The original content of Democracy Now! Headlines appears under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License (United States). For more, including their other shows and media, visit www.democracynow.org. December 7, 2022 Indigenous Activists Interrupt Speech by Canadian PM Trudeau at U.N. Biodiversity Conference -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Montreal, Canada, the U.N. Biodiversity Conference, COP15, kicked off this week with a stark warning from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. Secretary-General António Guterres: "With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction. We are treating nature like a toilet, and ultimately we are committing suicide by proxy, because the loss of nature and biodiversity comes with a steep human cost, a cost we measure in lost jobs, hunger, diseases and deaths." Indigenous and environmental activists disrupted a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, holding up a banner that read "Indigenous genocide = ecocide. To save biodiversity, stop invading our lands." Meanwhile, a new report by Friends of the Earth reveals corporate interests have steered the writing of the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international conservation treaty. .