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Speakers: Joe Lamb (Founder) and Jettie Word (Director)
The Borneo Project is one of the few rainforest advocacy groups in the United States working in Malaysian Borneo. Since its inception, the mission of The Borneo Project has been to assist the indigenous peoples of Sarawak and Sabah in their efforts to secure land rights, and to protect their forest. In an age when indigenous peoples everywhere are increasingly caught between the extremes of a worsening climate and an escalation in extractive industries, it is increasingly important for environmental groups to learn how to become good allies.
Joe Lamb is an arborist, writer, educator, and activist. He holds degrees in biology, ecology and filmmaking. His writing has been featured in Maxine Hong-Kingston’s Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace; in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart; and in numerous journals. Joe worked as hospital corpsman during the Vietnam War, built passive solar homes in New Mexico in the 1970’s, taught field ecology to grade school kids from Mexico City, and worked as a field organizer on the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Joe founded the Borneo Project in 1991 to bring attention to the plight of Borneo’s indigenous peoples and to the importance of their native customary land rights in the preservation of rainforests. Joe was featured as an “environmental hero” on the KQED program, Green Means.
Jettie Word has worked extensively with rural communities facing threats to their livelihoods and resources around the world. As a policy analyst with the Oakland Institute, Jettie supported community-initiated land rights campaigns in Papua New Guinea and Senegal. Before that, she worked for The Gage, providing food security assessments for community organizations in crisis situations. She has also worked for the International Budget Partnership, ACCION New Mexico, and the Nature Conservancy.