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In Part 2 of our special broadcast, we look at a recent victory for Indigenous communities in Ecuador, where people overwhelmingly voted to approve a referendum last year banning future oil extraction in a biodiverse section of the Amazon’s Yasuní National Park — a historic referendum result that will protect Indigenous Yasuní land from development. But the newly elected president, Daniel Noboa, has said Ecuador is at war with gang violence and that the country is “not in the same situation as two years ago.” Noboa has said oil from the Yasuní National Park could help fund that war against drug cartels. Environmental activists and Indigenous peoples say they’re concerned about his comments because their victory had been hailed as an example of how to use the democratic process to leave fossil fuels in the ground. “Amazonian women are at the frontlines of defense,” says Nemonte Nenquimo, an award-winning Waorani leader in the Ecuadorian Amazon who co-founded Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance. Her recent piece for The Guardian is headlined “Ecuador’s president won’t give up on oil drilling in the Amazon. We plan to stop him — again.” Nemonte has just published her new memoir titled We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People. We also speak with her co-author and partner, Mitch Anderson, who is the founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines and has long worked with Indigenous nations in the Amazon to defend their rights.

In this special broadcast, we begin with an extended interview with Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha about the situation in Gaza and his new book of poetry titled Forest of Noise. He fled Gaza in December after being detained by the Israeli military, but many of his extended family members were unable to escape. He reads a selection of poems from Forest of Noise, while sharing the stories of friends and family still struggling to survive in Gaza, as well as those he has lost, including the late poet Refaat Alareer. He also describes his experiences in Gaza in the first months of the war, including being displaced from his home and abducted by the Israeli military, noting that the neighborhood in Jabaliya refugee camp that his family first evacuated to last year was bombed by the Israeli military just days ago. “Sometimes I want to stop writing because I’m repeating the same words, even though the situation is worse. The language is helpless,” Abu Toha says. “Why does the world make us feel helpless?”

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The Winter 2024 issue of YES! Magazine has hit newsstands and landed in mail boxes around the country. It’s the last issue of the year and the last issue before Donald Trump’s second term begins.

Maya Schewar and Kim Wilson have co-edited a new book called We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition.