Resource: We Will Not Be Saved by Nemonte Nenquimo

“Mother Earth Is Not Asking To Be Saved; She’s Demanding To Be Respected”: Indigenous Activist Nemonte Nenquimo On Defending The Amazon.

Images Source Christopher Fragapane / Amazon Frontlines

A memoir of hope and resistance in the Amazon rainforest.

Reading We Will Not Be Saved was heartbreaking and shows how deeply human rights and environmental justice are tied together in the Amazon. Nemonte Nenquimo’s story reveals how her people’s land, rivers and ways of life were first undermined by missionaries, then by colonisers, and finally by extractive capitalism, all reshaping power in ways that robbed her community of agency and voice. The powerful memoir is about witnessessing, resisting, and reclaiming. Her intimate connection to the forest, her elders’ teachings, and her own grief turn into resolve, and ultimately into victory: leading her people in a courtroom triumph over Big Oil protecting vast tracts of rainforest. This memoir is heartbreaking and full of hope and possibility — that environmental rights are human rights, that protecting nature means protecting identity, culture, and dignity.

My climate work is centred in justice its my why - I’m fiercely, passionate about justice.

Learn more about me here.