From our Winter edition - Acting Out: Arts and Culture Under Pressure - is out on 1st December. Subscribe now and get two print editions a year delivered straight to your door for €8: www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/subscribe-or...

Despite this pressure, the Serena community has so far managed to fend off mining. Their resistance shows that another future is possible. Supporting their struggles represents a commitment to protecting life itself, because Indigenous people are the primary guardians of our earth.

Faced with this destruction, the women have turned to crafting jewellery and ceramics as alternative income. They dream to build a tourist lodge in the land, offering a different economic path that honours their culture and allows them to share it with visitors.

Mining brings narcotraffickers, prostitution, drug addiction, and violence to Indigenous areas. Women suffer disproportionately: they are exposed to toxic chemicals through household chores, struggle to farm contaminated land, and face increased domestic violence linked to alcoholism.

And that is not all. Under right-wing President Daniel Noboa, Ecuador has actively promoted extractive industries. His administration eliminated the Ministry of the Environment, transferring its functions to the Ministry of Energy and Mines and implementing policies that accelerated extraction.

Started as 14 women in 2020 has grown to reach nearly the entire community. They face constant pressure from illegal miners, private companies, criminal groups exploiting the gold trade. In the city of Tena, pro-mining demonstrators once broke their placards and issued threats against them.

⭐This article is featured in Acting Out: Arts and Culture Under Pressure - our Winter print edition out on 1st December.
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🟢Narrating the Amazon - how storytelling can awaken Western consciences to the environmental crisis in the region.
🌐Free Together - ecology as a way to unify societies divided by politics that serves the individual.
Read the latest issue: bit.ly/Culture-Afte...

When the arts are reduced to economic output, we lose sight of culture as a shared symbolic space where societies interpret their place in the world. Reclaiming this space requires supporting local cultural ecosystems and resisting extractive technologies that weaken artistic and civic life.

As a result, the UK government is now asking the cultural sector to feed its archives into AI systems in the name of national competitiveness, as a condition for receiving public funding.

The optimism of the early creative economy has dissolved. With cheap housing, public education, and strong civic institutions gone, cultural work has become precarious, with a handful of corporations dominating production.

✍️Hugo Dos Santos, full story on our website: www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/bulgarias-tr...

These activists share one conviction: ecology is the path to reclaim their city. They studied abroad, saw what was possible, and came home to build it themselves. United, they believe, they would be even stronger.

Nikola Bonchev created Drujba Garden, an urban garden run horizontally by 80 residents who grow their own food. Former industrial wastelands are now becoming biodiversity hotspots, like the Kremikovtsi mine, now Bulgaria’s deepest lake.

In the Boyana neighbourhood, residents like Aneliya K. are fighting to save the city’s last natural wetland from developers. “We will stand our ground,” she says, after years of legal battles and grassroots activism.