On the morning of Sept. 24, I joined a coalition of indigenous leaders and climate activists to deliver a letter from the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), as well as more than 260,000 petition signatures from Daily Kos and several other organizations’ community members to BlackRock, Inc.’s headquarters in New York City. BlackRock, despite its seemingly benign name, is actually the world's largest investment firm, with more money invested in fossil fuels and Amazon deforestation than any other company in the world.
The Amazon forest continues to burn with the encouragement of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, even as world leaders converged in New York City for the United Nations Climate Summit and as an unprecedented number of youth demand climate justice across the globe. We made sure that BlackRock employees, as well as passerby on the street, heard our rallying cry: “BlackRock, end your complicity in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous communities’ homes by divesting from deforesters.”
The petition delivery was just the latest in what was a hellacious month for BlackRock. On Sept. 17, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben published a New Yorker article making the case for targeting bad corporate actors, specifically naming BlackRock as one of the worst offenders. Additionally, several other news sites published exposés on BlackRock shareholders’ horrible voting records on company-wide climate and environmental resolutions, which was first made public through Majority Action’s 2019 corporate complicity report.
Even before that, on Aug. 30 Amazon Watch, Friends of the Earth, and Profundo published a report which concludes that BlackRock pumps more money into the companies most responsible for rainforest destruction than any other investor. BlackRock is also the world's largest institutional investor in coal, coal-fired utilities, and oil and gas corporations.
One of the petition’s key demands is that BlackRock divest from companies that are responsible for Amazon deforestation. While we didn’t get assurance from BlackRock employees that they will divest, they definitely heard the voices of our communities loud and clear.
Business cannot continue as usual while communities continue to experience death and displacement as a result of BlackRock’s misdeeds. Dinamam Tuxá, executive coordinator of APIB, has spoken about the importance of “(p)rotests that raise global awareness on the true impacts of (BlackRock’s) financing are very important, because they show how it drives deforestation, the destruction of indigenous lands, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. We need to understand who is behind these environmental crimes. Without public exposure these realities could go unnoticed.”
As the Amazon rainforest (affectionately known as the ‘lungs of the Earth’) continues to burn and indigenous communities are displaced, it is important for the international community to continue to show up for the Amazon, support indigneous-led organizations, and call out the bad actors responsible for the destruction—like BlackRock and Bolsonaro.
Want to learn more about BlackRock’s dirty business? Check out https://www.blackrocksbigproblem.com/.