A group of indigenous people in Russia are asking Tesla’s Elon Musk to stop buying supplies from miner MMC Norilsk Nickel until the company compensates them for environmental damage to their ancestral lands.
“The lands of indigenous people appropriated by the company for industrial production now resemble a lunar landscape,” members of the Aborigen Forum network wrote in an open letter to Musk this week. “Traditional use of these lands is no longer possible.”
The group is asking Nornickel to assess the damage from a massive fuel spill in the Arctic earlier this year, revise its policies toward indigenous peoples and to re-cultivate contaminated areas in the Taymyr Peninsula and Murmansk Oblast, where the company’s operations are based.