With all eyes on COP26, calls for the abandonment of state-sponsored extractivism have taken center stage. It is now clear that new oil, gas, and coal developments cannot be allowed to continue if we are to stay within safe climate limits. Despite this, it is estimated that the fossil fuel industry receives $11 million in subsidies every minute.

This growing call has historical legacies in local resistance to corporate land grabs; over the past decade alone, indigenous-led resistance in the United States and Canada has prevented the equivalent of a quarter of those countries’ annual emissions. As a consequence, the complicity of fossil fuel giants like Chevron and Shell in human rights violations globally is becoming increasingly visible — an issue which gained international attention in 1995 in the case of the Ogoni Nine.

Twenty-six years ago, the Ogoni Nine were executed by the Nigerian dictatorship after a campaign of resistance against Shell’s pursuit of profit at the expense of their community. The fight for environmental justice continues to be an international struggle against corporate exploitation, and today we should honor the activists whose resistance cost them their lives.