When Colombia entered its post-civil war transitional justice process, the investigatory magistrates sought to recognize me as a victim in Case 001 of their truth and recognition chamber. Their invitation came 20 years to the day after we found the bodies of my partner Terence Unity Freitas and his mentor-colleagues Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaiian). They were kidnapped and murdered in 1999 upon exiting Indigenous U’wa territory in northeastern Colombia, near land then coveted by a U.S. oil company.

Gingerly Terence’s mother and I breathed life into our questions long dormant about the role of Occidental Petroleum at the time of the murders in that part of Colombia, where oil pipelines have always been a magnet for armed violence. We wondered if finally we had found a forum robust enough to hold the weight of our inquiry.

The answer was no. The reason was a failure of imagination exacerbated by procedural capture. We can learn from Colombia’s mistakes.

As our own democracy falters, and the backbone of domestic federal environmental, climate, and civil rights protections breaks, it is time for us to look to the instruction Indigenous societies like Pueblo U’wa in Colombia offer for procedural guidance.

For Pueblo U’wa, oil is the blood of the Earth and the Earth is our mother. To sustain life, they say, we have to keep the oil in the ground. For the U’wa, it’s not about a sustainable development framework, or weighing interests among stakeholders. Rather, for the U’wa, the purpose of human life is to maintain equilibrium between the world below the surface of the Earth, and the world above, where we live our daily lives.

The Pueblo U’wa maintain this equilibrium through song: Songs that last days. Songs that every U’wa child learns. Songs that tell stories of our interdependence with the rivers, mountains, forests, oceans from which we come and to which we are beholden for planetary survival. In a letter home to a friend shortly before his murder, Terence observed, “this is the reason we are doing this work, so that people can listen to singing.” Defending the space for the song’s narrative defends people’s access to remembering who they are, a key to bold action. For life to sustain, the voice of the song must remain inviolate.

In the transitional justice process, Colombia considered an oil company to be a third party to the armed conflict. Although investigation of the role of third parties had originally been part of the envisioned charge, the judicial decision that finalized the investigatory scope of the truth and recognition chamber eliminated it. Business elites had ensured that third parties such as multinational resource extraction corporations were excluded from investigation.

In Terence’s notebooks, he meditated on the voice of silence in the U’wa people’s resistance to oil extraction in their territory. “Where is the voice of silence? Of women? Of children? Of the communities that cannot speak publicly about opposition to petrol?” He wondered about the relationship between silence and fear. His final note regarded the silence of “the sound of the stumps cut during seismic line studies.” In U’wa territory, Terence contemplated the narrative that silence elicits. In relegating corporations like Occidental Petroleum to third-party status, Colombia designed the truth and recognition chamber in a manner that restricted the range of stories that could be safely elicited. The narrative of silence was thus harder to hear. The sound of the stumps cut during seismic line studies did not ring out in the chamber. Earth itself was also rendered a third party, peripheral to the deliberations.

We are familiar with this playbook of course; it is, after all, our own corporations and those doing their bidding who are wreaking havoc on democratic institutions both abroad and here at home. But for a future to be possible, the truth demands that we move these so-called third parties—the corporations, the voices of community, and the not-so-silent voice of the Earth—out of the periphery and into the center of our vision.

As our institutions are eviscerated, we can take heart and reconstitute ourselves around a recent judicial ruling that did just that. In a case that Pueblo U’wa has diligently pursued since before the 1999 murders, the highest human rights court in the hemisphere—the Inter-American Court of Human Rights—just ruled in the community’s favor. Especially in this moment when everything tells us the opposite, Caso U’wa signals a course correction that we would do well to hear and amplify: For a livable planet, time’s up on the narrative of fossil fuel extraction as economic panacea.

In the context of the climate crisis, Caso U’wa highlights the importance of ancestral knowledge and the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination in the face of extractive projects that threaten their existence.

In the battle of competing narratives for our collective future, Pueblo U’wa played the long game and won. I have to believe that, in the end, we will, too. In these preposterous times, this is the collective pivot we make now to step forward into the livable climate future we know is possible.

Abby Reyes’ memoir, Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, is available now through Penguin Random House: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645675/truth-demands-by-abby-reyes/

About the Author

Abby Reyes

Abby Reyes began her career with rural environmental legal assistance in the Philippines, her father’s homeland, and walking alongside the Colombian U’wa Indigenous pueblo for dignity against big oil. As an environmental and human rights lawyer, she directs community resilience at University of California Irvine, supporting community-academic partnerships to accelerate community-owned just transition solutions.

Reyes is also a lecturer at UC Irvine School of Law.

A graduate of Stanford University and UC Berkeley Law, she is a partner of the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners and recently stepped down from the board of directors of EarthRights International after nearly a decade.

By Rodney V Salm

Rodney Salm takes us on a 55-year journey that began as a boy in Moçambique through a life of extreme adventure spent in and under the ocean in polar regions and tropical seas, but principally among coral reefs in far-flung places. He chronicles his transition from plundering seas to conserving their precious bounty.

In those early years when there were no rules and the resulting freedom liberating, Rod drew heavily on self-reliance built from camping in the bush and along beaches. He learned to live off the sea, often sharing his speared fishes with sharks that harassed him as he hunted for his next meal.

During the first decades of his career, Rod worked alone under the seas and across deserts in foreign lands, learning his limits, encountering danger, and checking off another of his nine lives. This lifestyle exposed him to adventure and discovery, different people and beliefs systems, and engaging legends. In his own words: “I fell inextricably in love with the underwater world, especially corals, and came to realise that the damage done to them by humans around the world is not necessarily fatal or final. Coral reefs are vital living organisms, well able to recover from most harm humans and the climate can do to them. They just need to be given the chance.” That theme lies at the core of the enthusiasm and messages Rod shares in this book.

Crammed with adventure, pioneering conservation achievements, and field science, Rod chronicles the many challenges that often plagued but never deterred him. Even as heat stress resulting from global warming caused mass coral bleaching and mortality and confounded reef managers and scientists, he led the charge to find ways to address the issue. Again, in his own words: “In 1989 Oman was where the seed of reef resilience was planted in my mind. In 1998 Kenya and Seychelles were where it was watered. And in 1999 it germinated in Palau.” The result was adoption of resilience as an organising principle for coral reef conservation, first in Palau and over time around the world.

The book concludes with a firsthand account of Rod’s development of a groundbreaking method for rapid assessment and enhancement of coral health and resilience to address the challenges of climate change.

Combining vivid storytelling with practical insights, the book aims to inspire scientists, students, and nature enthusiasts—showing that science can be thrilling, adventurous, and impactful. It leaves us optimistic that we can take action to safeguard coral communities and enhance their resilience to global change.

To order the book, please check with your local bookstore, or online at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

About the Author

Rodney V Salm

Although now officially retired, I continue to pursue practical methods for the application of resilience principles to coral conservation. I am a member of the scientific advisory board of the Coral Triangle Center and emeritus adviser to The Nature Conservancy Micronesia Marine Program. In recent years I led a coral health and resilience assessment for African Parks in the Bazaruto Archipelago National Park in Mozambique and continue to provide training to the Coral Triangle Center team and partners in rapid coral health and resilience assessments.

In Reefs of Time, geoscientist and writer Lisa Gardiner ventures into the fossilized past of coral reefs to illuminate the urgent questions of their future. This compelling new release from Princeton University Press arrives at a moment when the world’s coral ecosystems are teetering under the weight of climate change, pollution, and overexploitation. Gardiner’s approach is both scientific and lyrical, weaving together cutting-edge research and personal fieldwork into a narrative that is as illuminating as it is moving.

Rather than dwell solely on the devastation facing reefs today, Gardiner takes readers to the “shallow end of deep time,” ancient epochs when reefs adapted to shifting seas and temperatures. From these remnants, she distills stories of endurance and transformation. The fossil record becomes not just a window into the past but a guidebook for the path forward.

Her storytelling spans continents and millennia. Readers follow Gardiner through tropical locales, where she and fellow researchers decipher the cryptic signatures etched into coral limestone. These reef remnants, some older than the dinosaurs, hold clues about how coral communities once survived dramatic environmental upheaval and how they might do so again.

Praise for Reefs of Time reflects the resonance of Gardiner’s message. Nancy Bent of Booklist describes it as “lessons from the past [that] may help save corals for the future.” Science writer Juli Berwald calls it “an elegant, urgent, and ultimately hopeful message about why our past matters so much to our future,” while Riley Black hails it as “a delight” that blends science, history, and poetic observation.

At its core, Reefs of Time is a meditation on resilience. It reframes the story of coral reefs not as one of inevitable loss, but as one of possibility if we are willing to act, and act with knowledge. It speaks to scientists, educators, policymakers, and readers who care about life beneath the waves.

Reefs of Time will be released June 10 by Princeton University Press. It is a standout contribution to marine literature, offering clarity and hope in the face of one of our era’s most pressing environmental challenges.

Learn more or pre-order the book here: Princeton University Press: Reefs of Time

About the Author

Lisa S. Gardiner is a science writer, geoscientist, and educator. She is the author of Tales from an Uncertain World: What Other Assorted Disasters Can Teach Us about Climate Change. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as the Atlantic, Hakai Magazine, and Scientific American.