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The Marshall Islands face dual threats from the legacy of U.S. nuclear testing and the advancing impacts of climate change, creating an urgent struggle for justice and survival.

On this episode of Breaking Green we are going to speak with Shem Livai.

Shem Livai is a Director at Marshalls Energy Company in the Marshall Islands. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Leadership for Innovation and Change from the University of the Virgin Islands, he has an MBA from the University of the South Pacific, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Hawai‘i.

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Panganga Pungowiyi, an Indigenous mother and climate geoengineering organizer from Sibokuk in the Dena'ina Islands, shares her community's historical trauma and resistance against experimental climate technologies deployed without consent. Her powerful testimony reveals how colonial patterns of exploitation continue today through geoengineering experiments that ignore Indigenous sovereignty and knowledge systems.

• Military contamination during the Cold War left lasting environmental damage and health impacts including cancer and Parkinson's disease
• Climate geoengineering experiments are being conducted in Indigenous territories without free, prior and informed consent
• Researchers spread silica beads on Arctic ice
• Carbon capture technologies primarily benefit fossil fuel companies through enhanced oil recovery rather than addressing climate change
• Indigenous cosmovision views humans as part of nature, not above it, making ecosystem manipulation fundamentally problematic
• Outside researchers fail to understand Arctic ecosystems, where ice movement and marine life cycles would be disrupted by interventions
• True climate solutions require addressing oppression and restoring Indigenous rights rather than technological quick-fixes

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The Mapuche people of Chile are fighting to reclaim ancestral lands taken over by vast industrial eucalyptus and pine plantations established during the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s. Their struggle goes beyond land ownership—it's about reclaiming culture, spirituality, language, and food sovereignty while facing criminalization under Chile's new "usurpation law."

• Mapuche territory (Wallmapu) was initially protected by treaty but later seized through what the Chilean government called "pacification of the Araucanía"
• Industrial tree plantations have destroyed native ecosystems, depleted water resources, and created conditions for devastating "megafires" and "gigafires"
• Chilean authorities use "preventative prison" to hold Mapuche activists for up to two years without formal charges or trials
• Militarization of Mapuche territories has led to surveillance, intimidation, and targeting of young activists
• The controversial "usurpation law" criminalizes land reclamation efforts, violating international indigenous rights agreements Chile has ratified
• The struggle connects to broader patterns of indigenous land theft for industrial tree plantations under dictatorships globally
• Land reclamation is essential for Mapuche cultural revival and addressing extreme poverty

On this episode of Breaking Green, we spoke with Anne Petermann. Petermann co- founded Global Justice Ecology Project in 2003. She is the international coordinator of the Campaign to STOP GE Trees, which she also co founded. Petermann is a founding board member of the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series. She has been involved in movements for forest protection and indigenous rights since 1991, and the international and national climate justice movements since 2004. She participated in the founding of the Durban group for climate justice in 2004, in Durban, South Africa, and Climate Justice Now in 2007 at the Bali Indonesia UN climate conference. She was adopted as an honorary member of the St. Francis- Sokoki band of the Abenaki in 1992 for her work in support of their struggle for state recognition. In 2000, she received the wild nature award for activist of the year.

Photo by Orin Langelle.

For more information visit: https://globaljusticeecology.org/brazil-2023/

This podcast is produced by Global Justice Ecology Project.

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