We have a draft Feminist Principle of the internet on Environment! Thanks to Sursiendo who hosted an FPI Convening on the environment where participants drafted this text for us to collectively and collaboratively comment on, expand, imagine and dream into this principle.

We will be organising online convenings throughout 2023 as well as asking folx to discuss wherever you meet and send feedback and input.

We are also curious about the language of 'naming' "environment". Does your community use a different term, such as "earth justice"? What language do you use?

To send your responses or if you want to know more about our upcoming processes (read more below!), write here: ftx@apcwomen.org

An FPI on the environment will provide a framework for women's movements to articulate and explore issues related to technology, digital rights and the environment. Linked to this, there will be a way forward mapped to bring this text to life through engaging in spaces where we can influence policy, donor advocacy, public awareness and build momentum for collective action to actively shift the devastating impacts of the technology industry on the earth. The astounding and devastating impact on the Earth is yet another form of extractive colonialism.

APC WRP is rooting its work on environmental justice in APC's Environmental Sustainability initiative and in collaboration with APC members, allies and partners. Our work centres the importance of the feminist politics and practice of the internet and ICTs in feminist movement building, our focus in feminist environmental and earth justice work, is on the internet and digital rights. In recent years it has become clear that the work with the internet and technology is having a massive impact on people, through gendered disinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting climate justice activists, to fake news from climate denialists, to attacks on territorial defenders{ digital and physical bodies. Here, digital devices and the internet are clearly implicated as massively contributing to violence on people’s bodies and on the Earth. Lack of access to the internet and related news and resources about the climate emergency mirrors those who have no or insufficient internet connectivity. At the front lines of resisting extractive industries and defending territories are women and girls with all their diverse identities as well as gender non-conforming and non-binary people. These diverse identities exacerbate the threats they face.

At the same time, we want to work with ways of building and imagining alternative infrastructures which respect people and the Earth and which see an internet which is not extractive, breaks with the capitalist extractive model in technology and createa and enhances systems which centre the inter-connectedness of people and the Earth. As feminists, we aim to centre care, play and pleasure at the core of our work. So while resisting patriarchal, colonial and capitalist systems, we are simultaneously imagining and building alternative systems of connection and communication which, as far as possible, care for the Earth and acknowledge the connectedness of all life.

2023 for APC WRP on FPI on Environment:

(1.) Gather feminists, digital rights activists and organisations working on land and environmental justice, the internet and extractives to give input on the FPI on the environment and explore ways of integrating this into wider environmental justice discussions and actions. This will happen at various events, both regional and global, such as Digital Rights Asia-Pacific 2023 in late May 2023, a pre-event at RightsCon on infrastructures of care and the environment in early June 2023

(2.) In partnership with members and allies, we will develop a facilitated process and online convenings, where we will present the draft FPI and create space for engagement with this, see what is missing and finalise the text. These online convenings will be designed as an adapted open space where topics related to the environment are identified, prioritised, and discussed collectively.

(3.) Working with allies and partners, use small grants for local convenings on environment/Earth Justice in order to hold space for cross-movement building locally between feminist movement, digital rights activists, environmental defenders to build collaboration and resilience and to imagine a way forward together.