This project will support critical reporting on Indigenous frontline environmental defenders in Mexico.
Recognized by the United Nations Environment Program, Mexico stands among the seven most biodiverse countries in the Americas, with over half its land under Indigenous communal ownership. Despite Indigenous people constituting less than 5% of the global population, they steward an estimated 80% of the Earth's biodiversity, underscoring the significance of their ancestral traditions, knowledge, and ways of life in biodiversity conservation.
Led by award-winning author and journalist Anjan Sundaram, this project will spotlight the incredible stories and efforts of Indigenous environmental defenders in both Mexican and international mainstream media. It will highlight the challenges and strategies of these defenders in protecting their communities and ecosystems, focusing on their crucial role in preserving Mexico's rich biodiversity amidst substantial economic, security, and governmental pressures.
By increasing media visibility, this project will help safeguard these defenders and their traditional ways of life, contributing to the conservation of Mexico's biodiversity.
Anjan Sundaram is an award-winning author, journalist, and television presenter whose war correspondence has won a Frontline Club Award and a Reuters prize. Hailed as a ‘successor to Kapuscinski,’ his previous books are Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship (an Amazon Book of the Year) and Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo (a Royal African Society Book of the Year). Sundaram has reported from Central Africa for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer, Granta, Foreign Policy, Politico, and The Associated Press. His books have been featured by Christiane Amanpour and Fareed Zakaria on CNN, by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week and Start the Week. Sundaram graduated from Yale University and holds a PhD in Journalism and Literature from the University of East Anglia.
Recent articles
Carnegie Endowment policy article about protecting Mexico’s environmental defenders
Vox article about indigenous activists risking their lives for butterflies
LA Times article about Mexico’s indigenous environmental defenders
New York Review of Books article on a contaminated township in Argentina
Granta magazine article on the demise of democracy in Cambodia
New York Times front-page article on Western support for post-colonial dictators
Foreign Policy article on why global conflicts go unreported
Democracy Now interview with Amy Goodman on conflict reporting
