In the Russian Republic of Altai, traditional native people create their own mountain parks to rein in tourism and resist a gas pipeline that would cut through a World Heritage Site. In nothern California, Winnemem Wintu girls grind herbs on a sacred medicine rock as elders protest U.S. government plans to enlarge one of the West's biggest dams and forever submerge this touchstone of a tribe.

In Papua New Guinea, a Chinese government owned mine has violently relocated villagers, built a new pipeline and refinery on contested clan land, and is dumping mining waste into the sea. In Alberta, First Nations people suffer from rare cancers as their traditional hunting grounds are stripmined to unearth the world's third-largest oil reserve.

In Ethiopia's Gamo Highlands, the benefits of traditional stewardship are confirmed even as elders witness the decline of spiritual practices that have long protected their natural surroundings and religious tensions erupt into a riot. In the Peruvian Andes, the Q'ero are driven from their ritual site by intolerant Catholics as Q'eros potato farmers face a more ominous foe: climate change.

In Australia's Northern Territory, Aboriginal clans maintain Indigenous Protected Areas and resist the destructive effects of a mining boom. In Hawaii, indigenous ecological and spiritual practices are used to restore the sacred island of Kahoolawe after 50 years of military use as a bombing range.