This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
During a heated public meeting last Friday, Michigan’s top energy regulator granted the Canadian company Enbridge Energy a permit to build a new pipeline and tunnel under the environmentally sensitive Straits of Mackinac, in an important — but not final — step in the controversial project’s approval process.
Construction can’t begin unless the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers grants it a federal permit. Before that happens, the Army Corps has to release its assessment of the project’s environmental impacts.
The Michigan Public Service Commission’s decision sparked strong reactions from opponents and supporters of the tunnel.
Line 5 carries oil and natural gas liquids 645 miles from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ontario. Two pipelines run 4 miles along the lakebed, between lakes Huron and Michigan. Enbridge is proposing to replace those with a single 30-inch wide pipeline housed in a concrete tunnel in the bedrock below.
On Friday, the Public Service Commission said building the tunnel would meet the public’s energy needs while protecting that section of the pipeline from damage and preventing leaks.
Opponents called the decision “disastrous.”
The state has been in talks with Enbridge regarding the tunnel since 2017.
In 2018, an anchor struck the pipeline in the straits, damaging it. Commission Chair Dan Scripps cited that incident as an example of how vulnerable the pipes are, and why it was important to build this tunnel.
“We have a responsibility to approve the infrastructure needed to meet our energy needs, and to take steps necessary to get the current pipelines off the bottom lands,” he said.
Enbridge, which submitted a proposal for the tunnel in 2020, applauded the commission’s decision. Spokesperson Ryan Duffy said in an emailed statement on Friday that it is a “major step forward in making the Great Lakes Tunnel Project a reality.”
State Sen. John Damoose, a Harbor Springs Republican, was among the lawmakers cheering the decision; in a news release he called it a “major development toward energy security in the region” and “tremendous news for residents of northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula.”
But many people strongly oppose the tunnel and the pipeline.
The commission said it received more than 23,000 comments ahead of its decision, and people who spoke during Friday’s meeting said granting Enbridge a permit threatened their communities, their health and the environment.
After the decision was announced, project opponents voiced their anger with the commission.
“You were supposed to protect the Great Lakes, protect us,” said Andrea Pierce, a citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians and chair of the Anishinaabek Caucus. “These pipelines and tunnels are going to go through my tribal lands, through my people’s lands, through my community. And I think that’s just reprehensible.”
All 12 federally recognized tribal nations in Michigan oppose Line 5. The Bay Mills Indian Community in the Upper Peninsula has been leading a legal fight to stop the tunnel project for years, citing threats to treaty rights, resources and ways of life.
Bay Mills is challenging a separate tunnel permit from the state Environment, Great Lakes and Energy department.
“Today’s decision is another notch in a long history of ignoring the rights of Tribal Nations,” Bay Mills President Whitney Gravelle said in a statement. “We must act now to protect the peoples of the Great Lakes from an oil spill, to lead our communities out of the fossil fuel era, and to preserve the shared lands and waters in Michigan for all of us.”
Enbridge pipelines have ruptured multiple times. In what was one of the nation’s worst inland oil spills, a section of the Line 6B pipeline burst in 2010 and poured more than 840,000 gallons of oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. (The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 1.2 million gallons were recovered from the river in the following years.)
In 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordered Enbridge to shut down Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac by the spring of the following year, saying that Enbridge was violating its 1953 easement to operate there and that it threatened the Great Lakes with an oil spill. Enbridge defied that order.
In addition to the threat of a spill, opponents say the project is a foe in the global fight against climate change.
The 70-year-old pipeline transports more than 22 million gallons of oil per day. Opponents of the tunnel project say this permit shows that the state will continue to rely on fossil fuels.
In 2021, the Michigan Public Service Commission agreed to consider greenhouse gas emissions when reviewing Enbridge’s tunnel proposal under the state’s Environmental Protection Act.
It was the first time the commission considered climate impacts under the law when making its decision about a project like the pipeline. As part of that process, environmental groups submitted expert testimony to the commission.
Peter Erickson, then a climate policy director at the Stockholm Environment Institute, testified that construction of the tunnel would lead to the release of 27 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, compared to a scenario where Line 5 was shut down and no tunnel was built.
The commission said last week that it found no feasible alternatives to the tunnel project, and that many alternatives “would have a greater environmental impact.”
Commissioner Scripps acknowledged that a transition away from fossil fuels is taking place, mentioning the energy legislation recently signed into law by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, which requires that the state transition to 100% clean energy by 2040. Scripps said that in the meantime, the commission had a responsibility to approve infrastructure necessary to meet the state’s energy needs.
But there’s also disagreement on just how much Michigan relies on Line 5 for its energy. For instance, Enbridge says that the pipeline provides over half of Michigan’s propane, and that it’s central to energy security in the Upper Peninsula. But environmental groups like the Michigan League of Conservation Voters say there are alternatives. A report released in October by PLG Consulting said that with enough notice of a Line 5 shutdown, the state’s energy markets could adapt without supply shortages or price hikes.
While Friday’s decision by the commission was a big step toward the tunnel’s construction, it’s not the last.
Along with a slew of legal challenges, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will need to weigh in with its determination of the environmental impacts of the project. A decision on whether to grant the project a federal permit is expected in 2026.
New research from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has identified a key to successful forest restoration: long term, local governance by Indigenous peoples or local communities. The more formalized the land tenure rights, the better the outcomes. Research shows that Indigenous and rural communities are the best stewards of the forests they live in, but the study’s novel finding is that community-managed forests yield better, more positive results for both environmental and social outcomes.
“Where people depend upon forest resources for a range of livelihood benefits, like firewood, timber, food, various things, they often have an incentive to take care of those forests. It’s really quite simple,” said lead author Harry Fischer. “When you give communities the opportunity to manage in those ways, you will often see better outcomes.”
Forest restoration is a critical tool for global climate change mitigation, and is particularly important to the 1.8 billion people living in, and relying on, forests for their livelihoods. Restoration projects have historically prioritized environmental outcomes like planting trees to improve biodiversity, or monetizing carbon sequestration through carbon credit schemes. But typically, those interests take precedence over the interests of local communities. The authors argue that a locally-focused, rights-based approach means that those interests don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
The study analyzed data collected by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions over three decades, from 314 community-managed forests, across 15 nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Researchers wanted to understand what the best forests had in common in order to better inform future restoration efforts. The study focused on tropical ecosystems because of the high prevalence of forest restoration efforts in these regions, like the Trillion Trees project and other tree planting initiatives. Common measures of successful forest restoration include healthy biodiversity, like planting trees or stopping deforestation, climate change-mitigation services, like carbon sequestration and carbon credits, and improved livelihoods for local communities in the form of access to forests for food and housing. But the forests with the best results across all three measures were the ones where local communities determined the rules for forest management.
Fischer and the other researchers’ critique of those efforts is that they are target-based. Forest projects focused on planting trees or selling carbon credits saw benefits concentrated in those areas, but poor performance in other areas, particularly when it comes to improving the livelihoods of local peoples. That means that while those projects may be good on paper for international conservation groups or investors, they don’t provide positive spillover effects to the people that live there.
“What we’re saying in our study is, OK, planting trees is not bad,” Fischer said. “Giving power to local people is going to be more effective over the long term. If they have power, the interventions are going to be more legitimate. They’re going to have more local buy-in for that.”
But that transfer of power isn’t being applied. Additional reports show that the world remains off track from reversing forest degradation and meeting decarbonization goals — in part due to a failure to work with Indigenous peoples or local communities, or recognize their rights. A study earlier this month from the Forest Declaration Assessment, a nonprofit that tracks forest conservation efforts, analyzed the National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans of 27 countries with substantial forest ecosystems and Indigenous populations. According to the study, those plans to establish national conservation efforts had gaps where Indigenous peoples were performatively included or completely left out. Less than a third of those countries engaged Indigenous peoples when developing their plans.
Levi Sucre Romero, coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests and co-chair to the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, says this low rate of inclusion is one of the critical issues on the table at COP28 in Dubai.
“This implies that decisions are still being made from desks, from cities, for an issue as crucial as forests and those of us who are living and protecting those forests are not taken into account,” Romero said. “The world’s rulers must hear that they can no longer continue making promises about the problem of climate change if they are not going to fulfill them.”
Fischer says that a forest restoration approach that prioritizes local livelihoods instead of making them a secondary benefit will take time — but on average will generate the best results for both environmental and social concerns.
“If we’re going to have participation, let’s do it in a way that really sort of redistributes power over a long, long period,” Fischer said. “[Then], people are able to really manage and get practice, and these practices get institutionalized over time.”
People in Alaska’s rugged Interior have long known the hills surrounding the Native Village of Tetlin hid gold. As tribal member Kevin Gunter grew up, his elders told him such riches should be left alone. Nothing good would come of digging them up, they warned. Now, Gunter fears what might happen as an open-pit mine comes to his tribe’s land.
Kinross, the majority owner and operator of the project, plans to haul the ore roughly 250 miles on public roads to a mill at another mine, called Fort Knox, outside Fairbanks. To learn more about the company’s plans for the new mine, named Manh Choh, Gunter took a job as a senior electrician at Fort Knox about a year ago. He soon grew frustrated by the culture. “Nobody’s doing any quality control,” he said. “They won’t plan a job. And they won’t work the plan.”
Grist
That didn’t inspire confidence in Kinross sending 80-ton trucks rumbling down the primary highway linking Fairbanks to Canada and the Lower 48. So Gunter started digging into how and why his tribe approved the company’s lease for the land. He and other tribal officials found what they allege is a series of questionable background deals, corruption, and self-serving arrangements by the former chief and current tribal leaders.
In a written statement to Grist, Kinross insists that the company has acted in good faith and within the rights provided by its lease, while investing in things like a road to the community. But the Tetlin Native Corporation, a for-profit business owned by tribal shareholders, claims it is the rightful owner of some of the land — and that it was not party to the negotiations and did not approve the lease. It alleges that the mineral lease broke tribal laws. The corporation hopes to establish its claim to the land. This may call the lease with the tribal council into question, potentially delaying, or even stopping, the project.
The corporation’s allegations are one of two looming legal actions that could scuttle Kinross’ plans. In late October, a group of citizens called Committee for Safe Communities filed a lawsuit claiming the project violates state transportation regulations. It has asked the state to pause the truck haul pending an independent review of public safety concerns Grist previously reported.
Gunter grappled with his decision to speak out. As a single father, he worried about the repercussions for his family. The project has been contentious, as some locals cheer the jobs it promises, while others worry about the safety and environmental impacts. But one night while making his daughter dinner, he decided he had to take action. “I just thought, what kind of a s****y father would I be if I just let this happen to her,” he said.
Kevin Gunter poses for a photo at work.Courtesy of Kevin Gunter
Kevin Gunter’s daughter as a baby.Courtesy of Kevin Gunter
He felt a duty to his tribe to reveal what he’d found. “When you tell the truth, it becomes a part of your past,” he added. “But if you lie, that becomes part of your future. And we’re gonna be seeing everybody’s future here real soon.”
Until 1968, vast, unbroken tundra stretched across the northern reaches of Alaska, windblown hummocks resting beneath sweeps of curving sky. Then British Petroleum — the company now known as BP — struck oil in Prudhoe Bay. That lucrative discovery created a huge problem: Building an 800-mile pipeline to a shipping terminal on the other side of the state required figuring out who owned the land it would traverse.
Much of it belonged to Native communities who didn’t rely on written documents like deeds and titles. As oil companies pushed the state, established just nine years earlier, to quickly settle the issue and get the pipeline started, activists like Iñupiaq politician Eben Hopson pointed out how long it would take to litigate claims with hundreds of villages. “This is our land,” Hopson declared in a public hearing in 1969, as the fight unfolded. “If you want it, pay fair value for it.”
This 1968 aerial view shows Prudhoe Bay, on the Arctic slope 390 miles north of Alaska.
AP Photo
That tension led to the federal Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The law attempted to secure better treatment for the Indigenous peoples of Alaska than those in the Lower 48 had received. The federal government transferred 44 million acres — almost 10 percent of the state — to for-profit Alaska Native companies that serve tribal shareholders. These business ventures aimed to facilitate the economic development of Native communities and provide greater control over their natural resources.
The Tetlin Native Corporation received 743,147 acres. Unlike many other village corporations, it retained the rights to subsurface resources like minerals. While the corporation is responsible for the tribe’s business investments, the tribe’s chief and council govern Tetlin, overseeing things like the tribal court and social services. Ideally, the two entities work together on the community’s behalf, but things grew complicated when their leadership overlapped.
Donald Adams, whom everyone called Danny, was named Tetlin’s chief in 1989. He was also the president of the tribal corporation. Adams sported a wispy goatee, a love of cards, and a passion for sharing Tetlin’s culture. He was known to hunt ducks in the spring and live off the land. “You have to have that link to where you came from, and what your culture means to you,” he once told a filmmaker.
In 1994, Chief Adams led the council in applying for a casino license. The National Indian Gaming Commission denied the application because the corporation, not the council, owned the land. The following year, Adams’ attorney suggested transferring the tribe’s land to solve that problem. A majority of the corporation’s roughly 125 shareholders was required by state law to approve this move, but they never did so.
Nevertheless, in 1996, Adams transferred 643,147 acres to the council, leaving the corporation with 100,000 acres that was under litigation after a wildfire. The move rendered the corporation insolvent, leading dissenting shareholders to sue for “breach of fiduciary duties.” In 2006, the state Supreme Court ruled that Adams abused his authority in the “wrongful transfer.” The corporation removed Adams, but the tribal council allowed him to remain chief.
Before a new deed could be drawn up restoring the corporation’s ownership of the land, Adams met Brad Juneau, a clean-cut businessman fond of purple ties who owned a prospecting company in Texas. In June 2008, Adams brought Juneau to a tribal council meeting, where Juneau proposed exploring for minerals, gas, and oil. Roy David, a council member at the time, and others expressed wariness at the idea and requested more information. He believed Juneau should answer the council’s questions before any further action was taken.
But the following month, Adams unilaterally signed a mineral lease for 780,000acres — more land than Congress ever allocated to the corporation — during a closed-door meeting with Juneau’s exploration company. Adams “manipulated and controlled all transactions outside of the council’s knowledge,” David later said in notarized testimony.
Although tribal law requires a council majority to approve all contracts, David and at least one other council member said they never knew about the lease. He began hearing rumors about something happening with a mining company, and was disturbed when Adams refused to provide details. Frustrated by the stonewalling, he resigned from the tribal council.
Juneau went on to form a joint mining venture with several companies, eventually including Kinross, the Toronto-based mining business that now manages the operation. The details of the contract remained a closely guarded secret until 2015, when it was filed with the state Department of Natural Resources. When he finally saw it, David said, “the mineral lease from the first page on had false information.”
In the midst of all this turmoil, Roy David walked into the Wings of Healing Church in Fairbanks. The pastor, David Flenaugh, often turned to Scripture when his congregation was facing trouble. “Hell and destruction are never full; So the eyes of man are never satisfied,” he said, quoting Proverbs 27. But if greed isn’t serving you, he said, “we need to do something different.”
Flenaugh’s sermon resonated with Roy David, who invited the minister to Tetlin. Flenaugh, who runs a construction company, was struck by the lack of playgrounds there and offered to build some. Over time, he grew more involved with the community, eventually becoming the corporation’s general manager in 2011, paying its bills out of his own pocket. As he dug into the corporation’s finances to help it return to solvency, he discovered it couldn’t borrow money or use its land for collateral because the title remained clouded by Adams’ transfer. “It became our goal to clean that up,” Flenaugh said. He hired researcher Loretta Smith to help.
It turned out the mining deal Adams brokered had included an initial payment of $50,000 to Tetlin for negotiating expenses. The SEC filings don’t show who received that money, and the contract expressly stated “Tetlin shall not be responsible to [Brad] Juneau to account for the expense payment.” The mining venture named one of the project’s most promising areas the “Chief Danny Prospect.” Chief Adams also approved a finder’s fee to Rickey William Hendry, another Texan who brought Juneau to Tetlin in the first place: As a “friend of the tribe,” Hendry and his heirs would receive 10 percent of any future net profits from mineral exploration on the land in perpetuity. It is unclear whether anyone else knew at the time that the tribe had surrendered so much of its profits. As Grist previously reported, Tetlin will receive royalties of just 3 to 5 percent from Manh Choh, though similar endeavors elsewhere in Alaska often give tribes much higher returns, as well as partial ownership. Red Dog, for example, is a large zinc mine leased from the Iñupiat in northwest Alaska, who now receive 35 percent of its net profits.
Juneau’s company Contango ORE — which now owns 30 percent of the Manh Choh mine — later hired Adams as a consultant for $60,000 a year, citing his “special knowledge and experience with governmental affairs and tribal affairs issues.” Roy David later said in an affidavit that, “[Neither] I, nor any other council member were aware of this and would never have consented as this practice is prohibited under our governing laws.” Although the contract said that none of Adams’ work would relate to a “certain mineral lease” he had approved, it allowed for discretionary bonuses — payments which totalled an additional $80,000. All told, the payments to Adams came to more than $250,000. Chief Adams may have needed the money: Before he died in 2015, he had a federal $157,042 tax lien, according to the IRS.
Pieces of machinery drive through Fort Knox, Alaska.
Kinross Gold
Pieces of mining machinery drive through Fort Knox, Alaska. Courtesy of Kinross Gold
Manh Choh, Alaska.
Kinross Gold
A conveyer belt, left, carries ore in Fort Knox, Alaska. Kinross plans to transport ore more than 250 miles from the Manh Choh mining site, right, to Fort Knox for processing. Courtesy of Kinross Gold
A conveyer belt carries ore in Fort Knox, Alaska.
Kinross Gold
When Adams passed away, the tribe elected a man named Michael Sam to be chief, and a slate of new members joined the council. But fresh leadership didn’t help resolve the dispute with the tribal corporation. When Flenaugh sat down with Chief Sam in 2016, meeting notes show Sam didn’t know much about the joint venture, though he “stressed that it was his preference to see the miners leave.” Subsequent conversations proved difficult, and it appeared his attitude changed. The corporation’s emails and calls went unanswered. When Flenaugh sent a certified letter to the council, Kristie Charlie, the tribal administrator, returned it to the postmaster unopened. “We have no idea as to why our mail was refused,” Flenaugh later wrote to Sam, who did not respond to Grist’s interview requests.
According to Kevin Gunter, Sam recently has been seen driving new trucks and recreational vehicles and taking vacations that suggest to him an unusual increase in income. “Tetlin is a small village, but when tribal members see something out of place — word will spread,” Gunter wrote in an open letter he distributed among tribal members in October. “Is it possible the KINROSS mining partnership is paying Chief Sam for his tribal position like they did Chief Adams?” He’s now collecting signatures from tribal members, asking Kinross to publicly reveal if they are providing any compensation to Chief Sam or any other tribal officer. Gunter claims tribal council officers visited the homes of those who signed his letter, in what he considers an attempt to intimidate them into removing their names from the petition.
Gunter, who spent his own money consulting lawyers as he tried to parse the tribal council’s dealings, was furious. “You’re gonna sell your whole people out for a $90,000 pick-up truck? And give away all their resources just so you can feel special for a moment?” He scoffs. “Good Lord, you’d live forever if you just fought for your people — they’d always remember you. But that’s just not the choice that was taken.” If the mine’s going to move forward, he says the tribe should at least benefit. “Right now, we’re in generational poverty, and it’s just a dirty cycle,” he said. “It becomes — mentally, physically, spiritually — who you are.”
Questions about the Tetlin Tribal Council’s financial dealings go beyond the Kinross lease. Federal records show that in 2020 and 2021, the council received nearly $10 million in federal grants and contracts, including $4,841,963 in coronavirus relief funds for roughly 380 members. As the pandemic stretched on, tribal members repeatedly called the Tetlin Native Corporation, asking for help tracking down their checks. Since the tribal council received and distributed that cash, the corporation didn’t know anything about it. Under federal law, anyone who disburses more than $750,000 of federal assistance in a fiscal year must obtain an audit. Based on data from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, it appears the council has never done so. “What happened to the money?” Gunter asked.
Tribal members aren’t the only ones posing such questions of the council; in May, the federal Office of Family Violence Prevention and Services sent the Tetlin Native Corporation a delinquent notice regarding a grant awarded to the council. Flenaugh told the agency that the corporation was not involved, and asked what services the grant was meant to provide. “Tribal shareholders living in Tetlin, when asked, report knowing little to nothing about your grant,” he wrote in a response to the office’s inquiry.
With these financial inconsistencies as a backdrop, the Tetlin Native Corporation is trying to raise awareness about how the mining companies have portrayed their relationship with the tribal council. The joint venture misrepresented the tribal council to both the state and the SEC as a village corporation — something anyone familiar with ANSCA knows is not possible. The corporation alleges this “misappropriation of the Corporation’s ANSCA status [was] to entice investors,” who are often leery of dealing with tribal governments, given the sovereign laws and courts that entails.
When confronted, the joint mining venture wrote a letter saying it “inadvertently suggest[ed]” that status and amending its permit application — directly contradicting the language in its own lease. At that point, though, “they already got what they wanted, and did what they wanted to do,” Smith said. In a statement sent to Grist, the tribal council, which supports the mine and wants the project to proceed, said, “The Tribe reserves all of its legal rights and remedies with respect to the false and defamatory statements” by the corporation.
But the biggest problem may be much more fundamental. Eight years ago, the Tetlin Native Corporation conducted a licensed survey of the 100,000 acres it retained after the council’s 1996 takeover. It alleges some of the Manh Choh mine is on land it still owns. A surveyor the corporation hired earlier this year concurred. Indeed, in 2012, the joint venture that Kinross has since joined admitted in an SEC filing, “We have no assurance of title to our Properties.”
Kinross, of course, disagrees, and told Grist in a written statement “the Manh Choh mine is entirely on this Tetlin [Council]-owned land.” In a 2021 letter to Flenaugh, a lawyer for the mining venture denied any encroachment on any of “the lands reserved to the TNCorp in the 1996 Deed.” In its statement to Grist, Kinross said the council “owns in fee the surface and subsurface rights of their land” and that “[o]ur mineral lease with the Native Village of Tetlin provides access to explore and develop mineral resources on Tetlin Tribal lands.” It also said the venture has acted in good faith with all existing agreements with the tribal council, and that it has invested $600,000 in amenities for the area.
Yet the Tetlin Native Corporation insists that that 1996 deed is defective because the council and the corporation were still disputing the land rights when the lease was signed. Smith says this is an example of “tortious interference,” a legal term for when a third party wrongfully interferes in a business relationship. The tribal corporation wants to quiet the title, a legal process that would clearly establish its ownership of at least the 100,000 acres everyone agrees it retains, and possibly revisiting the wrongful transfer of the 643,147 acres to the council..
In part because its financial resources are limited — Flenaugh continues paying the corporation’s expenses — the corporation has had difficulty asserting its claims. Many lawyers have conflicts of interests; the state of Alaska has invested in the project, and it’s difficult to find a law firm that hasn’t previously worked for the state. Some environmental groups that might normally get involved have stayed quiet, not wanting to tread on tribal sovereignty or dampen fundraising by appearing to take sides against a tribe. But the impression that Tetlin was united in its approval of the mine is mistaken, Gunter said. “We keep our shame. We may talk about it with each other, but we won’t — culturally, we just don’t really go after the leader.”
On a chilly day this fall, Barbara Schuhmann was watching her granddaughter at home in Fairbanks while fielding calls and emails about Manh Choh. A retired lawyer, Schuhmann’s concerns about the ore haul’s threat to public safety led her to join Tracy Charles-Smith, the president of Dot Lake, another tribe on the trucking route, and Patrice Lee, a retired teacher who’s been fighting chronic air pollution in Fairbanks. They founded the non-profit Committee for Safe Communities to demand greater safety and accountability for the project. “All we’re doing is asking a court to order the DOT to follow the law, and its own rules,” Schuhmann said. In October, the Committee sued the Alaska Department of Transportation, seeking an injunction requiring the agency to follow all state regulations before allowing Kinross to haul ore on public roads.
A truck carrying black covered containers drives along the Alaska Highway
Courtesy of Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways
As Gristpreviously reported, the agency plans to use federal highway funds for road and bridge construction and improvements to accommodate the Kinross trucks — without conducting an environmental impact statement. The Committee also alleges that the 95-foot long trucks violate state restrictions governing vehicle length on roads that aren’t specifically designated for industrial use. A state consultant hired to conduct an independent review found that, contrary to previous DOT statements, bridges between the mine and Fort Knox cannot withstand the mining traffic. In some cases, the trucks will be twice as heavy as the federal maximum vehicle weight. The winding highway only has two lanes, and in some places the massive vehicles’ top speed will be about half the posted speed limit, creating dangerous traffic situations.
The DOT did not follow the necessary procedures and public process for adding these bridge replacements to the statewide transportation plan. As a result, this fall, the Federal Highway Administration told the agency to remove them — and froze federal funds for 2024 highway projects for the entire state until this is resolved. “This is extremely rare that a state DOT has ever been in this situation,” says Jackson Fox, executive director of Fairbanks Area Surface Transportation Planning. “It’s a pretty significant issue.” The local planning committee voted Nov. 8 to reject adding the bridge replacements to the DOT’s transportation plans, saying it pushed more urgent projects down the priority list — a move which will make it more difficult to resolve the DOT’s problem with the federal agency.
Darrel VanDeWeg, who recently resigned as the chief of the Salcha Fire and Rescue department, said “anytime somebody puts more vehicles on the road, that’s concerning.” The majority of the first-responders on the route are volunteers. As more commercial vehicles drive on the state’s roads, the risks grow. “It’s not just this road, it’s all the roads in Alaska,” he said. “I just don’t know what the limit is.”
Meanwhile, this fall Governor Mike Dunleavy named DOT Commissioner Ryan Anderson to the board of trustees for the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has invested $10 million in Manh Choh. “Like he doesn’t have enough to do, running the transportation system and the railroad and airports and ferry system and the roads and bridges,” Schuhmann said with a laugh.
Despite the concerns of people like Schuhmann and Gunter, and the pending lawsuits, the mine is slated to begin production by the end of the year. There is less and less time for those who oppose the project to make their voices heard. And though he died eight years ago, Adams’ influence still looms. In a video filmed shortly before he passed away, Adams sat in a camo jacket in a rough-hewn log cabin, reflecting on being a Tetlin tribal member in changing times. “Our everyday, simple goals [are] being challenged by this lack of knowing who we are and where we should be,” he said.
Though he sees things differently, the same questions spur Gunter. For him, the Manh Choh project and the council’s signing away the land is another in a long list of examples of how his tribe has been slowly pushed from its home and its ways of being in the world. “There’s no people without the land. It’s who they are,” he said, part proud, part frustrated at having to explain. “And a lot has already been lost.”
Lois Parshley is an award-winning investigative journalist. Follow her reporting @loisparshley on social media.
Ozawa Bineshi Albert wants the world to stop relying on fossil fuels. So last year, the co-executive director of Climate Justice Alliance flew from the U.S. to Egypt to make her voice heard at COP27, the international conference on climate change where world leaders gather to negotiate new commitments to battle the climate crisis.
But at COP27, Albert, who is Anishinaabe and Yuchi, noticed that Indigenous peoples like herself were outnumbered by fossil fuel lobbyists. She was also struck by how many people touted nuclear energy as an alternative to burning oil and gas.
“Nuclear is one of the most dirty, damaging energy sources, particularly for Indigenous people,” she thought. “It touches Indigenous communities all along its lifecycle from where it gets mined, to where it gets processed, to where nuclear power plants are placed, to where nuclear waste gets stored.”
That observation was just one indication of how the perspectives, and experiences, of Indigenous peoples aren’t always reflected in the broader environmental movement. As COP28 kicks off in the United Arab Emirates this week, hundreds of Indigenous advocates are making their way to Dubai with the hope of ensuring that their communities aren’t overlooked by global leaders.
Though the conference doesn’t officially begin until Thursday, the work has already started. Jennifer Tauli Corpuz is Kankanaey-Igorot from the Philippines and is managing director of policy at Nia Tero. She spent eight hours Tuesday in an auditorium with about 350 fellow members of the Indigenous Peoples Caucus, a delegation representing Native peoples, working on the details of a two-minute opening statement that the Caucus will be allowed to give during COP28’s opening ceremony. Corpuz says it’s not easy to distill everyone’s perspectives and issues into such a short statement and the work required interpreters in five languages.
Apart from ending fossil fuel reliance, Indigenous advocates at COP28 want to ensure that funding to offset the impacts of climate change reaches their communities; ensure Indigenous knowledge is seen as a solution to climate change; and prevent governments and private actors from violating their rights, especially as those actors pursue green energy projects.
Corpuz said the caucus plans to approve advocacy papers outlining their positions Wednesday. Then comes the work of convincing negotiators to listen. But it’s not easy.
The estimated 350 Indigenous peoples at COP28 is an attendance record for Native advocates, but it’s still far fewer than the 600 fossil fuel lobbyists who attended COP27 last year. As well, the most important work at the conference, negotiating the exact language of international climate change treaties, gets done behind closed doors among designated representatives from United Nations member countries.
Corpuz estimates that perhaps 20 of the 350 Indigenous people at COP28 this week have government badges that allow them access to negotiations. But even then, because they aren’t credentialed delegates representing a negotiating party, they are only able to watch and listen, not speak, she said.
Still, it’s an improvement over past years when Indigenous peoples’ representatives were locked out from even more rooms, said Corpuz. At least now Indigenous representatives will be able to hear the details of the negotiations, the perspectives of international representatives, and carry the information back for advocates to lobby government delegates. “A lot of the work of the Indigenous Caucus happens in the hallways,” Corpuz said.
A key question that’s expected to be decided this year is how much money wealthy nations like the U.S. should pay in order to cover the costs of climate disasters in the Global South, an initiative known as the loss and damage fund. One study estimates that nations in the Global North are responsible for 92% of excess carbon emissions each year, compared with 8% in the Global South.
“What’s at stake is how these finance mechanisms are going to impact and be accessible to Indigenous communities and other impacted communities, how they will be funded, and to what levels will they be funded,” Albert said. “And will those resources actually get to communities and not be taken up by agencies that will administer them?”
Eriel Deranger of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Canada and executive director of Indigenous Climate Action, thinks that it makes sense that wealthy countries would be paying for climate impacts, but Deranger also wants the money to be available to Indigenous people no matter what country they live in due to already extreme climate impacts, many of which are exacerbated by colonization and land theft.
“If Canada, for example, or the U.S. is contributing to the loss and damage fund and we don’t have access to it as Indigenous people in North America or in the Global North, where are we going to see those kind of climate reparations and restitution for the damages that we are facing from the climate crisis?” Deranger asked.
But money is only part of the equation, said Kandi White, a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations in the U.S. and program director at the Indigenous Environmental Network, which sent a 25-member delegation to Dubai. “For Indigenous peoples, it’s not just about the money, but it’s also about the return of our sovereignty over our lands,” said White.
Both Deranger and White, who are in Dubai this week, also hope to establish a grievance procedure through which Indigenous peoples whose rights are infringed upon could hold governments accountable. “We need there to not just be lip service of, ‘We recognize Indigenous rights,’ but we need to see language that has teeth,” Deranger said.
But securing that level of accountability may be an uphill battle. Even when world leaders make promises, they don’t always fulfill them: wealthy countries blew a 2020 deadline to spend $100 billion a year to help poorer nations cope with climate impacts and make progress toward decarbonization. One study suggested that goal may have been met last year, two years late, even as the world hurtles toward 3 degrees of warming.
The combined challenges—a lack of access to negotiating tables and tepid commitments by global leaders—have fueled disillusionment. Moñeka De Oro, who is Chamorro from the Mariana Islands and co-executive director of the Micronesia Climate Change Alliance, says that last year at COP some Indigenous Caucus members discussed boycotting the convention, “no longer being a part of these processes that continuously degrade our input,” she said.
“If you’re going to continue to continuously be ignored and continuously be just erased from the entire process, I don’t know how much longer we want to be complicit in attending these sorts of things,” she said.
The power imbalances can be discouraging but Ozawa Bineshi Albert still feels determined.
“COP is not a place that we go to thinking we’re going to get everything we want,” she said. To her, the overarching question is: “How can we make sure that we at least hold the line and make sure the least amount of damage and the least amount of harm is caused to frontline and Indigenous communities?”
Editor’s note: Nia Tero is a funding partner with Grist. Funding partners have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Just weeks after the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history ripped through the coastal town of Lāhainā, Native Hawaiian taro farmers, environmentalists, and other residents of West Maui crowded into a narrow conference room in Honolulu for a state water commission hearing.
The chorus of criticism was emotional and persistent. For nearly 12 hours, scores of people urged commissioners to reinstate an official who had been key to strengthening water regulations and to resist corporate pressure to weaken those regulations. One after another, they calmly and deliberately delivered scathing criticism of a developer named Peter Martin, calling him “the face of evil in Lāhainā” and “public enemy number one.”
One person summed up the mood of the room when he said, “F— Peter Martin.”
More than 100 miles away on Maui, Martin followed parts of the hearing through a livestream on YouTube. Despite the deluge of criticism, he wasn’t upset. He wasn’t even surprised. After nearly 50 years as a developer on Maui, he’s used to public criticism.
“When you’re around a gang of people, a mob, the commissioners just listen to the mob, they don’t listen to reasoned voices,” Martin told Grist. “I’m not comparing these people to Hitler; I’m just saying Hitler got people involved by hating, hating the Jews.”
Martin, who is 76, has long been controversial. He moved to Maui from California in 1971 and got his start picking pineapples, teaching high school math, and waiting tables. Before long, he began investing in real estate. His timing was perfect: Hawaiʻi had become a state just 12 years earlier, and Maui’s housing market was booming as Americans from the mainland flocked there. By 1978, local headlines were bemoaning the high price of housing, and prices only went up from there.
Developer Peter Martin West Maui Land Company displays a map during an interview with Grist reporter Anita Hofschneider.
Cory Lum / Grist
Developer Peter Martin told the New Yorker that protecting water for Native Hawaiian cultural practices was “a crock of shit,” and that invasive grasses and “this stupid climate change thing” had “nothing to do with the fire.”
A bible stands on top of a stack of papers next to West Maui Land Company developer Peter Martin.
Cory Lum / Grist
Martin points to a map of West Maui, indicating an area where he hopes to build homes. Next to him is his Bible, which he often quotes in conversations and emails. Cory Lum / Grist
Developer Peter Martin West Maui Land Company points to development locations on a map of west Maui during the interview. September 18, 2023.
Cory Lum / Grist
Over the last five decades, Martin has made millions of dollars off this real estate boom, building a development empire on West Maui and turning hundreds of acres of plantation land into a paradise of palatial homes and swimming pools.He owns or holds interest in nearly three dozen companies that touch almost every aspect of the homebuilding process: companies that buy vacant land, companies that submit development plans to local governments, companies that build houses, and companies that sell water to residents. His real estate brokerage helps find buyers for homes built on his land, and he’s even got a company that builds swimming pools.
Companies associated with Martin own more than 5,500 acres of land around Lāhainā, according to an analysis of county records, making him one of the area’s largest private landowners, and his web of businesses wields immense influence in West Maui, which is home to about 25,000 people. He drives his white Ford F-150 around the island with a large, black Bible on the center dashboard and peppers his conversations and emails with quotes from Scripture or libertarian economist Milton Friedman. He once served on the Maui County salary commission, where he helped determine pay for elected officials and county department heads, and he has donated $1.3 million to the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a libertarian think tank that has fought Native Hawaiian sovereignty. So extensive is the reach of his land empire that the command center for the response to the August wildfires is located on land owned by a company in which he has a stake.
Development on Maui, where the median home price now exceeds $1 million, often sparks controversy, and Martin is far from the only builder who has inspired opposition. But his staunch ideological commitment to free market capitalism and Christianity, coupled with his companies’ persistent pushback against water regulations intended to protect Native Hawaiian rights, has evoked particularly passionate distaste among many locals. “F— the Peter Martin types,” reads one bumper sticker spotted in Lāhainā.
And that was before the wildfire. Just two days after the outbreak of a blaze that would go on to kill 97 people, fueled in part by invasive grasses on Martin’s vacant land, an executive at one of Martin’s companies sent a letter to the state water commission. Glenn Tremble, who works for West Maui Land Company, wrote that the company’s request to fill its reservoirs on the day of the fire had been delayed by the state. He also asked the commission to loosen water regulations during the fire recovery.
“We anxiously awaited the morning knowing that we could have made more water available to [the Maui Fire Department] if our request had been immediately approved,” he wrote.
Residents of Martin’s West Maui developments have gorgeous views of the Pacific Ocean — and now many also look out on the burned remains of Lāhainā. Cory Lum / Grist
Tremble’s letter implied that a state official key to implementing local water regulations — and the first Native Hawaiian to lead the state water commission — had impeded firefighting efforts. He soon walked back the claim, but his first letter had immediate effect. The state attorney general launched an investigation into the official, the governor suspended water regulations, and the official was temporarily reassigned. Critics saw it as an attempt to capitalize on the grief of the community for profit.
It didn’t help that within weeks, when the Washington Post asked about the role the invasive grasses on Martin’s land played in the deadly wildfire, Martin said he believed the fire was the result of God’s anger over the state water restrictions.
Most people in West Maui get water from the county’s public water system. But Martin-built developments such as Launiupoko, a community of a few hundred large homes outside of Lāhainā, draw their water from three private utility systems that he controls, siphoning underground aquifers and mountain streams to fill swimming pools and irrigate lawns. More than half of all water used in the Launiupoko subdivision, or around 1.5 million gallons a day, goes toward cosmetic landscaping on lawns, according to state estimates. Just over a quarter is used for drinking and cooking.
The scale of this water usage is stunning: According to state data, Launiupoko Irrigation Company and Launiupoko Water Company deliver a combined average of 5,750 gallons of water daily to each residential customer in Launiupoko, or almost 20 times as much as the average American home. The development has just a few hundred residents, but it uses almost half as much water as the public water system in Lāhainā, which serves 18,000 customers.
Martin says he didn’t set out to make Launiupoko a luxury development, but that its value spiked after Maui County imposed rules that limited large-scale residential development on agricultural land. Martin’s development was grandfathered in under those restrictions, and demand for large homes drove up prices in the area. He says criticism of swimming pools and landscaped driveways is rooted in envy.
“People come over and make their land beautiful by using water,” he said.
Martin also maintains that there’s more than enough water for everyone, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Annual precipitation around Lāhainā declined by about 10 percent between 1990 and 2009, drying out the streams near Launiupoko, and now Martin sometimes can’t provide water to all his customers during dry periods. The underground aquifer in the area is also oversubscribed, according to state data, with Martin’s companies and other users pumping out 10 percent more groundwater than flows in each year on average. Climate change could exacerbate this shortage by worsening droughts along Maui’s coast: Projections from 2014 show that annual rainfall could decline by around 15 percent over the coming century under even a moderate scenario for global warming.
In response, the state water commission has intervened to stop Martin and other developers from overtapping West Maui’s water, setting strict limits on water diversion and fining his companies for violating those rules. Last year, the state took full control of the region’s water, potentially jeopardizing the future of Martin’s luxury subdivisions and making it harder for him to build more in the area.
Now, though, Martin is poised to play a key role as West Maui recovers from the Lāhainā wildfire, which destroyed 2,200 structures, including six housing units Martin had developed. Nine of his employees lost their homes. As of early November, more than 6,800 displaced people on Maui remained in hotels or other temporary lodging. Millions of dollars in federal funds are expected to flow into the state for reconstruction. Martin, with his dozens of development companies and thousands of acres of vacant land, is perfectly positioned to build new homes. And his concerns about water regulations slowing development may find a more sympathetic audience as local officials seek to address a post-fire housing crisis.
Moreover, he is itching to build. Before the fire, county and state officials were shooting down most of his new building proposals amid a concern about overdevelopment, even the ones that Martin pitched as affordable workforce housing. Martin thinks he can mitigate West Maui’s fire risk and and its housing crisis by getting rid of the barriers that prevent developers like himself from building more houses with irrigated farms and green lawns.
“What I just want is the water to be able to be used on the land, which God intended it to,” he said.
Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko doesn’t know what deity Martin is referring to.
“Ke Akua is a God of love and restoration and abundant life,” he told the water commission during September’s hearing, using the Hawaiian word for God. Palakiko had flown to Honolulu with many other Maui residents to urge the state officials to uphold their responsibility to protect water.
Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko kneels next to a taro plant on his family farm. The starch is a traditional part of the Native Hawaiian diet and is also spiritually important: Indigenous histories describe Hawaiians as being descended from the plant, known as kalo. Cory Lum / Grist
Palakiko doesn’t take his land, or water, for granted. He was a teenager in Lāhainā in the 1980s when his family started getting priced out by rising rents. That’s when his dad remembered that his own father had once shown him the family’s ancestral land in nearby Kauʻula Valley. According to Palakiko’s grandfather, the family had been forced out by the Pioneer Mill sugar plantation, which had diverted the Palakikos’ water to irrigate crops. Palakiko’s family still owned the title to the land, and his father was determined to find a way to reclaim it.
First they cleared brush by cutting firebreaks and burning the overgrowth, controlling the flames with five-gallon buckets of water hauled from a nearby river. Once they had opened enough land to build a house, the Palakikos worked out a deal with Pioneer Mill to restore free water access to their property, connecting their home to the plantation’s water system with a series of 1½-inch plastic pipes.
Access to that water meant that the Palakikos could live on their ancestral land for the first time in generations. Back then, Palakiko says, their property felt isolated from Lāhainā, accessible only by old cane field roads that could take 45 minutes to reach town. But the family didn’t mind. It was enough to be able to stay on Maui when so many other Native Hawaiians were forced by economic necessity to leave.
That isolation didn’t last. In 1999, Pioneer Mill harvested its last sugar crop, ending 138 years of cultivation in Lāhainā. The abandoned fields turned brown and Palakiko heard that the company was selling off thousands of acres. Where once the Palakikos had seen Filipino plantation workers tending to crops, they noticed fair-skinned strangers and surveyors exploring the fallow grounds.
The Palakikos soon realized that the land was now in the hands of Peter Martin, who had joined other local investors to buy everything he could of the old plantation land. These new owners soon subdivided the land and sold parcels at ever higher prices as demand for the area known as Launiupoko kept increasing. It didn’t matter that the area was zoned for agriculture: Like many other developers, Martin took advantage of a legal provision that allowed homeowners to build luxurious estates on such land as long as they did some token farming of crops like fruit or flowers, no matter how perfunctory it might be.
Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko walks walks through his family’s land in West Maui, which they’ve owned since before the U.S. overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. Their farm relies on water from Kauaʻula Stream, from which Martin also pulls water. Cory Lum / Grist
By the time Martin finished the development, which included around 400 homes on around 1,000 acres, he was diverting almost 4 million gallons from the stream every day, according to state data, almost as much as the 4.8 million gallons Pioneer Mill had diverted each day before it shut down.
Some days the Palakiko family would wake up to find no water running through the pipes. By the afternoon, puddles along the stream would evaporate and fish would flop on the hot rocks, suffocating. It wasn’t just the Palakikos who were suffering, but the whole river system: As Martin diverted water from the mountains, the waterway dried up farther downstream, threatening the native fish and shrimp that lived in it. Palakiko appealed to Martin’s new water utility, Launiupoko Irrigation Company, but he said the company was hostile. First it tried to shut off the water the family had been receiving through plastic pipes, then asked the family to pay for water they’d always drawn for free, only relenting after the Palakikos fought back.
In addition to diverting water away from Native Hawaiian families, Martin has tried to force some from their land. In 2002, his Makila Land Company filed a so-called “quiet title” case against the Kapus, another farming family whose land borders the Palakikos, seeking to claim a portion of the family’s ancestral land as its own. This legal strategy, which allows landowners to take control of properties that may have multiple ownership claims, later gained notoriety when Mark Zuckerberg used it to consolidate his holdings on Kauai.
Water gushes behind Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko on its way to his family’s taro patch, known as a loʻi. Farther behind him is a stretch of dry, invasive grass, similar to the grass that fueled the Lāhainā fire. Cory Lum / Grist
When the Kapus fought back, the company kept them in court for almost two decades, appealing over and over to gain the rights to a 3.4-acre parcel. The situation between Martin and the Kapu family became so tense that in 2020, Martin sought a restraining order against one member of the family, Keeaumoku Kapu, accusing him of “verbally attack[ing] me with an expletive-laced tirade” and blocking Martin’s access to the disputed land. The court imposed a mutual injunction against Martin and Kapu later that year; two years later, Kapu finally prevailed in court and secured the title to his property.
Martin’s companies filed multiple quiet-title lawsuits over the years as Martin sought to consolidate control of the land around Launiupoko. Just after it began litigation against the Kapus, Makila Land Company made a similar claim against a neighboring taro farmer named John Aquino, seeking to seize a portion of the land belonging to Aquino’s family. The company won the slice of land in an appellate court in 2013, but the Aquino family stayed put. Police arrested Aquino in 2020 after two of Martin’s employees drove a semi onto the land; Aquino had smashed the truck’s windows with a baseball bat. Makila later filed a trespassing lawsuit in 2021 against Brandon and Tiara Ueki, who also live near the Kapus. The parties agreed to dismiss the case the following year after an apparent settlement. More recently, Martin has fanned even more frustration by selling properties with contested titles, prompting at least one ongoing legal battle.
The offices of West Maui Land Company, the firm at the center of Peter Martin’s development enterprise. The company has been the subject of multiple lawsuits in the wake of the August wildfire. Cory Lum / Grist
Meanwhile, Martin and his fellow investors sought to expand to other parts of West Maui with several large-scale developments in areas along the coastline. In one instance, he and another pair of developers named Bill Frampton and Dave Ward proposed building 1,500 homes, including both single and multifamily housing units, in the small beachfront town of Olowalu, even though water access in the area is minimal and rainfall is declining. The developers later scrapped the project following protests from environmental activists, but in the meantime, Martin sold off a few dozen more lots in Olowalu, where he has a home. He also created another utility, Olowalu Water Company, to supply homes in the area with stream water.
Hawaiʻi, like most of the Western United States, allocates water using a “rights” system: A person or company can own the right to draw from a given water source, often on land they own, but they can’t own the water source itself. In states like Oregon and Arizona, this system has led to conflicts between settlers and tribal nations, but in Hawaiʻi the law provides explicit protection for Native Hawaiian users. State law stipulates that traditional and cultural uses, such as taro farming, “shall not be abridged or denied.” In times of shortage, Native users have the highest priority.
In 2018, the state water commission imposed so-called “flow standards” on several West Maui streams, capping the amount of water that Launiupoko Irrigation Company and Olowalu Water Company could divert at any given time. Palakiko had mixed feelings about this: He didn’t want to cede more control over the water that his family had used for generations, but it felt necessary in order to ensure someone could hold the companies accountable.
Even after these rules took effect, though, Martin’s water utility companies violated them dozens of times. When the state threatened to fine the companies, Launiupoko Irrigation Company stopped taking water from its stream completely. Residents of the lush Launiupoko subdivision soon had to ration irrigation water, and the Palakikos lost their access altogether. Their pipes stayed dry for more than a week until a judge ordered Martin’s company to turn on the tap back on.
West Maui Land Company has been struggling in recent years to secure approval for new developments. The wildfire could now spur a surge in housing construction on Maui. Cory Lum / Grist
The new restrictions started to hamper Martin’s development activities. Last year, his Launiupoko Water Company applied to the state’s utility regulator for permission to deliver water to a new area near Lāhainā. The company said it had agreed to supply a nearby landowner with potable water for 11 new homes, and told the state it needed to increase its groundwater pumping by at least 65,000 gallons per day. The regulator rejected the expansion plan, saying the company had omitted “basic information” about where it would get this new water. The landowner that would have received the water was another company in which Martin has an ownership stake.
Even as his companies’ plans faced headwinds, Martin continued to benefit. He loaned Launiupoko Irrigation Company a total of $9 million in recent years as the company tried to expand its Lāhainā well system, charging 8 percent interest. The company tried in 2021 to secure a bank loan for the project, but three banks turned it down, with one noting that the company’s “interest payments to Pete” were “substantial.”
Glenn Tremble, a top executive at West Maui Land Company, the company at the center of Martin’s development empire, said in response to a list of questions that Grist’s statements were “generally false and often libelous.” Tremble noted that Martin has built affordable housing units on West Maui and donated to churches. He said that Martin is “well positioned to assist with recovery and efforts to rebuild.”
If Martin’s track record with water and land made him infamous in Lāhainā, it also invigorated local support for even stricter water controls. Palakiko’s long campaign for more attention to the region’s water problems finally bore fruit last year when the state designated West Maui as a “water management area.” Instead of just setting limits on how much water Martin’s companies could take from West Maui streams at any given time, the state water commission announced that it would revamp the area’s entire water system, giving highest priority to Indigenous cultural uses like taro farming. That may mean limiting access for Martin’s luxury developments, though Tremble disputes this.
“We’ve heard a lot from the community about the development of West Maui Land’s holdings in Launiupoko,” said Dean Uyeno, the interim chair of the state water commission, about the decision. “To continue building in these types of ways is going to keep taxing the resource.” The question, Uyeno said, is whether developers “can … find a way to [be] building more responsible development that balances the resources we have.”
A worker checks on a water well that serves one of Martin’s housing developments in West Maui. Cory Lum / Grist
Martin thinks the argument that water is a scarce resource is a “red herring.” He argues that the market is calling for more housing, not more water for native fish that rely on the streams.
“All the people [who] ever come to me say, ‘Peter, can you get me a house? I want a place to live,’” he said. “They don’t go, ‘Oh, I wish I had [shrimp] for dinner.’ That’s not what people tell me. They say, ‘Can’t you give me some house, some land?’ I go, ‘I’d love to but the government won’t let me.’”
In the days before the wildfire, Martin’s executives worked long hours in his West Maui Land Company office filling out 30 state applications justifying their current water usage and seeking more, in accordance with the state’s revamp of the area’s water system. They submitted the applications just days before the state’s August 7 deadline. The day after the deadline, Lāhainā burned.
To Martin, this is not a coincidence. He believes the state water commission’s efforts to more strictly regulate water enabled the fire by preventing more construction of homes with irrigated lawns — in other words, more development would have made West Maui more resilient to fire. The day before the water commissioners met in September, he wondered if the commissioners would acknowledge their responsibility for the wildfire deaths and regretted not pushing harder against their restrictions.
“I feel I actually have blood on my hands because I didn’t fight hard enough,” he said.
Developer Peter Martin told Grist that concern about invasive grass fueling wildfires is a “red herring,” and asked, “How could this stuff that’s 8 inches, or 10 or 12 inches, or very low on the ground be the culprit?” Cory Lum / Grist
There’s no evidence that the state management rules, which are still in the process of going into effect, had any bearing on the fire. When Grist relayed this argument to the interim leader of the state’s water commission, he was stunned.
“That actually leaves me speechless,” said Uyeno. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
Palakiko and his family spent the day of the fire watching the smoke rising from the coastline, watering the grass on their property and praying the winds wouldn’t shift, sending the flames their way. Five years earlier, another fire fueled by a passing hurricane had burned down two homes on their land.
That day, their prayers were answered. But when Palakiko’s son, a firefighter, came home shaken from his shift fighting the blaze, the family realized that the West Maui they had known their whole lives was gone.
Two days later, Palakiko received another shock when he read Tremble’s letter accusing Kaleo Manuel, the deputy director of the water commission, of delaying the release of firefighting water. The letter argued that Manuel had waited to release water to West Maui Land Company’s reservoir until he had checked with the owners of a downstream taro farm. That farm belongs to the Palakikos.
The company’s allegations were explosive. The state attorney general launched an investigation and requested that the commission reassign Manuel, who had been instrumental in establishing the Lāhainā water management area and was the only Native Hawaiian to ever hold that position. Governor Josh Green temporarily suspended the rules that limit how much water Martin’s companies and other water users can draw from West Maui streams. The state later reinstated Manuel and restored the rules. In a statement to Grist, Tremble said he respects Manuel’s “commitment and his integrity” and said that “the problem is the process, or lack thereof, to provide water to Maui Fire Department and to the community.”
A reservoir owned by one of Peter Martin’s water utilities in the hills outside Lāhainā. The reservoir delivers water to a subdivision built by another of Martin’s companies. Cory Lum / Grist
While there was no evidence that filling the reservoir would have stopped the fire from destroying Lāhainā, and firefighting helicopters wouldn’t have been able to access the reservoir due to high winds on the day in question, there’s a growing consensus among scientists in Hawaiʻi that one factor in its rapid spread was the proliferation of nonnative grasses on former plantation lands — including lands that Peter Martin owns.
Before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, before the dominance of the sugar industry allowed plantations to divert West Maui’s streams, Hawaiian royalty lived on a sandbar in the midst of a large fishpond within a 14-acre wetland in Lāhainā, which was known as the Venice of the Pacific.
After plantation owners diverted streams for their crops, the royal fishpond became a stagnant marsh, and later was filled with coral rubble and paved over. Now, Palakiko imagines what it would be like if the streams were allowed to resume their original paths: what trees would grow, what native grass could flourish, what fires might be stopped. He doesn’t think this vision is at odds with the need to address Maui’s housing crisis.
For Palakiko, the fight over the future of water in Lāhainā is about more than just who controls the streams in this section of Maui. It’s also in some ways a referendum on what future Hawaiʻi will choose: one that reflects the worldview of people like Palakiko, who see water as a sacred resource to be preserved, or that of people like Martin, who sees it as a tool to be used for profit.
To Martin, such a shift is unsettling.
“I mean, for a hundred years, you could take all the water, and all of a sudden these guys come in, and say, ‘Oh, you can’t take any water,’” Martin said. “And they made it sound like I’m this terrible person.”
For now, it’s only a gaping hole in the ground, 100-by-100 feet, surrounded by farm machinery and bales of hemp on a sandy patch of earth in the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation in southwestern Minnesota.
But when construction is complete next April, the Lower Sioux — also known as part of the Mdewakanton Band of Dakota — will have a 20,000-square-foot manufacturing campus that will allow them to pioneer a green experiment, the first of its kind in the United States.
They will have an integrated vertical operation to grow hemp, process it into insulation called hempcrete, and then build healthy homes with it. Right now, no one in the U.S. does all three.
Once the tribe makes this low-carbon material, they can begin to address a severe shortage of housing and jobs. Recapturing a slice of sovereignty would be a win for the Lower Sioux, once a largely woodland people who were subjected to some of the worst brutality against the Indigenous nations in North America.
They lost most of their lands in the 19th century, and the territory finally allotted to them two hours south of Minneapolis consists of just 1,743 acres of poor soil. That stands in contrast to the fertile black earth of the surrounding white-owned farmlands.
The Lower Sioux, also known as the Mdewakanton Band of Dakota, have several fields where they grow their own hemp to process into hurd for their hempcrete projects. Aaron Nesheim / Grist
Nearly half of the 1,124 enrolled members of the tribe need homes. Some of the unhoused camp on the hard ground outside the reservation, with nowhere else to turn. Those who do have shelter live in often moldy, modular homes with flimsy walls that can’t keep out the minus-15 Fahrenheit winter cold.
Now, they have two prototypes that are nearly done and know how to build or retrofit more. While learning how to make the houses, the construction team developed a niche eco-skill they can market off the reservation as well.
“The idea of making homes that would last and be healthy was a no-brainer,” said Robert “Deuce” Larsen, the tribal council president.
“We need to build capacity in the community and show that it can be an income stream.”
That one of the smallest tribes in the country, in terms of population and land in trust, is leading the national charge on an integrated hempcrete operation is no mean feat, seeing that virtually no one in the community had experience with either farming or construction before the five-man team was assembled earlier this year.
“It’s fantastic,” said Jody McGuinness, executive director of the U.S. Hemp Building Association. “I haven’t heard of any other fully integrated project like this domestically.”
Besides, hempcrete as a construction material is normally the domain of rich people with means to contract a green home, not marginalized communities. That’s because the sustainable material is normally imported from Europe rather than made locally.
“It’s accessible to people with wealth, who can afford to build a bespoke house. It’s not accessible to the general public,” McGuinness said.
The project is the brainchild of Earl Pendleton, 52,a rail-thin man of quiet intensity, who until recently was the tribal council’s vice president. He grew obsessed with industrial hemp when reading about it 13 years ago.
Earl Pendelton, a former tribal council member, is responsible for driving the investment in hemp as a source of housing and revenue to hopefully sustain the tribe in the future.
Aaron Nesheim / Grist
Pendleton was intrigued to learn that the bamboolike plant has 25,000 uses, including wood substitutes, biofuel, bioplastics, animal feed, and textiles.
Hemp can grow in a variety of climates and, depending on the location, can yield more than one harvest a year. What’s more, hemp regenerates soil, sequesters carbon, and doesn’t require fertilizers.
“It blew my mind,” he recalled.
People often confuse hemp with its cannabis cousin, marijuana. But hemp has negligible THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive component that creates a weed high. And this stalky variant is more versatile than the flowery CBD (cannabidiol) type.
Hempcrete is made by mixing mashed stalks with lime and water. The oatmeal-like substance is stuffed or sprayed into the cavities of framed walls. Once it hardens, it resembles cement to the touch (thus the name) but has different properties.
The petrified substance has airtight qualities that can dramatically cut down on heating and air-conditioning needs. Unlike many commonly used building materials, it is nontoxic and resists mold, fire, and pests.
While used in Europe, commercial hemp was banned in the U.S. until the 2018 Farm Bill. Since then, hempcrete has been slow to catch on, due to a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Farmers don’t want to plant without facilities nearby to process the stalks. Potential processors don’t want to buy expensive machinery without guarantees of raw material. And most American contractors don’t know anything about hempcrete.
Aside from the green value, Pendleton saw a chance to pivot from the reservation’s Jackpot Junction Casino, the tribe’s main source of income for the past 35 years. A bronze statue of a warrior spearing a buffalo stands in front.
For many years, as Pendleton managed the floor and worked blackjack, he saw gamblers lose their paychecks, and more. The Lower Sioux weren’t getting richer. The population on the reservation has expanded rapidly since 2000, which meant the per capita cut that each family got from the $30 million yearly profits shrank. For most families, it is the only income they receive.
“We sell misery. It’s nothing to be proud of, the money to be made here,” Pendleton said.
He added that the guaranteed money from the casinos killed many people’s ambitions to get education or training for jobs, or to seek work off the reservation.
It took a while for him to convince the tribal leadership to endorse his hemp vision. “When I would bring it up eight years ago, they’d say, ‘What? You’re going to smoke the wall?’ They associated it with weed.”
He had some learning to do, too. Pendleton knew nothing about the industry, so he binged on YouTube videos about techniques and drove around the country to meet experts.
“It was daunting,” he said.
Once the tribal council got on board three years ago, they cobbled together loans, government grants, and their own funds to earmark more than $6 million to build the first two prototype homes and the processing campus.
They have the potential to plant hemp on 300 acres and, at a given time, grow on between 100 to 200 acres. Test seeds came from New Genetics in Colorado and the Dun Agro Hemp Group, a Dutch company with a new processing facility in Indiana that is seeking partnerships with tribal communities.
Pendleton recruited Joey Goodthunder, a cheerful 33-year-old who had picked up farming cattle and corn from his grandfather, as agricultural processing manager. Goodthunder set to planting in a field called Cansa’yap, or “the place where they paint the trees red,” which is what the tribe used to do to mark territory.
Joey Goodthunder, whose primary job is growing the tribe’s hemp, looks over the beginnings of a foundation for a building to house the Lower Sioux’s processing equipment. Aaron Nesheim / Grist
Pendleton lured as project manager Danny Desjarlais, 38, a tattooed carpenter who had been thinking about becoming a long-haul truck driver for lack of other work.
“Earl found out and took me and my kids’ mom out to eat and told her, ‘If he drives a truck, he’s not going to be home every night. I’ll have him home for dinner every night,’” Desjarlais said.
Desjarlais entertained doubts about this bizarre product he had never heard of. Pendleton sealed the deal by taking him to a hemp building conference in Austin, Texas. “That was eye-opening,” Desjarlais said.
Pendleton signed up three other Lower Sioux, only one of whom had experience putting up walls. And he invited two luminaries in hemp building: Jennifer Martin, a partner in HempStone, and Cameron McIntosh of Americhanvre to teach the different application techniques. They are based, respectively, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
Intrigued by what this project could achieve in terms of Native sovereignty, Martin traveled to Minnesota again and again to usher the crew through the project.
“What the Lower Sioux is doing is the most compelling and forward-thinking thing that’s happening in hempcrete today,” she said. “No one else is doing anything like this. And Danny is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with; he’s like a sponge.”
The venture has, unsurprisingly, experienced bumps. Equipment housed at another company’s warehouse nearby broke down. Replacement parts were backlogged due to pandemic supply chain issues. Since they couldn’t process hemp in the time allotted to build, the crew had to import some.
Goodthunder, meanwhile, struggled with harvesting techniques alien to conventional agriculture, such as leaving cut stalks to rot in the field for weeks so that unwanted seeds separate from the woody inner fiber, called hurd.
Yet they’ve made progress.
They began with a demo shed in September 2022, placed on a field where the tribe holds powwows, an annual celebration of music and dance. The kids used it as a concession stand to sell sodas and candies. The remaining skeptics all wanted their pictures taken next to it.
“Once they saw it, they changed their minds,” Desjarlais said. “They said, ‘Let’s build a house.’”
Danny Desjarlais, the project manager for the hempcrete initiative, stands next to a newly built duplex made with the tribe’s hempcrete.
Aaron Nesheim / Grist
Build they did. In a 14-day blitz in July, the team threw together a 1,500-square-foot lime-green ranch, without any blueprints. It’ll be used as two units of temporary housing for people coming from substance abuse treatment or jail.
“Everyone said, ‘It‘s impossible.’ Even people in the hemp world thought it was impossible,” Desjarlais said proudly. His muscled arm, tattooed with the words “Love Life,” pointed at the hempcrete blocks wedged securely into the 12-inch-thick walls. A pleasant, haylike smell wafted through the house.
Another four-room prototype is already framed and being filled with hempcrete. It will be rented out to community members when done.
The processing campus where they hope to manufacture blocks or panels of hempcrete has a solar greenhouse to store bags of lime and hemp, as well as equipment such as a combine harvester and a decorticator that separates the hurd from the softer fibers that can be used for textiles.
The project could serve as an example for the 573 other federally recognized tribes, many of which face similar critical shortages of jobs and housing. Native Americans retain 25 percent of U.S. land tenure in federal trust, and self-governing communities don’t have to wait for permits from other authorities.
Larsen, the tribal president, thinks hemp could provide a lucrative income stream for tribes that have the land to grow it and a trained crew that can offer its skills off the reservation.
“Native American tribes have an advantage, because they can build with materials that are new, without having to get them certified by a national agency,” said McGuinness. “They don’t have the bureaucracy holding them down.”
What’s more, he’s hearing about non-tribal companies, Dun Agro among them, that are viewing tribal communities as development partners.
Architect Bob Escher, who has four residential designs in the works involving hemp, sees demand for skilled hemp professionals increasing as green building takes off. So far, there are only a handful of these experts in the U.S.
“Who knew five years ago that a hempcrete consultant would be sitting at the same table with structural engineers, electrical contractors, HVAC installers, and interior designers to help me and the client develop the design program,” he said. “This is the pure definition of job creation.”
For now, the Lower Sioux undertaking has caught the eye of four other reservations in Minnesota, as well as Dallas Goldtooth, who plays the Spirit in the hit show Reservation Dogs on Hulu. Desjarlais said the actor was interested in a hempcrete build for his mother, who lives in the community.
Farther north, the Gitxsan First Nation in Canada invited Desjarlais to show them in August how to build. They’ve grown enough hemp for three prototype homes on their Sik-E-Dakh reserve 16 hours north of Vancouver and are seeking $5.5 million (Canadian) to get a similar integrated project off the ground.
Desjarlais left them inspired, said Velma Sutherland, a band administrator. “This could be the start of something big.”
Seven years after thousands of people converged in North Dakota to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the public now has an opportunity to weigh in on the environmental risks associated with the section of the pipeline crossing half a mile north of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reservation.
The 2016-2017 protests brought prolonged, international attention to the Standing Rock reservation, and the Nation’s fight to protect its sacred sites and drinking water. Yet despite months of protests, the project eventually went through with the support of then-President Donald Trump. By June 2017, oil was flowing and today, up to 750,000 barrels of petroleum pass through the pipeline, which stretches from western North Dakota to southern Illinois.
But the story continued. In 2020, a federal court ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers had not done a thorough enough analysis of the project’s impacts, noting that the pipeline’s “effects on the quality of the human environment are likely to be highly controversial.” The court ordered the Army Corps to produce a full environmental impact statement on the section of the pipeline that crosses underneath Lake Oahe and stop the flow of oil. A higher court later determined that the pipeline could continue operating, but agreed that a more extensive environmental analysis needed to be completed.
That analysis is happening now, and Steven Wolf, chief of the public affairs office in the Omaha branch of the Army Corps, said the current public comment period is an opportunity for the public to weigh in on whether the draft environmental impact statement is adequate — essentially serving as a quality control check on the agency’s revised analysis.
“This is a way for the public to say, ‘Yes, you studied this thoroughly or no, we think you need to look at some more information,’” he said. “Public input will actually help us to do better analysis and also to ultimately reach a better decision.”
The Army Corps’ new draft environmental impact statement says there haven’t been any leaks from the pipeline since it began operating, although there have been some spills at aboveground facilities where the oil has been recovered. The draft analysis describes the possibility of an oil spill underneath Lake Oahe as “remote to very unlikely,” and concluded that oil would be more likely to spill if it were transported via car or train.
While the draft environmental impact statement acknowledges that the water in the Missouri River corridor is considered sacred to Indigenous peoples, Janet Alkire, chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, is worried about the possibility of a petroleum spill that could contaminate her community’s water source. “Am I going to be the tribal chair that has to deal with a disaster? A pipeline that breaks? Am I going to be in that position?” she asked Army Corps officials at a meeting earlier this month.
The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Wolf says it’s important to remember that the public comment period deals strictly with the half-mile stretch of the pipeline under Lake Oahe. He added that the Army Corps only regulates land used by the company and has no authority to regulate the pipeline itself. “We don’t build pipelines,” said Wolf. “We don’t operate pipelines. We don’t regulate pipelines.” Wolf added that regulatory responsibility sits with the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Still, that authority is consequential. If Army Corps denies the easement, that could force Energy Transfer Partners to reroute the pipeline further away from the Standing Rock reservation.
One option is to move the pipeline 50 miles north of where it is currently, crossing nearly nine miles north of Bismarck, North Dakota. Energy Transfer Partners analyzed a similar route prior to building the pipeline. In its 2016 environmental assessment, the Army Corps supported avoiding that route, noting its proximity to municipal water supplies. Jade Begay, director of policy and advocacy at NDN Collective, said that the Army Corps’ decision to approve the pipeline’s placement near the reservation rather than the majority-white city of Bismarck was problematic.
“That crossing was really why so many people showed up because this was a symbol of blatant environmental injustice and environmental racism,” she said.
Steven Wolf says so far the Army Corps has already received tens of thousands of comments. However, many of them are form letters, which the Corps considers a single comment even if it is sent in by thousands of people. Wolf said the agency will respond to every unique issue raised. He estimated a final environmental impact statement on the section in question will take at least a year to complete.
Begay said the public comment period open now is an important opportunity for people to hold the federal government accountable.
“These laws that protect our landscapes, our water, our biodiversity, are really the things keeping us from seeing total destruction and disregard for our clean water and for environmental justice,” she said. “We have to keep the pressure on.” The Army Corps is accepting comments until December 13.
This story was originally published by the Arizona Mirror.
In an effort to address the ongoing drought affecting the Southwest, the Gila River Indian Community is taking an innovative step forward by launching its Solar Canal Project to construct the country’s first solar-over-canal project.
“A tribe is leading the way,” Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis said, adding that the shovel-ready project will immediately address water conservation.
The Gila River Indian Community and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed an agreement on Thursday in Sacaton, Arizona, kicking off construction on the first phase of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project Renewal Energy Pilot Project, which is expected to be completed in 2025.
“This new technology fits and supports our culture and tradition as we look forward to being sustainable in the future in a very real way,” Lewis said. The project may break new ground for the tribe, but he said it furthers their role as stewards of their water.
Lewis said they’re looking at this in terms of a Blue-Green Tribal Agricultural Economy, in which blue represents conserving water and green symbolizes renewable energy.
The GRIC has over 150 miles of canal that could ultimately be covered with solar panels, and this project could be a game-changer for creating energy.
The first phase of the project involves the construction of solar panels over a portion of the GRIC’s Interstate 10 Level Top canal, according to the tribe, and the project works to conserve water and generate renewable energy for tribal irrigation facilities.
David Deyoung, the director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, said there are two ways this project can conserve water: reducing the evaporative water losses and minimizing water use for power generation. The combination, he said, will save about 200 acre-feet a year.
The project is expected to produce approximately 1 megawatt of renewable energy to offset energy needs and costs for tribal farmers, according to the GRIC.
The solar panels are expected to cover more than 1,000 feet of the canal as part of phase one of the project. Lewis said he hopes to launch phase two in December, which involves installing solar panels on top of more canals near Casa Blanca.
Lewis said it’s great to see all the plans come to fruition, and he believes that the Gila River Indian Community is setting new ground for other tribes to follow.
For the last 20 years, Walter Ritte has been working to restore a massive, human-made lagoon along the south shore of the island of Molokai. Before Hawaiʻi become a state, before the United States overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom, this 55-acre pond was a fish farm — one of an estimated 450 brackish, coastal coves that fed an estimated 1 million people. Ritte is among a group of Native Hawaiians who have been working to bring the Molokai fishpond back to life.
“Our future is our history, and we’ve gone away from that,” he said. “If we’re not self-sufficient, we are gambling with our lives here.”
Ritte has rebuilt broken undersea walls and gates, removed predatory fish and invasive plants from the lagoon, reintroduced species that once thrived in the area, and monitored water quality. The goal, says Ritte, is to revive Indigenous aquaculture and reverse Hawaiʻi’s dependence on imported food, which makes up nearly 85 percent of all food on the islands.
But worsening rainstorms have raised worries. When the rain comes, it barrels down, transforming red dirt into mud that slides down the hillside into the sea, suffocating reefs and filling the fishponds Ritte has been trying to revive with sludge. As the impacts of climate change intensify, Ritte knows the challenge to revive, and preserve, Hawaiʻi’s aquaculture traditions will get harder.
“One of the big reasons why Molokai was known as ʻāina momona, which means the ‘fat land,’ is because we had so much protein coming off the reefs,” he said. “All of this is in jeopardy because of a hundred years of excess erosion.”
Indigenous peoples, like Ritte, bear both the weight of climate change’s impacts and carry knowledge that may help lessen its burden. That’s according to the latest National Climate Assessment published Tuesday, a federal, interagency report published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program every five years. The report’s authors emphasized that American land theft and colonization have made Indigenous peoples more vulnerable to climate change as shrinking coastlines and more frequent extreme weather events threaten historic sites, cultural practices, and food supplies.
“Historical abuses of Indigenous rights have significant responsibility for the heightened severity of climate disruption,” the report concluded.
The report cites a 2021 study that concluded that Indigenous peoples in the United States lost 99 percent of their territories through colonization, and that the lands that they were forced to move to face higher wildfire risk and worse drought than their traditional homelands. According to the authors, Indigenous peoples across the continental U.S. and its island holdings hail from more than 700 tribes and communities, and while each community has a different relationship with the federal government, all share similar experiences of colonization through stolen land, cultural assimilation, and persistent marginalization.
For example, the study noted that, on average, relocated Indigenous people endure two extra days of extreme heat. Nearly half saw an increased wildfire risk. More than a third of tribes studied are experiencing more frequent drought than they would if they were still living in their historical homelands.
More flooding is another challenge. According to the report, 70 out of 200 Alaska Native villages are at risk of “severe impacts” from flooding, erosion, and permafrost melt, according to one 2022 federal report. The problem prompted the Biden administration to launch a new federal program, last year, to pay tribes to move away from rivers and coastlines threatened by flooding and other climate change effects.
The report also detailed problems with the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal insurance program managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that helps homeowners insure against the risk of flooding, something that many insurance companies won’t cover. The program is supposed to help communities mitigate flood risk, but the report found that its implementation in Native communities has been flawed and ineffective: The program is mandatory for homeowners who live in flood-risk areas — even if they are Indigenous people who were forcibly moved to a danger zone — and premiums are costly. Tribes end up spending lots of money on floodplain managers and must shoulder the cost of creating and enforcing floodplain management ordinances, the report said.
“The [National Flood Insurance Program’s] inability to support a diversity of Indigenous jurisdictions and effectively communicate program information inhibits Indigenous peoples’ success as program operators and beneficiaries,” the authors concluded.
Many Indigenous communities also lack data on their flood risk, a problem that reflects broader climate-related data gaps for Native peoples that the report repeatedly noted. Despite the input of hundreds of expert collaborators, the report noted the absence of data on Indigenous peoples, including missing maps of historical ancestral homelands in American Samoa, missing data on wildfire risks to the U.S’s island territories, and a broad lack of environmental data from Indian Country. The absence of data, the authors noted, represents a major systemic obstacle that impedes policymaking.
Similarly, the report found that local, state, and federal governments often don’t do enough to involve Indigenous peoples in climate change response planning. Native communities that pursue such planning themselves are often hampered by lack of funding and staffing. Even when money is available to fund Indigenous-led projects, the money streams may not actually be constructed in a way to be actually accessible. Renewable energy projects, such as a wind farm pursued by the Rosebud Sioux Nation, for example, have faced many challenges, including inadequate funding, questions about ownership of infrastructure, and bureaucratic hoops.
The report concludes that supporting Indigenous self-determination is necessary to ensure Native communities’ needs are met, but also found that those efforts are undermined by policies and institutions that uphold state, local, or federal policies or prioritize the needs of the private sector.
“The right to self-determination means Indigenous peoples should be in the position to make decisions about how to respond to climate change in ways that meet community-defined needs and aspirations,” the report says.
Nationally, Native people lead more than 1,000 efforts to address climate change, drawing up hundreds of climate change adaptation and mitigation plans. In Washington state, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community cultivates clam gardens to fight ocean acidification; in California, the Karuk Tribe has fought for their right to conduct prescribed burns.
Walter Ritte says the hot, humid summers are lasting far longer than when the 78-year-old Native Hawaiian activist was a boy on Molokai, and the rainstorms are more erratic, and fierce. Still, he is confident that better land management practices can help restore the fishponds, supporting more nearshore fishing, despite the climate threat.
“The water is getting warmer and killing the reef, but it’s also the erosion coming from the land, and that we have the ability to mitigate,” he said. “I don’t know how to mitigate the temperature of the ocean, but I know how to mitigate the land, because that’s where I’ve lived and our ancestors did it. So that’s what we hope we’re going to do, what we know we can handle.”
This story was produced in partnership with Osage News.
The sun wasn’t quite high in the Oklahoma sky when Nona and Wayne Roach piled into their old pickup truck, their teenage granddaughter Shaylee perched in the back. It was a hot September morning, but Osage County is known for searing summer temperatures that stretch into the fall. The heat and the hot air swirled around the two-lane road to their horses and cattle.
The Roaches have about 160 acres just outside the tiny town of Avant — population 320 — in the eastern part of Osage County, land that Wayne has worked since the mid-1970s and that his family has owned since the 1930s. He’s a former steer roper who lost two fingers trying to rope a calf on a bet in nearby Nelagoney. His grandfather gave him a calf a year, which is how he got his start.
The terrain is rock-ribbed and full of bluestem prairie, long grasses that are good for grazing livestock. The landscape is graced by bois d’arc trees, sometimes known as Osage orange or horse apple trees.
Then there are the oil wells, both active and abandoned. It’s Osage County, after all, and stories often lead back to oil. For a time in the early 20th century, oil made citizens of the Osage Nation some of the wealthiest people in the world. Martin Scorsese’s recent film Killers of the Flower Moon unravels one thread of that story.
But Nona is more concerned with the present. Why wasn’t she informed when an oil company filed for bankruptcy and just left their equipment on the Roach acreage? Why did it have to sit on her property for so long? Why did no one answer her calls? She’s not alone in her concerns. The Osage Nation is full of “orphan wells,” wells that are done producing and should be capped but often aren’t, left to sicken the land and people around them.
Nona and Wayne Roach drive around their property in Osage County. The couple own about 160 acres of land, which has been in Wayne’s family since the 1930s. Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
Vast oil reserves were discovered beneath the Osage Nation reservation more than a century ago. Since then, the tribe’s roughly 2,300 square miles in northeastern Oklahoma have become pockmarked with abandoned oil and gas wells.
The companies that drill and operate these wells are legally obligated to close drill holes and clean up sites once they finish extraction, but when they go bankrupt or abdicate their responsibilities, tribal citizens and landowners are left to deal with the fallout.
Left unplugged, these wells become legacy sources of pollution. They can emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as well as leak saltwater, oil, and other toxic materials into the surrounding earth, posing an environmental and public health threat. Tribal officials have identified numerous abandoned wells releasing dangerous liquids and gases near schools, playgrounds, and homes.
Grist and Osage News analyzed Interior Department data and found that there are roughly 2,300 orphaned wells across the Osage Nation — a higher concentration per square mile than any state, including oil-rich Texas and Pennsylvania. Due to poor record-keeping by federal agencies and officials, the true number could be as high as 16,000. In recent years, the federal government has been stepping in to help clean up the mess, announcing $19 million in funds earlier this year. But with the cost of plugging wells in Osage running anywhere between $40,000 and $500,000 per well, it won’t be nearly enough to fix the problem.
Grist and Osage News analyzed Interior Department data and found that there are roughly 2,300 documented orphaned wells across the Osage Nation — though the true number could be as high as 16,000.
Data source: Osage Minerals Council; visualization: Grist / Lylla Younes
The challenges go beyond funding. Interviews with tribal officials, landowners, and Osage citizens revealed that a slew of bureaucratic hurdles and political challenges threaten to derail the cleanup. What’s more, new rules proposed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, the federal agency that oversees oil and gas drilling in Osage, continue to do little to hold companies accountable when they walk away from their environmental responsibilities. The regulations fail to address the underlying problem — unscrupulous oil and gas operators — ultimately ensuring the Nation may be dealing with ballooning orphan well counts for decades to come.
To complicate matters, about one-fifth of Osage Nation’s more than 25,000 citizens are shareholders of the tribe’s mineral estate and have a vested interest in seeing oil production increase. The Osage Minerals Council, however, which represents these shareholders, is wary of stricter federal regulations that might scare oil companies away and diminish the tribe’s already waning profits.
There are several reasons for the high concentration of orphan wells on Osage land. For one, oil and gas production in Osage County has been steadily declining since the 1970s. The Exxons and Chevrons of the world left Osage long ago, and a slew of mostly mom-and-pop operators are now squeezing every last drop of oil from wells that are at the end of their lives. Margins are slim, business is tough, and operators frequently go belly-up or leave the county. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, many of the wells in Osage were orphaned more than a half-century ago, making it impossible to locate the operators responsible for their cleanup. Some were plugged through crude methods long since deemed inadequate.
On average, Osage County produces less than five million barrels of oil annually — a small fraction of Oklahoma’s and the nation’s production. The BIA estimates that almost all of the nearly 300 oil and gas companies operating in Osage today are small businesses, with just two firms responsible for almost 40 percent of production in the county. Approximately 100 producers extract less than 1,000 barrels of oil a year — which roughly equates to less than a barrel a day per well.
“The smaller operators are out there managing and dealing with the wells themselves,” said Trevor Henson, an Oklahoma-based oil and gas attorney who has represented the Osage Producers Association, a trade group. “Those guys can’t survive when the prices go down.”
The BIA has failed for a century in its role of protecting and preserving the mineral estate for tribal members, and the amount that the agency requires operators to set aside for well cleanup is inadequate. Whatever cleanup funds it has collected from operators prior to drilling have also been mismanaged. In recent years, the BIA has had little to no funds to turn over to the Nation for orphan well cleanup. The result of these divergent interests and historical mismanagement is that many Osage citizens, including those without shares in the mineral estate, live on land poisoned with oil.
In response to questions from Grist and Osage News, a BIA spokesperson said that the agency “fully complies” with all federal laws and that the agency is currently revising its oil and gas rules for Osage to “bring them in line with the regulations governing oil and gas leasing and development throughout the rest of Indian Country.”
“The extent of this unmitigated problem is a monumental failure of the BIA to fulfill its trust responsibility for oil and gas development in our mineral estate over the past 100 years,” Paul Revard, a member of the Osage Minerals Council, told a congressional appropriations committee earlier this year. “No other Indian tribe in the United States has an orphaned-well problem like the problem impacting our lands. It is not even close.”
Nona Roach is petite with short, neat blond hair and the no-nonsense demeanor that usually accompanies people adept at navigating federal officials and oil wildcatters doing business on her family’s land. One thing you learn about Nona right away: She can recite the Code of Federal Regulations, or CFRs, in her sleep. The CFRs are the rules that govern oil production and leasing on the Osage Mineral’s estate. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, these rules require that the agency inform landowners in writing when it approves drilling and plugging permits, and that operators pay commencement fees. But when an operator files for bankruptcy, there are few safeguards in place.
Nearly 20 years ago, Nona noticed a company called McKee stopped operating on her land. Its equipment was idle. No oil was being pumped.
“I kept asking the BIA about it,” Nona said. She called and called. She found out later the company had filed for bankruptcy and that the BIA had terminated its leases. And despite Nona’s many calls, the BIA didn’t tell her. For months, pump jacks and other equipment remained on her land and the wells remained uncapped.
Nona Roach and her husband, Wayne on their land in Osage County, Oklahoma.
Shane Brown / Osage News
While McKee’s disappearance happened nearly two decades ago, it’s left an indelible mark on the Roaches and their land. In the family truck, Nona cited — from memory — CFR Title 25 Chapter 1 Part 226, which dictates what happens to the equipment when a lease is terminated.
“‘That when lease terminates, all such personal property shall be removed within 90 days or such reasonable extension of time as may be granted by the superintendent,’” she recited. “‘Otherwise, the ownership of all castings shall revert to the lessor and all other personal property.’”
She also points out in that same code the land must be restored “as nearly as practicable to the original state.”
Nona, who has worked for both sides in the oil production business — as an advocate for landowners and to help oil companies navigate regulations in Indian Country — felt like the BIA “did everything they could to make sure we didn’t even know the lease was terminated.”
A BIA spokesperson said that landowners may file complaints regarding operators at any time. “The BIA Osage Agency conducts an inspection and determines what action, if any, is needed,” the spokesperson said.
Wayne Roach says one attempt by a McKee employee to plug a well included cutting down a tree and then sticking its branches into a pipe that juts up from the ground. Then there are the wells, still active on the Roaches’ land, run by the current owner of the lease, a company called Grand Resources. Some of the wells they operate have what is known as a REDA cable that connects the motor to a nearby electrical box. Nona said Grand Resources didn’t use trained electricians and instead used field hands who, in her words, “did a poor job. Those lines have electrocuted and killed cows and horses.”
The Roaches’ property in Osage County has a number of inactive and active wells. Left unplugged, abandoned wells become legacy sources of pollution. Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
“Our granddaughters could have been fried just as easy as those cows were, because they were here the day before,” Nona said, noting her granddaughters like to ride their horses around the property.
Active wells have leaked saltwater into nearby ponds where their cattle graze, and even more oozed into their bluestem prairie pasture, turning it brown. At one point, Nona recalls, Grand Resources had contaminated two of their ponds with saltwater at least three times each.
In an email, Scott Robinowitz, president of Grand Resources, disputes the Roaches’ allegations, adding that saltwater spills were cleaned up in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency and BIA according to their standards. Robinowitz also disputes Nona’s claims about the REDA cable, saying that all work was done by certified electricians.
Robonowitz characterized the relationship with the Roaches as “relatively cooperative but always at odds about something.”
The rules that govern mineral rights on other tribal lands and across the country don’t apply in Osage County, where a patchwork of tribal and federal bodies regulate oil production and the ensuing environmental fallout.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs Osage Agency building in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
Since the United States holds the title to the Osage Mineral Estate in trust for the tribe, it gives the federal government sweeping authority over fossil fuel extraction in the county, from issuing companies’ permits for drilling to calculating and distributing profits to shareholders, also referred to as “headright owners.” The BIA carries out these duties as a trustee of the tribe’s energy resources, a legal title that the Secretary of the Interior once described as one of “the highest moral obligations that the United States must meet.”
It plays out like this: Whereas an oil company hoping to drill in West Texas would lease land directly from the owner of a property’s mineral estate, operators in the Osage Nation get permission to drill from the BIA. The Osage Minerals Council, the mineral management agency for the Osage Nation, has the authority to accept bids for leases and works closely with the BIA to represent shareholder interests. According to the BIA, landowners “do not have a say in whether their land is leased for oil and gas mining, who the lessee is, or how long the lessee operates the lease on their land.”
“It’s unique,” said Henson, the oil and gas attorney. “I’m not aware of any individual group that owns all of their mineral estate in America.”
Over the past decade, headright payments have plunged and orphaned wells have endured as a county-wide public health threat. In a 2014 report, the Office of Inspector General, the oversight division within the Department of the Interior, blasted the BIA for policies that led to these conditions. The document, which was published after the Nation reached a settlement with the federal government for mismanaging its energy resources, identified dozens of systemic flaws with the agency’s program, including poorly defined environmental regulations, an antiquated data system, and inadequate protections to ensure oil and gas companies plug wells at the end of their lives.
It wasn’t the first time that the department identified issues with the BIA’s program. In 1990, officials identified many of the same problems, but nearly two decades later, the BIA had failed to carry out most of that report’s recommendations. Correcting these deficiencies, the 2014 report stated, was about more than crafting sounder regulations: It was a matter of fulfilling its trustee duty to the tribe.
“Not only does BIA have the authority, but it also has the obligation to manage the Osage Nation’s oil and gas resources effectively so that headright holders receive the best value for their oil and gas,” the report read.
In an email, the BIA said that it has taken steps to implement the report’s recommendations, and added that the agency fully complies with the National Environmental Policy Act and is working on modernizing existing regulations governing oil and gas leasing on Osage land.
Active wells on the Roaches’ property have leaked saltwater into nearby ponds where their cattle graze. At one point, Nona recalls, the oil operator Grand Resources had contaminated two of their ponds with saltwater at least three times each. Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
The BIA has rules in place to protect the Nation and landowners from the environmental fallout that might result from a company filing for bankruptcy. But those rules were written in 1974 when the cost of plugging and the number of orphaned wells were lower. Today, those costs are higher in part due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and a limited pool of pluggers.
When an operator applies to drill in Osage, the BIA requires the company to set aside money in the form of bonds in case it’s unable to fulfill its environmental obligations. These financial instruments involve a third-party guarantor. If an operator goes belly-up, the guarantor steps in to provide cleanup funds.
Operators in Osage are required to secure bonds for anywhere between $5,000 to $150,000 depending on the number of acres that they produce on. However, the requirements are wholly inadequate, because a single well can cost anywhere from $40,000 to $500,000 to plug. Collecting $150,000 for dozens of wells means the agency may only have a few thousand dollars — if that — to plug each well.
“Those bonds [were] set back in the 1970s, and it has not been adjusted for inflation,” said Jim Gray, a former principal chief of the Osage Nation. “There’s a justifiable need to update that bond amount just on that reason alone.”
Jim Gray, former chief of the Osage Nation, at Central Park in Skiatook, Oklahoma.
Shane Brown
Jim Gray, former chief of the Osage Nation, photographed at Central Park in Skiatook, Oklahoma. “I would think everyone has a shared interest in a successful plugging of a well,” he said, “that no one is in dispute over whether or not it needs to be plugged.” Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
BIA rules require that companies secure bonds before they can operate in Osage, but historically, the agency has allowed firms to set aside money using a less stringent form of financial assurance called certificates of deposit, or CDs, a type of savings account that generates interest for a defined period of time.
The 2014 Inspector General report found that this type of “promissory note” from the bank doesn’t prevent companies from borrowing the money in the account. That means the operator may have set aside money on paper, but there may not be any tangible funds for cleanup — essentially, an empty promise. The report noted that in addition to allowing certificates of deposit, the agency did not periodically verify the funds to ensure operators weren’t withdrawing from the accounts. In total, the report found the BIA had secured just $5 million in CDs from nearly 400 operators, but because these had been collected as certificates of deposit, the actual money available for plugging was likely lower. The agency stopped accepting CDs in 2014 as a result of the Inspector General’s findings.
By the time the Osage Minerals Council began trying to plug wells in earnest in 2017, most of the money from the bonds and CDs collected had evaporated. In grant application documents submitted to the Department of Interior, the council noted it had been informed by the BIA “that there are no obtainable surety bonds” for the majority of the documented orphaned wells on Osage land. A BIA spokesperson said that there are approximately 300 lessees currently operating in Osage and that the agency has collected bonds from 30 lessees in the last decade. But the spokesperson did not disclose how much the agency holds in bonds or how much it collected from the 30 lessees.
“For more than a century, BIA has had little to no funding to plug abandoned wells on our Mineral Estate and failed to hold oil and gas developers responsible for plugging their wells,” Revard, the Osage Minerals Council member, told a congressional committee in March.
The Osage Nation Minerals Council building in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
To complicate matters further, no tribal or federal agency seems to know for certain just how many orphaned wells there are in Osage County. In a letter to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Everett Waller, the chairman of the Osage Minerals Council, said the BIA had developed a list of approximately 1,600 abandoned wells by 2017. Using money provided by Congress during the past few years, the council has located almost 700 more. Sources in Osage County described the true scope of the problem as uncalculated, and say the current list of documented wells is likely a vast underestimate.
On its website, the Osage Minerals Council hosts a database of more than 40,000 oil and gas wells across Osage County that it says was created by the BIA. In an email, the BIA said they could not vouch for the authenticity of the data as it was maintained by the Osage Nation and not the federal government but would not confirm if they maintained a similar dataset. Approximately 16,000 of the wells in the list are designated as “ABD,” or abandoned.
Revard added that the true number of orphaned wells is unknown, many of the drill holes never registered in tribal or federal data.
“Some wells were drilled without permits,” he said. “So there’s no record of it. It wasn’t an honest thing to do, but it happened.”
Oilfield detritus near an oil well on Nona and Wayne Roach’s land. The true number of abandoned wells in Osage County is unknown, with many of the drill holes never registered in tribal or federal data. Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
After the BIA failed for years to address Osage County’s orphaned wells, the Minerals Council decided to take matters into its own hands. In 2016, it appealed to Congress for funds to tackle the problem, and was granted $3 million in 2018 and an additional $1.1 million in 2022. The council got to work assembling a well-plugging committee, which involved identifying wells that posed the highest risk to communities and the environment and finding a group of contractors to close them up. The council has plugged more than 80 wells in Osage County using all of those funds.
In his congressional testimonies over the years, Revard has described the monumental challenges associated with plugging some of the trickier abandoned wells. In one case, the council closed a well that was leaking oil onto a school softball field, only to discover that it had begun venting gas from another opening nearby. To plug a different well, contractors had to reroute a creek and move a hill to haul equipment as well as avoid railroad tracks that ran along the site.
Those railroad tracks are “just one example of how our communities have grown up around these wells,” Revard noted. “Oil and gas development in the Osage Mineral Estate occurs in the same place where our families live, work, and play.”
Given its experience with well-plugging over the last several years, the Minerals Council applied for $49 million of additional funding from the Interior Department early this year, but found out a month later that its grant application had been denied. In its rejection letter, the agency explained that “the Osage Minerals Council is not eligible under the definition of a Federally Recognized Tribe as described in the guidance document.” Instead, $19 million of the funds would go to the Osage Nation, which had submitted its own application for $91 million over five years. There was no coordination between the two entities.
The situation raises tensions between the Nation, which represents all Osage citizens, and the Minerals Council, which only represents headright holders.
“After we spent over a year in this effort, it was really disappointing to not have received the requested funds,” Revard said. “We did all the hard work and we didn’t get any. And the chief got twice as much as what we asked for.”
Without a well-plugging program of its own, the Osage government will have to start from scratch, organizing contractors and identifying high-risk wells just as the council has done previously.
Jim Gray, former chief of the Osage Nation, said the Nation’s environmental department would ideally work in tandem with the Minerals Council to get the job done. However, he acknowledged that rival interests between stakeholders complicate the prospects of such a collaboration.
“I would think everyone has a shared interest in a successful plugging of a well,” he said, “that no one is in dispute over whether or not it needs to be plugged. This shouldn’t even be an issue, should be just getting done.”
The history of the U.S. government’s attempt to impede tribal economic development is a long one. From limiting taxing authority to creating bureaucratic hurdles for businesses, federal and elected officials have restricted the ability of many tribes to freely build sustainable economies. Nowhere are those restrictions more apparent than in the federal government’s involvement with the Osage mineral estate.
The Osage Nation purchased its own reservation in 1872 following the sale of many of its ancestral lands located in present-day Kansas. It’s the only tribe to buy its own reservation, but the 1906 law made the BIA — not the Osage Nation — manager of the day-to-day operation, use, and development of the oil and gas resources that belong to the tribe.
The Osage Nation purchased its own reservation — the only tribe to do so — but a 1906 law made the Bureau of Indian Affairs — not the Osage Nation — manager of the day-to-day operation, use, and development of the oil and gas resources that belong to the tribe.
Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
The Osage Nation purchased its own reservation — the only tribe to do so — but a 1906 law made the Bureau of Indian Affairs, not the Osage Nation, manager of the day-to-day operation, use, and development of the oil and gas resources that belong to the tribe. Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
For decades, the federal government also only recognized those Osages with a headright. The thousands of headright-owning Osage members could vote in tribal elections and run for office, but Osages without a share in the mineral estate were denied those rights. It was a unique system even among tribal governments. To rectify the issue, the Osage peoples created a new government with executive, legislative, and judicial branches and ratified a constitution. Today, there are more than 25,000 enrolled Osage members.
For the Osage Nation, protecting the mineral estate has been a priority. Quarterly payments can be a lifeline for headright owners, and over the years, shareholders have accused the BIA of mismanaging the estate. Two decades ago, the Osage Nation sued the agency, claiming that it had failed to pay shareholders the highest posted price on oil and gas leases and allowed buyers to purchase oil up to $2.30 less per barrel. Over the decades, it meant shareholders had likely been shorted billions of dollars.
In 2011, the Nation won a historic $380 million settlement from the United States. As part of that settlement, the Department of the Interior and the BIA were required to work with the Minerals Council on new rules for oil and gas leasing in Osage.
But when the BIA began working on rules in 2013, it caused an exodus of oil and gas operators. The agency’s new proposal made turning a profit near impossible, companies claimed, and the uncertainty over the effects the rules would have led to their departure. In the wake of those rules, oil production declined and royalty payments plunged. In 2012, the payout for a headright was $40,800. By 2020, that figure had dropped to $10,400.
“We had clients abandon the entirety of Osage County” when the rules were proposed, said Trevor Henson, the oil and gas attorney. “From an operator standpoint, they were looking at the fact that they were going to have to comply with these new regulations, and they were going to be so costly that most of them couldn’t afford it, and they just said, ‘Look, I’ll go find a place to operate wells elsewhere.’ The end result is that the Osage mineral estate makes less money.”
Asked why headright payments have declined so dramatically, the BIA made no mention of its regulatory history or its management of Osage resources.
“As with any mineral estate, revenues from the Osage Mineral Estate are impacted by fluctuating energy prices around the world,” a spokesperson said in an email.
The BIA is now attempting to rewrite those rules for the second time. Earlier this year, the agency released a new proposal that increases royalty payments to the Osage Nation but does little to address the agency’s chronically inadequate bonding requirements for orphan wells. If enacted, the new rule would require operators to post bonds depending on well depth or the number of acres they drill on. This highest bond amount is still $150,000. While the new regulations are a slight improvement from current requirements, the agency’s own analysis of the proposal shows that it expects to collect at most $2.4 million in additional bonds over 20 years — enough to plug perhaps 100 wells.
“These proposed revisions secure this special trust asset of the Osage Nation for generations to come through accountability and best industry practices,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland wrote in a statement.
The agency is keeping bonding levels low in part because of the new round of pushbacks it has received from oil and gas companies as well as the Osage Minerals Council, according to a member of the council. Similar to the changes that arrived a decade before, for companies operating on the margins more stringent bonding requirements can push their financials into the red. And if operators abandon the county and walk away from their environmental responsibilities, orphan well counts could balloon. Fewer operators and less drilling also mean lower royalty payments to the Osage headright owners.
The new rules have little support from tribal officials. At a meeting about the proposed regulations, Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear told Osage News the federal government is stepping on the Nation’s toes.
“They are issuing regulations that are so inclusive of what I think is the Osage Minerals Council business,” Standing Bear said. “It’s like the federal government is showing everyone they don’t have faith in the capabilities of our Osage Minerals Council. I don’t see the federal government going to ConocoPhillips and telling them how to run their business.”
Gray, the former Osage Nation chief, also emphasized the need for the tribe to take the lead in managing the estate. The blame for the vast problem of abandoned oil wells on Osage land, he said, ultimately rests with the oil and gas operators who came to the county to extract fuel and left gaping holes in the earth. But in their absence, the burden falls on the Osage government to clean things up, he said. Gray described this duty as a kind of test, an opportunity for the Nation to demonstrate that the groups within its governance structure can put aside their disagreements for the betterment of its citizens. It’s easy to be on the same page about buying Osage land back from the federal government or applying for a grant to carry out a needed public service in the community, he said. It’s harder to make the right calls on more contentious issues like energy resources.
“There’s a maturation process that I think has to happen,” Gray said. “And the way to get to the other side is by exercising our responsibility as a sovereign nation, in a good way and responsible way in good times, but especially in bad times.”
A view of the Roaches’ land in Osage County. “I think [oil producers] really need to just treat our land like it’s theirs,” says Nona Roach, “and not come in here and pollute and just destroy everything they touch.” Shane Brown / Grist / Osage News
The wells on the Roaches’ land are nearly 90 years old.
Nona Roach says that when McKee filed for bankruptcy, the company didn’t notify the Minerals Council and didn’t take steps to assess their wells — a critical step in the code of federal regulations and key to alerting the BIA on whether to keep the well in production or plug it.
The frustration is palpable. The Roaches say the BIA never sides with the landowner.
“That’s been the problem every time something would happen,” said Nona. “They would side with the operator because who’s making them the money: the operator.”
The couple say they know there’s a new regulation code in development, but they’re not optimistic: There are already laws in place that companies like McKee were supposed to follow. They just choose not to.
A representative with McKee could not be located for comment for this story.
“The whole thing comes down to this,” Nona said. “They already have the regulations and refuse to enforce them. They’re not going to enforce them any better if they have more of them. That’s the problem.”
The Roaches say they’ve had good oil producers on their land, people who clean up the mess, notify them when there is a saltwater leak, and maintain the roads. One producer even helped their cow give birth. Whether or not the new regulations will create an environment that encourages that neighborly attitude, however, and protect the land from orphan wells, the Roaches say they’ll wait and see.
“I think they just really need to just treat our land like it’s theirs,” said Nona. “Not come in here and pollute and just destroy everything they touch.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Abandoned in Osage on Nov 3, 2023.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country.
In the 1950s, after quarreling for decades over the Colorado River, Arizona, and California turned to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final resolution on the water that both states sought to sustain their postwar booms.
The case, Arizona v. California, also offered Native American tribes a rare opportunity to claim their share of the river. But they were forced to rely on the U.S. Department of Justice for legal representation.
A lawyer named T.F. Neighbors, who was special assistant to the U.S. attorney general, foresaw the likely outcome if the federal government failed to assert tribes’ claims to the river: States would consume the water and block tribes from ever acquiring their full share.
In 1953, as Neighbors helped prepare the department’s legal strategy, he wrote in a memo to the assistant attorney general, “When an economy has grown up premised upon the use of Indian waters, the Indians are confronted with the virtual impossibility of having awarded to them the waters of which they had been illegally deprived.”
As the case dragged on, it became clear the largest tribe in the region, the Navajo Nation, would get no water from the proceedings. A lawyer for the tribe, Norman Littell, wrote then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1961, warning of the dire future he saw if that were the outcome. “This grave loss to the tribe will preclude future development of the reservation and otherwise prevent the beneficial development of the reservation intended by the Congress,” Littell wrote.
Both warnings, only recently rediscovered, proved prescient. States successfully opposed most tribes’ attempts to have their water rights recognized through the landmark case, and tribes have spent the decades that followed fighting to get what’s owed to them under a 1908 Supreme Court ruling and long-standing treaties.
Courtesy of ProPublica
The possibility of this outcome was clear to attorneys and officials even at the time, according to thousands of pages of court files, correspondence, agency memos and other contemporary records unearthed and cataloged by University of Virginia history professor Christian McMillen, who shared them with ProPublica and High Country News. While Arizona and California’s fight was covered in the press at the time, the documents, drawn from the National Archives, reveal telling details from the case, including startling similarities in the way states have rebuffed tribes’ attempts to access their water in the ensuing 70 years.
“It’s very much a repeat of the same problems we have today,” Andrew Curley, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Arizona and member of the Navajo Nation, said of the records. Tribes’ ambitions to access water are approached as “this fantastical apocalyptic scenario” that would hurt states’ economies, he said.
Arizona sued California in 1952, asking the Supreme Court to determine how much Colorado River water each state deserved. The records show that, even as the states fought each other in court, Arizona led a coalition of states in jointly lobbying the U.S. attorney general to cease arguing for tribes’ water claims. The attorney general, bowing to the pressure, removed the strongest language in the petition, even as Department of Justice attorneys warned of the consequences. “Politics smothered the rights of the Indians,” one of the attorneys later wrote.
The Supreme Court’s 1964 decree in the case quantified the water rights of the Lower Basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — and five tribes whose lands are adjacent to the river. While the ruling defended tribes’ right to water, it did little to help them access it. By excluding all other basin tribes from the case, the court missed an opportunity to settle their rights once and for all.
The Navajo Nation — with a reservation spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — was among those left out of the case. “Clearly, Native people up and down the Colorado River were overlooked. We need to get that fixed, and that is exactly what the Navajo Nation is trying to do,” said George Hardeen, a spokesperson for the Navajo Nation.
Today, millions more people rely on a river diminished by a hotter climate. Between 1950 and 2020, Arizona’s population alone grew from about 750,000 to more than 7 million, bringing booming cities and thirsty industries.
McMillen agreed. The federal government “rejected that opportunity” in the 1950s and ’60s to more forcefully assert tribes’ water claims, he said. As a result, “Native people have been trying for the better part of a century now to get answers to these questions and have been thwarted in one way or another that entire time.”
Three missing words
As Arizona prepared to take California to court in the early 1950s, the federal government faced a delicate choice. It represented a host of interests along the river that would be affected by the outcome: tribes, dams, and reservoirs and national parks. How should it balance their needs?
The Supreme Court had ruled in 1908 that tribes with reservations had an inherent right to water, but neither Congress nor the courts had defined it. The 1922 Colorado River Compact, which first allocated the river’s water, also didn’t settle tribal claims.
In the decades that followed the signing of the compact, the federal government constructed massive projects — including the Hoover, Parker and Imperial dams — to harness the river. Federal policy at the time was generally hostile to tribes, as Congress passed laws eroding the United States’ treaty-based obligations. Over a 15-year period, the country dissolved its relationships with more than 100 tribes, stripping them of land and diminishing their political power. “It was a very threatening time for tribes,” Curley said of what would be known as the Termination Era.
So it was a shock to states when, in November 1953, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. and the Department of Justice moved to intervene in the states’ water fight and aggressively staked a claim on behalf of tribes. Tribal water rights were “prior and superior” to all other water users in the basin, even states, the federal government argued.
Western states were apoplectic.
Arizona Gov. John Howard Pyle quickly called a meeting with Brownell to complain, and Western politicians hurried to Washington, D.C. Under political pressure, the Department of Justice removed the document four days after filing it. When Pyle wrote to thank the attorney general, he requested that federal solicitors work with the state on an amended version. “To have left it as it was would have been calamitous,” Pyle said.
The federal government refiled its petition a month later. It no longer asserted that tribes’ water rights were “prior and superior.”
When details of the states’ meeting with the attorney general emerged in court three years later, Littell, the Navajo Nation’s attorney, berated the Department of Justice for its “equivocating, pussy-footing” defense of tribes’ water rights. “It is rather a shocking situation, and the Attorney General of the United States is responsible for it,” he said during court hearings.
Arizona’s legal representative balked at discussing the meeting in open court, calling it “improper.”
Experts told ProPublica and High Country News that it’s impossible to quantify the impact of the federal government’s failure to fully defend tribes’ water rights. Reservations might have flourished if they’d secured water access that remains elusive today. Or, perhaps basin tribes would have been worse off if they had been given only small amounts of water. Amid the overt racism of that era, the government didn’t consider tribes capable of extensive development.
Jay Weiner, an attorney who represents several tribes’ water claims in Arizona, said the important truth the documents reveal is the federal government’s willingness to bow to states instead of defending tribes. Pulling back from its argument that tribes’ rights are “prior and superior” was but one example.
“It’s not so much the three words,” Weiner said. “It’s really the vigor with which they would have chosen to litigate.”
Because states succeeded in spiking “prior and superior,” they also won an argument over how to account for tribes’ water use. Instead of counting it directly against the flow of the river, before dealing with other users’ needs, it now comes out of states’ allocations. As a result, tribes and states compete for the scarce resource in this adversarial system, most vehemently in Arizona, which must navigate the water claims of 22 federally recognized tribes.
In 1956, W.H. Flanery, the associate solicitor of Indian Affairs, wrote to an Interior Department official that Arizona and California “are the Indians’ enemies and they will be united in their efforts to defeat any superior or prior right which we may seek to establish on behalf of the Indians. They have spared and will continue to spare no expense in their efforts to defeat the claims of the Indians.”
Western states battle tribal water claims
As arguments in the case continued through the 1950s, an Arizona water agency moved to block a major farming project on the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ reservation until the case was resolved, the newly uncovered documents show. Decades later, the state similarly used unresolved water rights as a bargaining chip, asking tribes to agree not to pursue the main method of expanding their reservations in exchange for settling their water claims.
Highlighting the state’s prevailing sentiment toward tribes back then, a lawyer named J.A. Riggins Jr. addressed the river’s policymakers in 1956 at the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual conference. He represented the Salt River Project — a nontribal public utility that manages water and electricity for much of Phoenix and nearby farming communities — and issued a warning in a speech titled, “The Indian threat to our water rights.”
“I urge that each of you evaluate your ‘Indian Problem’ (you all have at least one), and start NOW to protect your areas,” Riggins said, according to the text of his remarks that he mailed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Riggins, who on multiple occasions warned of “‘Indian raids’ on western non-Indian water rights,” later lobbied Congress on Arizona’s behalf to authorize a canal to transport Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. He also litigated Salt River Project cases as co-counsel with Jon Kyl, who later served as a U.S. senator. (Kyl, who was an architect of Arizona’s tribal water rights strategy, told ProPublica and High Country News that he wasn’t aware of Riggins’ speech and that his work on tribal water rights was “based on my responsibility to represent all of the people of Arizona to the best of my ability, which, of course, frequently required balancing competing interests.”)
While Arizona led the opposition to tribes’ water claims, other states supported its stance.
“We thought the allegation of prior and superior rights for Indians was erroneous,” said Northcutt Ely, California’s lead lawyer in the proceedings, according to court transcripts. If the attorney general tried to argue that in court, “we were going to meet him head on,” Ely said.
When Arizona drafted a legal agreement to exclude tribes from the case, while promising to protect their undefined rights, other states and the Department of the Interior signed on. It was only rejected in response to pressure from tribes’ attorneys and the Department of Justice.
McMillen, the historian who compiled the documents reviewed by ProPublica and High Country News, said they show Department of Justice staff went the furthest to protect tribal water rights. The agency built novel legal theories, pushed for more funding to hire respected experts and did extensive research. Still, McMillen said, the department found itself “flying the plane and building it at the same time.”
Tribal leaders feared this would result in the federal government arguing a weak case on their behalf. The formation of the Indian Claims Commission — which heard complaints brought by tribes against the government, typically on land dispossession — also meant the federal government had a potential conflict of interest in representing tribes. Basin tribes coordinated a response and asked the court to appoint a special counsel to represent them, but the request was denied.
So too was the Navajo Nation’s later request that it be allowed to represent itself in the case.
Arizona v. Navajo Nation
More than 60 years after Littell made his plea to Kennedy, the Navajo Nation’s water rights in Arizona still haven’t been determined, as he predicted.
The decision to exclude the Navajo Nation from Arizona v. California influenced this summer’s Supreme Court ruling in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, in which the tribe asked the federal government to identify its water rights in Arizona. Despite the U.S. insisting it could adequately represent the Navajo Nation’s water claims in the earlier case, federal attorneys this year argued the U.S. has no enforceable responsibility to protect the tribe’s claims. It was a “complete 180 on the U.S.’ part,” said Michelle Brown-Yazzie, assistant attorney general for the Navajo Nation Department of Justice’s Water Rights Unit and an enrolled member of the tribe.
In both cases, the federal government chose to “abdicate or to otherwise downplay their trust responsibility,” said Joe M. Tenorio, a senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund and a member of the Santo Domingo Pueblo. “The United States took steps to deny tribal intervention in Arizona v. California and doubled down their effort in Arizona vs. Navajo Nation.”
In June, a majority of Supreme Court justices accepted the federal government’s argument that Congress, not the courts, should resolve the Navajo Nation’s lingering water rights. In his dissenting opinion, Gorsuch wrote, “The government’s constant refrain is that the Navajo can have all they ask for; they just need to go somewhere else and do something else first.” At this point, he added, “the Navajo have tried it all.”
As a result, a third of homes on the Navajo Nation still don’t have access to clean water, which has led to costly water hauling and, according to the Navajo Nation, has increased tribal members’ risk of infection during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eight tribal nations have yet to reach any agreement over how much water they’re owed in Arizona. The state’s new Democratic governor has pledged to address unresolved tribal water rights, and the Navajo Nation and state are restarting negotiations this month. But tribes and their representatives wonder if the state will bring a new approach.
“It’s not clear to me Arizona’s changed a whole lot since the 1950s,” Weiner, the lawyer, said.
For 5,000 years, the Inuit communities of the Arctic have relied upon the ocean and its wildlife to sustain them. But as climate change warms seas and melts ice, ships are venturing north in greater numbers. With them comes a sharp increase in undersea noise that disrupts sea creatures, adversely impacting the hunters who have pursued them for millennia.
In response, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents about 180,000 Inuit from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Chukotla, has urged a United Nations agency that oversees commercial shipping to adopt mitigation guidelines that incorporate Indigenous knowledge.
Earlier this month, the International Maritime Organizationpublished recommendations that advise the shipping companies traversing the Arctic to draw on that experience and lists specific suggestions for reducing the din. It’s a significant recognition of the value of Inuit expertise, and the potential for their insights to mitigate the racket caused by ships breaking through ice and hauling cargo across miles of ocean.
“Inuit and Indigenous peoples have extensive knowledge about underwater radiated noise impacts on marine wildlife, and its impacts in sensitive areas,” the new Arctic-specific guidelines say. “This knowledge should be used by mariners in voyage planning and operations in order to minimize impacts to sensitive marine species and local communities.”
Because sound travels much further through water, the passing of a ship can impact marine life over great distances. Much of the noise these vessels create clutters the frequencies whales, fish, and other creatures use to communicate, hunt, mate, and navigate the inky depths. Persistent rumbling and droning above 120 decibels — about the volume of a chainsaw — can alter their behavior, and short blasts at 200 decibels or more can damage their hearing.
In warmer waters, research has linked the pings of Navy sonar to the stranding of Cuvier’s beaked whales. The vast expanse of the Arctic makes it harder to spot potential strandings, but scientists worry about the potential for loud noises to disrupt deep-diving cetaceans like narwhals.
In an effort to minimize the cacophony, the guidelines say shipping companies should consider using electric engines or changing the designs of vessels’ propellers and bows. They also ought to incorporate Inuit knowledge when gathering data on underwater radiated noise and share their findings with researchers and Indigenous communities, the agency wrote.
The maritime organization also emphasized the importance of helping Indigenous groups understand and manage the effects of underwater radiated noise themselves.
Melanie Lancaster, a biologist and expert on Arctic species at the World Wildlife Fund, told Grist the new guidelines are valuable but wishes they were mandates, not suggestions — something the Inuit Circumpolar Council has also called for.
The shipping industry has a patchy history complying with both mandatory and voluntary shipping speed limits. Just this week, the environmental group Oceana released a report saying that 84 percent of ships on the East Coast sped through stipulated slow zones between November 2020 and July 2023, threatening endangered whales. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disputed the findings.
The Arctic is generally quieter than other parts of the globe. Animals there may be less acculturated to noise due in part to the ice that settles like a blanket over the ocean, Lancaster said. At the same time, ships may need to break that ice as they pass through, compounding the undersea noise affecting seals, walruses, and other wildlife.
Lancaster considers mandatory speed limits in the Arctic especially important because noise pollution is increasingly common there as shipping increases. One report noted that such commotion doubled in parts of the region between 2013 and 2019.
“The ocean is opening due to climate change, which is melting the sea ice, and that’s actually enabling ships to go further,” she said. But, she added, the problem that creates is easily solved.
“It’s pollution with a solution,” she said. “If you stop doing it, it’s gone.”
Water is hard to come by on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation, and it has been for a long time. The Chippewa Cree tribe members who live on this reservation in north-central Montana get most of their water from a thin underground aquifer that is insufficiently replenished by occasional rainfall, and they’ve been under some form of water restriction for several decades. There’s only enough groundwater for cooking and hygiene, so residents aren’t allowed to water their yellowing lawns or run sprinklers. It’s illegal to operate a car wash.
“It’s been in place for most of my life,” said Ted Whitford, the director of the tribe’s water resources department. “And if we get a water main break on our main line, what happens is it drains the tanks, and pretty much puts everyone that’s on that system out of water.”
When the tribe reached a deal to obtain water rights for the reservation in 1997, the federal government agreed to pipe in water from a reservoir on the Marias River, almost 60 miles away, replacing the aquifer water. But for more than 20 years, that project proceeded at a crawl, with the government spending only enough money each year to build a small portion of the pipeline. In the meantime, the reservation’s water problems grew more dire with every spell of drought.
That changed last year. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, flush with money from the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress passed in 2021, directed $57 million to the Rocky Boy’s Reservation for the project. This year, the Bureau spent another $77 million, allowing construction crews to complete a new water treatment facility at the reservoir and build several miles of pipeline, extending the project closer to the reservation. In the coming years, the feds will pay more than 90 percent of the total project costs.
“When I became familiar with the project, in my mind, it was doomed from the beginning because it was a project that was scheduled to be completed over a 40- to 50-year period,” said Whitford. “We were getting spoon-fed funding. Now we can accelerate that process.” While he once doubted that the pipeline would reach the reservation’s central town of Box Elder in his lifetime, it now looks like the pipe could reach there as soon as 2025.
A looming depletion of groundwater across the U.S. has drawn nationwide attention in recent years, as local officials in states from Kansas to Arizona struggle to manage dwindling water resources even as homes and farms get thirstier. However, the federal government’s surprisingly robust push to address this crisis has drawn far less attention. With little fanfare, the Biden administration is funneling billions of dollars to a suite of infrastructure projects designed to break the country’s dependence on vanishing groundwater. An infusion of money from the 2021 infrastructure bill is now being deployed, reviving long-dormant proposals for pipelines, reservoirs, and treatment facilities in rural areas across the U.S. West.
These rural areas have long relied on underground aquifers as their only source of water, lacking access to the major rivers and reservoirs that sustain cities such as Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles, California. As climate change leads to worsening droughts, the water level in these aquifers has fallen as there’s less rainfall to recharge them. As a result, many of these communities have suffered dire water access issues: Some have found their aquifers contaminated with unhealthy chemicals, while others have lost water access altogether as irrigated farms drain water away from household wells.
The $8.3 billion in funding from the infrastructure bill should help change that. By building pipelines to import clean water or facilities to treat contaminated groundwater, the administration will help address the sins of over-pumping in rural areas, cleaning up the mess made by a century of intensive agriculture. Under ordinary circumstances, the Bureau of Reclamation, which has managed Western water infrastructure for more than a century, would never have found the money to support big construction projects in cash-poor rural areas. The infrastructure bill has made the math for these projects much easier.
“We have had steady funding for these projects in our discretionary budget, but you need these bursts of investment because of the scope,” said Camille Camimlim Touton, the Bureau’s commissioner, in an interview with Grist. “It’s the octane to getting these done.”
Even though federal, state, and local officials all agree on the need for water projects like the one at Rocky Boy’s, the money for it only arrived thanks to the $550 billion legislative package that Democrats (and a small number of Republicans) passed before losing control of Congress in last year’s midterm elections. The new money is far from sufficient to address all the groundwater issues in the West, and there’s no guarantee that Congress will give Reclamation another burst of funding down the road. In the meantime, though, the Bureau has been able to complete projects that have languished for decades.
The largest of these projects — and the best indication of how Reclamation seeks to use its new windfall — is a $610 million pipeline effort called the Arkansas Valley Conduit. The 130-mile pipeline will deliver melted snow from a reservoir in the suburbs of Denver to a dry valley of southeast Colorado, relieving a long-standing water crisis in that area. Much of the Arkansas Valley’s groundwater contains high amounts of selenium, which can cause hair loss and cognitive impairment, as well as radionuclides that can increase cancer risk if consumed over long periods. Prolonged drought periods made this contamination even worse.
“Almost everybody down there drinks bottled water, because they can’t drink the water out of their faucets,” said Chris Woodka, the senior policy and issues manager at the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which is managing the project. “They have to replace their appliances all the time because they get caked up with minerals. A lot of farmland has disappeared, and in some communities people have had to move out.”
Workers install a segment of pipeline near Pueblo, Colorado, as part of the Arkansas Valley Conduit project. The project is being funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill Congress passed in 2021.
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Congress first tried to tackle this problem more than half a century ago when it authorized the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project in 1962 — then-president John F. Kennedy visited the valley that year to commemorate the effort — but funding for the project never materialized, and Reclamation had to shelve it. Aside from some preliminary construction in the 1980s, there was no progress on fixing the valley’s water issues. The amount of water needed to supply the parched communities was minuscule, but the area’s population was so sparse — most towns along the pipeline’s 100-mile length have just a few hundred residents — that providing the water was insurmountably expensive.
That changed last year when Reclamation announced its first suite of infrastructure grants. The Bureau pledged to fund around 80 percent of the dormant project, finished the final paperwork, and soon there were shovels in the ground. Woodka told Grist that the whole line should be operational by 2031, years earlier than previously projected.
“There are people who’ve been working on this for their careers who didn’t believe that it would happen,” said Touton. “So to be out there with six miles of pipe waiting to be put in the ground was just an amazing feeling.”
The new money has also been a game-changer in the llanos of eastern New Mexico, where federal dollars are helping to build a pipeline that will carry fresh mountain water from a reservoir called Ute Lake to two farming counties on the Texas border. In this case, the issue is quantity rather than quality: As big farming operations have expanded across the area in recent years, farmers have drained the local aquifers at an unprecedented rate, accounting for more than 90 percent of water usage in the area. Many of the area’s 73,000 residents have grown concerned that their wells will soon grow dry. After years of stasis, the local water authority is moving forward on an $666 million, 151-mile pipeline, with the federal government paying around 75 percent of the cost.
Grayford Payne, a deputy commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, speaks at the groundbreaking for the Ute Lake pipeline project in New Mexico. Reclamation allocated $160 million to the project last year. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Over the course of the next five years, as Reclamation doles out dozens of new grants, it will reach areas where federal investment is almost nonexistent. The beneficiaries include small towns in central Montana such as Ryegate and Lavina, which have populations of 223 and 136 respectively, and tribal nations such as the Jicarilla Apache, who have fought for water access on their remote New Mexico reservation for decades. Had it not been for the jump in funding, these areas might never have seen long-promised upgrades and repairs.
Even so, Reclamation’s focus on bolstering water supply has critics in some areas, who argue that reservoirs holding surface water are no more reliable than underground aquifers. Many of the Bureau’s projects are holdovers from a previous era when large water infrastructure projects such as dams and pipelines were more common. In recent years, this “water buffalo” policy — a term referring to politicians who solved water issues by seeking out new supplies — has given way to a focus on reducing usage and increasing water recycling.
In the case of the New Mexico pipeline, some in the area think the better solution to the area’s water problems is to reduce irrigation demand rather than importing new supply. Warren Frost, an attorney for rural Quay County, opposes the Ute Lake pipeline and is suing to stop it. He argues that the local governments in the region should buy out some of the farmers and ranchers that are using up the area’s groundwater and repurpose that water for residential use.
“They haven’t taken any steps to buy water rights from the irrigators,” Frost told Grist. “They’re not trying to save their groundwater there. They’re just letting them pump it while they’re building this pipeline.” Frost said that buying out agricultural water rights would be much cheaper than the pipeline, and furthermore that the surface water supply from Ute Lake isn’t reliable given future drought: As has become clear on the Colorado River, even large river reservoirs are vulnerable to overuse and can vanish during drought periods.
Meanwhile, in California, environmentalists have criticized a long-standing proposal to create a new reservoir in the mountains north of Sacramento, arguing it will help perpetuate a pattern of unsustainable water use for farms and ranches. The Bureau has spent $60 million on that effort.
Touton acknowledged that the United States has a water demand problem as well as a supply problem. Even so, she said, the projects will ease or prevent dire health concerns in rural areas that have no other options for firming up their water supplies.
“We’re the largest water deliverer, that’s our mission, and we look to use these tools to meet our mission,” said Touton. “But that also means that we need to have water to deliver, and part of that is recognizing that it has to be a sustainable system.”
On Monday, the U.S. military began draining jet fuel from 20 World War II-era storage tanks in Hawaiʻi, in a victory for Native Hawaiian activists and environmentalists who have, for years, warned of the risks the tanks pose to a critical source of drinking water on Oʻahu, the state’s most populated island.
The Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility consists of 20 underground tanks, about 250 feet tall and 100 feet in diameter, filled with more than 100 million gallons of petroleum, along with a system of pipelines and tunnels. It will take three months to drain the tanks, a process that involves releasing the fuel down three miles of pipelines to a pier at Pearl Harbor where it will be loaded onto tankers. From there, some will be stored on site or transferred to West Oʻahu. More fuel will be shipped to San Diego, the Philippines and Singapore.
Officials say some fuel and sludge will remain after the draining is complete and will require a much longer cleanup.
Constructed more than 80 years ago, the Red Hill facility has long been the source of multiple fuel spills, but it wasn’t until recently that calls to shut down the facility gained traction: In November of 2021, about 93,000 people were exposed to jet fuel-laced water.
The problem began the weekend after Thanksgiving when families in military housing noticed that their water smelled like gasoline. Some started to get headaches or feel nauseous, or noticed that their dogs refused to drink the water. When families raised concerns, Navy leadership initially said the water was safe to drink. Even after the state Health Department warned residents not to use the tap water, it took three more days for the Navy to confirm the petroleum contamination.
In the weeks after, the Navy continued to downplay the threat, contending that the jet fuel-laced water was “not a crisis”. A federal report later revealed that nearly 17,000 gallons of fuel leaked from the facility and at least 3,300 gallons contaminated the Navy’s drinking water system on Oʻahu.
The extent of the spill and the Navy’s bungled management of the situation gave ammunition to previously unheard calls from Indigenous and environmental activists to empty the tanks. Advocates contended that Red Hill threatened a critical aquifer, and they were joined by the Honolulu Board of Water Supply citing the potential for leaked fuel to contaminate the municipal supply. In December, the state’s Health Department joined the fight, and in March 2022 the Navy agreed to shut the facility down.
“We got here not because the U.S. Navy or the Department of Defense woke up one day and said, oh, ‘We’re going to do the right thing’,” said Healani Sonoda-Pale, one of the organizers of Oʻahu Water Protectors, a grassroots organization. “We got here because of the collective voices of the people who were calling for the shutdown of Red Hill and the protection of our aquifer here on Oʻahu.”
But while the defueling process is being seen as a victory, it’s not without its own risks. According to the Department of Defense’s environmental assessment, there’s still a chance for leaks or spills as the fuel makes its way through underground pipelines and is shipped to other locations. The agency says it’s worked to reduce that risk through repairs and training.
“We listened to the community and have taken significant precautions to mitigate risk and protect the aquifer and the environment as we safely and expeditiously defuel the facility,” Vice Adm. John Wade, JTF-Red Hill Commander said in a press release Monday.
Wayne Tanaka, who leads the local Sierra Club, is still worried. He says even a small amount of jet fuel leaking into the environment could be disastrous.
“We’ve been told repeatedly by the military that there’s nothing to worry about, that they have everything under control, that they thought of everything, and time and time again, unfortunately, events have proven them wrong,” Tanaka said. “Many of us are holding our breath, clenching our butts, and praying that for once, the [Department of Defense] will be able to execute.”
In preparation for the worst-case scenario, the Sierra Club has created a toolkit that urges local families to store clean drinking water and buy water quality testing kits.
Healani Sonoda-Pale, who is also the chair of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative, a group of elected community members who have input on the defueling process, has pushed the military to set up a hot line so that people can more quickly alert authorities if the fuel transfer results in more water pollution. An Environmental Protection Agency consent order requires that the Department of Defense notify the organization within 24 hours of a threat to health and safety, but the community group also wants a commitment from the agency to notify them if anything doesn’t go according to plan, given that health risks may not be obvious right away.
Ultimately, Sonoda-Pale hopes that the land where the storage facility sits can be returned to Hawaiians.
“All of the bases sit on stolen Hawaiian Kingdom, Crown and government land,” Sonoda-Pale said. “When the overthrow happened in 1893, it was the U.S. military that landed troops to support a small group of American and European businessmen overthrowing a constitutional monarchy and literally stealing millions of acres of prime Hawaiian lands so that they can use that for their own self interests.”
She says it was only after the Navy poisoned their own people that politicians recognized how dangerous the underground storage tanks were and took action.
“If Hawaiians were in control of their own land and resources, this would have never happened.”
Outside of the royal palace, in Oslo, seven Sámi youths waited to speak with King Harald V of Norway. They wore gáktis, their traditional clothing, and on the lawn, near the neo-classical building, a lávvu stood – a temporary Sámi dwelling that resembles a teepee. Just after noon, the youths were granted an audience with the King.
The meeting was the culmination of several days of protests in Oslo that captured the boldness of young Sámi activists as well as the obstacle they face: challenging the government of Norway to respect its own laws and the rights of Indigenous Sámi people. To date, they have been unsuccessful.
The protests have been fueled by frustration and anger over the $1.3 billion Fosen wind farm, the largest wind project in Norway on the nation’s central-west coast. Exactly two years before protests began, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the wind park had been built illegally in Sápmi, the traditional territory of the Sámi, and violated the rights of Sámi reindeer herders as well as the cultural rights of the Sámi peoples. In the wake of the ruling, the Sámi parliament of Norway demanded the wind park be torn down and the land restored for reindeer herders, however, in the years since, Norwegian officials, including those at Statkraft, the state-owned power company responsible for the project, have refused to remove the turbines instead opting to negotiate with impacted communities in the hope that the park will continue to produce energy.
For the Sámi, that means the only authority left who may help them, is King Harald V.
According to Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen, one of the seven youths to meet with the King and a Sámi youth organizer, there was no other option.
“We have set up lávvus on Oslo’s main street,” said Hætta Isaksen. “We have occupied the parliament for a whole day. We have blocked Statkraft and closed down 11 ministries. What more can we do?”
The act of meeting with the King is grounded in history. In 1997, King Harald issued an apology for Norway’s treatment of Sámi peoples. “We must regret the injustice the Norwegian state has previously inflicted on the Sami people,” said King Harald. “The Norwegian state therefore has a special responsibility to create the right conditions for the Sami people to be able to build a strong and viable society. This is a time-honored right based on the Sami’s presence in their areas going back a long way.”
Hætta Isaksen said that they had inherited the fight from their ancestors, and that while the King made no promises, and carried little power to influence state leaders, the meeting was important. “We have been met with arrogance all week,” she said. “But to meet Norway’s highest leader, who understands us, [it] gives us strength to continue.”
The latest demonstration began last week, on the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling, when 14 Sámi activists, including Mihkkal Hætta who has been living in a lávvu outside parliament for a month, began a sit-in. By the end of the day, police carried activists out of the building but no arrests were made. By Friday, activists blocked the entrances to 11 government ministries and Statskraft until they were carried away by police, and through the weekend, campaigners continued to march through Oslo.
However, the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy has refused to heed Sámi demands. Earlier this year, Petroleum and Energy Minister Terje Aasland officially apologized to reindeer herders in Fosen and acknowledged that the wind park constituted a human rights violation, but has maintained that “demolition of the wind farms in their entirety is not a likely outcome.” Statkraft has also committed itself to reaching an agreement with reindeer herders that doesn’t require the removal of the wind park, as has Norway’s Prime Minister.
“We are having conversations about mitigating and are trying to find a solution,” said Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. “Those who run those negotiations, and the reindeer herders are present, and I hope it can lead to a solution.”
Sámi rights defenders say neither apologies nor negotiations matter.
“It is simply political reluctance that stops the wind turbines from being demolished,” said Petra Laiti with the Saami Council’s Human Rights Unit. “What Nordic infrastructure projects in Sápmi call ‘green energy,’ to the rest of the world looks exactly like traditional colonialism.”
Almost 98 percent of Norway’s electricity comes from renewable sources like wind and hydropower. With a population of roughly 5 million people, Norway produces around 154 terawatt-hours of electricity each year. According to Statskraft, that’s enough energy to power 15 million homes in the United States for a year. In 2021, almost 26 terawatts of electricity were exported from Norway, mostly to Denmark.
“It is important for international observers to note that the image of Norway as a fair country governed by the rule of law is shattered: the true image is what we see today,” said Elle Rávdná Näkkäläjärvi a member of the Norwegian Sámi Association’s Youth Committee. “With two years of ongoing human rights violations, we see that Norway, as a democratic state, is not functioning”.
For now, the Fosen Wind Park is still producing energy for the state, and Sámi organizers have vowed to continue fighting.
“It has been incredibly emotional to be here today and see all the youth fighting,” said 75-year-old Niillas Aslaksen Somby. “They are probably as optimistic as we were back then.”
In 1979, Aslaksen Somby was one of seven hunger strikers that fought to stop a hydroelectric dam being built in Sápmi. Known as the Alta Action, Sámi leaders and activists also occupied a government building while Aslaksen Somby lost an arm during a failed act of sabotage to destroy a bridge on a construction road to the dam’s proposed site.
“Almost everyone who did the hunger strike with me back then are now resting in their graves,” said Aslaksen Somby. “But the fight for Sámi rights lives on”.
In September, Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that marco temporal, a legal theory that would have limited Indigenous claims to land and opened those territories to extractive industries like mining and agriculture, was unconstitutional. The marco temporal case spent 16 years moving through the courts.
But following the ruling, Brazilian lawmakers approved legislation that would make marco temporal legal anyway, putting Indigenous lands and communities at risk again.
It’s estimated that Indigenous peoples safeguard nearly 80 percent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity with the Brazilian rainforest containing almost a quarter of all terrestrial biodiversity and 10 percent of all known species on earth. However, over the last four years, under former president Jair Bolsonaro’s policies, deforestation in the Amazon rose 56 percent with an estimated 13,000 square miles of land destroyed by development, and an estimated 965 square miles of Indigenous territories lost to extractive industries.
Brazil’s agribusiness sector, which holds significant influence over the country’s conservative congress, has supported efforts to make marco temporal law, citing economic development as the key reason to adopt the legislation. With passage, the law would mark a specific time for when Indigenous land claims could be accepted: if Indigenous communities weren’t on the land they claimed in 1988 – when the Brazilian constitution was passed – they would have no claims to those lands, opening them up for development.
According to Land is Life, an international Indigenous rights advocacy group, beyond ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling, the bill infringes on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Global watchdogs like Cultural Survival, an organization promoting the self determination of Indigenous peoples plan to fight for the protection of Indigenous lands.
A coalition of seven Indigenous Brazilian organizations have sent an appeal to the United Nations denouncing violence against Indigenous peoples and warning that the approval of the marco temporal bill could lead to more. They have also urged president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to veto the bill.
In the runup to his election, president Lula said he would create a Ministry of Indigenous Affairs headed by an Indigenous person, recognize Indigenous land claims, and put a stop to illegal mining on Indigenous territories and rebuild the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI).
The bill now awaits Lula’s approval or veto, but even with a veto, lawmakers can override it with a majority vote in each chamber.
A record-breaking number of wildfires are blanketing the Amazon with smoke, choking some Brazilian cities and further isolating many Indigenous villages. Over 2,700 wildfires have been reported in the region in the first 11 days of the month — the highest number for any October since 1998, when the record-keeping began.
Air quality became so poor last week in places like Manaus that officials had to postpone the city’s annual marathon, and major universities canceled classes. Philip Fearnside, research professor at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia, said hospitals in the city are full of people who are having respiratory issues. “That should be a wake up call to actually change government policies and individual behavior to actually contain global warming,” he said.
Part of the issue is that the Amazon is in the middle of a severe drought. Water levels in the region’s major rivers have become so low as to be unnavigable, leaving many Indigenous river communities without any way to obtain certain foods, drinking water, or medicine, according to Reuters. Commercial shipping has also been impacted as vessels from the Denmark headquartered company Maersk suspended service in Manaus, after a barge ran aground on the Rio Negro river last month.
“It’s a very worrisome situation,” said Marcia Macedo, an associate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “We’ve seen large fish kills [an event in which numerous dead fish are suddenly observed in a body of water], water levels dropping way faster than normal — lake levels, river levels, like 6 meters below what would be expected at this time of year. And definitely the potential for it to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”
On Wednesday, Indigenous tribes in the region called for the Brazilian government to take more formal action. “We ask the government to declare a climate emergency to urgently address the vulnerability Indigenous peoples are exposed to,” read a statement from the Indigenous umbrella group APIAM, which represents over 60 Amazonian tribes.
As of Friday, almost all of the 62 cities in the state of Amazonas, which includes Manaus, had declared a state of emergency.
Tree loss is not the only factor contributing to the current crisis. Climate change as well as El Niño, a weather phenomenon which results in a mass of warm water traveling east over the Pacific and crashing into South America, are also driving dry conditions. “Deforestation contributes to global warming, although fossil fuels globally are the main cause,” said Fearnside. “But global warming is changing climate all over the world, including here in the Amazon.”
El Niño, climate change, and extreme heat
El Niño is a natural weather phenomenon that fuels above-average global heat and more intense natural disasters in parts of the world. It is characterized by warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The hottest years on record tend to happen during El Niño.
The planet’s weather over the past three years has been dominated by El Niño’s opposite extreme, La Niña, which has had a cooling effect on the globe. Even so, the past eight years were the hottest in recorded history, the result of the warming effects of climate change.
Now, in conjunction with accelerating climate change, El Niño means a wide array of exacerbated hazardsmay be coming down the pike. El Niño’s impacts differ by region but can range from extreme rainfall to severe drought and increased wildfire risk.
Macedo warns that if the cycles that maintain the Amazon rainforests trademark wet, rainy, cloudy conditions start to dissipate, the forest could be permanently altered
“If you get beyond a certain amount of deforestation, you start to affect that recycling of rainwater back to the atmosphere that helps to kind of cool the land surface and also seed new rain clouds,” she told Grist. “If fires get out of control, then you have less forest cover and these droughts are even more intense and so on and so forth.”
While the system is fairly well understood, Macedo says it’s difficult to pin down at what point things will stop working as usual.
“It’s not linear. It’s not it’s not a simple process to kind of pin down,” said Macedo.
Indigenous food systems and traditional land management techniques are the best options for tackling ecological restoration. However, outdated scientific models and conservative views on environmentalism has led many researchers to overlook and discount traditional ecological knowledge held by Indigenous peoples. That’s according to a new study in Frontiers.
Researchers from the Indigenous Ecology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia, and the Historical-Ecological Research Laboratory at Simon Fraser University looked at two restoration efforts in St’at’imc and Quw’utsun territories and outlined a method known as “pop-up restoration” employed by environmental NGOs, extraction industries, and government agencies that offers prescriptive techniques to restore and heal land without considering local, Indigenous scientific practices. Pop-up restoration, the authors suggest, comes from deeply rooted misconceptions of Indigenous livelihoods and knowledge due to long-standing, deeply ingrained prejudices and racist ideas.
According to the researchers, pop-up restoration, or restoration initiatives that don’t make their restoration goals and impose inequities on unceded and stolen lands, often overlooks traditional
food systems and Indigenous histories.
In the report, the authors assessed two disturbance-restoration cycles and the ways Indigenous food systems approach restoration ecology and Indigenous land— especially when restoration erases longstanding land management and stewardship efforts.
“An Indigenous food systems lens provides a holistic approach to food production, distribution, and consumption, that centers humans’ coexistence with other living beings and prioritizes a cultural-ecological equilibrium over exploitation or fixed restoration goals,” wrote the authors.
The first example comes from St’at’imc territory in British Columbia, where St’at’imc voices were ignored by the government, hunters and ranchers while providing traditional knowledge for the restoration of lands devastated by a wildfire.
In June 2021 a heat dome in the region created record-breaking temperatures resulting in 619 heat related deaths and creating extreme fire conditions over much of the Pacific Northwest eventually leading to the McKay Creek Wildfire which burned about 85 miles of forest.
facilitating communication between affected Indigenous and settler communities, the Canadian government and ranchers. The St’at’imc Nation were given the opportunity to take part in the committee, and share their ideas on the best ways to restore the land.
But during the restoration process, government-led wildfire recovery in the region was largely driven by the values, goals, and priorities of only a few interest groups. Ranchers wanted to reseed much of the landscape with crop species that would introduce non-native plants, reducing native vegetation needed for the survival of mammals, birds and other wildlife – many of which are relied on by the St’at’imc Nation.
“We observed how government policy and decision-making overlooked, and in some cases outright dismissed, St’at’imc voices, knowledge, and expertise at the table,” wrote the authors.
“Non-Indigenous hunter and rancher interests seemed to be given priority over St’at’imc values, goals, and priorities, especially when those interests were at odds.”
The authors highlight that the settler colonial history in the St’at’imc region began in the late 1850’s with the Fraser River Gold Rush, which led to the establishment of cattle farming on the forests and grasslands in the area. The clearing of land for cattle, introduction of invasive species through fodder, wildfire suppression, the ownership of land by settlers and the removal St’at’imc peoples from their lands resulted in damage to the region, which helped the McKay Creek wildfire, the climate and the St’at’imc people.
Overall, the authors of the study said acknowledging the effects of past and ongoing waves of colonialism, being genuinely open and flexible to evolving community needs, being familiar with past failures and wrongdoings, and understanding and having compassion for the varying levels of interest, knowledge, resources, and skills for supporting land healing initiatives are important to the redevelopment and maintenance of lands.
“Results suggest that applying an Indigenous food systems lens to ecological restoration may provide a tangible framework for resolving some of the issues faced in top–down colonial policies common in pop-up restoration contexts,” the authors wrote.
This story is co-published with Arizona Luminaria and is part of The Human Cost of Conservation, a Grist series on Indigenous rights and protected areas. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
On a breezy spring day, Lorraine Eiler, a member of the Hia-Ced O’odham tribe, walked with me around the border of Quitobaquito Springs — a strawberry-shaped oasis in the Sonoran Desert near Pima County, Arizona. Her family has lived in the area for generations.
“If you do research on Quitobaquito, the majority of times you will read about the cattlemen that lived here in the area, about the people that went through Quitobaquito,” she said. “You hear nothing about the fact that it’s an old Indian village. It was abundant. Now, it’s just … well, you see what it looks like.”
The first thing you notice most about Quitobaquito Springs is the trees. It’s the only source of water for miles in the desert and the lush vegetation around it is stark against the dry tan and khaki landscape and occasional organ pipe cactus. The second thing you notice: the border wall, 30 feet tall, just feet from the water’s edge. I asked Eiler how the landscape compares to her early memories of the site.
“Barren,” she said, “very, very barren.”
For thousands of years, people have used Quitobaquito as a place to trade, to grow food, and to rest. The springs also provided water for animals in a region where it’s hard to come by. Quitobaquito’s springs are still sacred to O’odham people today and several of Eiler’s relatives, for example, are buried here.
“It has always been a place of refuge, a place of survival for anybody and anything that’s ever crossed through that territory,” said Amy Juan, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network, a collective of college students and youth focused on issues impacting Tohono O’odham peoples.
In the 1900s, the springs and the surrounding area were selected by the U.S. government for conservation and given one of the highest levels of environmental protection in the world. But today, Quitobaquito’s sacred springs are drying up. So what went wrong?
Quitobaquito Springs is part of the O’odham people’s traditional homelands — especially the Tohono and Hia-Ced O’odham nations. Before it was part of a National Park, before Arizona became a state in 1912, and even before there was an international border, the springs were really more like a marsh. Water flowed into the wetlands, feeding the gardens of squash, corn, and melons in the middle of the desert.
But settlers, warfare, and political decisions in the 1800s dispossessed the O’odham of their lands and carved the region into pieces. First, the U.S.–Mexico border split O’odham communities, separating families and cutting people off from their lands. Decades later, the U.S. government seized O’odham lands by congressional act, and, without a treaty, pushed the Tohono O’odham onto a reservation. Meanwhile, lawmakers created more policies intended to protect Quitobaquito’s fragile ecosystem. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt used the newly claimed lands surrounding Quitobaquito Springs to create Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
In the early days of the National Park Service, parks were mostly created with entertainment, sightseeing, and aesthetic beauty in mind. The agency believed that these areas should be kept wild, and protected from human interference.
But what they missed was that places like Quitobaquito were already a product of thousands of years of human maintenance — and that the park still had people in it. For instance, the Oroscos, a Hia-Ced O’odham family, were living in Quitobaquito Springs at the time when the park was created. They stayed in the area long after many tribal members were pushed out.
The family’s animals, buildings, and machinery didn’t match the agency’s vision of a wild, peopleless park. Finally, after decades of pressure, the National Park Service purchased the land for $13,000, bulldozed the Oroscos’ home, dug out a bigger collecting pond for water from the spring, and built a parking lot nearby to attract visitors.
“There was this idea that you would take the people out of living in these protected spaces, but they could come and they could visit and they could enjoy the natural environment, and we would protect that environment up to an extent,” said Rebecca Tsosie, an attorney and professor at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. “But Indigenous presence is vital to the stewardship of the land.”
Without livestock to graze by the water’s edge, cattails invaded the pond, decreasing water flow. The decrease in water flow led to sediment build up, and in 1962, that increased sediment prompted park officials to dredge the pond. But dredging made the water too deep and too cold for the Sonoyta pupfish, one of the two endangered species endemic to the area. This forced the Park Service to build a kind of shelf in the pond so the fish could live in warmer waters.
At the same time, the nearby parking lot meant visitors had easy access to the water, and one park visitor released a golden shiner into the pond — a fish so well suited to the springs it started outcompeting the pupfish and driving it toward extinction. Once park officials realized this, they removed the pupfish, poisoned the pond to get rid of the golden shiners, refilled the pond, and then put the pupfish back in.
On a recent visit to Quitobaquito, I managed to spy a few pupfish — brown slivers of movement in the shallow waters of the springs. Tyler Coleman, a biologist and researcher with the National Park Service, told me that one of the biggest threats to the species today is low water levels. Ever since the 1990s, which saw a long term drought in the region, Quitobaquito has been drying up.
“So the little water that is produced in the Sonoran Desert is really valuable,” he told me. He pointed to the main springhead, a trickle of water which he described as a crack in the side of the mountain. “Any amount lost is going to be a problem.”
The decline of the springs has been attributed to drought, climate change, and the expansion of nearby farming that taps into the natural underground aquifers.
Then the border wall came.
In 2020, the U.S. government began building the controversial wall along the U.S.–Mexico border, 30 feet high, that cut across the entire southern edge of the park. Crews drilled for groundwater near the declining springs that they used to make cement.
“Unfortunately, during that period of time, the water levels started going down and the pond itself right in the center just became dry, which was something new,” Eiler said.
It’s not entirely clear if border wall construction caused water levels to drop. And we may never know, because the Trump administration waived all environmental assessments in the name of national security.
“The United States has some of the best environmental laws of any nation in the world,” said Tsosie. “But on the border, they wanted a full-scale, speedy construction of the border wall. So they bypassed all of those things.”
In 2022, the Park Service relined the pond, with support from the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, a nonprofit organization that Lorraine Eiler works with. People from U.S. government agencies and the Tohono O’odham nation worked to delicately scoop the turtles and pupfish into holding tanks until the lining was replaced and the pond was refilled.
But restoration is ongoing and it’s not yet clear whether or not these efforts will restore water levels — or how long that fix will last.
“Whatever was here is gone,” Eiler said. “We can try to make it. We’ll never get to the point of what it used to look like. And it all depends on water.”
Around the world, in the face of biodiversity loss and climate change, there are calls to expand protected areas like Quitobaquito — though, as the springs show, a designation doesn’t guarantee protection. Last December, 196 countries agreed to “30×30,” a global goal to conserve 30 percent of the world’s lands and waters by 2030. The U.S. has its own version of that project, called “America the Beautiful.” Many of the areas targeted for protection under these policies are in Indigenous territories or on lands integral to Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, and many have not sought consent from those communities or integrated their knowledge or practices in protection plans.
“I think a lot of the border violence, a lot of the impacts on the Tohono O’odham, those are invisible when you’re visiting [Quitobaquito],” Tsosie said. “That cultural landscape is part of the environmental landscape. And we need to steward that and protect it and care for it just as we do those endangered species.”
Amy Juan agrees that Quitobaquito needs to be protected, but from a country that has caused more harm to the springs than good, not from the people who have cared for it for generations.
“Sometimes it feels out of our hands,” she said. “But what we can control and what we can continue to do is make sure that we maintain these traditions, these ceremonies, these connections, because once we let go of them, once we lose them, once we don’t maintain them, that just continues to hurt who we are as O’odham. We’re desert people. We have to take care of all these things that make us who we are.”
The lavvu is set up in the traditional way: three, debarked birch rods holding up a cloth exterior. The lavvu, a traditional Sámi structure that resembles a teepee or a tent, is insulated with reindeer skins, and in the center, on a floor of twigs, a hearth. Typically a fire would be burning, but for now, a plant stands.
Traditionally, one doesn’t stand inside a lavvu save to enter and sit, so Mihkkal Hætta, the 22-year-old Sámi organizer from the village of Kautokeino, Norway, gestured to me to sit on the soft reindeer pelts.
“Welcome,” said Hætta. “I’ve been staying here for three weeks now.”
With the door closed, fresh air circled through the dwelling from an opening at the top of the lavvu. It was remarkably quiet inside, and soothing.
Outside stood the Norwegian Parliament. Street musicians busked for tourists, scooters and cars flew by, and dog walkers filed past Hætta’s temporary home. A cluster of Sami youth and other environmental-activists also gathered. Curious passersby stopped to ask what was going on. Most asked what a lavvu was doing on official government property.
“I came here on September the 11th because it’s been 700 days since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of [the Sámis from Fosen],” Hætta would explain. “It’s quite unbelievable that a state like Norway lets human rights violations continue for 700 days. And it’s still ongoing.”
Hætta said most people from Oslo who come to the lavvu say they support him, but in the early days of his protest, there were several incidents: a rock band tried to break in one night and another time, someone stole some of his clothing.
Hætta’s presence in Oslo is becoming a familiar one – as are his comrades, and their attempts to bring attention to the Fosen case. On October 11, 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the Fosen wind farm near the city of Trondheim, on the nation’s central-west coast, violated the rights of Sámi reindeer herders, the cultural rights of the Sámi people, and were constructed illegally.
Now, on the eve of the two year anniversary of the court’s ruling, Hætta’s one-month protest serves as a reminder that despite Norway’s international renown for human rights advocacy and standards, Indigenous peoples inside the country’s borders still have no recourse to justice.
“I became really angry, losing more and more hope and losing more and more faith with the government,” said Hætta. “So I decided to put up a lavvu here outside the Norwegian Parliament to remind them that this is still ongoing.”
While Hætta’s protest has gone on for a full month, he’s not alone and it’s not his first. By night, allies and friends look out for him, taking turns on night watch shifts outside the lavvu to keep him safe. And with the exact anniversary of the court ruling only one day away, more and more supporters are arriving to support, with buses coming from Sámi villages and communities across Sápmi — the traditional territory of the Sámi stretching from Russia across northern Finland into Sweden and Norway.
“I’m never alone here,” he said. “I couldn’t do this if I was alone. I have a lot of people around me.”
Hætta first became involved with the Fosen case earlier this year. On February 23, exactly 500 days after the court’s ruling, the Norwegian Sámi Association’s Youth Committee, also known as NSR-N, began occupying the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy in protest of the Norwegian government’s inaction after the verdict. Hætta took part.
During the protest, nearly 30 demonstrators, including Hætta, were arrested and another 90 removed from the Ministry’s property by police. Over the course of a week, Sámi youth organizers were joined by land and rights defenders from Young Friends of the Earth Norway, Greenpeace, Greta Thunberg and nearly 2,000 additional supporters. Human rights campaigners eventually shut down 10 ministries and ended their protest outside Norway’s royal palace.
In the wake of the actions, the Minister of Petroleum and Energy delivered an official apology to reindeer herders in Fosen and acknowledged that the wind park constituted a human rights violation, while the Sámi Parliament of Norway demanded the windmills be demolished and the area restored to reindeer grazing land. Instead, however, Norwegian officials have attempted to negotiate with reindeer herders in order to keep the Fosen wind park operational.
Much of the energy produced at the $1.3 billion Fosen wind park will be part of Norway’s green transition – approximately 98 percent of the country’s electricity comes from renewable sources. However, in 2021, almost 17 percent of that electricity was exported to other European countries. There are nearly 53 wind farms operating, or under construction, in Norway right now and it’s estimated that another 100 licenses have been granted by the government with many slated for construction in Sápmi.
“By failing to enforce a judgment by its highest Court, the Norwegian government is denying the rights of Indigenous Sámi to their cultural heritage and livelihoods,” said Carla Garcia Zendejas, Director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s People, Land and Resources Program in Geneva, Switzerland. “Sámi leaders should not need to put themselves at risk to ensure that effective justice is carried out. Not only does this cast a shadow on the Norwegian government’s commitment to upholding human rights obligations, it questions the rule of law.”
In June of this year, Hætta marked 600 days of inaction by joining with NSR-N and Motvind Norge, an organization that opposes the construction of wind turbines on conservation grounds, to demonstrate outside the Norwegian Parliament again, while activists blockaded the entrance to the wind park at Fosen.
Recently, 24-year-old cultural worker Emily Cottingham from Tønsberg and 26-year-old Daniel Fuller were guarding the lavvu. Fuller, who is Irish-British, works at a nearby cafe and became involved when he began offering coffee to Hætta and other activists outside the Parliament.
“I have always been interested in decolonisation, having studied this,” said Fuller. “When I saw that Mihkkal moved into the lavvu, I realized that it was time to put my theory into practice”.
Then there’s Israel Nebeker, an American musician from Oregon who has come to Norway to trace his Sámi roots. When Nebeker heard about the Fosen case, and the actions taking place, he extended his trip.
“It feels important to be at this demonstration, to show my support for the Sámi at Fosen, and to hold the government accountable to its own laws,” said Nebeker. “It’s time for the government of Norway to protect the rights of Sámi, instead of continuing a history of brutal injustice.”
In 1981, Sámi organizers began demonstrations in Oslo to protest a proposed hydroelectric dam in Sápmi. Known as the Alta Action, Indigenous leaders occupied a government building and began hunger strikes. While efforts were unsuccessful in stopping the dam from being built, the moment marked a major turning point in Indigenous resistance in the region.
“When my father lived in Oslo as a young man, he attended the Alta demonstrations,” said Nebeker. “The Sámi have been fighting for far, far too long.”
Demonstrations are expected to begin tomorrow as more human rights campaigners make their way to Oslo. Sámi people that have worn Gaktis, traditional clothing, are wearing them inside out – an old Sámi tradition that communicates protest. When Sámi people turn their Gaktis inside out, it signifies resistance.
“It’s completely despicable for a country like Norway to ignore its own courts and laws,” said Hætta. “It’s a human rights violation and it’s been going on for 729 days.”
The justices of Brazil’s Supreme Court voted 9-2 last week against a legal framework that would have made it impossible for Indigenous tribal leaders to reclaim traditional land and that would have eased the way for more mining, agriculture and other extractive industries on that land.
The ruling sets a precedent for hundreds of acres of Indigenous land claims and is expected to have a widespread impact on Indigenous land rights.
The legal thesis at the heart of the case, known as marco temporal, had been moving through the courts since 2007 and was overwhelmingly endorsed in the nation’s conservative-dominated lower congressional house.
It involved a legal interpretation of Brazil’s 1988 constitution, which gives Indigenous people the right to claim lands they “traditionally occupied.” Since the adoption of the constitution in 1988, more than 700 Indigenous territories have been claimed. To date, 496 have been officially recognized, or demarcated, by the government, which defines property boundaries and guarantees the possession of the land and the exclusive use of its natural resources to the Indigenous peoples who live on it.
The theory would have limited tribal claims to territories they were occupying or legally disputing on the day the constitution was ratified. However, due to the Indian Statute of 1973, Brazil gave Indigenous people the same legal status as children, meaning they didn’t have standing to represent themselves in the state’s legal system — including in land matters.
The ruling marks the end of the yearslong fight that grew intensely under former President Jair Bolsonaro. Over the last four years, deforestation in the Amazon rose 56 percent with an estimated 13,000 square miles of land destroyed by development. During that time, Indigenous peoples lost an estimated 965 square miles of their traditional territories due to Bolsonaro’s policies.
Brazil’s right wing, agribusiness sectors and other industries such as developers, loggers, miners, and farmers with business interests in Indigenous lands, including the Amazon, have supported the effort. Many proponents cited economic development as a key reason to support the idea — particularly for soybean production, cattle farming, and mining.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January and pledged to protect existing lands and create new territories. In recent months he has made climate and the environment central to his agenda. In August, his administration unveiled infrastructure investment programs and other initiatives that he pitched to start Brazil’s green transition.
In a ruling last week, a Minnesota judge summarily dismissed misdemeanor charges against three Anishinaabe water protectors who had protested at a pipeline construction site in an effort to stop the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline. “To criminalize their behavior would be the crime,” she concluded.
Judge Leslie Metzen relied on a rarely-used Minnesota statute that allows a judge to dismiss a case if doing so furthers “justice.” She assessed that in this case justice meant throwing out charges against Anishinaabe people committed to preserving their treaty lands. “The court finds that it is within the furtherance of justice to protect the defendants peacefully protesting to protect the land and water,” she wrote.
“I’ve never seen a judge dismiss a case in the name of justice,” said Claire Glenn, a staff attorney at the Climate Defense Project who was part of the defense team for the water protectors. She said that research undertaken by the legal team found very few cases where the statute had been cited previously.
The three defendants, Tania Aubid, Dawn Goodwin, and Winona LaDuke, were emotional as they processed the ruling during a press conference on Monday. Each member of the trio faced a range of charges — including trespass, harassment, public nuisance, and unlawful assembly — for their participation in a protest in January 2021.
“Judge Metzen proved that treaties are the supreme law of the land, and we have every right to protect for future generations,” said Goodwin, who also goes by Gaagigeyaashiik and is a White Earth tribal member.
LaDuke, however, argued that the system was not strong enough to keep their people’s land and water safe. Since the completion of the pipeline in 2021, regulators have revealed that Enbridge punctured aquifers at least four times during construction.
“The regulatory system and legal systems are not equipped to deal with the violence of the ecological crimes underway,” LaDuke, former director of the nonprofit Honor the Earth, said. As she sees it, the water protectors had no other recourse than to participate in a months-long series of protest actions meant to halt the project.
As the Center for Media and Democracy and Grist laid out in a recent investigation, Enbridge reimbursed sheriffs’ offices, the Minnesota State Patrol, the Department of Natural Resources, and even a public relations officer for work related to quelling the protests, funneling a total of $8.6 million to various agencies through an escrow account created by the state Public Utilities Commission.
According to police reports, a group of 200 protesters blocked traffic on a rural Minnesota road on January 9, 2021, as they marched toward a place where a backhoe was holding a large pipe near a freshly dug hole. Twenty or 30 people entered the pipeline construction site, stopping work. “A Native American woman I did not know, wearing a jingle dress did a dance on the edge of the trench, and would not move back,” wrote Aitkin County Investigator Steve Cook. Police issued dispersal orders, and the protesters cleared out soon after, the reports conclude.
An officer on the ground pointed to Aubid and LaDuke as potential leaders, and another investigator identified Goodwin after reviewing Facebook videos. But the trio only received citations weeks later — five misdemeanor charges for Aubid and LaDuke, and three for Goodwin.
It would be months before Enbridge reimbursed law enforcement agencies for the hours they spent policing the protest. According to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, at least four local law enforcement agencies received more than $17,000 from Enbridge for assigning nearly 40 officers to the protest site that day.
“It was not necessary to have 40 or 50 police officers at any point,” LaDuke said. “This was excessive force used upon all of us — excessive prosecution, and it was incentivized by Enbridge.”
About two weeks after the protest, Enbridge machinery quietly punctured an aquifer at a similar Line 3 construction site. Over the next year, a total of more than 72 million gallons of water spilled from the earth. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources forced the company to pay $3.2 million in environmental penalties. However, a single misdemeanor was the only criminal charge Enbridge faced, and it came with a deal that said it would be dismissed after a year.
The aquifer breach was key to the defense attorneys’ argument for dismissal of the charges. At a settlement conference the day before the decision, Joshua Preston, who represented Goodwin, asked the judge to put the case in perspective.
“We just experienced the hottest summer globally on record, a documented fact that led the United Nations Secretary General to issue a statement on September 6 stating ‘climate breakdown has begun,’” he said. “Why does Enbridge get one charge while my client gets three?”
“This is the question history will ask if the state is allowed to move forward in its prosecution,” Preston continued.
At the press conference, Frank Bibeau — who is Anishinaabe and a longtime attorney for pipeline opponents — said that such arguments are typically ignored when they come from Indigenous people: “These are words we say all the time, but they never get heard.”
Prosecutors filed a total of 967 criminal cases against people attending Line 3 protests. The vast majority were dismissed, some for lack of probable cause, others via negotiated agreements. Not everyone has avoided “guilty” verdicts. In the last three months, two were convicted of felonies for participating in protests. Glenn said those cases involved prosecutorial misconduct that is still being litigated. Fewer than 20 open cases remain.
In a number of cases, attorneys attempted to argue that the involvement of the Enbridge escrow account means the arrests violated pipeline opponents’ rights to due process. However, these arguments failed to sway any judge.
Preston’s arguments about his clients’ case’s relation to the climate crisis, on the other hand, found a receptive audience in court. “These cases and these 3 defendants in particular have awakened in me some deep questions about what would serve the interests of justice here,” Metzen, the judge, wrote in a memo attached to the ruling.
“Their gathering may have briefly delayed construction, caused extra expense to law enforcement who came to clear their gathering (much of which was reimbursed by Aitkin County through Enbridge), but the pipeline has been completed and is operating in spite of their efforts to stop it through peaceful protest,” she continued. “In the interest of justice the charges against these three individuals who were exercising their rights to free speech and to freely express their spiritual beliefs should be dismissed.”
When Neil Patterson Jr. was about 7 or 8 years old, he saw a painting called “Gathering Chestnuts,” by Tonawanda Seneca artist Ernest Smith. Patterson didn’t realize that the painting showed a grove of American chestnuts, a tree that had been all but extinct since his great-grandparents’ time. Instead, what struck Patterson was the family in the foreground: As a man throws a wooden club to knock chestnuts from the branches above, a child shells the nuts and a woman gathers them in a basket. Even the dog seems engrossed in the process, watching with head cocked as the club sails through the air.
Patterson grew up on the Tuscarora Nation Reservation just south of Lake Ontario near Niagara Falls. The painting reminded him of his elders teaching him to harvest black walnuts and hickories.
“I think, for me, it wasn’t about the tree, it was about a way of life,” said Patterson, who today is in his 40s, with silver-flecked dark hair and kids of his own. He sounded wistful.
“Gathering Chestnuts” watercolor by Ernest Smith (Tonawanda Seneca, Heron Clan), 1938. Courtesy of the RMSC. Rochester, N.Y.
The American chestnut tree, or číhtkęr in Tuscarora, once grew across what is currently the eastern United States, from Mississippi to Georgia, and into southeastern Canada. The beloved and ecologically important species was harvested by Indigenous peoples for millennia and once numbered in the billions, providing food and habitat to countless birds, insects, and mammals of eastern forests, before being wiped out by rampant logging and a deadly fungal blight brought on by European colonization.
Now, a transgenic version of the American chestnut that can withstand the blight is on the cusp of being deregulated by the U.S. government. (Transgenic organisms contain DNA from other species.) When that happens, people will be able to grow the blight-resistant trees without restriction. For years, controversy has swirled around the ethics of using novel biotechnology for species conservation. But Patterson, who previously directed the Tuscarora Environment Program and today is the assistant director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has a different question: What good is bringing back a species without also restoring its traditional relationships with the Indigenous peoples who helped it flourish?
That deep history is not always clear from conservation narratives about the blight-resistant chestnut. For the past four decades, the driving force behind the chestnut’s restoration has been The American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit with more than 5,000 active members in 16 chapters. Before turning to genetic engineering, the foundation tried unsuccessfully to breed a hybrid chestnut that looked and grew like an American chestnut but had genes from species native to Asia that gave it blight resistance. “Our vision is a robust eastern forest restored to its splendor,” reads The American Chestnut Foundation’s homepage, against a background of glowing green chestnut leaflets. “Our mission is to return the iconic American chestnut to its native range.”
But the Foundation website’s history of the tree begins during colonial times, suggesting a romantic notion of a precolonial wilderness that ignores the intensive agroforestry that Indigenous peoples practiced. By engineering vanished species to survive harms brought on by colonization without addressing those harms, people avoid having to make hard decisions about how most of us live on the landscape today.
Two unmodified, open-pollinated American chestnut burs, left, grow near hand-pollinated, genetically modified samples, in bags at right, at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry Lafayette Road Experiment Station in Syracuse in 2019. Adrian Kraus / AP Photo
Bill Powell began working on chestnut genetics when he was a 28-year-old graduate student in Utah, which is actually outside the tree’s natural range. Now in his late 60s, with silvery hair, glasses, and an infectious curiosity about the relationship between tree and pathogen, he’s a leading chestnut restoration expert.
When I met Powell in 2022, he fretted that the chestnut restoration process was taking too long. “Unfortunately, I see retirement on the horizon,” he told me. “But not anytime soon, because I have to get this done.” At the time, Powell was a colleague of Patterson’s, working for the same university and directing the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project. Since then, as the blight-resistant tree has wound its way through the deregulatory labyrinth of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Agriculture, Powell has had to step down, recently sharing his diagnosis of terminal colon cancer publicly.
When we spoke, Powell stressed that after the blight-resistant chestnut is deregulated, no Indigenous nations will have to grow the transgenic trees on their lands if they choose not to. But he acknowledged that this does not reassure those who think of Indigenous land not in colonial terms, meaning within reservation boundaries, but instead in terms of treaty rights or cultural practices on historic tribal lands. Indigenous nations, including members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy such as the Tuscarora Nation, have long argued that even when they ceded land to colonial governments, they did not cede their rights to access and care for plants and animals on those lands.
Bill Powell, stands in a lab at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry in 2019. Adrian Kraus / AP Photo
The nuts of the American chestnut are small, sweet, and nutritious. They were an important part of the varied diet that sustained Patterson’s ancestors for millennia; in return, people cared for groves of the trees across thousands of miles. When the United States pushed Indigenous peoples throughout the chestnut’s range off their lands, and the American chestnut became functionally extinct, an ancient reciprocal relationship vanished, too.
“We were instructed to pick those nuts,” Patterson said. “And when we don’t pick them, the plant goes away.”
With craggy bark and shaggy branches of feathery leaves, the American chestnut could reach 100 feet tall during its heyday. Its trunk could be 13 feet wide. The trees huddled along the Gulf Coast for some 8,000 years during the most recent ice age, sheltering in the relatively warm stretch from Florida to the Mississippi River, because mountain peaks even in the southernmost part of the Appalachians were too cold for chestnut trees to grow. Then, as the snow receded northward 20,000 ago, the trees slowly migrated from their coastal refuges. They worked their way up the Appalachian Mountains — helped by Indigenous peoples, whom they helped in turn.
The trees dropped an avalanche of chestnuts to the forest floor each year. According to historian Donald Edward Davis, people burned low fires that dried the nuts and killed off chestnut weevils. By suppressing other plants, fires helped the chestnut trees spread, and the nuts became staples of Indigenous diets — a reliable source of nutrition that people stored in earthen silos or pounded into flour for chestnut bread and other foods. The human-tended groves also fed animals such as elk, deer, bison, bears, passenger pigeons, panthers, wolves, and foxes. Chestnut logjams in streams created deep, clear pockets of water where fish could thrive. Several species of invertebrates relied on chestnut trees for habitat; after the trees died out, five species of moths went extinct.
An 1885 print from L. Prang & Co. shows the American chestnut (Castanea vulgaris, var. Americana). Library of Congress
European settlers forced Indigenous peoples along the chestnut’s range from much of their homelands, severing access to plants and animals they’d long interacted with. Meanwhile, settlers cut down chestnuts for many reasons — to clear space for towns and farms; to build fence posts, telegraph poles, and railroads; or just to gather the nuts more easily.
Nevertheless, the chestnut survived for centuries. Enslaved people gathered chestnuts to supplement meager meals and to sell. White Appalachian communities came to rely on chestnuts as free feed for their hogs and other livestock, and as a cash crop.
Then, in the late 1800s, horticulturalists imported trees carrying the fungal blight Cryphonectria parasitica to the United States. The blight spread by wind and splashing rain; it also hitched rides on insects and birds. Once it landed on the bark of a new tree, it dug in through weak spots — old burn injuries, insect wounds, or scars left from woodcutting — and dissolved the tree’s living tissue with oxalic acid, creating angry orange streaks and open cankers on trunks. The trees would die back to their roots, resprout, and die back again, like botanical zombies. The blight killed at an astonishing pace. All told, a tree whose ancestors evolved millions of years ago died out in less than 50 years.
A 1912 article from the Sun describes the American chestnut tree blight. Courtesy of The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation / Library of Congress
In turn, the chestnut lost the people whose practices helped it thrive. Patterson told me that some Indigenous nations even lost their word for the chestnut tree, because chestnuts disappeared at the same time that the U.S. government took Indigenous children, including at least one of Patterson’s own relatives, and placed them in boarding schools. In part, this was another strategy for coercing tribes to give up territory. Many children didn’t survive the schools, which were often run by Christian organizations. Those who did were forced to give up their languages, religious beliefs, and traditions. But chestnuts still inhabit Indigenous creation stories and religious calendars, and Patterson believes that a reciprocal relationship can be reestablished between Indigenous nations and the tree. He’s just not convinced that releasing the transgenic chestnut will restore those connections.
The Tuscarora Nation, of which Patterson is an enrolled citizen, is one of six Indigenous nations that today comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee creation story, Patterson said, is “a cycle of loss, grieving, and recovery all the time, just like ecological succession.” By creating a genetically engineered chestnut, Patterson argues, scientists are avoiding the part of the cycle where people grieve and learn from their mistakes.
On the timescale of Haudenosaunee history, the losses still feel new. “It’s been 100 years — but that’s not long,” Patterson observed. Then he reconsidered. “That’s long for research scientists, or a plant technology innovator. It’s too long.”
To Patterson, what’s not being restored — treaty rights to access and care for plants and animals on the landscape — is telling.
“If you want to restore this, like, ‘primordial’ forest, don’t you also want to restore our relationship with that forest?” he asked. “Like — what’s your relationship to a transgenic chestnut?”
An undated archival photo shows a grove of blighted American chestnut trees in Page County, Virginia.
Library of Congress
By the time Patterson first saw Ernest Smith’s artwork in the early 1980s, the Tuscarora Nation was going through a cultural renaissance. Patterson’s mother made her children speak Tuscarora at home to keep the language alive. His family and other Haudenosaunee community members participated in political acts such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island by Indigenous people from across the U.S., in part as a response to post-World War II termination policies aimed at curtailing tribal sovereignty and revoking territory. Murals on the walls of Patterson’s state-run elementary school showed Tuscarora people hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering, even as non-Indigenous people contested those traditional activities outside of reservation lands, from the local to the national level.
Over time, Patterson was taught that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy never ceded its “reserved rights,” or rights that are not explicitly mentioned in treaties or court cases. Today, the Confederacy maintains that it still holds rights to care for and access the species growing on its ancestral homelands and in ancestral waterways — even in territory ceded to settlers. But both the state of New York and the federal government have chipped away at those reserved rights through court cases, and often won. In this legal context, harvesting chestnuts, like the family in Smith’s painting, is not only a cultural practice; it’s an exercise of tribal sovereignty.
Neil Patterson studies a small chestnut, right, in the woods outside Syracuse. The main trunk has been killed by blight, but the roots keep sending out shoots. Julia Rosen / Los Angeles Times
Patterson works to rebuild tribal access to many plants and animals that are culturally important for Haudenosaunee peoples. Because those plants and animals often live outside of reservation lands, his work can be difficult. New York State maintains that, except on reservation lands, Indigenous peoples have the same rights as non-Indigenous peoples, and have to follow the same regulations regarding when, where, and how much they hunt, fish, or gather, such as hunting seasons or fishing licenses — regulations the Tuscarora have been fighting in court for decades. So to Patterson, the question of whether to grow transgenic trees isn’t really the most urgent one. He’s more concerned about upholding a way of life that restores traditional ecological relationships.
“Aside from the whole issue of being transgenic, this is just about access and care of place,” he told me. In New York’s state lands, he added, there are almost no provisions for gathering medicines, collecting food, or growing food in traditional territories. Yet that reciprocity helped chestnuts spread and thrive across thousands of miles and thousands of years.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy began making treaties with white settlers more than 400 years ago. The two-row wampum belt, made of rows of white beads run through with two rows of purple beads, documents a 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers to live in parallel, not interfering with each other’s ways of life. In 1794, during George Washington’s presidency, the Haudenosaunee and the United States signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, affirming the Confederacy’s sovereignty on its territory. In the Nonintercourse Act, a series of statutes passed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Congress also barred states from purchasing lands from Indigenous nations without federal approval. When states’ land purchases are approved, Indigenous nations don’t lose any other rights on those lands, such as hunting, fishing, or gathering, unless the treaty specifically cedes those rights, explained Monte Mills, who directs the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington.
Nonetheless, states including New York still try to assert control over tribes or tribal resources, and in many cases, succeed. In one 2005 case, Patterson himself was the defendant, charged by the state of New York for ice fishing without properly labeling his gear. Patterson brought a copy of the Treaty of Canandiagua to court, explaining to the judge that as a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, he had the right to fish in the state park, formerly Seneca territory, without regulation by the state of New York. Patterson lost that case.
The Supreme Court of the United States has also limited Haudenosaunee reserved rights, though from a different angle. In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, decided just a few months before Patterson’s case, the Supreme Court ruled that although the Oneida Nation, which is part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, never gave up certain rights on its ancestral land, it had essentially waited too long to exercise them.
This particular case centered around whether tribes had to pay local and state taxes on ancestral land that they bought back on the real estate market. In the majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that both Indian law and the need to treat people equally “preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” According to Mills, the Supreme Court essentially said that Oneida had let too much time pass to assert its sovereign rights, and therefore had lost them.
“It’s one of the worst decisions from foundational Indian law court,” Mills said. Although the case was about property taxes, Mills said that it could be a precedent for preventing Indigenous nations from exercising reserved rights. “The state would probably point to Sherrill and say, ‘No, you can’t have those rights, because you haven’t asserted them for so long,’” he added.
But Mills also pointed out that sometimes, tribes and states have been able to work together to come up with mutually beneficial ways for tribes to exercise their reserved rights. If states are interested in recognizing tribal sovereignty, he said, there are models out there for how to do it.
For its part, the state of New York has been working recently to improve its relations with Indigenous nations. In 2022, the state and the federal government agreed to return more than 1,000 acres to the Onondaga Nation. That same year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration created an Office of Indian Nation Affairs in the Department of Environmental Conservation, the same department that 20 years previously ticketed Patterson and fought him in court over reserved fishing rights. Peter Reuben, who is enrolled in the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, is currently serving as the first director of the new office.
To Reuben, the creation of his position by the department “really shows that they are serious about us,” he said. Reuben is working to create a productive and respectful consultation process between the region’s Indigenous nations and the state of New York on environmental issues, and to hash out agreements over hunting, fishing, and treaty rights.
“If it’s in the state’s interest — which it seems like it would be — to have more support and additional resources for natural resource management, then why not work with tribal folks to support a program where they’re able to continue to do what they said they’ve been doing all along?” Mills said. “It’s probably going to lead to a better end result anyway.”
Holly Stapleton / Grist
For now, while transgenic American chestnut trees are still highly regulated, one of the best places to see one is at the Lafayette Road Experimental Field Station on the southern outskirts of Syracuse. Powell met me there on a sunny July morning two summers ago.
On fields that glowed bean-pod green in the upstate humidity, thousands of chestnut trees grew in varying stages of reproduction, healing, and death. White paper bags festooned the taller trees, their flowers covered to manage fertilization.
The transgenic chestnuts contain wheat DNA that lets the tree create an enzyme that fights off Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungal blight. The blight cankers on these trees don’t grow big enough to girdle them.
Rows of strappy transgenic saplings, some as tall as Powell, waited in holding plots fenced to keep out hungry deer. “We’re planting them on very close spacing, and we can only hold them for about three years, and then they get root-bound,” Powell said. As the permitting process drags on, time is running out to replant these young trees.
A lab manager records data while a student researcher pollinates flowers on an American chestnut tree at a field research station in Syracuse in July 2022. Lauren Petracca / The Washington Post via Getty Images
I asked Powell why he thought restoring the chestnut was important. Chestnuts produced a stable crop of nuts for wildlife, because they flowered late enough in the year that they escaped flower-killing frosts, he said. “It was just an important part of our ecosystem, and for our heritage, too,” he added. “The railroads that were made in the East used ties that were made out of chestnuts because they were rot resistant. And people used to say, chestnuts used to follow you from cradle to grave, because the wood was used in everything from cradles to coffins.”
Although he’s retired, Powell is working to create a research center that would develop transgenic versions of other native species going extinct from blights, insects, and other introduced pests. He imagined growing transgenic versions of everything from elms, killed off by Dutch elm disease and the elm yellows pathogen, to ash trees, which are currently being devoured by iridescent green beetles called emerald ash borers.
People who hope to use technology to resurrect extinct species, whether the American chestnut or even the woolly mammoth, are sometimes considered ecomodernists. According to Jason Delborne, who studies biotechnology and environmental policy at North Carolina State University (where I previously worked, in the English department), “There are people who are environmentalists at their core, but sick of losing, and interested in the promise of technology to solve the ecological and environmental problems we are facing.” Part of that interest, he said, comes from a sense of responsibility to “fix what you broke.”
Dead leaves hang on a non-transgenic American chestnut tree, caused by a blight canker further down the trunk, at a field research station in Syracuse in July 2022. Lauren Petracca / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Indeed, Jamie Van Clief, the southern regional science coordinator for The American Chestnut Foundation, explained to me that she got interested in working for the organization because her field, environmental science, was depressing.
“There’s a lot of disaster, there’s a lot of dismay, and to have this foundation with such a positive and impactful mission just attracted me immensely,” she said. “To be able to work towards something when it kind of feels hopeless sometimes — and to be part of restoration on the scale that we’re doing — is incredible.”
As Powell and I gazed at a diseased, non-engineered chestnut sapling, its yellowing leaves hanging limp in the sun, I reflected that eastern forests weren’t exactly flush with any other giant trees. Almost all old growth has fallen to human endeavors. Conservation efforts also have to take into consideration climate change, which may shift suitable chestnut habitat north into Canada — and shift plant diseases’ habitats as well. Root rot, or Phytophthora cinnamomi, is another introduced pathogen. It only infects chestnuts in the South right now, because root rot dies during winter freezes. The American Chestnut Foundation estimates root rot will spread to New England in the next 50 years as the region warms. Plus, there are few places available for a new chestnut forest to grow, except perhaps forest remediation sites such as old Appalachian coal mines. The fact is, releasing blight-resistant chestnuts into the wild won’t guarantee them a landscape where they can survive.
Because biotechnology alone can’t restore the American chestnut to the numbers that its supporters are envisioning, Powell anticipates relying on citizen scientists. After deregulation, he imagines The American Chestnut Foundation sending transgenic pollen to interested people, who could pollinate the flowers of wild mother trees growing nearby. They could plant the nuts the trees grow or pass them on to other chestnut fans.
Genetically modified chestnut embryo clusters are stored in a lab at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science & Forestry in Syracuse. Adrian Kraus / AP Photo
The health and ecological risks of introducing the transgenic chestnut into the wild are likely to be low, according to Delborne; its signature wheat gene is commonly found in many major food crops. But at heart, Delborne argues, the debate isn’t just about chestnuts. “It’s also about a category of technology that could find its way into the world,” he said.
Even if the chestnut recovery doesn’t work out, the approval of the engineered chestnut for unregulated growth could open the door to a new era of biotechnology in U.S. forestry — such as a pest-resistant poplar tree, which kills forest insects by expressing genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and already grows commercially in other countries.
The debate about blight-resistant chestnuts isn’t really about trees or even genetic engineering; it’s about who gets to make decisions on the land. Conservation is framed in European cultures as an objective goal, but it’s a worldview that other people may not share, explained Katie Barnhill-Dilling, a North Carolina State University social scientist who researches environmental decision-making. “Some of the people I’ve talked to from the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force would contest that humans are here to accept the gifts as they are now,” she said.
Some Indigenous nations in the chestnut’s historic range, such as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, or EBCI, and the Seneca Nation of Indians, are considering growing genetically engineered chestnuts on their reservation lands after the trees are deregulated. To EBCI Secretary of Agriculture and Natural Resources Joey Owle, restoring the American chestnut is another way for the tribe to exercise its sovereign rights, more than a century after the tree’s disappearance.
“It’s one project of many projects that we work on to enhance our sovereignty as a tribe, to work to establish a culturally significant resource that provided a bountiful harvest for our ancestors and wildlife,” he said. “It’s just cool to be part of it.” Based on feedback from EBCI committee members, Owle said that planting transgenic trees, while an option, is the “last option that we would like to pursue” to restore the species. For now, the EBCI is scouting out wild chestnuts that survived the blight, and planting hybrid trees on its land in partnership with The American Chestnut Foundation.
Holly Stapleton / Grist
On a crisp fall day a couple of years ago, Patterson and Powell arranged for around 15 people to gather chestnuts in upstate New York. The grove grew on a hilly slope on state land that used to be an agricultural field. “It was just a beautiful little spot,” Patterson recalled. The 12 or so American chestnuts were young; Patterson estimated they were perhaps 20 years old and no more than 25 feet tall.
The group, a mix of Haudenosaunee Confederacy members and non-Indigenous scientists, toted assorted equipment to gather the prickly nuts: ladders, homemade pickers, plastic buckets, sturdy leather shoes, and gloves. But first, they stood in a circle in the grove and discussed the future of the American chestnuts. According to Patterson, things quickly became adversarial.
Powell and Patterson had long been collegial: Patterson first tasted an American chestnut after he microwaved some that Powell handed him in the campus building where they both had offices. Meanwhile, Powell’s students learned from Patterson about the parallel expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the disappearance of chestnut trees.
Powell has constantly reached out to tribes for input and to understand their perspectives, Patterson said. And unlike other biotechnology researchers, Powell has focused on technology for environmental restoration, not for personal profit. “I admire the idea that this is about technology for restoration — whatever that is,” Patterson added.
But their relationships with plants remain fundamentally different. For example, Powell has talked about keeping the price of the transgenic chestnuts low, just to raise enough money to cover the costs of getting them out to people. In contrast, when I asked Patterson why he never bought or sold seeds from traditional food plants for his home garden, he sounded incredulous. “That’s like selling people,” he said. “That’s life. … Why would you sell somebody?”
That fall day, Patterson began worrying that if the restoration succeeds and transgenic chestnuts grow across the land, releasing pollen into the wind, people won’t be able to tell transgenic trees apart from non-transgenic trees. Scientists in the group assured everyone that in the future, people would be able to tell the trees apart through genetic testing.
“It was this privileged standpoint, which is, ‘Well, technology will figure it out for us.’ But it’s not as if I’m going to hand that technology to my son or nephews or my grandsons before they go off to gather,” Patterson said. “It just seemed like it was so simple to them.” He wondered why the non-Indigenous scientists and conservationists had been able to plant this grove on state land in the first place, when his nation was largely prevented from accessing or caring for plants there.
The group got tense. “The conversation turned to fear, and to moral opposition,” Patterson recalled. Patterson realized this standoff wasn’t the right frame of mind for the trip. “Well,” he exclaimed, “let’s go pick some nuts!”
As he collected chestnuts, Patterson couldn’t help but think of Ernest Smith’s painting. “It was a fulfillment of that scene,” he told me. Patterson reflected on his ancestors, wondering how they’d gathered the prickly nuts without his contemporary tools. He felt that by collecting chestnuts, he was doing what he was supposed to do. He hoped that in the future, he’d be able to find more wild chestnuts and organize more gathering trips, taking care to bring Haudenosaunee kids along. But he could see that the masting trees were struggling with the blight and weren’t going to survive much longer. Some of the young trees were already more than half dead, leaves brown and wilted.
He and his wife, who also attended the trip, were struck by a realization: If the federal government deregulated the blight-resistant trees, letting their pollen float freely through the air, this trip might be one of the last times they could gather wild American chestnuts with certainty.
A new study found trace amounts of nuclear waste in sea turtles in the Marshall Islands and five locations in the continental United States, underscoring the enduring legacy of nuclear testing and weapons development.
The analysis, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, looked at turtle and tortoise shells at locations tied to nuclear testing including Southwestern Utah, the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range in Arizona.
Cyler Conrad, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico who led the study along with 22 other researchers, said the team found evidence of uranium radionuclides in the shells of turtles and tortoises at all five sites. He added that contamination amounts were so small that it’s doubtful the animals experienced health impacts.
“If you take a paperclip and divide it a million times, if you take a millionth piece of that and divide it another million times, that’s about the same quantity that we’re measuring in some of these shells,” Conrad said.
Still, Conrad says the findings are significant because they illustrate how turtles and tortoises, in part due to their long lives and metabolic processes, are able to retain nuclear contamination in their tissues. According to Conrad, turtle shells grow in a sequential style, similar to tree rings, and record isotopic elements such as uranium-236 from spent nuclear fuel.
The study is the first that Conrad knows of that identifies nuclear contamination in turtles in the Marshall Islands, but it’s far from the first to find evidence of historical, military-related pollution in wildlife there. In 2019, a U.S. Army study found dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs, and arsenic in fish around Kwajalein Island in the Marshalls, which has served as a U.S. military base for decades and is currently part of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.
The paper also builds upon decades of research illustrating how nuclear waste bioaccumulates in sea creatures. Conrad said the study’s methodology of analyzing shells is new, but noted past studies have found previous evidence of radionuclides in turtles. A 2020 study of sea turtles in the Montebello Islands found contamination of turtle eggs and tissues.
The findings coincide with Japan’s decision to release treated, contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. The move prompted China to ban seafood from Japan, inspired protests in Fiji and South Korea and has particularly frustrated Indigenous peoples in the Pacific who have spent decades fighting against the dumping of nuclear waste in the region. Between 1946 and 1958, the Marshall Islands were the site of 67 U.S. nuclear tests, leading to health and environmental harms that the Indigenous people of the islands continue to grapple with.
Conrad hopes the study inspires more research into turtles and tortoises and how they record nuclear history.
“They’re taking in all of this information, they’re depositing this, and they’re acting as a really critical library for us to be able to reconstruct the history of the world in different ways,” Conrad said. “They’re experiencing what humans are experiencing and they’re able to record this in a very unique way.”
Danity Laukon was sitting in her bedroom in her two-bedroom flat in Suva, Fiji when she got the call. It was November 2021, and her dad, more than 1,800 miles away at her home in Majuro in the Marshall Islands, had died after a battle with diabetes.
He was 50 years old.
Diabetes is not an illness that is directly caused by radiation. But Laukon believes that American nuclear testing in the Pacific played a role in his early death.
After years of nuclear bomb detonations in the Marshall Islands, fallout and forced relocations of communities began a ripple effect: many Indigenous Marshallese people who had relied on subsistence farming and fishing for 4,000 years suddenly couldn’t trust the safety of their food, becoming reliant on imported products, and unhealthy, non-native processed foods.
And those were the lucky ones. On Utrik atoll, where Laukon’s maternal family is from, many residents fell ill from acute radiation sickness.
Now she’s worried her community will face even more health risks. On Thursday, the government of Japan began releasing wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, and plans to continue to do so gradually for the next 30 years.
An observatory room at Tokyo Electric Power Company Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant shows (from left) unit 1 to unit 4 reactor buildings and storage tanks for contaminated water.
BEHROUZ MEHRI / AFP via Getty Images
Japan is treating the water before it is poured into the sea, but the water will still contain low levels of radioactive contaminants that can’t be removed. Japan promises that the levels of contaminants present will be significantly lower than international health standards, and has gained the support of a key United Nations agency. But some scientists remain concerned about how little is known about potential long-term effects of the wastewater.
Japanese officials declined to speak on the record about their plans but have publicly outlined an argument that the country is running out of room to store contaminated water from the nuclear power plant and that another earthquake – similar to the quake that damaged the plant – could release the stored water before being treated. The plan now is to treat contaminated water, then dilute it into the Pacific Ocean over the course of three decades in order to more quickly decommission the nuclear facility.
In 2011, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck Japan causing a tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people and knocked out emergency generators to the Fukushima nuclear plant. In the hours after, three nuclear reactors melted down, forcing the evacuation of more than 100,000 people. Radioactive water spilled into the Pacific and was carried east by currents toward the United States. Two and a half years later, radiation from the plant was detected in waters off California, but at levels considered harmless.
A photo from April 2011 shows the “ghost town” of Minamisōma, a city located in Fukushima Prefecture. All residents were evacuated after an earthquake damaged the nearby Fukushima nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011.
Noboru Hashimoto / Corbis via Getty Images
In the decade since, Japan has erected more than 1,000 tanks to store more than a million tons of water from Fukushima: rainwater, groundwater, and water pumped into the facility to cool the damaged reactors. Once treated, that water will be poured into the Pacific for the next three decades.
Japanese officials have promised that the levels of contaminants present in the wastewater will be significantly lower than international health standards, and last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations agency that oversees nuclear energy, greenlit the plan when it released a report describing the wastewater as having a “negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.”
However, some scientists remain concerned about how little is known about potential long-term effects of that wastewater, while many Indigenous peoples in the Pacific, like Laukon, worry that the move will add an additional burden to the health disparities communities already face. For Laukon, Japan’s decision is an extension of a long-running history of using the Pacific as a dumping ground for nuclear waste.
“It’s giving us more to deal with,” she said. “It feels helpless.”
During the Cold War, Britain, France and the U.S. tested more than 300 nuclear bombs across the Pacific regions of Polynesia and Micronesia as well as in the deserts of Australia. After a detonation in the Marshall Islands, children on Rongelap atoll ate “snow” that fell from the sky that later turned out to be calcium debris from the fallout. Radioactive debris clung to the coconut oil of women’s hair.
Five Pacific islanders, left to right, Jonita Jalme, 15, Jemloch Kebinli, 14, Lisa Paul, 42, Mary Kebinli, 20, and Mina Boaz, 13, exposed to heavy radio-active fallout in 1954, pose before leaving New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston on June 11, 1966, where they recovered from surgery for removal of growths from their thyroid glands. The group were among the 64 residents of Rongelap atoll in the Marshall Islands who were showered with particles from an H-bomb test at Bikini on March 1, 1954.
FCC / AP Photo
At Fukushima, one concern about the discharge is around tritium, a radioactive isotope produced in nuclear reactors that can’t be removed through Japan’s treatment process. Japanese officials say that once the wastewater mixes into the ocean one kilometer off of Japan’s shores, the amount of tritium present is expected to be well below the World Health Organization’s standards for drinking water quality –1,500 becquerels per liter compared with the WHO limit of 10,000 becquerels per liter; levels comparable to those in water released from normally-operating nuclear power plants in China, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Japan says the discharge is safe, but Timothy Mousseau isn’t so sure. The biologist and professor at the University of South Carolina and author of an exhaustive review of existing studies on tritium currently awaiting publication.
“The bottom line from my perspective is that (tritium) has been insufficiently studied to be making hard promises about the long-term safety of this kind of release,” Mousseau said. “We don’t actually really understand what the potential ramifications of a massive point source of tritium will be on the natural environment.”
While exposure to tritium through swimming or drinking water isn’t a risk, the radioactive isotope can bioaccumulate through the food chain. Studies of mice and rats suggest that ingesting tritium could lead to cancer and fertility problems, Mousseau said, but whether that would happen in humans isn’t clear because the radioactive isotope hasn’t been studied enough.
“We really don’t know whether there will be a significant hazard to humans at the end of the food chain,” said Mousseau.
That potential to impact the food chain is a big concern to Robert Richmond, director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawaiʻi and a professor who specializes in marine conservation biology and coral reefs.
Richmond is part of a panel of experts advising the Pacific Islands Forum, the chief diplomatic body representing Pacific island nations, on Japan’s plan. In February, he visited Japan to meet with the country’s scientists about the release. He left unimpressed by the lack of data they provided regarding the contents of their water tanks and the effectiveness of their treatment system.
“When they say the science is impeccable — no, anything but,” he said.
Richmond and his fellow scientists saw red flags in what data did exist including inconsistencies and poorly designed sampling protocols. One of Richmond’s colleagues, Kenneth Buesseler, is a marine radiochemist and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Buesseler says the water flowing through the plant is exposed to more radiation than cooling water in normally functioning nuclear reactors because it’s in direct contact with molten coil. That means the water will need to be treated multiple times to reach the health standards that Japan has promised. He doesn’t believe Japan has effectively demonstrated that its treatment system can consistently remove the high levels of dangerous compounds present in the wastewater.
He also doubts that there’s an urgent need to get rid of the water and says Japan should consider other viable alternatives. The rush to discharge the water, Richmond said, suggests Japan is choosing the cheapest, most politically expedient method to get rid of the nuclear waste rather than doing what’s best for its neighbors and the ocean, which is already stressed from the effects of climate change, plastic pollution and ocean acidification.
“Once you’ve made a mistake, there’s no turning back, and all the monitoring in the world does nothing to protect ecosystems or the people who depend on them,” he said. “It simply tells you when you’re screwed and that doesn’t really do anything.”
People gather on August 24, 2023, in front of Tokyo Electric Power Company to protest the release of stored nuclear-contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
David Mareuil / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Pacific opposition to the plan was initially strong, but after Japanese officials carried out a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to sway public opinion including meeting with Pacific leaders, several expressed support, most recently Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka.
On Twitter on Tuesday, Rabuka called the comparison of Japan’s controlled wastewater discharge to historic nuclear testing in the Pacific “fear mongering.”
“It’s impossible to compare those nuclear tests with the careful discharge of treated wastewater from Fukushima over a period of approximately 30 years,” he wrote.
But other leaders, like Vanuatu’s foreign minister, remain unconvinced. Sheila Babauta, a former legislator from the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, abbreviated as CNMI, authored a resolution that condemned Japan’s plan in 2021. Today, she remains resolute in her opposition.
“I’m deeply concerned for the people of the CNMI and how decisions by major world powers are being made without our knowledge and how that’s going to impact our lives today and for future generations,” she said.
On Tuesday, Laukon was visiting Honolulu, and woke up to Facebook messages from friends asking her about Japan’s plan to release the wastewater that week. What could they do? Could they put out a statement criticizing the plans? Would it make a difference?
It took her a while for the reality to sink in — the fact that what she and others had been campaigning against was actually happening.
“To be honest, it feels helpless to really voice what you want to say because does it matter? Are they listening?” she said. “But it does matter. Whatever we do now will still affect later generations. And that’s why I’m worried.”
It was hard to put how she felt into words. What could she say that could capture the feeling she had about what she feared, what this big decision that was so far out of her control meant for her people?
She finished composing a poem she had started writing last week in Fiji. It was about a turtle who lays eggs under the full moon, only to realize they won’t hatch.
“Under a full moon / I see raindrops / blue water / an island is grieving / in silence,” she wrote.
Forests managed by Indigenous nations are severely underfunded. To reach per-acre parity with forests managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, the federal government would need to increase funding by nearly $96 million every year. That’s according to a new report from the Intertribal Timber Council, a nonprofit consortium consisting primarily of tribes and Alaska Native Corporations.
In 2019, the base year for the study, tribal forests represented nearly 19 million acres in the United States, including approximately 10.2 million acres of commercial forests and woodlands. A total of 345 tribal forests are managed across the nation, with 316 of those forests being held in federal trust.
“It seems like a fairly straightforward answer that when we look at the disparity in funding between other federal agencies and tribes, that [Congress] would just increase appropriations,” said Cody Desautel, President of the Intertribal Timber Council and member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. “But that hasn’t been the case.”
According to the report, non-timber forest products are essential to many tribal communities. Traditional herbaceous plants are found within forested areas while fish, wildlife, roots, fungi and edible tree components such as sap, seeds and nuts, are harvested by communities for medicinal purposes and provide connection to lands.
“Indian forestlands are quite diverse across the country. But all have one thing in common, they are a lifeline for the tribes that live on these lands,” wrote the authors. “The tribal needs from their forests are diverse: forests provide everything from stumpage revenue to employment to harvesting game for subsistence, to being cultural and religious sanctuaries.”
Since 2013, Tribal Priority Allocations, or TPA, that provide federal funding for basic Tribal services, like ecosystem and landscape conservation, have been relatively stagnant despite rising costs for forestry management at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Coupled with sub-par funding for other services, like law enforcement and healthcare, Desautel says much of that TPA funding is often dispersed to different departments, like education.
“Because of that lack of funding and staffing, we’ve got significant backlogs in work that should have been done over the previous decades,” said Desautel. “That puts our forests at worse health and higher risk or disturbance.”
The lack of funding has created limited staffing and issues around workforce capacity which have impacted tribal forest management. “Neither the BIA nor tribes have adequate funds to pay for staffing,” said the authors of the study. “In multiple visits the team was told that the annual funding from the Bureau has not increased in 20 or more years and is no longer a sufficient amount to pay salaries it was originally designed to.”
For tribes such as the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, timber revenue made up a large fraction of their revenue, at one point providing 80 percent of their yearly budget. “It paid for that tribal council, it paid for a police force, it paid for 80 percent of our staff,” said Desautel “It was hands down the most important resource we had to ensure that we had money to function as a tribal government.” However, he adds that a transition is being made by many tribes to find funding and revenue in other places.
The study’s authors also found that climate change, wildfires, and catastrophic natural events are causing unprecedented destruction at a massive scale, making the need for forest protection and conservation even more dire.
Carbon sequestration is gaining popularity across Indian Country as well, projects such as Fond Du Lac Band Of Lake Superior Chippewa, Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and Lower Brule have been embraced among tribes and have been used in commercial forest lands as sequester options. Indigenous forests, particularly in the Amazon rainforest are helping curb climate change. The world’s forests, which cover about 30% of Earth’s land, absorbed approximately 7.2 billion more tonnes of CO2 per year than they emitted between 2001 and 2021.
However, despite world leaders spending billions of dollars to protect forests, only 17 percent of global funding actually goes to Indigenous communities, like those in the United States. Desautel said government leaders must work with Indigenous peoples to provide better funding for tribal forestry.
“Tribes are vastly underfunded compared to other federal agencies, and we don’t think that should be the case,” said Desautel. “We also know that because of that lack of funding and staffing that we’ve got significant backlogs in work that should have been done over the previous decades. That puts our forests in worse health and higher risk of disturbance.”
I will never forget the first time I killed a tree. It was a warm January morning, and my forehead was sweating under my orange hardhat. I pulled the starter rope of my chainsaw, lifted the roaring silver blade, and sliced through a small Douglas fir. The tree barely made a sound as it fell.
With sawdust and the smell of fresh resin filling the air, I turned toward another fir and paused, wishing I knew a ritual to make its death easier. Within minutes, bits and pieces of seven trees lay strewn around me. I separated limbs from trunks and stacked them, hoping that orderly piles of firewood might alleviate my guilt.
I live in coastal Sonoma County, California, where Douglas firs grow faster than most other native trees, eventually shading oaks from sun and often killing them. The trees near my cabin are valley oaks, the largest of American oaks, found only in California. Each of them can live up to 600 years and will drop as many as 3 million acorns during its lifetime, making valley oaks the most important source of food and shelter for wildlife. I wanted to protect these ecological linchpins, but I also picked up that chainsaw three years ago to repay a childhood debt.
I love all trees, but I’m especially moved by oaks. One of my earliest memories is of hiding in the roots of a particularly majestic one as my parents fought and neighbors called the police. I remember its large, sturdy trunk protecting me from the wind, rain, and fear of violence. That tree still stands in southeastern Latvia, where I spent most of my life until my mother and I moved to San Francisco in 1994.
Eight years ago, I returned to my rural roots and found a home in the coastal range 70 miles north of San Francisco, on the unceded land of the Kashia Pomo people. The few remaining oaks here are surrounded by a sea of Douglas firs stretching to the Pacific Ocean.
For over a century, the American environmental movement has been animated by an intuitive and simple idea: Protecting trees means leaving forests alone. This stance — championed by men like John Muir and based on their belief that any alteration, including thinning or intentional burning, of wilderness harms it — was once key to stopping timber companies from wiping out old-growth forests entirely. And it was an approach that I embraced; for most of my life, I was categorically opposed to felling trees.
But that ethos created an unintended outcome: An expanding body of research shows that the West’s overgrown forests are fueling unnaturally severe wildfires that can cause irreparable ecological damage and massive economic loss. Living in rural areas during this period of catastrophic fires driven in no small part by climate change has forced many people — myself included — to look at tree cutting, and forests, differently.
My perspective began to shift in August 2020 when I attended a class led by Clint McKay, the Indigenous education coordinator at Pepperwood Preserve, a research station in eastern Sonoma County on the traditional homeland of the Wappo people. That summer, the region reached a record 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and two devastating wildfires, which together killed six people and destroyed 1,491 homes, came within a few miles of my home. I joined McKay’s popular Indigenous forest stewardship class expecting to master the use of prescribed burns to defend the forest. Instead, he spent much of our time explaining why people must become more comfortable with cutting down some trees — a necessary intervention in many dense forests before beneficial fires can be reintroduced safely.
The author (center, with hooded jacket), attends a forest stewardship class at Pepperwood Preserve led by assistant preserve manager Devyn Friedfel (in white hat).
Summer Swallow
The Indigenous people of what is now California have always used fire and thinning to promote mosaics of large trees interspersed with shrubs and grasses. They also developed some of the most complex and sophisticated land stewardship practices that increased the density of rich crops of nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruits — on a scale that is “unimaginable today,” writes Enrique Salmon, the author of Iwígara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science. This array of species and surfaces reduces fire intensity and promotes biodiversity. Salmon, who is Rarámuri and leads the American Indian Studies Program at California State University, East Bay, calls these practices “land gardening.”
But beginning in the early 19th century, as colonists settled the region, the Wappo were forced from their ancestral lands, and the intentional fires they and other Indigenous people used to tend forests were outlawed. The U.S. Forest Service was founded in 1905 with fire suppression as a key policy. Thirty years later, it tightened that approach, striving to extinguish all fires by 10 a.m. the next day, fundamentally changing the composition of the forests across the West.
Before European settlers arrived, the land Pepperwood now stewards sustained around 100 trees of varying sizes and species per acre. Today, that same acre supports 1,000 smaller trees that are less fire-resistant and starved for nutrients, water, and sunshine. Most scientists increasingly lament the overcrowding found throughout Western forests and call for ecological thinning — the selective cutting of smaller trees and undergrowth — typically followed by intentional fires to reduce the fuel load and recycle nutrients.
Since 2014, Pepperwood, which is not an Indigenous organization, has worked under the guidance of a Native advisory council, chaired by McKay, who is Wappo, Pomo, and Wintun, to implement such practices. The approach proved itself when the 2017 Tubbs Fire burned 95 percent of the preserve and the 2019 Kincade Fire scorched 60 percent. In the areas that had been thinned and prescriptively burned, few large trees died, and most wildlife soon returned and thrived. Since then, Pepperwood has provided a model of how combining science with local Indigenous research, knowledge, and practices can restore forest health and resiliency while mitigating the growing frequency and severity of fires.
The benefits of thinning coupled with intentional burns are widely accepted in the scientific community for helping to maintain the health and resiliency of Western forests. But a small group of vocal environmentalists and researchers argue that this approach is misguided, that forests must be left largely untouched. These critics argue that thinning is a ploy to increase commercial logging and that severe wildfires are critical for forest health and biodiversity.
Prescribed-fire professionals ignite cultural burns. Ian Nelson
Their opposition comes even as warmer, drier weather contributes to larger, faster, and hotter fires. Fourteen of California’s 20 largest conflagrations on record occurred in the last decade, burning some 5.3 million acres, destroying 11,393 structures, and killing 35 people. Suppression costs continue breaking records, hitting $1.2 billion in 2021 alone. Modern megafires in the West are eight times more severe than those that burned when Indigenous people stewarded the land, often killing entire stands of healthy trees and making regeneration difficult. Researchers fear that over the next two decades, severe wildfires could turn huge swaths of forests into scrubland and destroy critical habitat.
The implications extend nationwide. Between 2001 and 2019, the U.S. ranked third globally in forest cover lost to fires. Wildfires now account for nearly half of the fine-particle pollution in the West. All that smoke can shroud distant places like Boston and New York, and it sends ever more people to hospitals with cardiac issues and asthma attacks. Catastrophic Western fires increasingly contribute to extreme storms and hail as far east as Nebraska.
The Golden State highlights a challenge facing states throughout the West. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, estimates that roughly 15 million forested acres need restoration — mostly thinning and burning — but state and federal government agencies treat at most 325,000 acres each year.
That slow progress follows unprecedented government investment in wildfire resilience. The reasons are complex, but the impediment most frequently mentioned by fire and forest researchers, tribal leaders, park managers, prescribed-fire practitioners, and others is public opinion. While the support for beneficial fires has grown significantly in the past two years, many people still resist them or the smoke they generate. Others staunchly oppose tree cutting, or fear being vilified by those who do. Until that changes, these experts see little chance of making headway on an escalating problem.
“The view of forests as primeval, untouched nature still resonates strongly among the conservation-minded general public,” said Cristina Eisenberg, who is of mixed Rarámuri and Western Apache heritage and works as the associate dean of inclusive excellence and director of tribal initiatives at Oregon State University College of Forestry. “As a result, many people don’t trust Indigenous forest stewardship yet.”
It’s spring at Pepperwood Preserve, and the lush grasslands burst with color: golden poppies, cream buttercups, purple lupins. A group of 28 of us — a preschool teacher, several park managers, two musicians, a few retired couples — are climbing a narrow footpath. The gentle midmorning sun warms us as we follow McKay toward a ridge.
Considerate, composed, and generous with his knowledge of Wappo culture, McKay enjoys making frequent stops to show us plants important to his people and the health of the forest — soap root, Indian potato, and wild strawberries. Two of McKay’s relatives have joined him today, which seems to inspire lighthearted jokes about his family. Raised in a traditional Wappo and Pomo household, McKay spent much of his childhood gathering acorns, redbud, and willow for basket-weaving. The Indigenous people of this area are renowned for the artistry of their baskets, and McKay’s family includes two cultural icons: Works by his late aunts Mabel McKay and Laura Fish Somersal appear in museums and galleries around the world.
Clint McKay, Indigenous education coordinator at Pepperwood Preserve, leads a blessing for a cultural burn alongside his wife and grandson. Ian Nelson
While growing up, every trip to the forest offered McKay a lesson in where each plant loved to live, what it needed to thrive, and how humans could read them to know if the land was out of balance. Plants and animals were considered kin and teachers. Observation of forests taught Wappo people the importance of open space and of viewing trees in terms of their needs and role sustaining humans, animals, and other plants.
For at least 10,000 years before Europeans arrived, the Indigenous peoples of what is now California benefited from and shaped a landscape that teemed with an incredible array of flora and fauna. As authors Otis Parrish and Kent G. Ligthfoot described in California Indians and Their Environment, their stewardship increasedthediversity of plants and wildlife habitats, and it was this abundance that supported one of the most densely populated and culturally diverse areas in the world. Before colonization, about one-third of all Native peoples of what became the United States lived in the Golden State area, where they gardened forests spanning immense landscapes.
Small, frequent, and intentional fires were the main practice they used to promote biodiversity and reduce the severity of fires. In some forests, they also cut Douglas firs to increase the number of oaks and madrones that provided food and shelter for wildlife, cultural resources, and building materials. Weeding, tilling, and irrigating landscapes promoted edible grasses, herbaceous plants, and native vegetables and fruit.
As we reach the ridgeline, McKay has us survey a vast landscape with densely packed spears of blackened Douglas firs. Although the forest was thriving before the fires in 2017 and 2019, we see few signs of regeneration.
McKay then leads us to an oak woodland that had been thinned and burned before the fires. First, a crew with chainsaws cut the firs growing through the canopies of oaks. Brush and smaller trees were removed to prevent a blaze from reaching the crowns of mature trees. Then another team built hundreds of small “burn piles” and set them alight, clearing the slash. Today, lush, green clumps of black and coast live oaks and bay laurel dot verdant meadows. It is hard to see any sign of those past wildfires.
Oaks don’t burn as hot as firs, they cause less destruction of neighboring plants, and they provide crucial protection for animals and birds during conflagrations, says McKay, who researches black oaks and has contributed to studies about them. As we take in distant peaks and silver rock outcroppings dotted with oaks and bay laurels, someone asks, “Was every acre here managed when the Wappo people lived on this land?”
McKay pauses before answering. “We cared for every part of this forest, but living with the land is different than managing it,” he says. “I don’t believe we have the right to control nature. We work with it from a place of responsibility, respect, and reciprocity. This means that every time we do something in the forest, we ask, ‘What is in the best interest of animals, plants, soil, water, air, and humans?’ Humans are in that circle, but we are just one of the spokes in the wheel.”
When humans begin to view themselves as part of the land, he says, they can learn how to become thoughtful participants in nature, share obligations, and express their gratitude by tending landscapes for the benefit of all species.
Sunlight peeks through the trees during a prescribed burn at Pepperwood Preserve.
Ian Nelson
When the U.S. seized control of what is now California in 1850, the federal government signed 18 treaties in which tribes ceded about 90 percent of the land in return for 7.5 million acres of reservations. The U.S. Senate, at the request of state officials, rejected those agreements without informing the tribes, leaving them without land of their own. That same year, California legislators passed a bill that allowed the enslavement of Indigenous children and indentured servitude of adults, and banned intentional fires. The new government then funded militias to remove Native people from their traditional lands and killed thousands of people — something Governor Gavin Newsom called genocide and formally apologized for in 2019.
At the beginning of Euro-American contact, between 200,000 to 300,000 Indigenous people lived in what became the Golden State. By 1870, that number — driven by forced removal, violence, and disease — dropped to 12,000. As immigrants flooded the West Coast, many often described the depopulated forests they found as parks, but as researcher M. Kat Anderson notes in Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, settlers assumed California’s rich biodiversity was born of untouched wilderness, not Indigenous effort. They also believed that they had a God-given right to profit from those resources, which they viewed as limitless.
During the Gold Rush, trees became extremely valuable as construction materials and fuel. By 1900, 40 percent of California’s 31 million acres of old-growth forest had been logged in what historian Hank Johnston called “the greatest orgy of destructive lumbering in the history of the world.”
Into this destruction stepped John Muir.
Raised in a devout Christian family, Muir grew up with a strict father who forbade all distractions from Bible studies. He found refuge in nature, which sparked an interest in geology and botany. But it was while hiking in the Sierra Nevadas that he first saw “sparks of the Divine soul” in its trees and rocks. Muir, who co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892, spent the rest of his life trying to bring city dwellers closer to the presence of the deity he perceived in the mountains and forests. “God never made an ugly landscape,” he wrote in 1897. “All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.”
More than anyone else, Muir galvanized public support for the protection of nature against ecological degradation, but he didn’t believe that Indigenous people and their stewardship had a place in what he saw as pure wilderness. He supported the removal of the Miwok from their homelands in what became Yosemite National Park, and the government pursued a century-long policy of pushing them out of the area. Like other well-known environmentalists of his day, including Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Muir believed that wildlands existed to help “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” suffering from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” He promoted the idea, still resonant today, of nature as a refuge separate from human civilization.
Around the time that Muir was hiking and preaching the gospel of untouched wilderness, burgeoning Midwestern naturalist Aldo Leopold was getting hunting lessons from his father. In 1909, Leopold earned a forestry degree from Yale University, which launched the nation’s first graduate school focusing on the subject. Initially he approached forests as human-centered projects: sustainable tree farms grown for the benefit of people and cattle. Over time, he changed his mind. Co-founding the scientific ecology movement and, in 1935, the Wilderness Society, he became a leading environmentalist — the “most radical” in the estimation of conservation activist and novelist Wendell Berry.
A lifelong outdoorsman and hunter, and later the owner of a small farm, Leopold shared little in common with Muir. While he advocated for the creation of parks and protection of sensitive habitats, he didn’t view preserving the land and using plants and animals sustainably as mutually exclusive. Instead, he believed the land was improvedby ethical and sustainable management.
Leopold did not believe that the environmental movement should prioritize the preservation of celebrity trees, parks with epic views, or charismatic animals. Rather, he argued that humans must promote the health of the land everywhere, including nature in urban centers and degraded farms — and that the requirements of doing so were specific to each place. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” he wrote. “It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Years later, his successor, restoration ecologist William Jordan, argued that treating wildlands as exotic trophies or using nature solely for extraction of resources are essentially different sides of the same coin: Both worldviews promote alienation from nature. And both continue to shape modern environmentalism and forest management tactics, often to the detriment of the very land they are meant to protect.
The Western U.S. is a home to some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, but California’s iconic trees — among the world’s tallest, largest, and oldest — in particular have long inspired passionate devotion. It’s no surprise that the Golden State has been the epicenter of the American environmental movement.
The idea behind Earth Day originated in California in 1969. It helped launch the second wave of the environmental movement, a response to the degradation of nature wrought by the post-war boom. Between 1945 and 1960, timber harvests in the national forests of the Pacific Northwest more than doubled to 5 billion board feet as the U.S. Forest Service allowed the clear-cutting or razing of entire stands of trees, often ancient redwoods, to accommodate rapid suburban growth.
As pictures of barren land proliferated, environmental activists filed lawsuits that effectively stopped large-scale clear-cutting and helped people see forests as sources of biological diversity, not warehouses of lumber. In tandem with these changes, the federal government enacted a variety of historic bills to protect the environment, and California passed the Forest Practice Act of 1973, which to this day is recognized as the most comprehensive forestry regulation in the country.
Thanks to this activism and regulation, today, nearly 33 million acres — about a third of California — remains forested. All that land is home to nearly one-third of the plant and animal species in America, making it one of 34 global biodiversity hotspots in the world. The Golden State remains a national leader in conservation, but climate change and increasingly severe droughts present unprecedented challenges.
“About 80 percent of bishop pines are either dead or dying here,” Matt Greene, a forester who works with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria, state parks, and private landowners in Sonoma County, told me while pointing toward a coastal ridge blanketed in cinnamon-brown canopies. These pines are among the hardiest of trees, but the worst drought in 12 centuries coupled with 100 years of aggressive fire suppression made this forest vulnerable to an unprecedented onslaught of pests and diseases. As we drive east, Greene shows me another forest in which around 90 percent of tanoaks, a culturally important tree for the Kashia Pomo people, have died in the past decade from sudden oak disease.
All this wood, often left standing or where it falls, helps create high-severity fire patches. Such areas, in which a conflagration kills 75 to 100 percent of the trees, are larger and occur more frequently than at any time in recorded history. Some level of fire intensity is essential to maintain biodiversity, but prior to European settlement, such patches typically covered a few acres. Today, they can range from hundreds to thousands of acres, creating an alarming impediment to the ability of conifer trees to regenerate.
When the Wappo and other Indigenous peoples tended the forests, their mosaics of trees, shrubs, and grasslands promoted biodiversity and “pyrodiversity” — fires with greater variation in unburned and low-, moderate, and high-intensity areas. A wildfire traveling through patches of mixed vegetation tends to be less severe, because openings in the landscape create areas with less fuel. In some woodlands, Indigenous people “weeded” fir seedlings and saplings by hand to prevent their encroachment on oaks or grasslands, as the ethnobiologist M. Kat Anderson has documented.
I remember the day I read about this in 2021, because that summer, I began to feel a change of heart. Like many Californians, I’d long believed that planting and protecting trees was the only way to save them, and the sight of anyone with a chainsaw created feelings of intense judgment. But the image of humans meticulously tending these forests long before Europeans arrived, and the reality of entire stands of dead Douglas firs and tan oaks, helped me accept that my categorical beliefs were contributing to this damage; so too was my view of the lush, mostly homogenous blankets of Douglas firs surrounding my home as a “natural” forest.
Through the early and mid-20th century, timber companies and the U.S. Forest Service managed many Western forests like farms growing single crops. Here in coastal Sonoma County, loggers first took out the largest and most fire-resilient redwoods and Douglas firs. As Indigenous people were forced from their lands and fires were aggressively suppressed, many forests gradually converted to dense stands of fir. Less economically valued varieties, such as tanoaks, were often killed. The vast tracts of Douglas firs covering much of coastal Sonoma are largely the result of these industrial methods and fire suppression. While the species vary with different ecosystems, such tactics were the norm across the West.
When fire and forest researchers talk about forest restoration, or ecological tree thinning, they’re typically describing the need to embrace selective cutting coupled with prescriptive burning that results in larger, healthier trees and forests more resistant to drought and climate change. A largebody of research from at least two decades, along with evidence from recent megafires, shows that this approach, implemented thoughtfully, reduces the severity of fires and the pollution they produce, and protects mature trees.
After more than a century of mismanagement, and given the challenges of climate change, forest restoration for wildfire resilience presents an unprecedented and complex task that requires diverse tools and tactics tailored to each site. A growing body of research shows that the most biodiverse and resilient forests are often located on protected Indigenous lands where people make a sustainable living from it. Providing funding, legal support, and more rights to Indigenous communities to manage their land is key to climate conservation goals. McKay believes that collaborative stewardship through Native advisory councils, created with the right intentions, can serve as a meaningful step in that process.
Prescribed-burn professionals gather at the site of an intentional burn. Ian Nelson
In recent years, other nonprofits, public agencies, and private individuals have been finding ways to restore Indigenous ownership in other innovative ways: In 2016, a private family in coastal Sonoma — with the support of the county and philanthropic dollars — worked with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria to return 688 acres to the tribe.
Meanwhile, many studies that examine the success of specific wildfire-resilience practices in forests managed by diverse public and private agencies show that the most efficient and ecologically beneficial approaches typically involve at least some thinning or brush removal, followed by prescriptive or Indigenous burning. Effectively managed wildfires, mostly in remote forests, also can reduce the size and severity of future conflagrations while promoting biodiversity.
At this time, prescribed fires face many barriers in the West, including obtaining the necessary permits, the fear of liability and public backlash should something go wrong, too few people to do the job, and the small window of optimal weather conditions for safe burning. Given these obstacles, many public and private land managers, especially near urban areas, opt to thin without burning, typically followed by chipping or mastication (reducing leftover slash into small bits). While somestudies show that such methods alone can increase wildfire resiliency, most research and field experience indicates that thinning coupled with beneficial fires is the most effective. But thinning without fire rarely brings additional ecological benefits, such as regeneration of fire-resilient trees and plants and promoting soil health.
While commercial logging of large trees alone does not lead to wildfire resiliency, in some forests ecological thinning can include that as one way of reducing density, promoting the diversity of species, or creating fuel breaks that allow for safe prescribed or cultural burns, said Scott Stephens. He is the principal investigator of the UC-Berkeley Blodgett Forest Research Station, which led a two-decade study evaluating various forest treatments. Stephens told me that fire, wildlife, and soil ecologists at Blodgett sometimes recommended removing large white fir trees. This, researchers found, resulted in faster growth, vigor, and diversity among the remaining trees. It also improved pyrodiversity and resilience against bark beetles. The revenue from saleable logs helped offset restoration costs.
But some environmentalists consider thinning a ploy to commercially log forests. One of the most vocal opponents is Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project. Hanson, who holds a doctorate in forest ecology from University of California, Davis, and his wife, Rachel Fazio, an attorney and co-lead of the John Muir Project, have filed dozens of suits against the U.S. Forest Service to block various plans to remove trees deemed a fire hazard.
In his research and articles, Hanson and his colleagues argue that the density of historical forests varied, and that high-severity wildfires do not harm forests but rather promote biodiversity and should be allowed to burn with minimal intervention. He fiercely opposes any tree removal beyond 100 feet of buildings and evacuation routes. Hanson argues that thinning removes a natural wind barrier to fire, and can increase its speed and intensity. He concedes that land managers should occasionally use prescribed or cultural fires, but insists the preferred approach is to manage wildfires. “Fire alone is what we need,” Hanson told me. “Thinning is not needed. … And you don’t have to remove any trees before you do a prescribed fire.”
Most fire ecologists and practitioners disagree and believe removing small trees and brush, especially near residential areas, is essential to protect mature trees or reduce the risk of fires jumping over control lines. In recent years, in a rare effort within the scientific community, dozens of them came together to publish a series of rebuttals to efforts by Hanson and others who they believe are advancing “agenda-driven science.”
Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington who has taken a leading role in the campaign, told me the benefits of ecological thinning coupled with prescribed burning are settled among fire ecologists, but the boisterous claims of a small group often receive equal weight in the media and courts. She compares them to the academically credentialed climate deniers who once got equal attention in the news despite volumes of data about the effects of global warming.
Hanson calls such criticisms “character assassination,” and this year published a study arguing that the data Prichard and her colleagues use contain a “broad pattern of scientific misrepresentation and omissions.” Hanson counters that wildfire resilience is best achieved by a focus on “hardening” homes with fire-resistant roofing and other tactics. He also calls for tree pruning and removal of brush and saplings near buildings and evacuation routes.
Research supports these practices and shows that even small upgrades can have a big impact on wildfire resilience. But protecting property and leaving forests alone overlooks the interdependence of wildlands and people. Forests store carbon. Trees capture rainfall and contribute to rivers that, here in California, deliver water to 25 million residents and businesses, including the farms that grow about one-third of the country’s vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit and nuts. When large patches of severe wildfires cut through dense, drought-parched forests, the ground starts to repel water. The runoff can pollute watersheds with ash and harm water-treatment facilities. Damaged forests also threaten important plants and wildlife and the Indigenous communities that depend upon them to sustain their culture.
Elected officials understand what’s at stake. In 2022 and 2023, the federal government sent $3.3 billion for forest management treatments in 10 Western states with 21 “high-priority landscapes” — forests and rangelands near communities, powerlines, highways, water supplies, or endangered species. Despite these unprecedented investments, progress has been slow across the West: Since 2012, only about 1.8 million acres of the estimated 50 million acres in need have been treated.
One factor is a chronic shortage of forest workers. Until recently, funding for restoration and wildfire resiliency was extremely limited. Permitting for thinning and burning poses big challenges, as does fear of litigation. But the impediment that forest and fire ecologists and others in the field mention most frequently remains public opposition to prescribed fires and, particularly in California, the removal of trees.
“There are many people who don’t like seeing vegetation removed, especially green vegetation,” John Melvin, the assistant deputy director of resource protection and improvement programs at Cal Fire, told me. “The 2020 wildfires began to change these attitudes, but we still have a lot of public education work to do.”
Surveys of public perceptions of resilience efforts are generally small, but overall, most people support mitigation efforts — yet opposition to them can appear more widespread than it actually is. A 2019 study in Colorado found that although just 27 percent of respondents opposed the thinning and burning proposed in their area, highly organized resistance to the effort received outsized attention during public hearings and was reflected by the media as being a broad sentiment.
Still, there are valid reasons to explain why people might oppose prescribed burning and strategic thinning. Studies show less than 2 percent of intentional fires jump their borders, the vast majority of those that do are contained, and few of them cause damage to homes and property — yet those that do draw intense news coverage. Deforestation is a key contributor to climate change and calls to plant more trees, regardless of the needs of a given ecosystem, are often (and inaccurately) portrayed as the best solution to the crisis. A legacy of resource exploitation by the U.S. Forest Service and timber companies doesn’t help.
Despite these deep and long-standing divisions, the fights over forest restoration are going through a radical shift, Cristina Eisenberg of Oregon State University’s College of Forestry told me. Since 2017, Eisenberg, who also directs the university’s Traditional Knowledge Lab, has been working with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to help public agencies strengthen partnerships with tribal nations on forest restoration projects. “The momentum is tremendous,” she said. “Finally, there are Indigenous people in the positions of power to help make sure this work is done right. We are at the very beginning of this change, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
It’s a chilly morning at Pepperwood, and I start my day pulling non-native bull thistles. The thick, green stems glisten atop jet-black patches of soil. These areas, called burn scars, indicate where past volunteers burned the wood left behind by tree thinning.
The oak woodland where I’ve joined about 30 volunteers is one of many restoration sites Pepperwood has been thinning and burning since 2014. We are removing invasive weeds that without human intervention often displace indigenous plants.
When colonial settlers outlawed intentional fires, they removed an important process native grasses need to thrive, Devyn Friedfel, Pepperwood’s assistant preserve manager, tells us. Friedfel is warm and personable, and his intimate knowledge and passion for this land is infectious. The grasses settlers brought from Europe produce more seeds, which allow them to spread rapidly. These transplants are more fire-prone and poorly adapted to regrowth after a conflagration. Purple needlegrass, one of the native species my group is planting, can live over 200 years, and its roots can grow as deep as the oaks are tall. These long tendrils support oak seedlings, especially during droughts, by maintaining moisture in the soil and promoting the transfer of carbon and other nutrients to trees.
Environmental educator Summer Swallow plants native bunch grasses in a burn scar left from an intentional burn at Pepperwood Preserve.
Stephanie Beard
We break up into groups of three. After removing the thistles, I dig slender holes in the soil, while the two women in my group — a nurse and a copyright specialist — gently remove the grass seedlings from their nests and place the footlong shoots in the soil.
This restoration project, like most stewardship decisions at Pepperwood, was designed with the guidance of a Native advisory council. Five years ago, Michael Gillogly, who manages Pepperwood Preserve, and Clint McKay walked through this forest to discuss the council’s priorities, research, and the traditional Indigenous practices that could be incorporated here. Gillogly, who has been caring for and living on this preserve since 1994, also consulted a staff ecologist, wildlife specialist, and a forester before writing a detailed prescription for this area.
In 2019, a crew with chainsaws came through to prune large trees, take out every Douglas fir less than 10 inches in diameter and some bigger ones crowding out oaks, and remove brush growing alongside large trees. Volunteers then built and burned piles, learning how to work with beneficial fires and return nutrients to the earth.
Community engagement and education is an important aspect of the work. Nearly every week, Pepperwood guides lead hikes or workshops with landowners, urbanites, park managers, environmentalists, and young people. “You don’t change people’s opinions by preaching or hitting them over the head on social media,” McKay, whose workshops almost always sell out, told me. “I believe in small steps: Come and visit. See how we thin and prune to prepare for fire. See how we work after the fire.”
McKay brings Indigenous perspectives to nearly every aspect of programming: research, thinning and native plant uses, public education, and making Pepperwood more welcoming to Native people. Last year, for the first time in over 100 years, the council returned cultural burns to Pepperwood. Currently, the focus is on repopulating the land with more of the edible and medicinal native plants essential to sustaining Wappo culture.
Today, most researchers agree that addressing a catastrophic wildfire problem requires a new path — one rooted in both modern science and Indigenous knowledge and practices. Pepperwood provides a promising model of what this work looks like when organizations hire and actively engage Indigenous communities in their work. The nonprofit serves as a research hub where scientists, land stewards, and Indigenous members collaborate; it’s also a public education venue and a place that works actively to restore the connection between the land and its original inhabitants.
As a result of this approach, Pepperwood receives relatively little pushback against its thinning and burning. It also offers an unusually high number of hands-on workshops focused on forest stewardship and Indigenous culture in addition to the traditional approach of hikes focused on appreciation of animals and plants.
“How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” Robin Wall Kimmerer asks in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer is also a professor of environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York, where she has found that most students who grew up confronting the loss of biodiversity struggle to find examples of positive interactions between nature and humans.
The author with a chainsaw near her home in rural California. Mike Stern
The author leaning against the base of an oak tree.Mike Stern
Weeding, planting, pruning, and using beneficial fires — in preserves like Pepperwood, our favorite parks, urban community gardens, and suburban yards — can help us develop a positive relationship with nature, Kimmerer writes. Tending forests and grasslands can help transform us from consumers of nature to stewards who express gratitude for the clean air, water, biodiversity, and beauty it offers in exchange.
Later that afternoon, the three of us plant our last seedling. We stand up to take in the gradual change happening around us. It’s a small project, but the effect on our psyche is immeasurable. For a few hours, we contributed to building a healthier, more resilient forest. As our workday comes to an end, I settle in the roots of a black oak. Its trunk is warm and stable, and, like every oak since that distant tree in Latvia that has ever provided me with shade and comfort, it renews my sense of endurance and possibility. As people gather their tools and begin to leave, I linger, asking for this oak’s continued guidance on how to pay closer attention to its needs and the well-being of the entire forest community.
This week, South American leaders descended on Belém, Brazil, to try to save the Amazon rainforest. It was the first meeting of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization in 14 years. The summit, however, has produced mixed results.
In a declaration released yesterday, the eight nations that are home to the rainforest agreed to take “urgent action to avoid the point of no return in the Amazon,” combat organized crime, and bolster regional cooperation. But the accord did not resolve tensions over some of the thorniest issues affecting the region, such as a unified approach to deforestation and whether to limit fossil fuel extraction in the delicate ecosystem.
“We would have been super happy to have specific goals and mechanisms,” Vanessa Pérez-Cirera, the director of the global economic center at the World Resources Institute, told Grist. “This is a good first step.”
The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covering some 2.5 million square miles — an area roughly twice the size of India. It’s a critical carbon sink for planet-warming emissions and home to a fifth of the world’s fresh water. But deforestation and human-caused climate change are degrading the Amazon and its ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Experts have long called for immediate and drastic actions to protect the rainforest and the hundreds of Indigenous groups that inhabit and care for it.
“We’re going to be crossing tipping points for the global climate. They are points of no return, [and] the Amazon is absolutely central to that,” said Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia. But what was discussed at the conference, he added, were “the easy things.”
The nearly 10,000-word summit declaration recognized the scientific imperative to avoid tipping points in the Amazon and pledged to renew regional cooperation to avoid that end. It also acknowledged the central role that Indigenous communities play in conservation efforts and called on developed countries to fulfill their promises of financial support.
“The forest unites us. It is time to look at the heart of our continent and consolidate, once and for all, our Amazon identity,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “In an international system that was not built by us, we were historically relegated to a subordinate place as a supplier of raw materials. A just ecological transition will allow us to change this.”
The majority of the Amazon is in Brazil, and Lula has made its protection a hallmark of his presidency. Deforestation has already dropped since he took office this year, which is a major shift from the environmental devastation that proliferated under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. This summit was another attempt to reverse that trend.
“It’s completely a break from the Bolsanaro era. It’s important that that happened,” said Fearnside. Still, he was disappointed that the group didn’t adopt a ban on oil development in the Amazon, a step that leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro championed but other countries were less reluctant to embrace.
“Brazil has a big plan for oil and gas in the western part of the state of Amazonas,” Fearnside said, which would be “disastrous.”
Leaders also failed to find common ground on deforestation, which has already claimed nearly a fifth of Amazon and is on track to degrade even more of the rainforest. “The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries are unable to put in a statement — in large letters — that deforestation needs to be zero,” Marcio Astrini of environmental lobby group Climate Observatory told Reuters.
Answers to those difficult questions are being pushed to another time, perhaps even the next gathering of the treaty organization — which experts hope won’t take another 14 years. Pérez-Cirera is optimistic and sees this summit as a catalyst for future action.
“It is a historic moment for the Amazon,” she said. “And more needs to come.”
The conference concludes today, as leaders from the Amazon nations meet with representatives of other countries with large rainforests, such as Indonesia, Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The aim is to plan for COP28, the global United Nations climate summit in November.
“We want to prepare for the first time a joint document of all forest countries to arrive united at COP28,” Lula said last week.
President Biden on Tuesday designated a new national monument on lands near the Grand Canyon, shielding the area from future uranium mining and protecting nearly a million acres of land sacred to more than a dozen tribes.
Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, which translates to “where tribes roam” and “our footprints” in the Havasupai and Hopi languages, is the fifth national monument President Biden has designated during his time in office, and contains diverse ecology including federally protected species like California condors and a dozen plants found nowhere else on Earth. The region is also rich in uranium, where it has been mined since the 1950s when it was used primarily for developing nuclear weapons. Today, uranium from the Grand Canyon is used for nuclear energy plants and power reactors in submarines and naval ships.
“Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have traveled to the Grand Canyon, awed by its majesty. But few are aware of its full history,” said Biden. “From time immemorial, over a dozen tribal nations have lived, gathered, and prayed on these lands. But some one hundred years ago they were forced out. That very act of preserving the Grand Canyon as a national park was used to deny Indigenous people full access to their homelands.”
Indigenous nations and environmental groups have fought to protect the area from uranium mining since at least 1985, citing potential risks to sources of drinking water, including ongoing contamination of the sole source of water for the Havasupai reservation — one of the most isolated communities in the United States and reachable by an eight-mile hike from the rim of the Grand Canyon.
On Monday, Republican leaders in Arizona voted to formally oppose the monument’s designation, calling the move a federal land grab. More than 80 percent of land in Arizona is federally controlled, including 21 Indian reservations, and both state and local officials fear Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni will decrease the amount of land available for sale to private individuals.
“With global climate the way it is and with global politics the way it is, is it really the smartest thing to do — from a national security standpoint and an energy standpoint — to forever lock off the richest uranium mining deposits in the whole country,” said Travis Lingenfelter, Mohave County District 1 supervisor. The new monument will overlap with about 445,000 acres in Mohave County.
Representative Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, joined Lingenfelter in his opposition of the designation.
“This administration’s lack of reason knows no bounds, and their actions suggest that President Biden and his radical advisers won’t be satisfied until the entire federal estate is off limits and America is mired in dependency on our adversaries for our natural resources,” Westerman said in a statement, adding that Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni would leave the U.S. reliant on countries like Russia for uranium.
“I have a thousand-plus acres of private land included in this,” said Chris Heaton, a local landowner with claims to property that predate Arizona statehood in 1912. “This is a problem. They are coming after our private land and private water rights.”
According to the White House, the new monument will only include federal lands, and not state or private lands, and will not affect property rights.
In 2012, a 20-year ban on uranium mining was enacted by then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. However, the new designation will not have an impact on mining claims that predate that ban, and two operations within the monument’s boundaries, including one approved by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022, will continue to operate.
The designation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukven National Monument comes during President Biden’s three-state tour to discuss his environmental agenda and successes, which include $370 billion in tax incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources that he signed into law last year.
A dusting of snow clings to the highway as Barbara Schuhmann drives around a hairpin curve near her home in Fairbanks, Alaska. She slows for a patch of ice, explaining that the steep turn is just one of many concerns she has about a looming project that could radically transform Alaskan mining as the state begins looking beyond oil.
Roughly 250 miles to the southeast, plans are developing to dig an open-pit gold mine called Manh Choh, or “big lake” in Upper Tanana Athabascan. Kinross Alaska, the majority owner and operator, will haul the rock on the Alaska Highway and other roads to a processing mill just north of Fairbanks. The route follows the Tanana River across Alaska’s interior, where spruce-covered foothills knuckle below the stark peaks of the Alaska Range. Snowmelt feeds the creeks that form a mosaic of muskeg in nearby Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge, a migration corridor for hundreds of bird species.
Trumpeter swans land on the Chena River near a bridge on Peger Road. Eighty-ton trucks will soon be driving across it as part of Kinross’ 250-mile ore haul. Grist / Sean McDermott
When Schuhmann first heard about the project about a year ago, she was surprised. Kinross’ contracted trucking company, Black Gold Transport, will use customized 95-foot tractor-trailers with 16 axles, which will weigh 80 tons apiece when fully loaded. These trucks will soon rumble by homes and businesses every 12 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with trial runs starting this summer. “It sounded pretty crazy at the time, moving a mountain from one area of Alaska to another,” she recalls. “It just seemed unbelievable that this would be allowed without special permitting and safety considerations.”
She doesn’t often bring it up, but Schuhmann knows just how dangerous the road can be. Her husband lost his mother, brother, and sister on that highway when a truck crossed the centerline, hitting their car head-on. “So, accidents happen,” she says.
Barbara Schuhmann’s face reflects out of the side-view mirror while parked on a stretch of road on the haul route just north of Fairbanks. Grist / Sean McDermott
The risks go beyond traffic. The mine and its tailings at Fort Knox, the state’s largest gold mine, have the potential to pollute the air and waterways. But unlike most other mines in the state, there has been no environmental impact statement prepared for Manh Choh. Residents in communities along the route worry about the increased violence and housing shortages that often follow the arrival of such projects. Others question the state’s ability to impartially oversee the permitting process when it has invested $10 million from a state fund in the mine.
Kinross, which declined repeated interview requests and told others not to speak to Grist, says the project will create more than 400 jobs. Supporters point to the economic boost it could bring to the Native Village of Tetlin, which is leasing the land to Kinross, as well as to nearby Tok, home to 1,200 people.
But Manh Choh is just the beginning of a surge in mining projects in the state. While gold is not a critical mineral, Alaska holds large reserves of cobalt, copper, and rare earth minerals essential to the green transition. If Kinross is allowed to use public roads, it will set a precedent for other companies eager to expand — one in which significant health and safety risks are underwritten by taxpayers. Other looming projects, like the planned Ambler Road in the Brooks Range, are already quietly preparing to use the state’s highways.
Grist
Alaska is at a pivotal moment: Oil and gas production, historically the most important driver of the state’s economy, has been declining for decades. Mining, meanwhile, saw a 23 percent increase in production value in 2021 alone. As the Biden administration pushes to shore up domestic supply chains, Alaskans like Schuhmann aren’t the only ones questioning the race for minerals. She worries the state hasn’t taken the time to make sure that Alaskans can benefit from this kind of development — or at the very least, won’t be harmed by it. “They can’t answer the questions,” Schuhmann said. “And so we just keep trying to ask them.”
Lynn Cornberg adjusts her skis, tucking her chin into the wind. She sets off on a historic trail, just north of where gold was first discovered in Fairbanks in 1902, earning it the nickname “The Golden Heart City.” Spindrifts kick up behind her, crystalline in the below-zero chill. The snow darkens with dust as she approaches Fort Knox, where the original gold deposit is running out. After investing so much in the mine’s mill, however, Kinross is eager to keep it running by processing ore from other sites.
Fairbanks resident Lynn Cornberg stands at an overlook near the Fort Knox mine, Alaska’s largest gold mine. She says she is concerned about the impact of the ore haul and the introduction of potentially acid-generating tailings to Fort Knox mine. Grist / Sean McDermott
The rumble of huge machinery booms through the forest as the wind whips downhill toward Cornberg’s house. She worries about the risks the rock arriving from Tetlin might pose for her family.In addition to carcinogenic heavy metals, Manh Choh’s ore has the potential to generate acid. Such toxic effluent can continue for millenia. “It goes on generating acid forever,” Schuhmann says. “When you expose this sulfide to the air, it oxidizes. With a little precipitation, it turns to sulfuric acid that kills fish.” This pollution could be a problem not only at the pits in Tetlin, but from dust raised while crushing or transferring the ore to trucks; from whatever blows out of the big rigs on the road; or from processing, stockpiling, or storing the tailings at Fort Knox.
Stanley Taylor, the environmental coordinator for the Native Village of Tetlin, says some village residents were concerned about the risks, and the tribe intentionally outsourced some of the potential hazards to Fort Knox. As the Tetlin Tribal Council wrote in a letter to the Army Corps, “This plan only works because it uses existing infrastructure, the public highway system, and the mill at Fort Knox.” (Tetlin’s chief, Michael Sam, and its tribal council declined repeated interview requests.)
Given these concerns, the project’s environmental review has recently come under scrutiny. Permitting for Manh Choh falls to different state and federal agencies, and there has been no comprehensive look at the project’s full scope. When Fort Knox was first developed in 1993, Kinross conducted an assessment that did not require independent expert review, like an environmental impact statement would have. The permit issued then provided an umbrella for several other mines developed since, with few public details about their operations. Due to Fort Knox’s geochemistry, no one anticipated acid generation. Now, with Manh Choh, “I don’t think any of us [at the Corps’ Alaska district] considered that as a potential impact, that they’re bringing a different type of ore to the mill,” says Gregory Mazer, the project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Corps’ own review focused on a 5-acre area of wetlands around Manh Choh that did not include the trucking corridor and the tailings at Fort Knox. Both the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service criticized that decision. The EPA pointedly noted that many other hard-rock mine projects in Alaska have required an environmental impact statement, which “established a precedent which we recommend be considered.” It also suggested that “this project would greatly benefit from a more thorough review.” Both agencies warned about mercury, arsenic, and other heavy metals contaminating waterways, and about the mine’s effect on wildlife, including salmon that spawn in nearby waterways like the Tanana and Tok rivers.
An aerial view of the existing Fort Knox mine, where ore from Manh Choh will be processed. Grist / Sean McDermott
This strategy is known as segmentation, or “dividing up projects so that each little facet of it would have no significant impacts,” says Robin Craig, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. “Normally tailings are part of a mining permit,” she says dryly, and “historically in Alaska, tailings affect water quality.” A recent analysis of court cases by environmental law professors at Lewis & Clark Law School argues that the Corps’ pattern of narrowly reviewing projects is inconsistent with the agency’s own National Environmental Policy Act regulations. “Alaska is kind of infamous for letting mining go, regardless of the environmental impacts,” Craig says.
When Schuhmann filed a federal record request in the winter of 2022, for example, she learned that even the agencies involved in the mine’s permitting didn’t have all the information needed to assess its impacts. Kinross had given the Army Corps of Engineers a geochemical report detailing Manh Choh’s potential for acid generation — but experts at U.S. Fish and Wildlife didn’t know about it until Schuhmann gave it to them.
The state Department of Natural Resources routinely publishes links to permits, leases, and environmental audits for other mines, but Schuhmann was the first to share the documents publicly. “I have never considered myself an environmentalist. I mean, my whole working life, I was trying to help people develop their property,” she says. But now, “I am flabbergasted.”
A “No Trespassing” sign stands outside of the Fort Knox mine along a public ski and snow machine trail. Grist / Sean McDermott
Despite these concerns, Kinross is only required to monitor for acid generation for five years after mining is completed, after which the state will review its condition — a period Craig says is far too short for a problem that can last thousands of years. (The Department of Environmental Conservation says it is limited by state regulations to five-year permits.) Unlike many of the Western states now struggling to deal with acid leaching, she adds, “Alaska is actually in a position to prevent future, lingering, avoidable harm.”
But the state, which has invested $10 million in Manh Choh via Kinross’ junior partner Contango ORE, has been very supportive of the project. One of the trustees involved in managing that state fund, Jason Brune, also leads the agency responsible for issuing Kinross’ waste management permit. (In March, Alaska’s Permanent Fund Corporation board of trustees banned in-state investments to avoid future conflicts of interest.) “Regulatory agencies follow the politics of the administration they work for,” says Dave Chambers, founder of the Center for Science in Public Participation, a nonprofit that provides technical assistance on mining.
And in Alaska, the current administration is decidedly pro-development, a point Governor Mike Dunleavy — who fired an employee for refusing to sign a loyalty pledge — made in an interview with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner last winter. “There’s too much ‘no.’ No trucks on the road from Tetlin to Fort Knox, no West Susitna Access Road, no Ambler Road,” the governor said. “I need Alaska to say yes to everything.”
A truck is pulled to the side of the highway for repairs along the road between Fairbanks and Tok that will be used for the ore haul. Grist / Sean McDermott
Every year as the ice breaks up across Alaska’s vast Interior, caribou travel from their winter range near Tetlin to their calving grounds. Their tracks crisscross the crust along the highway into Tok, where another kind of migration is under way: White trucks flying orange safety flags zoom into the gas station and pull into Fast Eddy’s, the sole restaurant. Though Kinross isn’t yet processing ore, crews are building a gravel road to the site, where the company has started working. It recently bought a shuttered motel to use as a “man camp,” or employee housing. The wood on its tall, locking fence — built in response to locals’ concerns about the influx of workers — is still raw.
Down the road, Bronk Jorgensen’s log house offers a view of the hill, bristling with dark trees, that will soon be dug out. He grew up in Tok, flying over old claims in the back seat of his dad’s bush plane. It’s always been a “passing-through town,” Jorgensen explains. Tok began as a camp for the construction of the highway during World War II, and eked out a few more jobs when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was constructed. Now, it’s a stop along what remains the only road to the Lower 48. “This will be the first real industry this community and area has seen on any scale,” he says.
Bronk Jorgensen poses for a photo at home with his young son. Kinross hired Jorgensen’s company to help construct the road connecting the Manh Choh site to the highway. Grist / Sean McDermott
Jorgensen concedes the increased traffic may be inconvenient, but says gold is a commodity, like any other already carried on the road. “If we as a society want to keep living the lifestyle that we live — between electric cars, iPhones, TVs — you know, we need a lot of minerals,” he says. He works a family placer mine, a small-scale operation that extracts gold from a stream bed, and argues that Alaska has far better safety records and environmental standards than other parts of the world. “If we’re going to be consuming these items, we should be responsible and producing them.”
Given his experience moving equipment into remote locations, Kinross hired Jorgensen’s company to help construct the road connecting the mine site to the highway. “Kinross has been very generous in making sure local contractors have had an opportunity to bid part of the work,” Jorgensen says. “The trickle-down economics of this project is going to be huge.”
Communities around Tok are hopeful Kinross will offer coveted year-round employment. The Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development recently awarded a $300,000 grant to train residents for potential jobs at Manh Choh. But Larry Mark, one of several hundred Tetlin tribal members, says, “What I’d really like to see is the tribal members have the first priority on jobs. We see all the non-tribal members getting hired left and right.”
Tetlin tribal member Larry Mark, left, sits next to his wife, Shirley. Mark wants the economic benefits from the mine to reach tribal members. Grist / Sean McDermott
Mark also questions the royalties Tetlin will receive from the project, which are set at a range of 3 to 5 percent. Elsewhere in Alaska, similar endeavors often offer much higher rates, as well as partial ownership. Red Dog, for example, is a large zinc mine leased from the Iñupiat in northwest Alaska, who now receive 35 percent of its net profits. Over half of its employees are tribal members.
Tetlin is in a unique position: Unlike other tribes, it retained its subsurface rights under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and negotiated the lease of its land to Kinross directly. “You have small communities with limited resources, responding to large companies with unlimited resources. And it’s very much an imbalance,” says Bob Brean, the former president of the native corporation of Tanacross, a tribe to the west of Tetlin. He spent decades negotiating surface deals for Tanacross with multinational companies like ExxonMobil. He learned the hard way to always demand a profit-sharing formula. “Alaska is still subjected to colonization techniques by big industry,” he says.
Though some tribal members remain enthusiastic about what Manh Choh money could bring to Tetlin — where most of the 130 village residents lack running water or sewer systems — Mark doesn’t feel the village is getting its fair share. “You got to benefit the tribe,” he says, frowning, “and it’s got to be in writing.”
Today, Mark lives in Tok with his adult sons, who come and go as he watches a basketball game, wearing moccasins with a hand-beaded Pittsburgh Steelers logo. “I grew up without electricity,” he says. He learned Upper Tanana Athabascan as his first language, traveled by dog team, and spent his winters trapping. “We’re the richest people there is. We have all the land, we have all the animals — we have everything.”
But Kinross’ bulldozers ran over his traps, costing his family thousands of dollars. Tribal members hunting a moose were recently thwarted by Kinross employees when the animal crossed the company road. Mark worries the ongoing construction will scare away the game his family relies on, especially if Manh Choh is just the beginning of renewed mining in the region. As the price of gold hovers around all-time highs, many old claims, like those scattered through the hill country north of Manh Choh, have become profitable again. “You ever see a miner stop looking for gold?” Mark asks. “They’re going to move to the next hill.”
Gold-themed shops and restaurants dot a street in Fairbanks, Alaska. Grist / Sean McDermott
Forty-five minutes west of Tok, over rippling frost heaves and past the skeletons of wildfire, sits the Native Village of Dot Lake. A northern harrier hovers near the small cluster of buildings, its cinnamon belly flashing as it circles, listening for prey. Tracy Charles-Smith, the president of Dot Lake’s tribal council, says Kinross recently asked to speak with the tribe about employment opportunities. She said no. “We don’t have people that want to work in their mine,” she says. “They apparently buy pizza for everybody and whatever. But we can buy our own pizza.”
Traffic blows by Dot Lake’s school at 65 mph. “My tribe is very concerned with cultural and social impacts [of Manh Choh], especially when it has to do with murdered and missing Indigenous women,” Charles-Smith says, citing research that suggests man camps can lead to greater incidences of sexual violence. “We’re pretty much expecting there to be an increase in victims,” she says. The closest hospital that can handle rape cases is 155 miles away in Fairbanks; Charles-Smith says it can take tribal members hours to get there. As a result, Dot Lake is in the process of creating a sexual assault response team.
Alaska already has an ongoing critical shortage of law enforcement in rural areas, and getting a timely response can be difficult. “The increase in the population alone is going to mean that there’s less opportunity for police to respond,” she says.
Other safety questions loom over the route as it winds from Tok to the urban centers of North Pole and Fairbanks. It’s primarily a two-lane ribbon of pavement with few passing lanes, and there are no alternative roads — for many, it’s a lifeline to a hospital, airport, or grocery store. The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities has made plans to fast-track the replacement of five bridges along the way, including two that the agency says are specifically to accommodate the ore haul. The Federal Highway Administration recently took issue with Alaska’s ratings standards for bridges. Alaska is the only state with no maximum load limit, which could result in trucks carrying more than the federal agency allows, possibly damaging structures over time. (The state has agreed to a plan with the federal agency to come into compliance.)
The Alaska Highway passes over the Johnson River Bridge between Delta Junction and Tok. Grist / Sean McDermott
The DOT brushed away Barbara Schuhmann’s questions about these bridges last fall. During that same timeframe, the agency’s staff was working on a weekly basis with Kinross to provide engineering support for the project. “It’s kind of disconcerting that they’ve worked so hand-in-glove with Kinross, and yet they’re not forthcoming with the public,” Schuhmann says.
Three of these bridges were built during the 1940s. Their replacements aren’t likely to be completed until 2027. One of them is so narrow that the local custom is to wait for oncoming traffic to clear before starting across. The Department of Transportation places the price of the infrastructure upgrades at more than $317 million. None will be completed before the first trucks roll later this summer, or even before the mine reaches full production next year.
Retired DOT engineer Bob McHattie, who oversaw this stretch of highway during his decades at the agency, says that based upon his experience with haul roads, ongoing maintenance will add to those expenses — a point the agency concedes. Kinross will increase traffic on the road by as much as 20 percent. “Those big trucks will be the highway traffic between the mine and Fairbanks,” McHattie says. “Those will be the vehicles that are wearing out the road.” In states with less permissive load formulas, he believes, based on his experience, that “it probably wouldn’t be legal.”
Retired Department of Transportation engineer Bob McHattie examines a 50-peso coin, which he says contains an ounce of gold. Grist / Sean McDermott
The DOT says it doesn’t know how much this will ultimately cost Alaska, which has a budget crisis. To help pay for safety measures like additional plowing, the DOT could levy a toll on trucks using regulations already on the books. Kinross, meanwhile, has suggested the state increase its fuel tax on the general public.
Feeling like state officials were not taking these concerns seriously, Schuhmann helped form a group called Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways. Its members make unusual allies, with viewpoints spanning the political spectrum. Most, Schuhmann hastens to add, support mining. “We’re not out to get anybody, we’re not anti-mining,” she says. “We just want some common sense and safety to be injected into the whole situation.” Among balloons left over from her granddaughter’s birthday party, piles of paperwork have taken over a corner of her kitchen table. “From the beginning, we’ve asked, ‘What’s your transportation plan? What’s your safety plan?’ And we’ve never seen it in writing,” she says.
Barbara Schuhmann stands near the planned haul route for ore mined at Manh Choh. Grist / Sean McDermott
After much pleading from Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways, the DOT hired consulting firm Kinney Engineering to study the potential impacts to roadway infrastructure and safety. The assessment likely won’t be completed before the ore haul begins, but preliminary findings suggest the added traffic will increase crashes. In addition to road conditions, Kinney will also examine factors like the rise in air pollution. Coal-fired power plants, wood-burning stoves, and frequent air inversions have left the Fairbanks North Star Borough with some of the worst air in the country. The Environmental Protection Agency recently warned the borough it may lose $37 million in federal highway funding each year if it doesn’t come into compliance — just as the haul trucks and their emissions hit the road. “At this point, we really do not have the problem defined well enough to come up with solutions,” says Randy Kinney, founder of Kinney Engineering.
These concerns prompted the North Pole City Council and the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly to pass nonbinding resolutions opposing the ore haul last winter, although the borough’s language was softened after a new assembly member received a torrent of angry calls from fellow Republicans. A Kinross representative attended the borough meeting as it was being discussed and reminded everyone that the company is the community’s largest taxpayer. “I asked, ‘Oh, do you think we should treat people differently if they pay more in taxes?’” recalls assemblymember Savannah Fletcher. The opposition was symbolic anyway, she says. “We don’t have the ability to limit who can use these public roadways.”
School buses drive the Alaska Highway, the only road from Tok to Fairbanks. The Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways are concerned that mining trucks along the route will be a danger for children at the hundred-plus school bus stops along the ore haul route. Grist / Sean McDermott
Schuhmann argues that the length of the trailers that will haul the ore normally would prohibit Kinross from using the planned route. (The agency claims a clause in state transportation regulations allows long combination vehicles like those Black Gold Transport will deploy to use several primary roads through the heart of Fairbanks. Schuhmann counters that another regulation provides sweeping authority to keep any vehicle off the road in the interest of public safety.) Kinney estimates the ore trucks — passing a dozen traffic signals, over 100 school bus stops, and many driveways through Fairbanks and all along the route — will need at least 365 feet to come to a stop during the winter. Meanwhile, drivers experienced with Arctic roads are already in short supply; the Alaska Trucking Association estimates that the state is currently 500 short of its needs.
If these trucks have to brake rapidly, they run the risk of jack-knifing, or having the trailer spin forward of the cab. To explain the potential risks, DOT veteran McHattie wrote a tongue-in-cheek poem about Santa’s sleigh running into just such a rig near Dot Lake. “There lies Santa, buried by ore,” he wrote. “Just let the alternative sink into your head. It could have been you and your family instead!”
A candy cane decoration sits outside of North Pole’s city hall. Grist / Sean McDermott
The dark humor helps with his cynicism. “They’re going to kill folks on my highways,” McHattie says. Though he’s a staunch conservative, joining Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways has changed his general outlook, especially “on things that can hurt people.” Later, he pulls out a gold coin. It’s cold and surprisingly heavy. Since Kinross has obtained the necessary permits, he’s fatalistic about the group’s chances of stopping the project. “People have been killing each other for thousands of years over gold,” he says. “This up here is just a much, much watered-down version.”
Fort Knox’s pit is so deep it’s difficult to see the bottom, even when flying overhead in a two-seat Cessna. The scars of old placer mines are pockmarked by recent exploration holes, as Kinross expands its footprint. The ore from another new — and also potentially acid-generating — deposit stands out, a darker brown framed by snow.
Alaska’s mines produced $4.5 billion worth of minerals last year. But mining contributes less than 1 percent of state revenue, which in 2021 came to $83 million. The base tax structure for that sector has remained largely unchanged since Alaska became a state in 1959. “There’s probably a lot of merit in revisiting many of the tax structures we have in the state of Alaska,” says state Representative Ashley Carrick, noting that Kinross and its supporters have worked to emphasize mining’s role in the region’s economy. “We have to really think about how we balance the past and current industries with what we want the long-term future to look like,” she adds. She notes, for example, that using highways as haul routes is in direct conflict with the tourism industry. Yet, she says, “Kinross and Contango do not seem moved by the public outcry.”
An aerial view of the existing Fort Knox mine, where ore from Manh Choh will be processed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service warns that potentially acid-generating tailings from Manh Choh could harm water quality and fisheries, requiring mitigation in perpetuity. Grist / Sean McDermott
Questions about the role mining will play in Alaska’s economy grow increasingly urgent as companies use the lure of rare earth metals as an excuse to fast-track mine permitting. The U.S. Geological Survey has recently announced a $5.8 million initiative to map the state’s critical minerals, including rare earth deposits like cerium and yttrium as well as minerals important to renewable energy, like cobalt and copper. The governor is currently pushing to take control of wetland permitting from the Army Corps of Engineers, which would allow state agencies to expedite new projects. “It’s going to cost the Alaska taxpayers a fair amount of money,” says Dave Chambers of the Center for Science in Public Participation. He’s concerned that the state lacks both the budget and the technical expertise required. “Unfortunately, there’s no law against being stupid.”
Federal mining law isn’t much better. It was last updated in 1872, prompting U.S. Representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona to introduce legislation in the spring of 2022 that would modernize a “severely antiquated” statute. The bill would require hard-rock mines to meet similar standards as oil and gas companies on public lands, establish royalties for operations, and conduct meaningful consultation with impacted tribes. (Nearly one-third of the mineral resources needed for the green energy transition are on or near Indigenous land.)
“If Alaska is transitioning to a mining-based extractive economy, they certainly need to review the percentage of benefits that the public gains,” says Mike Spindler, a former national wildlife refuge manager with decades of experience managing natural resources. “We do need jobs, we do need an economy, we do need critical minerals,” he acknowledges. But he wants it to be done responsibly. Many metals — including gold, which plays little part in the green energy transition — are easily recyclable. Developing alternative technologies, such as sodium-ion batteries, could also reduce the need for virgin materials. Instead of focusing on new extraction, using materials efficiently and revisiting existing tailings, which often have unutilized minerals, could reduce impacts.
But rather than modernizing, Manh Choh is setting a return to an era of deregulated mining, says Jeff Benowitz, a Fairbanks-based geologist. Contrary to industry best practices, for example, Kinross has not conducted seismic evaluations at Manh Choh. Earthquakes could have significant impacts on the mine’s hydrology, affecting where acid drainage might migrate. His comments during the public process pointing out these flaws were dismissed by the agencies issuing permits. If Alaska doesn’t do its due diligence, he says, it’s “a problem for the country — the whole United States of America. Because if you can do unregulated mining, why wouldn’t you?”
Geologist Jeff Benowitz with his dog, Sonya Creek Volcanic Field, who was named for a geologic formation in Alaska’s Wrangell mountains. Benowitz has raised concerns that the Manh Choh ore haul, and the lack of a comprehensive environmental review, is setting a troubling precedent for mining in Alaska. Grist / Sean McDermott
Mining companies are currently eyeing many other deposits along Alaska’s roads to make it much easier to transport their ore — including the Parks Highway, the state’s primary highway, which runs from Anchorage to Fairbanks. Kinross itself has been open about its intention to use public roads to develop other deposits, telling an industry publication there’s “an economic radius around Fort Knox, given the mill capacity, that makes a good chunk of Alaska attractive.”
There’s a near future in which many companies are trundling ore alongside tourist RVs and family minivans, compounding the risks. Yet Benowitz has a realistic view about how much outrage Manh Choh’s haul will generate — it’s so far away, most Americans can’t even picture the problems it poses. “I try not to be like, ‘No one cares about the school children, no one cares about air pollution in North Pole or Fairbanks, no one cares about the local fish,’” he says. “But they’re going to care when that’s in their state, and in their county.”
As a working geologist, Benowitz is concerned about the repercussions questioning the Manh Choh project might have on his career. “But eventually, when you see something that’s really wrong, you have to speak up. The precedent this is setting for the state of Alaska — and for the country — is horrific.”
Schuhmann also worries about backlash. She’s warned her daughter not to mention the mine in public, and to be cautious when she goes out with friends. Billions of dollars, she knows, are at stake. But she isn’t quitting. Schuhmann sends off another email to the state assistant attorney general about DOT regulations. She gives frustrated scientists matter-of-fact advice on appealing the permitting process. She tries to stay focused on the law that ought to be followed. “I don’t believe in getting angry over cases,” she says. “What’s the impact going to be for Alaskans? Those are the issues, not how I’m feeling.”
Barbara Schuhmann and her granddaughter hug on an Alaskan spring day. Grist / Sean McDermott
But one overcast spring day, Schuhmann walks along the Chena River with her granddaughter, watching as the season’s first trumpeter swans land in the newly open water. They pause by a bridge that 160,000 pound mining trucks will soon be crossing. “Do these companies ever really reconsider?” she asks, finally showing her exasperation. “I don’t know. It’s hard not to get depressed.”
We stand there in the snow until our toes get cold, watching as the swans front and bicker like politicians. By then, Schuhmann’s back to business. “We’ll have to just keep our thinking caps on.”
Lois Parshley is an investigative journalist. Read more of her work @loisparshley. This reporting was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
