social, political and economic structures. They developed many of the medicines now used by industrialized societies, and created some of the principal staple foods like maize and potatoes that now feed millions. Tribal peoples shaped the environment and help make the world a better place.  Tribal societies are extraordinarily diverse and there’s a lot to learn from them. They understand the natural world and are expert conservationists.

Many tribal peoples have enlightened social values. They’re not brutal savages as is sometimes claimed. They put the community before the individual, share and exchange possessions rather than amass personal wealth, and embrace gender equality.  Tribal peoples are at the mercy of racism, land theft, forced development and genocidal violence. Their human rights are being violated. Their lands and resources are stolen for profit, even though land theft is a crime under international law. Tribal lands give them food, housing, medicines, clothing and a sense of identity and belonging. Land theft causes destitution, disease and death, and it’s wiping out uncontacted tribes.   The world needs tribal peoples. Our work is preventing their annihilation. We work in partnership with tribes and give them a platform to speak to the world. We need your support to bring about a radical change in public opinion to make sure they have a future. Help us fight one of the most urgent and horrific humanitarian crises of our time. Tribal peoples need you. Let’s fight for their survival, together.

Survival International

Together, we can preserve the rainforests, protect the climate and uphold human rights.

Rainforest Action Network preserves forests, protects the climate and upholds human rights by challenging corporate power and systemic injustice through frontline partnerships and strategic campaigns.

RAN works toward a world where the rights and dignity of all communities are respected and where healthy forests, a stable climate and wild biodiversity are protected and celebrated.

We are committed to doing what is necessary, not only what is considered politically feasible, to preserve rainforests, protect the climate, and uphold human rights.

Our commitment to fairness and equity demands that we treat each other, fellow activists, and community partners with honesty, respect and dignity and that we are accountable to these relationships.

We are committed to working with Indigenous communities and frontline communities directly impacted by profit-driven systems of injustice. We support the leadership of these communities in working on strategic and effective solutions to protect people and the planet.

We believe creativity, integrity and people power drive the success in our campaigns and in our organization; while compassion, irreverence, and a celebration of life’s possibilities drive the commitment to our mission.

We are a collaborative organization that challenges corporate power and exposes institutional systems of injustice in order to drive positive systemic change.

Rainforest Action Network

Our mission is to conserve and distribute seeds for future generations through seed conservation, education, and collaboration.

The Path is a non-profit organization housed on a 40-acre property in Estancia, New Mexico, where Grandmother Flordemayo’s Seed Temple and Sacred Temples for Humanity are built and cared for with your help. Thank you for your contribution and blessings of the day to you.

The Seed Temple is the realization of Grandmother Flordemayo’s original vision of a place where the sacred heritage seeds would be protected for future generations. It has existed since 2012 and has served as a source of seed for the local area, such as the Estancia Seed Library, as well as for many individuals in New Mexico and elsewhere. The many gatherings on the site have involved educational classes, sharing of seeds, and celebration of the spirituality carried in the seeds. Kindly note, we do not sell or otherwise monetize the seeds themselves.

Now more than ever it is important that we protect and increase our heritage seeds for the future and for our communities. Much of the diversity of seeds is being lost as fewer people are planting the original seeds, as modern agriculture has turned to genetically modified and patented seed to produce our crops.

The seeds in our collection have come from numerous donations of samples of traditional varieties of corn, beans, squash, grains, vegetables, and herbs. The Seed Temple is designed as a controlled environment that protects the viability of the seeds stored. From the Seed Temple, many kinds of seeds from our collection have been sent to volunteers who have helped grow and increase them, to keep them strong and to provide a stock source to distribute to others. Working to preserve these seeds gives us a sense of purpose and unity and fosters the relationships in community which are our true wealth.

The mission of The Path is to conserve and distribute seeds for future generations. We meet our mission through seed conservation, education, and collaboration with other organizations.

The Path

The power of law and the power of people in defense of human rights and the environment

EarthRights International (ERI) is a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that combines the power of law and the power of people in defense of human rights and the environment. We specialize in fact-finding, legal actions against perpetrators of earth rights abuses, training grassroots and community leaders, and advocacy campaigns. Through these strategies, ERI seeks to end earth rights abuses, to provide real solutions for real people, and to promote and protect human rights and the environment in the communities where we work.

EarthRights International

Harnessing the passion of the arts & the discipline of the sciences to co-create a sustainable future.