How You Can Help the Campaign

Dear friends and allies,

The campaign “Stop the Harmful Forms of Prescribed Burning!” will be developed by steps.

At the current stage, the key task of the Campaign is to inform the World community about the problem of prescribed burnings and other intentional burnings. We would like to put this problem on the agenda of discussions of governments of the countries (especially those ones where prescribed burning practice is frequently implemented), environmental organizations, international committees, scientific specialized institutes and press.

The press as well as blog media and social networks can implement a key role in fulfilling these tasks.

In this regard, the following actions will be important contributions to the development of the Campaign.

• Distribution of the Campaign's position and other information materials of the Campaign among the press. Involvement of journalists in the problem, providing them with the materials of the Campaign on the basis of which they can make articles in their issues.

• Distribution of the Campaign’s materials on social networks - facebook, twitter and others.

• Sending the appeals based on the Campaign’s position to officials of your country (from the government of the country to the authorities of the region), asking them to study and understand the problem of prescribed burning in the territories under their control.

• Involvement of local (for your region of residence) environmental and scientific communities and organizations in the prescribed burning problem.

• Appeals to the courts with accusation of companies conducted prescribed burning inside valuable natural territories in destructive ecocide.

An appeal to a court is a difficult, but very effective form of environmental protection. All cases of appeals to courts accusing of state or commercial companies in implementation of prescribed burning inside valuable natural territories, will be very important.

The justifications for accusation in ecocide of companies, conducting prescribed burning inside valuable natural lands, are considered in the Part I of the Campaign's position, as well as in this section of the website. Also, in this section we define the “harmful forms of prescribed burning” and justify why all such burnings are multiyear ecocide of large scale, which can lead to degradation and destruction of functionality of natural ecosystems, disruption of possibility of decomposition of plant litter (and other dead organic matter) in the burnt natural areas, as well as loss of biodiversity on the burnt natural areas, and in general on the planet.

Despite the fact that the concept of “Ecocide” is a criminally punishable crime only in a few countries of the world, presenting facts and arguments to the court regarding the consequences of the harmful forms of prescribed burning, as well as obvious analogies between the phenomena of Ecocide and Genocide (which has been recognized by the United Nations as an international crime since 1948) can lead to a positive (for the fight against prescribed burning) court decision and an important precedent of judicial practice.

If you intend to appeal to the court or other law enforcement agencies, especially if you do not know exactly how to do this, please inform us by these contacts. Together we will think over the most effective strategy of these actions, will ask for the help of lawyers and specialists in environmental law. Regardless of the success of the appeals, such actions would be very important now , at the beginning of the fight against harmful forms of prescribed burning in the world.

Also you can help the development of the Campaign financially. What we need money for is described here here.

The simplest way of distribution the Campaign’s position is distribution the leaflet of the Campaign.

Download the Campaign Leaflet

The rest of the materials of the Сampaign, prepared in a file format for download, can be found here.