UN Silences Nature on Earth Day

After inviting rights of nature advocates to speak at the UN, bureaucrats manufacture a 'security breach' as an excuse to censor grassroots voices

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By Ben Price, CELDF Education Director

There is a beautiful premise behind the United Nations: the idea of people from varied cultures coming together, surpassing linguistic barriers, sharing ideas and perspectives, debating contentious topics, and working collaboratively towards coexistence on a shared planet.

This, unfortunately, is a fairy tale.

In the real world, the UN is a contested institution – a space in which empires project their power, where cutthroat diplomacy is employed to protect the interests of the wealthy, where endless debate leads to dead-ends more often than it leads to social change. The UN is where idealism goes to die.

On International Mother Earth Day, April 22, 2025, with the approval of the United Nations Secretary General and at the invitation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, 140 international advocates for the Rights of Nature convened for the first High-Level meeting of the UN’s Harmony with Nature and Living Well Programme.

There was no harmony and it did not go well.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development, a UN body dedicated to “sustainable development” announced the event, stating, “the meeting will feature an opening segment, a plenary segment, and a panel discussion. The panel discussion will discuss policies, practices, and related challenges in the promotion of healthy lifestyles and holistic approaches in harmony with nature that can contribute to implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Participants will consider four guiding questions:

• How can the ‘Harmony with Nature and the Living Well’ paradigm be further integrated into national, regional, and international sustainable development frameworks?

• What policy mechanisms and governance structures are needed to promote sustainability?

• What are the challenges in ensuring that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in Harmony with Nature?

• How can multilateral processes be strengthened to incorporate diverse knowledge systems, including Indigenous perspectives, in decision making?

At the opening of the morning conclave, Celinda Souza Lunda, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Plurinational State of Bolivia was introduced and he began with these prophetic words: “Thank you very much. International Day of the Mother Earth, it is not only a day to pronounce discourses or plant trees, it is a day to listen to the silence, the deep, deep, the world's darkness.” Little did we know that the silence and the darkness would be experienced first hand.

Rights of Nature champions came from great distances to speak at this meeting, including from Brazil, Poland, USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Netherlands, France, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Colombia, and had been credentialed and admitted by the UN Security and Safety Service. They were academics, students, NGOs, Indigenous people, scientists, and environmental professionals. I was among them, and had with me a prepared statement about a bill CELDF had drafted and which had recently been introduced into the New York State Assembly, the “Great Lakes and State Waters of New York Bill of Rights.” Our communications team had sent out a press release in advance, previewing what I would be talking about.

We listened from 10:00 am until 1:00 pm while Secretary General António Guterres gave opening statements and then relinquished the chair to moderator Ligia Noronha, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Head of the New York Office of the United Nations Environment Programme. She facilitated speeches by many national delegates gathered in the Trusteeship Council Chamber at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. When the last of the delegates had spoken, Ms. Noronha paused the proceedings for lunch, with notice to return for the afternoon session at 3:00 pm.

The silencing of dissent

With three hours in the afternoon (3:00 pm – 6:00 pm) allotted for the invited 20-30 Rights of Nature advocates to speak briefly (3 minute limit), moderator Ligia Noronha, without advance notice, broke from the official schedule and appropriated an hour of the advocates’ time, eliciting extended comments from four speakers at the head table who had already presented. In other words, those with power at the UN didn’t follow the plan. Then, ninety minutes before the session was scheduled to close, the moderator ended the meeting, denying all but one non-Rights of Nature affiliated UN visitor, seventeen year old Shane Lischin, the opportunity to speak. Shane was representing the DMUN Foundation, which, according to him, emphasizes “the importance of youth stakeholder participation in international decision-making to advance sustainable development.” And that was the anti-climactic end of the proceedings that had drawn people from around the world with an opportunity to speak truth to power about their work on behalf of the planet.

The only explanation offered by Ligia Noronha for censoring Nature’s rights advocates was that she had no choice but to follow the rules of the Secretary General. New rules, apparently, that had just been issued in her earphone. But the rules for the high level meeting had been set in a UN resolution adopted by the General Assembly in December 2024. The last minute change of plans might have been challenged by the Bolivian delegate, who had invited the speakers from civil society, but he was called out of the session by the office of the Secretary General prior to the moderator closing the meeting prematurely,, and so was not there to intervene to halt the travesty.

At an off-site debriefing meeting the following day, April 23rd, marine biologist and executive director of The Leatherback Project, Callie Veelenturf, who was the only Rights of Nature proponent seated at the head table to the moderator’s right, shared her observations of what happened leading up to the unceremonious silencing of Nature’s advocates.

A manufactured security breach

Just before the moderator announced there would be no more speakers, Veelenturf reported that “She [the moderator] was writing messages to me. …. And at one point, she wrote the word ‘Republicans’ on a piece of paper. I couldn't read the rest of what her note was, because I couldn't read her handwriting. but she wrote something about Republicans and the president of the General Assembly just being really careful and cautious. And she said that they ‘didn't know who everyone was.’ They said that ‘nobody was registered.’ They said ‘it was a breach of security.’ They didn't know how you had passed into the event. And that they were looking into this major breach of security. . .”

This, of course, was completely made up. Each invited participant had been issued a “3RD FLR ACCESS TRUSTEESHIP” pass which on its reverse side reads: “This access pass is produced and issued by the United Nations Security and Safety Service.” The UN site for registration to attend the Harmony with Nature event states: “Please note that if you hold a UN grounds pass, you may proceed directly to the venue and do not need to register.” All invited participants were expected to arrive two days in advance of the high-level meeting in New York to receive security credentials allowing entrance to the UN on Tuesday, April 22 for the event. This credentialing meeting included an airport-style security checkpoint which scanned all participants, checked for their floor access passes, and checked IDs.

Veelenturf continued, “. . . the man to the left of the moderator wouldn't make eye contact with me because I think he knew I was pushing… he just kept saying, ‘the president [of the UN General Assembly] said no. The president said no.’ …I was getting a little desperate at that point. I just couldn't fathom the fact that you all would have come and wouldn't be able to share your story. And then after the panel was over, the — [representative] from the office of the president of the General Assembly… told me that because everyone wasn't registered, they wouldn't be able to speak. And that's when I texted Maria at first. It's like, ‘this is not possible. Can you do something from your end?’ ... It felt like a major injustice.”

At the announcement that invited guests would not be allowed to speak, a drone of “boooos!” filled the balcony where we were seated. Security guards stepped into the aisles threateningly, and as UN representatives vacated the space, Nature’s advocates congregated to muse about what had just happened.

“They want this to fail”

At the April 23 debrief session at the Norwegian Church in New York City, where Callie Veelenturf shared what she saw on Earth Day, Maria Mercedes Sanchez, the retired 30 year head of the United Nations Harmony with Nature Programme said, “There are many indications that they want this to fail.”

It seemed an ironic statement to me, because this program has been locked in cyclical bureaucracy for nearly two decades. Since its inception in 2009, the UN’s Harmony with Nature program has met annually. In its inaugural year, the UN General Assembly proclaimed International Mother Earth Day (A/RES/63/278), and beginning in 2011 the meetings were designated as annual “interactive dialogues.” For fifteen years they engaged in dialogue. Fourteen yearly resolutions were adopted to hold subsequent annual meetings. In other words, the only outcome was to talk more. Finally, in 2024 something new was proposed.

The UN General Assembly, at its 79th session, adopted the fourteenth resolution on Harmony with Nature (A/RES/79/210), which requested the President of the General Assembly to “convene. . . a one-day high-level meeting on Harmony with Nature and Living Well to be held on 22 April 2025 at the plenary meetings during the commemoration of International Mother Earth Day, with participation of the United Nations system and multi-stakeholder participation from independent experts, civil society, academia and other relevant stakeholders, in particular Indigenous Peoples and local communities, that continues to reinforce multilateralism through the discussion of alternative holistic approaches based on diverse world views that may contribute to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Now that meeting has come to nothing, as seems likely too for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which calls for a “summit” – still a world away from an actual decision by the General Assembly to actually DO anything. Despite Maria Sanchez’ best efforts over the years, based as they were on trust in the UN’s good faith engagement with her program, there seems little doubt that hopes for its success were one-sided.

For fourteen years CELDF has known about the interactive dialogs, and chosen to not attend. Our reasons are these:

1. The United Nations has yet to demonstrate its utility in addressing global crises. Its most powerful members hold trump cards to override consensus and majority decisions.

2. From the top of the pyramid there is no way to go but down. We think it makes more sense to work with the people, not their oppressors’ enablers, and complicit institutions. We believe in grassroots change led by everyday people.

Many representatives of UN member states spoke a lot of words on Earth Day, but they rang hollow. And the words of those grassroots advocates who came to give voice to the suffering of Earth’s biosphere and its human members were silenced. A complaint was filed with the Bolivian UN delegation about the incident, in which the authors stated that “It is our hope that the offices of the UN addressed in the letter will take the matter seriously and will act to ensure Stakeholders will not be excluded from participation at future meetings.” But a plurality of us silenced Nature advocates expressed disinterest in this approach, choosing instead a dignified exit and a reassessment of whether to return in the future after this institutional slap in the face.

For all the years of the Harmony with Nature program's interactive dialogues, and the fact that the UN condescended to allow them to continue, year after year, but drew the line at the “high-level meeting,” what can we learn? I suggest it is this: symbolic gains cannot be the centerpiece of our efforts to protect our communities and our ecosystems. Official platforms to speak from are only elevated by the powerful to the degree that they legitimize but do not challenge power. It is time to withdraw that legitimacy and to confront power by turning our attention away from false instruments of diplomatic change like the UN and towards the people.

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Ben G. Price is the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s education director, with twenty years of experience organizing communities across the country to challenge state and federal legalization of corporate assaults against people and their environments. He pioneered Rights of Nature legislation in the United States and assisted scores of communities to enact rights-protecting laws. Ben is the author of several books, including “How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property” and “Wouldn’t You Say? A Collection of Essays About Environmental and Community.”