Defending the Earth is deadly work. A new report illuminates how much.

Since the 1990’s, Martin Egot has protected his tribe’s ancestral homelands near Nigeria’s Cross River National Park. Egot, who is Indigenous Ekuri, helped establish the Ekuri Initiative, an organization dedicated to protecting parts of the rainforest.

In 2009, the Ekuri Initiative successfully pushed the Cross River government, a state in Nigeria, to put a moratorium on logging activity in community-controlled areas of the rainforest, and were able to enforce the logging ban by deploying eco-guards: Ekuri men who patrol the rainforest to deter developers and illegal loggers.

But in 2023, the Nigerian government lifted the moratorium to allow logging. Then, later that year, a local timber company arrived without proper permits. The Ekuri eco-guards confiscated the company’s logging e