You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Maddie, I want to start today's episode with a speech.

From Francia Marquez, an Afro-Columbian environmental activist.

In 2018, she won the Goldman Environmental Prize for Central and South America.

And that's the biggest prize out there for grassroots environmental activists.

Yeah, it's sometimes called the green no bells.

Talking about her community in Colombia, Latoma.

Francia pauses to collect herself.

This is a place where a legal gold mining was booming a few years ago,

where miners were coming in and polluting local water sources with harmful chemicals.

And in response, Francia organized 80 women to march and protest to Bogota, the capital,

a journey of 350 miles.

I mean, that's a 350 mile, that's far.

Francia is someone who has tirelessly fought a legal mining on her ancestral land,

but at great personal cost.

She says, we are taught to love and value our land and to fight for it.

Even if it means putting our own lives at risk.

That's the sentence I want to pay attention to,

because the lives of environmental and land activists are increasingly at risk.

An international NGO, Global Witness, has documented a rise in the murder and disappearance

of environmental and land activists in recent years.

They documented 212 murders in 2019,

...