This is the speech I delivered during the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Global Assembly 2025 in Jakarta, Indonesia, 17-21 February 2025. When I received the invitation couple months back, I realised that this event could be a platform for me to echo the elephant in the room: uncomfortable topics which many has been avoiding….
Tag: Green Energy Transition
Consent Denied: The Hidden Cost of Geothermal Dreams
The air around Poco Leok carries an unsettling silence. The kind that echoes between the slopes of hills where ancestral spirits are said to roam, where rituals of planting and harvest are not just seasonal but cosmological cycles anchoring life to the land. This silence now stretches not from tranquillity but from tension — an…
Why Mining Will Never Be Sustainable? And Why Responsible Mining Is Our Only Path Forward (Part 1)
For over two decades, I have seen many Indigenous communities whose lands have been scarred by mining. From Buyat Bay in North Sulawesi, where Newmont Minahasa Raya poisoned the waters with mercury and arsenic, to Timika in West Papua, where Freeport McMorran’s operations have turned sacred lands into a wasteland. I have seen firsthand the…