The Weekly Anthropocene Interviews: Etelle Higonnet, Knight for Humanity

A chat with a lifelong campaigner for human rights and environmental progress

Etelle Higonnet

Etelle Higonnet is a lifelong campaigner for human rights and environmental protection. She has worked at Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Human Rights Law Institute, the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, UNICEF, Greenpeace Southeast Asia, Mighty Earth, Waxman Strategies, and the National Wildlife Foundation. Ms. Higonnet is particularly known for her work on uncovering war crimes in Central America and West Africa and leading global campaigns to improve sustainability and labor rights in the cacao, coffee, rubber and palm oil supply chains,

She is also an actual, literal knight, having been named a Chevalier of France’s Ordre national du Mérite (National Order of Merit) by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019.

A lightly edited transcript of this exclusive interview follows. This writer’s questions and remarks are in bold, Ms. Higonnet’s responses are in regular type. Bold italics and image captions are clarifications and extra information added after the interview.

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Ms. Higonnet, it is a great honor to to have you with us. And there are many, many things I want to talk about from the many fascinating facets of your career. One of the chronologically first that I want to talk about is your work uncovering the Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s in Latin America, part of the broader theme of U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships in Latin America through Operation Condor and stuff like that. And that was awful, obviously, that was heinous, that was a Cold War atrocity.

But one thing that made me as an American feel really hopeful and proud was when in Brazil last year, as I'm sure you saw, the Biden administration actually worked really hard to prevent a right-wing coup d'etat [by warning the Brazilian army not to indulge Bolsonaro’s attempts to steal the election], as opposed to enabling them, as the Reagan administration habitually did. So could you talk about how in the sweep of your career, how you've seen sort of that change and eventual reversal in the U.S. approach to Latin America?

I have a special place in my heart for that moment you described where the Biden Administration prevented a coup in Brazil. My husband is Brazilian, and we were deeply disturbed when some of his own family were in support of the proposed [pro-Bolsonaro] coup, it gave me deep insight into how complex and tormented the political situation is and how easy it would have been for things to go a different direction. So a moment of huge relief and hope and as you said, kind of beauty that we just experienced.

And I think as you pointed out, Sam, it's very different from how things were during the Cold War, when the US was actually supporting and arming and backing a number of right-wing military dictatorships. Most notoriously, the US supported Pinochet. What happened in Guatemala really is especially atrocious, even by the standards of the depravity and violence of the dirty wars of Latin America. In a nutshell, there was a genocide that was carried out with the knowledge of the U.S. government at the time.

I worked in Guatemala, and that was my first ever really serious human rights job, as a very young person. I did have a brush with a chap in an all-black outfit with a flak jacket and a ski mask on the Dia del Ejercito, the day of the army, who I assume was part of the death squads, who came to the office I was an intern at, the NCORD office. The National Coordinating Office for Returned Refugees and Displaced People. It was helping resettle folks who had fled during the genocide after the peace accords were signed. And it was a great honor for me to be part of that organization. But frankly, terrifying as a young person to see that level of menace and intimidation right outside a leading human rights organization. Even though the peace accords were signed by that point, it brought to my mind how precarious democracy can be, and how deep the legacy of violence can run. I saw somebody killed in the neighborhood where I was living, and I never found out why.

But it was a real eye opener for me to work in the field at a time when there was the beginning of a reckoning for all the atrocities that had been carried out during the genocide and the dirty war in Guatemala. And that spurred me, you know, years later to publish this book. I was very grateful and lucky to have a foreword by Rigoberta Menchú, who is a Nobel Prize winner, and I think a heroine for human rights.

I think the Guatemalan experience I had, meeting people like Mrs. Menchú and being able to be a very small part of these big beautiful efforts to build peace and to find some measure of accountability in the face of impunity, these things inspired me and set me on a path for my whole life of doing human rights work later. You know, in the Caribbean and in West Africa and Iraq and Lebanon and in Southeast Asia, and going from human rights work to human rights and environmental work as I sort of broadened my consciousness and realized how much climate issues are intertwined with human rights.

Well, thank you. That's a fascinating and passionate and powerful summary. Can you give like a snapshot of what's happening in Guatemala now? Because I'm a huge geopolitics nerd, as you can probably tell from the general tone of my newsletter. I like the recent election with the Movimiento Semilla, it looks like it's a shot at anti-corruption reforms and also maybe addressing some of the ongoing issues with climate change causing trouble for small scale agriculture. Can you like summarize sort of where Guatemala stands now?

Movimiento Semilla supporters

In a nutshell, there was recently a progressive presidential victory in Guatemala. It’s a bit complicated. There’s been legal challenges, allegations of irregulations, but this progressive candidate who won, Bernardo Arevalo, I think is a game-changer and represents for me this arc of hope that you see in a number of places in Latin America. We saw Lula being elected in Brazil, replacing Bolsonaro. There’s been movements across the Southern Cone for more women’s rights.

We’re very hopefully this is going to be the beginning of big, beautiful climate action in Guatemala, which is very hard hit by desertification.

There's been, for a long time in Guatemala, really poor agricultural practices, often pushed on the country by large corporations and ag industries that embraced monoculture and, you know, very few labor rights for agricultural workers.

And this may be changing, right, where we would now see that these practices which brought with them desertification and soil fertility loss and migration and dire poverty in rural areas, this could be reversed, you know, we could be looking at a government that promotes agroforestry and regenerative agriculture and labor rights for farm workers and farmers and, you know, that might herald a really different outcome.

Thank you. Can you talk about how you got involved with working in the cocoa and palm oil supply chains?

So I started work, my first really serious human rights job, as you pointed out in Guatemala. And this was right after the peace accords were signed. And there was this, I think, immense interest amongst progressive circles, especially in the United States, even though I'm French, I went to college in the US, so I was formed in that crucible of hope that things were going to get better in Latin America. It was a really important time to lean in and fight the good fight for human rights all across the Southern Cone.

I also worked on the border with Haiti and Dominican Republic around that time, where there's a lot of issues of human rights and statelessness and racism, and poverty. But actually, although I'd been so drawn to that region, as serendipity would have it, when I graduated from Yale, I got an offer to work at Human Rights Watch in their Africa program. And that was right around the time when some really pretty awful civil wars were unfolding in West Africa. Especially, the war in Sierra Leone and Liberia was really bad at that time.

I had a kind of trial by fire and plunged into, I guess you could say, really hardcore human rights work at Human Rights Watch, which is one of the top human rights groups in the world. And I got to work with people like Alison Des Forges, who was one of the leading scholars on the Rwandan Genocide, and with Corinne Dufka, who subsequently won a MacArthur Genius Award, you know, these kind of women who just knocked my socks off and inspired the hell out of me. And it sort of cemented my desire to do some of the toughest human rights work out there in really the most bleak places, which I did. I worked on issues like police brutality, recruitment of child soldiers, rape as a weapon of war, torture in prisons, FGM. The really difficult subjects. Especially in West Africa, but all across the continent.

And then went to law school and ended up working in the War Crimes Court in Sierra Leone and the team that was preparing the War Crimes Court in Cambodia. And after that went and did work in Iraq and Lebanon and back in West Africa and worked for Amnesty International as well as Human Rights Watch. Nose to tail, I would say I spent about 12 and a half, 13 years working in a pretty focused way on atrocities in conflict areas or in post-conflict areas. But it was so grim. It was so grim that I decided I need to do something more cheerful with my life and have better work-life balance, which is much in line with your philosophy of joy and cheer and looking for silver linings even in dark clouds. So to cut a long story short, I decided to work on climate change, which felt a little bit less grim than war crimes.

And I ended up at Greenpeace in Southeast Asia. So I'd already worked in Cambodia previously, but wound up covering Indonesia, Philippines, and the whole Mekong region, especially Thailand, plus a bit of work on Malaysia and Singapore issues, and, you know, being a sort of jack of all trades, doing research for all the different campaigners who needed it and wanted it.

And that includes things like IUU fishing, pirate fishing, overfishing, seafood slavery and how it intersects with horrible environmental fishing practices. Looking at deforestation, but also human rights abuses that intersect with environmental crimes that come along with the deforestation that you see for palm oil and for pulp and paper, especially in Southeast Asia, but also to a lesser extent coffee, rubber, cocoa. A lot of those deforestation crises are tied with land-grabbing and indigenous rights abuses and other violence and corruption. There’s a nexus, a Venn diagram between human rights violations and deforestation for commodity agriculture. There’s of course a strong correlation between people suffering health problems and also the environment suffering health problems

Former Indonesian Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti (center) aboard a captured illegal fishing vessel, later sunk

So I would say I really got up close and personal with some of the worst environmental problems and how they intersect with human rights abuses that can be quite severe and egregious. But also, I came up close and personal with all the beautiful solutions and the great heroes and heroines of the region, like Minister Susi, the fisheries minister in Indonesia who was like gangbusters saving the oceans. So yeah, I think I got my fair share of massive inspiration and joy and feeling like the solutions are at our fingerprints. Yeah, it was just a fascinating time at Greenpeace. I loved it.

And I went from Greenpeace to Mighty Earth, which you could say is kind of like a spinoff of Greenpeace. We decided to work on those things that Greenpeace couldn't really. Greenpeace had not been able to do as much work on deforestation for palm oil in certain very high risk places, like Papua, as some staff wanted to do, including me. You don't want to put your staff at risk if you can't protect them and if your name brand brings more risks and it's complicated to operate in really high risk places. And also Greenpeace hadn't been able to work on deforestation for cocoa, coffee, and rubber. So at Mighty Earth, I launched the first ever campaigns to stop deforestation in cocoa and in rubber and also did a lot of work on our palm oil frontier project. And I'm happy to say, you know, we really helped turn around large-scale deforestation for palm oil and rubber in Gabon, the whole country, with the help of our amazing allies in Brainforest, run by Goldman Award winner Marc Ona Essangui, who is a total hero of mine. We totally turned around deforestation for cocoa. I mean, there's still many, many problems that bedevil the industry. But on our watch, we went from like zero to the bulk of the industry having committed to ending deforestation in cocoa - and often commitments are key to opening the door to on-the-ground reforms.

And then the questions are whether that commitment is real, and how do you have time bound implementation plans that are not greenwashing? But you know, it's just a night and day transformation of really the bulk of the cocoa industry in a way that I found hugely gratifying and beautiful. And with rubber, you know, maybe not quite so successful, but well over 50% of global rubber went from having nothing to having a strong commitment to no deforestation. And what's interesting is that in cocoa, we were not only able to pressure the industry to end deforestation, but also pushed them further on the journey towards traceability, agroforestry, and curbing chemical inputs.

And then I went to National Wildlife Federation. I'd been an advisor to the EU on the no-deforestation law that's recently passed.

Yes, let’s talk about that!

That's a beautiful law, Sam, just up your alley. It's so great.

I wrote about it when it came out.

The EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR) will have global impacts, enforcing higher standards for anyone that wants to export to the EU.

I cried tears of joy on that day. I had been an advisor on that law and it helped organize lots of advocacy with MEPs and people in the Commission. It's been sort of banging down the door of the EU to try to get soy and cocoa and rubber and multi-commodity focus, because at first there was just this monomaniacal obsession with palm oil. Don't get me wrong, that's great that people care about deforestation for palm oil, but I really felt that we had to go further. And yeah, it was just beautiful to see. I helped start a big push to get thousands of companies to speak out for that law. Cumulatively like 15,000 businesses spoke out for mandatory human rights due diligence legislation and deforestation free legislation. It's very surprising to see that level of positive engagement from so many industry players for regulation. But I guess part of it is that a lot of those companies had been hit by campaigns themselves and had to commit to no deforestation, and they sort of wanted the whole industry to have to move with them. That law, Sam, it's such a beautiful game changer.

And I went to National Wildlife Federation in part because I was hoping we could get a parallel law passed in the US, which is called the FOREST Act. It's equally fantastic if it passes, although unlikely to pass soon. It's also sometimes called the Schatz-Blumenauer Act.

And also there are these New York and California bills for deforestation-free procurement. I have huge hope. I recently started working with somebody in the Illinois legislature to start something similar, and the governor of Colorado did an anti-deforestation executive order, so I did a petition to try to get more governors. Look, people seem to care. My petition got almost 70,000 signatures. I think the New York and California bills might pass. I think more governors might follow Colorado. I think Illinois might follow New York and Cali. I hope Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK will follow the EU.

So this is spectacular. You were named to the Order of Merit of the French Republic by President Emmanuel Macron. Can you tell me about that? Was that like a lifetime achievement type thing or was that for a specific recent thing like your role in the EU Deforestation Bill?

I’ll never know exactly what it was for. It's supposed to be a little bit more like a lifetime achievement thing, but I think maybe it had to do with something called the National Strategy to Combat Imported Deforestation. In French, that's the SNDI, Stratégie Nationale pour la Déforestation Importée.

I went on this huge campaign to raise awareness about deforestation for soy, and then for cocoa, and then for rubber in France. People were like, soy? You mean tofu? I'm like, no, no, it's three quarters of animal feed. Soy goes to feed pigs and chickens. So yeah, the soy thing took off in France. And the cocoa campaign and rubber campaign were also very successful there. And so I think I had a role to play in making sure that the SNDI was not just palm oil, but was also multi- commodity. I think maybe that was part of why I got the knighthood.

I also started this lawsuit against the biggest supermarket in Latin America, which is called Casino - with the help of wonderful ally NGOs and Indigenous Organizations I rallied, and superb lawyers. It's a French supermarket. In Brazil, it's called Pão de Açúcar and Colombia is called Grupo Éxito. The biggest chain in Latin America, and of course it buys a huge amount of beef and other things. But in particular, a lot of beef from JBS, which is the world’s biggest meat company, which has a track record of slavery, labor abuse, land-grabbing, deforestation, burning, and corruption. In the end, I think that lawsuit, which is using this French Devoir de Vigilance law, was quite innovative, and it really changed a lot of French supermarket practices. I mean, it changed Casino, but it also changed Carrefour and it changed to some extent I think JBS and Marfrig and Minerva, which are these big meat companies. Marfrig and Minerva, although they are better than JBS in many ways, still have a lot of problems with the kinds of abuses that I was just detailing right now for JBS.

I wouldn't by any means say that the lawsuit solved these problems. But it’s all about incremental change. Every bit of incremental change is so positive.

I really have sort of a complex multi-paragraph question now, and it's about Climate Defiance, the activist group you're currently working with. I have a complex opinion on this that is somewhat controversial within the climate space and I'd really love to set it out and get your thoughts on it.

I think it’s bad for the climate to be protesting the Biden Administration right now. The Inflation Reduction Act delivers uncapped federal investment in renewable energy! We need to focus on defending that! We, the climate action movement, need to play defense through the 2024 elections and rally around Biden. If Biden stopped drilling on federal lands right now like Climate Defiance is asking him to do, the price of gas would go up, and he’d be less likely to win re-election! I’d love to see a little more strategic thinking—at the very least, start pushing on that in 2025! Which is worse: a little more drilling on federal lands through 2024 to keep gas prices low, plus ongoing huge federal support for renewables, or four more years of Trump with lots more drilling, the federal government turned against renewables, and the huge other dangers of Trump?

I think what you raised up is very valid. You know, I tremble at the thought that Biden would not be re-elected. I'm definitely feeling much of what you're feeling in terms of Biden being 100,000 times better than Trump for the climate. I mean, the IRA has unlocked immense, immense benefits. And so many other wonderful things have happened for the environment thanks to the Biden administration. Yet, it is crucial for humanity to stop 'carbon bombs' and major fossil fuel projects before it's too late. I think we've been trying to thread the needle, and I certainly don't want to be like Ralph Nader, you know, who may have cost Al Gore the 2000 election. It's something I think a lot about.

What I would beg you guys to do is keep protesting the fossil fuel financing, keep protesting the American Petroleum Institute, do all of that, but please don't say anything bad about Joe Biden. Most people don't really pay that much attention to politics. And if they hear one statement from a climate group saying Biden's bad, they'll be like, oh, guess Biden doesn't care about climate change. And they'll have no idea of the broader context. So please, please, please, I'm begging you at Climate Defiance, don't attack Joe Biden. It is too, too fragile right now.

That is why I have not joined Climate Defiance. I do not want to join a group attacking Joe Biden right now. We are in these crazy tight elections and I do not want any friendly fire. I hope I'm making clear that I agree with your aims and ideals, but just tactically I'm really worried about any friendly fire with Joe Biden right now.

More broadly, Republicans tend to do immediate propagandistic unstinting praise of their guy once they get elected. And Democrats, because we actually really care about making the world a better place, tend to criticize everything our guys aren't doing as well as they could be.

And I'm just really, really worried that what that adds up to is people only hear bad things about Democrats because Republicans are saying evil lies and Democrats are saying, we wish you'd do more of this.

And I'm trying, I just really, really, really wish, and this is what I'm trying to do, that environmental organizations, at least until the election, change this, and at least until the election, let's just pivot to thanking Biden and really trying to up his young voter approval and stuff like that. So, you know, that's something that really, really worries me.

I think we'll be very careful. But bottom line, I hear you. This is super important.

Okay. So, thank you. One question I always have about this stage of the interview is I've asked you a bunch of questions. What question haven't I asked that I should have asked? What would you like to share with me?

Well, you know, you talk a lot about hope and change and redemption and about how individuals can intersect in their own private life with these big trends. And I think one question that I would love for you to probe is about chocolate. You know, we're entering the Halloween season, which is one of the biggest chocolate purchasing days in the U.S. of the year, but then also we're bumping up pretty soon on the Christmas, New Year's season, Hanukkah as well, of course, which is the biggest chocolate purchasing week of the year worldwide.

And I think what's fascinating is that I've learned through doing all these undercover investigations into deforestation, slavery and child labor and other problems in Cocoa, that you can be a part of the solution or the problem with every bite of chocolate that you take.

You can buy chocolate that's killing chimps and enslaving small children, just like you can buy chocolate that's healing Mother Earth, bringing back biodiversity and paying farmers a living income. It's amazing to me, Sam, that today we live in a time when most cocoa farmers make less than a dollar a day and women cocoa farmers make 30 cents a day. I really consider that to be so close to modern slavery, but actually that's not even the worst part. There are probably at any given point tens of thousands of actual slaves in cocoa. And the best estimates are that there's somewhere north of 1.5, probably around 2 million kids working in cocoa worldwide, with most of them being in West Africa.

It so doesn't have to be that way. It can be so different. You know, we shouldn't be in a world where slavery is normal, where child labor is normal, where deforestation is the sort of business model. We can be in a completely alternate paradigm. And what's nice is that the chocolate industry is kind of heading in that direction. But every little bit that consumers do really pushes them. It sounds silly, but I remember I had one particularly recalcitrant chocolate company that didn't want to change to do agroforestry and thought monoculture was the right way to go and agroforestry was silly and a kind of tree hugger fantasy. I worked with a petition site, we got over 100,000 signatures in two days and the company changed like overnight. They started answering our calls, they hired people, they set aside money, they got a team, they started a pilot project, they expanded. It was an eye opener for me to just see this power that people have as consumers, as petition signers.

And so I started several cocoa petitions, and created a kind of one stop shop webpage where everyone browsing can sign nearly every petition that's ever been done in chocolate. Also a chocolate scorecard where consumers can see what is good and bad about each major brand - it covers over 90% of global chocolate..

[Check out Etelle Higonnet in John Oliver’s recent episode on the chocolate industry].

And what's fascinating is that it went from being kind of one NGO to three NGOs to five NGOs, now it's like almost 40 NGOs have joined. And at first, you know, it was a rinky dink little thing. And now hundreds of millions of people see it every year, we think, and oh my god, Sam, it changes the world. And I know it sounds stupid to say, but you know, there's this redemption that is within our grasp. And our system is so broken and chocolate is this one thing that is really severely broken that we can really fix. It's super fixable right now because the industry is at the interesting tipping point.

I really appreciate you sharing this. And yeah, I'll definitely share the link to the chocolate scorecard. Thank you so much for sharing that story and thank you so much for really living a life of trying to make the world a better place.

I'm only one of many, many, many. You can see, you know, when you go on that petition page that actually there's like two million people who signed petitions on over 100 petitions to make chocolate better. I'm only one of two million, but that's a lot of us.

I think people can sometimes feel so daunted and depressed and overcome with existential despair. And what's beautiful is to know your vote matters. You know, you can vote for something like the EU law or the New York or California law. You can sign petitions. You can vote with your pocketbook. You know, you open your wallet for Halloween purchases or Christmas or Valentine's Day or Easter.

Even the power of speaking out, I found when when people just tweet at a company to say “I buy your snacks and I really wish you wouldn't have child slaves,” this is is a game changer. Companies hate that. And it changes their behavior. it really does I've seen with my own eye this game changing transformation of the chocolate industry in the last seven years. And I think that we can make it as beautiful for Mother Earth and as tasty and sweet for farmers as it feels for us in our mouths.

Spectacular.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Sam. I'm a huge fan of all your work. I read everything you write and send it to my friends who are depressed.

So many of the best people in the world, the people like you who do this, become depressed because they seek out the worst things in the world, because they want to change them. And what I try to do is share some of the stories of progress. What we're actually doing is ignoring all the progress. Destroying things tends to happen fast and explosively and attention-grabbingly, and building things up and making things better tends to happen really slowly over the course of years, so it never makes the headlines.

It's terrible because when people only see the bad things, then they feel that they can't make a difference. But I think the message about chocolate and everything else is of course you can make a difference. You can pass laws, you can change companies, you can change government policies, you can save the lives of kids and chimpanzees and people around the world.

You know, if you only ever think Iraq is a war zone, then you wouldn't think, oh, Iraq is a place where we could capture methane fugitive emissions, if we worked with the best people that we could find there who are willing and able to use this amazing new satellite mapping technology to find methane leaks and go and fix the methane leaks. And I have friends in Iraq who are trying to do this, but it's very hard for them to get money and to get off the ground because people just only ever think of Iraq as a basket case.

And this is exactly what you're talking about, this fascination with war pornography, I call it, and this doomsday media drumbeat of despair. It doesn't just disinform people about the good things. It disempowers them about taking action and that's when we all lose because knowing that you can make good change happen is what makes people try to make the change.

Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree and that is exactly what I feel. Thank you so much for sharing that, and I really admire that you continuw to feel that way given the horrible things you've seen.

I do, I do. I'm one of the rare people who's seen the worst that the world has to offer. But I really keep waking up every day and I do my best.

I donate to every charity that I can. I sign every petition that I can. I go protest when I can. I try to do everything that I possibly can.

And I think it helps.

I really do.

I believe.

Well, you are a true knight. Not like the medieval thugs, but like the cultural ideal of a knight that we never got in real life. Knights should be like you.

You're too kind. Thank you. It was such a pleasure to chat with you. I hope that you never stop and that you keep up the good work, keep inspiring people! Hope breeds action and despair breeds passivity.