This story was originally published byProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
In September 2020, the Hopi Tribe’s four-decade effort to secure its right to water culminated in a court proceeding. The outcome would determine how much water the arid reservation would receive over the next century and whether that amount would be enough for the tribe to pursue its economic ambitions. Under rules unique to Arizona, the tribe would have to justify how it would use every drop it wanted.
The monthslong ordeal in Arizona’s Superior Court unfolded in video calls over shaky internet connections.
Chairman Timothy Nuvangyaoma called it “the fight of our lives.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1908 that reservations have an inherent right to water. In the rest of the country, courts grant tribes water based on the amount of arable land on their reservations, relying on a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court precedent. But in 2001, Arizona developed its own method that was ostensibly more flexible to individual tribes’ visions for how they wanted to use their water by examining their culture, history, economy and projected population.
This new standard offered tribes an opportunity to shape their plans for economic development and growth beyond farming. But the Hopi case, the first adjudicated under this process, showed it also came at a high cost with uncertain outcomes.
Court records show that at the trial, experts brought in by the tribe, state and corporate water users argued over how many Hopi had lived in the area going back centuries and how much water they had used for crops and livestock. They debated the correct fertility rate of Hopi women and the viability of the tribe’s economic projects. And the court examined lists of sacred springs — sites the Hopi traditionally kept secret to preserve them — to decide how much water could be drawn from them for future religious ceremonies.
The legal battle, one of the tribe’s largest expenses in recent years, resulted in May 2022 with the court awarding less than a third of the water sought by the Hopi Tribe. That was the amount needed, the court said, “to provide a permanent homeland.”
“I would define it as modern-day genocide,” Nuvangyaoma said. “Withholding water, which is life for the Hopis, until an undetermined time is really a position to kill off a tribe that’s been here since time immemorial.”
The trial and decision carry profound implications for other Colorado River Basin tribes seeking water, especially in Arizona, where 10 out of 22 federally recognized tribes have outstanding claims. Water awarded to these tribes often comes out of the allocation states can use, leading to inherent conflict between tribes and states over the scarce resource. If the Hopi decree survives the tribe’s planned appeal, other tribes will be subjected to the same scrutiny of their way of life, said Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at Arizona State University.
“It’s a big deal for the history of water law in the United States of America and what it means to be a Native American tribe,” Larson said.
“To provide for our existence”
The Hopi Tribe has inhabited villages in northeastern Arizona for more than 1,100 years. In the time since white settlers arrived, the Hopi Tribe’s water supply has been decimated by drought and coal companies’ unchecked groundwater pumping.
The reservation, established by the U.S. government in 1882, is entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation. Both tribes use the same aquifer, with wells reaching thousands of feet into the ground. Three-fourths of the Hopi citizens living on the reservation rely on well water tainted with high levels of arsenic, according to tribal leaders and studies conducted with the Environmental Protection Agency. A heavy metal that leads to increased risk of developing cancer, cognitive developmental disorders and diabetes, arsenic is naturally present throughout Arizona, but pumping can increase its concentration in groundwater.
According to Dale Sinquah, a member of the Hopi Tribal Council, concerns about the aquifer make it hard not only to find drinking water, but they also limit the construction of new homes and businesses allowing the community to grow.
The only other available water on the reservation is inconsistent, running in four major streambeds that are dry most of the year. Those four washes, which empty into the Little Colorado River, have likely been impacted by drought, with two showing a “significant decreasing trend” in recent years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
“We need another source of water off-reservation to provide for our existence in the future,” Sinquah said.
The case involving Hopi water rights began in 1978, when the Phelps Dodge mining company filed suit against the state and all other water users to protect its claims in the Little Colorado River watershed. Under Arizona law, the only way to quantify a single water claim was to litigate all regional claims at once. Soon, the Hopi Tribe and thousands of others with claims became parties to the case in the Superior Court of Arizona.
The tribe put the court case on hold twice as it attempted to get water through out-of-court settlements. Those talks though would have required compromising with other users making claims to that water, including the Peabody Western Coal Co., which until 2019 pumped groundwater from the aquifer for its mining operations. Between 1965 and 2005, Peabody accounted for 63 percent of the water pumped out of the aquifer, and 31 percent between 2006 and 2019, according to the United States Geological Survey. Peabody did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2012, the Hopi Tribe appeared on the brink of a settlement with the state that would have provided the tribal nation with $113 million for pipelines and other infrastructure to bring groundwater to communities on the reservation. But that effort fell through when Hopi leaders refused to sign off on a guarantee in the settlement allowing Peabody continued access to the aquifer until 2044.
“We don’t think that’s feasible for you”
Unable to reach a settlement, the Hopi Tribe’s pursuit of water for its homeland continued in court through Arizona’s untested legal process.
Due to the large number of parties and the underfunding of both the state courts and Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, the case moved at a snail’s pace. The department filed a key technical report on water availability in 2008. It took until 2015 for the department to finalize it for the court.
By then, the case had been overseen by four judges. They appointed three separate special water masters, who are key to producing a proposed decree for the court. Susan Ward Harris, the water master who delivered the 2022 decree, was appointed in 2015. Harris did not respond to requests for comment.
When its day in court finally came, the Hopi Tribe explained it wanted water for an economically vibrant future with farms, cattle operations, coal mines and power plants.
More than 90 witnesses testified. They included a long line of experts — for the tribe; the federal government; the state; the northern Arizona city of Flagstaff; and the Little Colorado River Coalition, which represented small cities, utilities, ranchers and commercial interests. They discussed the tribe’s projected population, argued over the accuracy of the census count of the Hopi and offered predictions of what the numbers would be in the future.
In the end, the court went with the lowest population projections put forward by Flagstaff and the state, and it decided to only include people living on the reservation full time.
The reservation’s population, currently about 7,000, would peak at 18,255 by 2110, Harris decided.
She also decreed the tribe would get water to only irrigate 38 percent of farmland it planned to. It was denied water for a cattle operation, saying it “would not be feasible, practical, or provide economic benefits,” based on the court’s assessment of the current market. Harris also declared the coal operations were not “economically feasible.” Some $10 billion in economic development projects, presented in detail to the court, were deemed unrealistic.
Water for ceremonial and subsistence gardens was also denied. The court publicly listed nearly 100 sacred springs with limits on how much water the tribe was entitled to use for religious ceremonies.
In total, the tribe had requested at least 96,074 acre-feet a year of water, and the Arizona water master recommended awarding just 28,988 acre-feet, all of it from the same depleted, contaminated aquifer and seasonal streams the Hopi already use. After four decades, they ended up in the same precarious position they’d started.
Nuvangyaoma said the decree suggested the state and non-Native parties believed the tribe was incapable of carrying out its ambitious economic plans. It closed the door on future growth and, overall, was “insulting.”
By refusing to count members who live part time on the reservation as part of the population, the court ignored the connection many Native Americans have with their land, even when they don’t live there permanently, he said. Many leave so they or their children can pursue an education; for work; or to live in homes with reliable electricity and water. In short, Nuvangyaoma said, they seek the very things Hopi leaders hoped that the settlement would help bring to the reservation, and that the tribe needed water to do. But the court said that because the reservation was not growing at the speed the tribe claimed it could, it couldn’t have the water — a circular logic that hobbles the Hopi.
“It’s very frustrating that you’re told that your population will peak at a certain amount when we don’t see it that way,” Nuvangyaoma said.
Even with Harris’ decree on the books, the Hopi Tribe still faces a long road to access its allotted 28,988 acre-feet of water. Funding for dams, pipes and other infrastructure will likely require congressional action and involve more negotiation with other water users, including the Navajo Nation, which draws from the same groundwater. “I suspect I will not be alive when it comes to fruition,” Sinquah, the tribal council member, said.
Nuvangyaoma said the tribe will still pursue its plans for economic development, but with the understanding it cannot look to the state or federal governments for support.
Cities across the Southwest have, with government support, pursued economic development and growth in the ways they want, he said, whether it’s coal mining, raising cattle or farming the desert using water brought from far away.
“So why are we putting limitations on Hopi and making a decision for us saying, ‘Oh, well, we don’t think that’s feasible for you all?’” Nuvangyaoma asked. “Who has that right to tell us what is and what is not feasible for us?”
My small turboprop plane whirred low through thick clouds. Below me, St. Paul Island cut a golden, angular shape in the shadow-dark Bering Sea. I saw a lone island village — a grid of houses, a small harbor, and a road that followed a black ribbon of coast.
Some 330 people, most of them Indigenous, live in the village of St. Paul, about 800 miles west of Anchorage, where the local economy depends almost entirely on the commercial snow crab business. Over the last few years, 10 billion snow crabs have unexpectedly vanished from the Bering Sea. I was traveling there to find out what the villagers might do next.
The arc of St. Paul’s recent story has become a familiar one — so familiar, in fact, I couldn’t blame you if you missed it. Alaska news is full of climate elegies now — every one linked to wrenching changes caused by burning fossil fuels. I grew up in Alaska, as my parents did before me, and I’ve been writing about the state’s culture for more than 20 years. Some Alaskans’ connections go far deeper than mine. Alaska Native people have inhabited this place for more than 10,000 years.
As I’ve reported in Indigenous communities, people remind me that my sense of history is short and that the natural world moves in cycles. People in Alaska have always had to adapt.
Even so, in the last few years, I’ve seen disruptions to economies and food systems, as well as fires, floods, landslides, storms, coastal erosion, and changes to river ice — all escalating at a pace that’s hard to process. Increasingly, my stories veer from science and economics into the fundamental ability of Alaskans to keep living in rural places.
The island community of St. Paul sits 800 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska.
Nathaniel Wilder
You can’t separate how people understand themselves in Alaska from the landscape and animals. The idea of abandoning long-occupied places echoes deep into identity and history. I’m convinced the questions Alaskans are grappling with — whether to stay in a place and what to hold onto if they can’t — will eventually face everyone.
I’ve given thought to solastalgia — the longing and grief experienced by people whose feeling of home is disrupted by negative changes in the environment. But the concept doesn’t quite capture what it feels like to live here now.
A few years ago, I was a public radio editor on a story out of the small Southeast Alaska town of Haines about a storm that came through carrying a record amount of rain. The morning started routinely — a reporter on the ground calling around, surveying the damage. But then, a hillside rumbled down, taking out a house and killing the people inside. I still think of it — people going through regular routines in a place that feels like home, but that, at any time, might come cratering down. There’s a prickly anxiety humming beneath Alaska life now, like a wildfire that travels for miles in the loamy surface of soft ground before erupting without notice into flames.
But in St. Paul, there was no wildfire — only fat raindrops on my windshield as I loaded into a truck at the airport. In my notebook, tucked in my backpack, I’d written a single question: “What does this place preserve?”
Drone video by Nathaniel Wilder
The sandy road from the airport in late March led across wide, empty grassland, bleached sepia by the winter season. Town appeared beyond a rise, framed by towers of rusty crab pots. It stretched across a saddle of land, with rows of brightly painted houses — magentas, yellows, teals — stacked on either hillside. The grocery store, school, and clinic sat in between them, with a 100-year-old Russian Orthodox church named for Saints Peter and Paul, patrons of the day in June 1786 when Russian explorer Gavril Pribylov landed on the island. A darkened processing plant, the largest in the world for snow crabs, rose above the quiet harbor.
You’re probably familiar with sweet, briney snow crab — Chionoecetes opilio — which is commonly found on the menus of chain restaurants like Red Lobster. A plate of crimson legs with drawn butter there will cost you $32.99. In a regular year, a good portion of the snow crab America eats comes from the plant, owned by the multibillion-dollar company Trident Seafoods.
Not that long ago, at the peak of crab season in late winter, temporary workers at the plant would double the population of the town, butchering, cooking, freezing, and boxing 100,000 pounds of snow crab per day, along with processing halibut from a small fleet of local fishermen. Boats full of crab rode into the harbor at all hours, sometimes motoring through swells so perilous they’ve become the subject of a popular collection of YouTube videos. People filled the town’s lone tavern in the evenings, and the plant cafeteria, the only restaurant in town, opened to locals. In a normal year, taxes on crab and local investments in crab fishing could bring St. Paul more than $2 million.
The shuttered Trident Seafoods plant.
Nathaniel Wilder
Then came the massive, unexpected drop in the crab population — a crash scientists linked to record-warm ocean temperatures and less ice formation, both associated with climate change. In 2021, federal authorities severely limited the allowable catch. In 2022, they closed the fishery for the first time in 50 years. Industry losses in the Bering Sea crab fishery climbed into the hundreds of millions of dollars. St. Paul lost almost 60 percent of its tax revenue overnight. Leaders declared a “cultural, social, and economic emergency.” Town officials had reserves to keep the community’s most basic functions running, but they had to start an online fundraiser to pay for emergency medical services.
Through the windshield of the truck I was riding in, I could see the only cemetery on the hillside, with weathered rows of orthodox crosses. Van Halen played on the only radio station. I kept thinking about the meaning of a cultural emergency.
Some of Alaska’s Indigenous villages have been occupied for thousands of years, but modern rural life can be hard to sustain because of the high costs of groceries and fuel shipped from outside, limited housing, and scarce jobs. St. Paul’s population was already shrinking ahead of the crab crash. Young people departed for educational and job opportunities. Older people left to be closer to medical care. St. George, its sister island, lost its school years ago and now has about 40 residents.
Crab pots sit idle outside of the community of St. Paul.
Nathaniel Wilder
If you layer climate-related disruptions — such as changing weather patterns, rising sea levels, and shrinking populations of fish and game — on top of economic troubles, it just increases the pressure to migrate.
When people leave, precious intangibles vanish as well: a language spoken for 10,000 years, the taste for seal oil, the method for weaving yellow grass into a tiny basket, words to hymns sung in Unangam Tunuu, and maybe most importantly, the collective memory of all that had happened before. St. Paul played a pivotal role in Alaska’s history. It’s also the site of several dark chapters in America’s treatment of Indigenous populations. But as people and their memories disappear, what remains?
There is so much to remember.
The Pribilofs consist of five volcano-made islands — but people now live mainly on St. Paul. The island is rolling, treeless, with black sand beaches and towering basaltic cliffs that drop into a crashing sea. In the summer it grows verdant with mosses, ferns, grasses, dense shrubs, and delicate wildflowers. Millions of migratory seabirds arrive every year, making it a tourist attraction for birders that’s been called the “Galapagos of the North.”
Driving the road west along the coast, you might glimpse a few members of the island’s half-century-old domestic reindeer herd. The road gains elevation until you reach a trailhead. From there you can walk the soft fox path for miles along the top of the cliffs, seabirds gliding above you — many species of gulls, puffins, common murres with their white bellies and obsidian wings. In spring, before the island greens up, you can find the old ropes people use to climb down to harvest murre eggs. Foxes trail you. Sometimes you can hear them barking over the sound of the surf.
A blue phase arctic fox barks at a vistor. It is thought the fox arrived here walking over on sea ice which used to encompass the island annually.
Nathaniel Wilder
An arctic fox pup barks at a visitor. Nathaniel Wilder
ATV tracks between beaches near the northeastern point of St. Paul Island.
Nathaniel Wilder
Left: A shed reindeer antler on St. Paul Island. The herd is managed by the tribal government. Above: ATV tracks between beaches near the northeastern point of St. Paul Island. Nathaniel Wilder
Reindeer are an introduced species and the herd is managed by the tribal government: the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island.
Nathaniel Wilder
Two-thirds of the world’s population of northern fur seals — hundreds of thousands of animals — return to beaches in the Pribilofs every summer to breed. Valued for their dense, soft fur, they were once hunted to near extinction.
Alaska’s history since contact is a thousand stories of outsiders overwriting Indigenous culture and taking things — land, trees, oil, animals, minerals — of which there is a limited supply. St. Paul is perhaps among the oldest example. The Unangax̂ — sometimes called Aleuts — had lived on a chain of Aleutian Islands to the south for thousands of years and were among the first Indigenous people to see outsiders — Russian explorers who arrived in the mid-1700s. Within 50 years, the population was nearly wiped out. People of Unangax̂ descent are now scattered across Alaska and the world. Just 1,700 live in the Aleutian region.
St. Paul is home to one of the largest Unangax̂ communities left. Many residents are related to Indigenous people kidnapped from the Aleutian Islands and forced by Russians to hunt seals as part of a lucrative 19th century fur trade. St. Paul’s robust fur operation, subsidized by slave labor, became a strong incentive for the United States’ purchase of the Alaska territory from Russia in 1867.
On the plane ride in, I read the 2022 book that detailed the history of piracy in the early seal trade on the island, Roar of the Sea: Treachery, Obsession, and Alaska’s Most Valuable Wildlife by Deb Vanasse. One of the facts that stayed with me: Profits from Indigenous sealing allowed the U.S. to recoup the $7.2 million it paid for Alaska by 1905. Another: After the purchase, the U.S. government controlled islanders well into the mid-20th century as part of an operation many describe as indentured servitude.
The government was obligated to provide for housing, sanitation, food, and heat on the island, but none were adequate. Considered “wards of the state,” the government compensated Unangax̂ for their labors in meager rations of canned food. Once a week, Indigenous islanders were allowed to hunt or fish for subsistence. Houses were inspected for cleanliness and to check for homebrew. Travel on and off the island was strictly controlled. Mail was censored.
Two-thirds of the world’s population of northern fur seals breed each summer on beaches in the Pribilof Islands. Nathaniel Wilder
Between 1870 and 1946, Alaska Native people on the islands earned an estimated $2.1 million, while the government and private companies raked in $46 million in profits. Some inequitable practices continued well into the 1960s, when politicians, activists, and the Tundra Times, an Alaska Native newspaper, brought the story of the government’s treatment of Indigenous islanders to a wider world.
During World War II, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor and the U.S. military gathered St. Paul residents with little notice and transported them 1,200 miles to a detention camp at a decrepit cannery in Southeast Alaska at Funter Bay. Soldiers ransacked their homes on St. Paul and slaughtered the reindeer herd so there would be nothing for the Japanese if they occupied the island. The government said the relocation and detention were for protection, but they brought the Unangax̂ back to the island during the seal season to hunt. A number of villagers died in cramped and filthy conditions with little food. But Unangax̂ also became acquainted with Tlingits from the Southeast region, who had been organizing politically for years through the Alaska Native Brotherhood/Sisterhood organization.
After the war, the Unangax̂ people returned to the island and began to organize and agitate for better conditions. In one famous suit, known as “the corned beef case,” Indigenous residents working in the seal industry filed a complaint with the government in 1951. According to the complaint, their compensation, paid in the form of rations, included corned beef, while white workers on the island received fresh meat. After decades of hurdles, the case was settled in favor of the Alaska Native community for more than $8 million.
A cabin on the road to the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge at the western edge of St. Paul Island.
Nathaniel Wilder
“The government was obligated to provide ‘comfort,’ but ‘wretchedness’ and ‘anguish’ are the words that more accurately describe the condition of the Pribilof Aleuts,” read the settlement, awarded by the Indian Claims Commission in 1979. The commission was established by Congress in the 1940s to weigh unresolved tribal claims.
Prosperity and independence finally came to St. Paul after commercial sealing was halted in 1984. The government brought in fishermen to teach locals how to fish commercially for halibut and funded the construction of a harbor for crab processing. By the early ‘90s, crab catches were enormous, reaching between 200 and 300 million pounds per year. (By comparison, the allowable catch in 2021, the first year of marked crab decline, was 5.5 million pounds, though fishermen couldn’t catch even that.) The island’s population reached a peak of more than 700 people in the early 1990s but has been on a slow decline ever since.
I’d come to the island in part to talk to Aquilina Lestenkof, a historian deeply involved in language preservation. I found her on a rainy afternoon in the bright blue wood-walled civic center, which is a warren of classrooms and offices, crowded with books, artifacts, and historic photographs.She greeted me with a word that starts at the back of the throat and rhymes with “song.”
“Aang,” she said.
Aquilina Lestenkof is a historian who is working to preserve Unangam Tunuu, the Indigenous language of St. Paul Island.
Nathaniel Wilder
Lestenkof moved from St. George, where she was born, to St. Paul, when she was four. Her father, who was also born in St. George, became the village priest. She had long salt-and-pepper hair and a tattoo that stretched across both her cheeks made of curved lines and dots. Each dot represents an island where a generation of her family lived, beginning with Attu in the Aleutians, then traveling to the Russian Commander Islands — also a site of a slave sealing operation — as well as Atka, Unalaska, St. George, and St. Paul.
“I’m the fifth generation having my story travel through those six islands,” she said.
Lestenkof is a grandmother, related to a good many people in the village and married to the city manager. For the last 10 years she’s been working on revitalizing Unangam Tunuu, the Indigenous language. Only one elder in the village speaks fluently now. He’s among the fewer than 100 fluent speakers left on the planet, though many people in the village understand and speak some words.
Back in the 1920s, teachers in the government school put hot sauce on her father’s tongue for speaking Unangam Tunuu, she told me. He didn’t require his children to learn it. There’s a way that language shapes how you understand the land and community around you, she said, and she wanted to preserve the parts of that she could.
“[My father] said, ‘If you thought in our language, if you thought from our perspective, you’d know what I’m talking about,’” she said. “I felt cheated.”
She showed me a wall covered with rectangles of paper that tracked grammar in Unangam Tunuu. Lestenkof said she needed to hunt down a fluent speaker to check the grammar. Say you wanted to say “drinking coffee,” she explained. You might learn that you don’t need to add the word for “drinking.” Instead, you might be able to change the noun to a verb, just by adding an ending to it.
Her program had been supported by money from a local nonprofit invested in crabbing and, more recently, by grants, but she was recently informed that she may lose funding. Her students come from the village school, which is shrinking along with the population. I asked her what would happen if the crabs fail to come back. People could survive, she said, but the village would look very different.
Notes on the wall in the classroom where Aquilina Lestenkof runs a program to teach local youth Unangam Tunuu.Nathaniel Wilder
“If you could think in Unangam Tunuu, you would understand what I’m saying,” Aquilina Lestenkof’s father once told her. She said this was a slap in the face that motivated her to learn the language, which has few remaining speakers. Now, she teaches it to local youth.Nathaniel Wilder
“Sometimes I’ve pondered, is it even right to have 500 people on this island?” she said.
If people moved off, I asked her, who would keep track of its history?
“Oh, so we don’t repeat it?” she asked, laughing. “We repeat history. We repeat stupid history, too.”
Until recently, during the crab season, the Bering Sea fleet had some 70 boats, most of them ported out of Washington state, with crews that came from all over the U.S. Few villagers work in the industry, in part because the job only lasts for a short season. Instead, they fish commercially for halibut, have positions in the local government or the tribe, or work in tourism. Processing is hard, physical labor — a schedule might be seven days a week, 12 hours a day, with an average pay of $17 an hour. As with lots of processors in Alaska, nonresident workers on temporary visas from the Philippines, Mexico, and Eastern Europe fill many of the jobs.
The crab plant echoes the dynamics of commercial sealing, she said. Its workers leave their homeland, working hard labor for low pay. It was one more industry depleting Alaska’s resources and sending them across the globe. Maybe the system didn’t serve Alaskans in a lasting way. Do people eating crab know how far it travels to the plate?
“We have the seas feeding people in freakin’ Iowa,” she said. “They shouldn’t be eating it. Get your own food.”
Drone video by Nathaniel Wilder
Ocean temperatures are increasing all over the world, but sea surface temperature change is most dramatic in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. As the North Pacific experiences sustained increases in temperature, it also warms up the Bering Sea to the north, through marine heat waves. During the last decade, these heat waves have grown more frequent and longer-lasting than at any time since record-keeping began more than 100 years ago. Scientists expect this trend to continue.
A marine heat wave in the Bering Sea between 2016 and 2019 brought record warmth, preventing ice formation for several winters and affecting numerous cold-water species, including Pacific cod and pollock, seals, seabirds, and several types of crab.
Snow crab stocks always vary, but in 2018, a survey indicated that the snow crab population had exploded — it showed a 60 percent boost in market-sized male crab. (Only males of a certain size are harvested.) The next year showed abundance had fallen by 50 percent. The survey skipped a year due to the pandemic. Then, in 2021, the survey showed that the male snow crab population dropped by more than 90 percent from its high point in 2018. All major Bering Sea crab stocks, including red king crab and bairdi crab, were way down too. The most recent survey showed a decline in snow crabs from 11.7 billion in 2018 to 1.9 billion in 2022.
Scientists think a large pulse of young snow crabs came just before years of abnormally warm water temperatures, which led to less sea ice formation. One hypothesis is that these warmer temperatures drew sea animals from warmer climates north, displacing cold water animals, including commercial species like crab, pollock, and cod.
A Northern Fulmar circles below cliffs that hold nesting seabirds during the summer season.
Nathaniel Wilder
Another has to do with food availability. Crabs depend on cold water — water that’s 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit), to be exact — that comes from storms and ice melt, forming cold pools on the bottom of the ocean. Scientists theorize that cold water slows crabs’ metabolisms, reducing the animals’ need for food. But with the warmer water on the bottom, they needed more food than was available. It’s possible they starved or cannibalized each other, leading to the crash now underway. Either way, warmer temperatures were key. And there’s every indication temperatures will continue to increase with global warming.
“If we’ve lost the ice, we’ve lost the 2-degree water,” Michael Litzow, shellfish assessment program manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. “Cold water, it’s their niche — they’re an Arctic animal.”
The snow crab may rebound in a few years, so long as there aren’t any periods of warm water. But if warming trends continue, as scientists predict, the marine heatwaves will return, pressuring the crab population again.
Bones litter the wild part of St. Paul Island like Ezekiel’s valley in the Old Testament — reindeer ribs, seal teeth, fox femurs, whale vertebrae, and air-light bird skulls hide in the grass and along the rocky beaches, evidence of the bounty of wildlife and 200 years of killing seals.
When I went to visit Phil Zavadil, the city manager and Aqualina’s husband, in his office, I found a couple of sea lion shoulder bones on a coffee table. Called “yes/no” bones, they have a fin along the top and a heavy ball at one end. In St. Paul, they function like a magic eight ball. If you drop one and it falls with the fin pointing right, the answer to your question is yes. If it falls pointing left, the answer is no. One large one said “City of St. Paul Big-Decision Maker.” The other one was labeled “budget bone.”
The long-term health of the town, Zavadil told me, wasn’t in a totally dire position yet when it came to the sudden loss of the crab. It had invested during the heyday of crabbing, and with a somewhat reduced budget could likely sustain itself for a decade.
“That’s if something drastic doesn’t happen. If we don’t have to make drastic cuts,” he said. “Hopefully the crab will come back at some level.”
Phillip Zavadil, the city manager for St. Paul, has hope for the island’s future.
Nathaniel Wilder
The easiest economic solution for the collapse of the crab fishery would be to convert the plant to process other fish, Zavadil said. There were some regulatory hurdles, but they weren’t insurmountable. City leaders were also exploring mariculture — raising seaweed, sea cucumbers, and sea urchins. That would require finding a market and testing mariculture methods in St. Paul’s waters. The fastest timeline for that was maybe three years, he said. Or they could promote tourism. The island has about 300 tourists a year, most of them hardcore birders.
“But you think about just doubling that,” he said.
The trick was to stabilize the economy before too many working-age adults moved away. There were already more jobs than people to fill them. Older people were passing away, younger families were moving out.
“I had someone come up to me the other day and say, ‘The village is dying,’” he said, but he didn’t see it that way. There were still people working and lots of solutions to try.
“There is cause for alarm if we do nothing,” he said. “We’re trying to work on things and take action the best we can.”
Aquilina Lestenkof’s nephew, Aaron Lestenkof, is an island sentinel with the tribal government, a job that entails monitoring wildlife and overseeing the removal of an endless stream of trash that washes up ashore. He drove me along a bumpy road down the coast to see the beaches that would soon be noisy and crowded with seals.
We parked and I followed him to a wide field of nubby vegetation stinking of seal scat. A handful of seal heads popped up over the rocks. They eyed us, then shimmied into the surf.
In the old days, Alaska Native seal workers used to walk out onto the crowded beaches, club the animals in the head, and then stab them in the heart. They took the pelts and harvested some meat for food, but some went to waste. Aquilina Lestenkof told me taking animals like that ran counter to how Unangax̂ related to the natural world before the Russians came.
“You have a prayer or ceremony attached to taking the life of an animal — you connect to it by putting the head back in the water,” she said.
Slaughtering seals for pelts made people numb, she told me. The numbness passed from one generation to the next. The era of crabbing had been in some ways a reparation for all the years of exploitation, she said. Climate change brought new, more complex problems.
I asked Aaron Lestenkof if his elders ever talked about the time in the detention camp where they were sent during World War II. He told me his grandfather, Aquilina’s father, sometimes recalled a painful experience of having to drown rats in a bucket there. The act of killing animals that way was compulsory — the camp had become overrun with rats — but it felt like an ominous affront to the natural order, a trespass he’d pay for later. Every human action in nature has consequences, he often said. Later, when he lost his son, he remembered drowning the rats.
“Over at the harbor, he was playing and the waves were sweeping over the dock there. He got swept out and he was never found,” Aaron Lestenkof said. “That’s, like, the only story I remember him telling.”
We picked our way down a rocky beach littered with trash — faded coral buoys, disembodied plastic fishing gloves and boots, an old ship’s dishwasher lolling open. He said the animals around the island were changing in small ways. There were fewer birds now. A handful of seals were now living on the island year-round, instead of migrating south. Their population was also declining.
Aaron Lestenkof is an island sentinel for the tribal government of St. Paul Island, posing here above a northern fur seal rookery he monitors.Nathaniel Wilder
Marine debris can be found on beaches all over the Bering Sea.Nathaniel Wilder
People still fish, hunt marine mammals, collect eggs, and pick berries. Aaron Lestenkof hunts red-legged kittiwakes and king eiders, though he doesn’t have a taste for the bird meat. He finds elders who do like them, but that’s gotten harder. He wasn’t looking forward to the lean years of waiting for the crabs to return. Proceeds from the community’s investment in crabbing boats had paid the heating bills of older people; the boats also supplied the elderly with crab and halibut for their freezers. They supported education programs and environmental cleanup efforts. But now, he said, having the crab gone would “ affect our income and the community.”
Aaron Lestenkof was optimistic that they might cultivate other industries and grow tourism. He hoped so, because he never wanted to leave the island. His daughter was away at boarding school because there was no in-person high school any more. He hoped, when she grew up, that she’d want to return and make her life in town.
The Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church on St. Paul Island. Nathaniel Wilder
On Sunday morning, the 148-year-old church bell at Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church tolled through the fog. A handful of older women and men filtered in and stood on separate sides of the church among gilded portraits of the saints. The church has been part of village life since the beginning of Russian occupation, one of the few places, people said, where Unangam Tunuu was welcome.
A priest sometimes travels to the island, but that day George Pletnikoff Jr., a local, acted as subdeacon, singing the 90-minute service in English, Church Slavonic, and Unangam Tunuu. George helps with Aquilina Lestenkof’s language class. He is newly married with a 6-month-old baby.
After the service, he told me that maybe people weren’t supposed to live on the island. Maybe they needed to leave that piece of history behind.
Outside the Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church after the Sunday readers’ service. Nathaniel Wilder
“This is a traumatized place,” he said.
It was only a matter of time until the fishing economy didn’t serve the village anymore and the cost of living would make it hard for people to stay, he said. He thought he’d move his family south to the Aleutians, where his ancestors came from.
“Nikolski, Unalaska,” he told me. “The motherland.”
The next day, just before I headed to the airport, I stopped back at Aquilina Lestenkof’s classroom. A handful of middle school students arrived, wearing oversize sweatshirts and high-top Nikes. She invited me into a circle where students introduced themselves in Unangam Tunuu, using hand gestures that helped them remember the words.
After a while, I followed the class to a work table. Lestenkof guided them, pulling a needle through a papery dried seal esophagus to sew a waterproof pouch. The idea was that they’d practice words and skills that generations before them had carried from island to island, hearing and feeling them until they became so automatic, they could teach them to their own children.
In a major blow to the Navajo Nation, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the federal government had no obligation to supply water to the tribe.
In a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that water security for the Nation did not fall to the judiciary branch, but rather Congress and the President.
“The burden now is on tribal nations to advocate for themselves and intervene whenever water rights are an issue,” said Morgan Saunders, a staff attorney in the Washington D.C. office of the Native American Rights Fund.
Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh held that the 1868 treaty, which established the Navajo Reservation, reserved water for the tribe, but did not require the government to take active steps to build the infrastructure needed to secure said water – an issue that has become more pressing each year as the Colorado River Basin, a major source of water for the tribe, experiences record-setting heat and some of the driest years ever recorded.
“In short, the 1868 treaty did not impose a duty on the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Tribe – including the steps requested by the Navajos here, such as determining the water needs of the Tribe, providing an accounting, or developing a plan to secure the needed water,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Since 2003, the Navajo Nation has been arguing that the federal government must quantify the amount of water they have access to in the Basin as well as the potential infrastructure they need to access the water. The Nation maintained that the 1868 treaty – which ceded nearly 22-million acres of land to the United States and ended the internment of Navajos at Bosque Redondo – established the reservation as a “permanent home”, meaning that the United States agreed to take affirmative steps to secure water for Navajo citizens. The court rejected that argument.
“My job as the President of the Navajo Nation is to represent and protect the Navajo people, our land, and our future,” wrote Presiden Buu Nygren in a statement. “The only way to do that is with secure, quantified water rights to the Lower Basin of the Colorado River.”
The decision leaves water infrastructure for the Navajo Nation on unsure ground, and could reverberate along the Colorado River Basin where 30 tribal nations rely on the river’s water supply. Of those 30 tribes, 12 of them, including the Navajo Nation still have “unresolved” rights, meaning the extent of their rightful claims to water have not been agreed upon.
In his dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who is an expert in Federal Indian Law, accused the majority of “misreading” the Navajo’s request and “applying the wrong analytical framework,” adding that the Nation was looking for the government to “formulate a plan” for the tribe to access water rather than hold the government responsible for paying for pipelines or other aquifers to do so.
“Where do the Navajo go from here?” Gorsuch asked rhetorically. “The Navajo have waited patiently for someone, anyone, to help them, only to be told (repeatedly) that they have been standing in the wrong line and must try another.”
He said the tribes have done all they could including writing to federal officials, petitioning the Supreme Court and seeking to intervene in ongoing water-related litigation as well as awaiting 20 years on the court’s ruling in this case.
“At each turn, they have received the same answer: ‘Try again,’” Gorsuch wrote.
With over 17 million acres of land and over 300,000 citizens, the Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the United States. Yet, Navajo citizens, on average, use only seven gallons of water per day for household needs compared to the national average of 82 gallons per person per day due to a lack of infrastructure. It’s estimated up to 40 percent of Navajo households don’t have running water.
Sandra Liliana Pena was a human rights defender in Colombia. A member of an Indigenous group known as the Nasa and the Paez, she eventually became the governor of a reserve in the Cauca community, where she protested against illegal crops being grown on Nasa land. Then in April of 2021, she was pulled out of her home by four unknown individuals and shot in the head.
Pena is just one of scores of women who’ve faced violence – beatings, attacks, dispossession, incarceration, intimidation assassination – related to their roles as environmental activists. In a new analysis from the Autonomous University of Barcelona published in the journal Nature, researchers examined 523 documented cases of violence specifically against women environmental defenders, or WEDs. In 81 of these cases, the defender was assassinated, whether by the state, an organized criminal group, a business interest, or some combination of the three.
A woman is seen during the funeral of Sandra Liliana Pena, Indigenous governor of La Laguna Siberia, in El Porvenir, Colombia, on April 23, 2021. She was opposed to illicit coca cultivation in the territory and had received threats from illegal armed groups. She was killed by armed men in April 2021.
Luis ROBAYO / AFP via Getty Images
According to the study, women often face violence in these conflicts not only as activists, but because their actions often defy patriarchal gender expectations of docility and sacrifice that authoritarian governments may use as means of enforcing social order. Women, particularly low-income and Indigenous women, have long been at the frontlines of environmental conflict, putting them in close contact with paramilitaries, traffickers, and resource extraction workers. Even when governments concede to environmentalists, women are often left out of negotiations, despite the documented disproportionate impacts of ecocide on women.
“Across these countries, authoritarian populism reinforced existing chauvinism wherein gendered tropes and inequalities incite and justify violence against women,” the study authors wrote.
These cases were identified using an ongoing mapping project called the Environmental Justice Atlas, which tracks environmental justice conflicts throughout the world. The atlas sorts conflicts by health impacts, type of environmental problem (oil and gas, agriculture, etc.), conflict levels, and other categories. WEDs faced extrajudicial violence primarily in the Philippines, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, where conflict over land, minerals, and industrial activity have reached a fever pitch.
In Colombia, for instance, illicit cattle ranching and coca farming near Indigenous communities have led to armed conflicts between land defenders and organized criminal groups. The country also has a high rate of violence against women in general, with 630 femicides officially recognized in 2020 alone. Indigenous and Black women are disproportionately likely to be affected by gendered violence, and are also more likely to live near the frontlines of armed environmental conflict and face threats when speaking up.
Study authors noted that violence against women activists doesn’t always look like outright murder. Other more common forms of environmental harassment include displacement, repression, criminalization, and non-deadly forms of violent targeting. The study found that women were incited to take action after facing certain forms of violence, such as sickness or non-assasination deaths of family members. They also mobilized in response to food insecurity and loss of livelihood..
Study authors say that cases of violences against WEDs are likely severely undercounted, noting that conflict reporting frequently sidelines women as residents, mothers, and wives, rather than as activists in their own right. Furthermore, environmental conflicts are not always well documented in and of themselves, making it difficult for researchers to determine if violence against women was related to environmental activism.
But documenting violence against women environmental defenders is not the same as finding justice. International human rights advocates say that even in high-profile cases, it’s often difficult for families of WEDs who have been murdered or wrongfully incarcerated to get justice. The assassination of Honduran land defender Berta Cáceres for example, was international news seven years ago, but according to Amnesty International campaigner Graciela Martinez, Cáceres’ family is still searching for some of the perpetrators.
Women take part in a protest in demand of justice in the murder of Honduran activist Berta Caceres, during the second anniversary of her death, at the Public Ministry headquarters in Tegucigalpa on March 2, 2018.
ORLANDO SIERRA / AFP via Getty Images
“It is important to keep pushing for justice, as there is a lot of impunity,” Martinez said. “When attacks are gender-based it is even more difficult to get justice.”
Martinez is working with human rights defenders from around the world to advocate for increased protections for environmental activists like Cáceres. She said 15 out of 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries have agreed to take on articles of protection, which would outline rights for the region’s marginalized people in their defense of their lands and communities. She believes better protection — for women and other vulnerable environmental activists — is possible with commitment from world leaders, but only if those groups are able to participate in the process of implementation.
“We must engage human rights defenders, and especially Indigenous people, women, and children in this process,” she said.
This story was originally published by WNIJ and is republished with permission.
The Mississippi River flowed lazily under the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities. Cars cruised past on a Saturday afternoon in early May, waving and occasionally honking at a long line of environmentalists who say the river is alive.
Glenda Guster was among the roughly 80 people to join the Great Plains Action Society’s Walk for River Rights — the centerpiece of a three-day summit earlier this month for Black and indigenous organizers from across the Mississippi River basin, who, among other things, want to grant the river legal standing.
Like many making the march across the river, Guster, who held a sign saying “water is life” over her head, said the river needs more protection.
“The river has rights, just like human rights,” said Guster. “Nature has rights and it’s up to us to preserve these rights.”
According to Sikowis Nobis, the founder of the indigenous rights organization, the goal of the summit was to build a riverwide coalition to rethink the legal framework they believe imperils life on and in the Mississippi River. The way she sees it, the existing legal system cannot confront the types of environmental disasters that are increasingly imminent – but “Rights of Nature” might.
The idea is that natural entities like rivers, trees and wildlife have the same rights as humans and thus have legal standing in a court of law. Natural entities, the legal principle holds, constitute living beings with legally enforceable rights to exist that transcend the category of property.
Spring has brought high water levels to the Mississippi River at Guttenberg, Iowa, as seen here on May 25, 2023. If the river were granted legal rights, it could be defended in the court of law. Aerial support provided by LightHawk. Drake White-Bergey, Wisconsin Watch
“The earth is really suffering, and rights of nature would basically give personhood to the river,” said Nobis. “It would allow us to have more power to keep it safe.”
The legal movement to grant natural entities like forests and rivers the same legal rights as humans has won meaningful success abroad, and has in recent years picked up steam in the United States. Largely indigenous-led campaigns to recognize the legal rights of natural entities like wild rice in Minnesota, salmon in Washington, and the Klamath River in northern California are setting the stage for a nascent movement for the Mississippi River.
The implications of rights of nature as a legal instrument are far reaching. Companies could be taken to court for damaging ecosystems, and construction projects with the potential to cause environmental damage could be stopped.
That’s exactly what happened in Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. Thomas Linzey is a senior attorney at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and drafted the document to grant the small borough rights.
“It may be a radical concept, or it was 20 years ago, but we’re rapidly coming to a place where without this kind of new system of environmental law, we’re all kind of done, we’re kind of cooked,” said Linzey.
Ultimately, locals were able to stop sewage sludge from being dumped in Tamaqua using the new ordinance.
Linzey said that before the rights of nature movement made its way into the mainstream, it was born from the cosmologies of indigenous people that recognized the natural world as made up of living beings – not just resources or commodities.
In 2008, Linzey consulted the Ecuadorian government while it drafted its new constitution, the first in the world to ratify the Rights of Nature. In 2021, an Ecuadorian municipality appealed to the constitutional protections to overturn mining permits that they said violated the rights of nature of the endangered Los Cedros rainforest.
“The work has spread to other countries, and in the U.S. to about over three dozen municipalities at this point,” said Linzey.
Ecuador remains the only country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. A similar proposal was considered in Chile last year, and the island nation of Aruba is currently reviewing its own amendment addressing the inherent rights of nature. Court decisions in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda have successfully held up the rights of nature. Local laws and treaty agreements recognizing the rights of nature are emerging across the globe, particularly in the U.S.
Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a speaker at the Mississippi River Summit, said that a couple years ago, the success of rights of nature in South America got his and other tribes thinking, why not us?
“And we wondered why haven’t the big rivers, like the Missouri River, and the Mississippi River, gotten those rights?” said Foster.
Advocates march over the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities, on May 13, 2023. They called for the Mississippi River to be granted legal rights. Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / WNIJ
He said his tribe and others have created an inter-tribal resolution for the rights of the Missouri River. They hope to use it to fight industrial scale agriculture and deep mining operations.
“If the Mississippi had those rights recognized… it would be able to have standing in court for an advocate on its behalf to help clean it up,” said Foster.
Two years ago in Minnesota, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a suit against the Enbridge corporation’s Line 3 on behalf of wild rice, called Manoomin. And last month, the city of Seattle settled a case with the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe over the claim that salmon had the right to spawn, among other rights.
Because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers flow through so many states and tribal lands, experts said it would be prohibitively complicated to secure legal standing for them in the courts.
But Foster said if corporations get legal rights in the U.S., why shouldn’t rivers? Afterall, they were here far before humans.
States like Idaho, Florida and Ohio have moved to preemptively ban the possibility that nature or ecosystems can have legal standing. Even so, Foster said the rights of nature isn’t as unthinkable as it once was. After all, children, women, Black and indigenous people were denied rights once too – what’s stopping the river.
“It gives us a chance,” said Foster. “Now, will we take that chance as a society? I’m dubious most days, but we have to keep trying, we have to keep going to the bitter end.”
Decisions by federal and state officials last week will limit where New Mexico’s powerful oil and gas industry is able to drill.
On Friday, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that the department will soon ban new oil and gas leases on more than 330,000 acres of public lands within a 10-mile radius of Chaco Culture National Historical Park — a UNESCO World Heritage Site of deep cultural importance to the region’s Pueblo and Tribal nations.
The day before, the New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands instituted a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on state trust lands within one mile of schools, daycare centers, and sporting fields used by students.
The measures taken last week won’t significantly curb fossil fuel production in the state — the new restrictions impact relatively small portions of land — but they will partially reshape where it is done and with what amount of oversight. They also represent a win for the growing movement to limit the impacts of oil and gas on public and environmental health in New Mexico. Last month, for example, a coalition of Indigenous, youth, and environmental groups sued state lawmakers, officials, and the governor for “violating their state constitutional duty to control the rapidly growing pollution from the oil and gas industry.”
There are more than 4,700 archaeological sites within a 10-mile radius of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, according to the Department of the Interior. Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The withdrawal of lands around Chaco Canyon will apply to federal parcels and mineral estates and not to land owned by private, state, or tribal entities. It will ban new leases but still allow production from existing drill sites and on existing leases.
“Tribal communities have raised concerns about the impacts that new development would have on areas of deep cultural connection,” Haaland said in a statement, calling Chaco Canyon, “a sacred place that holds deep meaning for the Indigenous peoples whose ancestors have called this place home since time immemorial.”
The area contains archaeological artifacts and cultural sites significant to the Pueblo and Tribal nations, including 4,700 known archaeological sites within the 10-mile radius outside the park. Some Chacoan structures date back thousands of years.
While the department touted what it said were extensive efforts to gather community input, and the withdrawal does not apply to tribal mineral rights, the Navajo Nation issued an emailed statement denouncing the decision.
Nation members have their own land allotments in the area, which generate revenue through leasing. “The Biden administration has undermined the position of the Navajo Nation with today’s action and impacted the livelihood of thousands of Navajo allotment owners and their families,” said Navajo Nation Speaker Crystalyne Curley. The tribe could not be reached for additional comment.
At the state level, New Mexico Commissioner on Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard issued a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on trust lands near schools “and other educational institutions, including day care centers, preschools, and sports facilities used by students.”
State trust lands were granted by the federal government with the primary purpose of generating revenue for schools, according to the commission’s order, but Garcia Richard argues that the office maintains the right to withhold land tracts from leasing and that it is the responsibility of her department “to help ensure that communities are free from pollution and harmful effects of such activities.”
While existing drilling sites like this one would not be impacted by the rule, new leases with 1 mile of schools will be banned.
New Mexico State Land Office
New Mexico state law does not currently mandate a minimum health setback for the siting of oil and gas wells, and Garcia Richard invited state lawmakers to take related action in response to her decision.
“A moratorium on new oil and gas leasing near schools … will provide an opportunity to engage the Governor and the state agencies under her purview, state legislature, and other interested stakeholders regarding potential legislative and administrative options,” she said in the order.
While the moratorium only applies to new leases, it also orders a study on all current drilling activities on state trust lands to assess their compliance with regulations, “including the requirement to plug inactive wells, remediate spills, and adhere to relevant air quality standards.”
About 144,000 New Mexico residents live within one half-mile of oil and gas production in the state, according to research by Earthworks and FracTracker Alliance, nonprofit groups that work to curb fossil fuel extraction. And air quality in several of the state’s oil- and gas-producing counties fails to meet federal standards.
The new state-level regulations are “a first step to protecting our kids from oil and gas pollution, but it’s only on state land,” Gail Evans, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a statement. “We need health and safety setbacks across New Mexico.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland met with tribal leaders representing a dozen Indigenous nations last weekend in a move that could expand protections for land around The Grand Canyon, permanently safeguarding the region from future uranium mining.
The proposed Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument would convert 1.1 million acres of public land surrounding Grand Canyon National Park into a National Monument, providing significant protections to tribal water sources, delicate ecosystems, and cultural sites, while curtailing the impacts of uranium mining — a proposal tribes in the area have been fighting for since 1985. Baaj Nwaavjo means “where tribes roam” in the Havasupai language, I’tah Kukveni translates to “our footprints” in Hopi.
The region has high concentrations of uranium and mining has been a feature of the landscape since the 1950s. When mining first began in the area, uranium was used primarily for nuclear weapons. Today, uranium from the Grand Canyon is used for nuclear energy plants and power reactors in submarines and naval ships.
In 2012, then-Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, placed a 20-year ban on uranium mining on more than a million acres of federal lands near the Grand Canyon in order to protect surface water from radioactive dust and mining waste. Without increased federal protections, tribal leaders say mining claims can be made at the end of the 20-year-ban, re-opening the Grand Canyon to uranium exploration.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, mining in the area disturbs underground vertical rock formations called “breccia pipes” — formations that often hold hydrothermal fluid or extremely hot water heated by the earth’s mantle and filled with various gasses, minerals and salts, including uranium. When disturbed, those breccia pipes can release their contents into aquifers and eventually, larger water systems.
In 2016, the Pinyon Plain Mine pierced an aquifer flooding mineshafts, and draining groundwater supplies. Between 2016 and 2021, the Grand Canyon Trust estimated that more than 48 million gallons of water had flooded Pinyon’s mineshafts, and the National Parks Conservation Association has consistently reported uranium levels in that water exceeding federal toxicity limits by more than 300%.
When ingested, uranium can cause bone and liver cancer, damage kidneys, and affect body processes like autoimmune and reproductive functions.
In 2016, tribal leaders brought the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni proposal to the Obama administration, but were rejected. Now, the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition, made up of 12 tribes with ties to the area, hope Secretary Haaland will encourage the Biden administration to protect the region.
“We can’t wait until the accident happens,” said Carletta Tilousi, a Havasupai elder and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “We are trying to prevent the catastrophe before it happens.”
The Havasupai reservation is an eight mile hike below the rim of the Grand Canyon and one of the most isolated communities in the United States.
But Tillousi says that while stopping uranium mining will be a major goal of the proposal, ongoing contamination issues must be addressed. The Pinyon Plain Mine continues to contaminate the Havasupai’s sole water supply, the Havasu Creek. Pinyon has been operating since 1986, and while the 2012 uranium mining ban stopped the construction of new mines, Pinyon is exempt due to its pre-approval. As of 2020, 30 million gallons of groundwater tainted with high levels of uranium and arsenic have been pumped out of the mines flooded shaft and dumped in an uncovered pond.
“We’re a small tribe, our tribe is made up of 765 people,” said Tillousi. “We need to protect our village and homes.”
Esta historia es parte de una serie de Grist sobre derechos indígenas y conservación. Cuenta con el apoyo de Bay & Paul Foundations y se publica conjuntamente con High Country News. Read this story in English. Lisez cette histoire en français.
Transcripción
La Conservación Fortaleza: Un Legado de Violencia
Para conservar la biodiversidad de la Tierra, muchos países están presionando para proteger
más áreas terrestres y marinas. Las áreas protegidas, definidas como un “área definida
geográficamente que haya sido designada, regulada y administrada a fin de alcanzar objetivos
específicos de conservación”, abarcan aproximadamente el 16% de la superficie terrestre del
Mundo.
Se espera que esta cifra se duplique en el marco de 30X30, una iniciativa global para proteger
el 30% de las tierras y los océanos del planeta de aquí a 2030.
Muchas áreas protegidas utilizan un modelo llamado conservación fortaleza, que se basa en la
creencia de que la mejor forma de crear estas zonas es sin la presencia humana.
Una vez que se establecen estas nuevas áreas protegidas, las comunidades indígenas sufren
desalojos y violencia por parte de “guardias ecológicos”. Desde 1990, hasta 250 000 personas
en todo el mundo han sido desalojadas de sus hogares para proyectos de conservación. En el
último siglo, cerca de 20 millones.
El Parque Nacional Yosemite
El Parque Nacional Yosemite en California fue uno de los primeros parques nacionales y un
modelo para el sistema de parques nacionales en los Estados Unidos y en todo el mundo.
El presidente Lincoln declaró Yosemite reserva federal en 1864, tras una guerra genocida
contra los Miwok que habían vivido en la región durante miles de años.
La guerra en el valle de Yosemite tuvo su origen en la fiebre del oro de California (1849-
1851), cuando decenas de miles de colonos invadieron la región en busca de riquezas. Como
consecuencia del así llamado genocidio de California, la población indígena de la zona se
redujo de unos 300 000 a solo 30 000 habitantes.
La invasión de los colonos en Yosemite desencadenó una serie de enfrentamientos que
culminaron en la Guerra Mariposa (1850-51). Para luchar contra los Miwok, el estado de
California financió una milicia, el Batallón Mariposa.
Tras una serie de sangrientas incursiones y batallas que causaron la muerte de docenas de
indígenas y la destrucción de sus aldeas, los Miwok se rindieron en mayo de 1851. La
mayoría de los supervivientes se vieron obligados a trasladarse a reservas fuera del valle de
Yosemite.
En 1890, el conservacionista John Muir lideró un movimiento que declaró el valle de
Yosemite parque nacional, allanando así el camino para todo el sistema de parques nacionales
de los Estados Unidos. Muir, que fue aclamado como héroe nacional, era un racista que
consideraba a los Miwok “extremadamente feos, y algunos de ellos completamente
repugnantes”. En una naturaleza tan pura como su sagrado Yosemite, “parecían no tener un
lugar adecuado en el paisaje y me alegré de verlos desvanecerse por el desfiladero”.
A pesar de su reubicación forzosa, algunos Miwok permanecieron en el valle de Yosemite o
regresaron más tarde, muchos de ellos trabajando en la industria turística. No obstante,
sufrieron repetidos desalojos en 1906, 1929 y 1969, cuando el Servicio de Parques
Nacionales demolió sus últimas viviendas.
En 2018, el Servicio de Parques concedió a los miembros de la tribu Miwok acceso a su
hogar ancestral dentro del parque, donde han construido una casa redonda tradicional y
cabañas para ceremonias culturales.
El Bosque de Protección Alto Mayo
El Bosque de Protección Alto Mayo, situado en el norte de la amazonia peruana, abarca unas
700 millas cuadradas y es el hogar de 72 comunidades indígenas Kichwa. Para los Kichwa, el
bosque sigue siendo un recurso importante para la caza, la pesca y la recolección de
Medicinas.
En 2001, Perú estableció el Parque Nacional Cordillera Azul, seguido cuatro años más tarde
por el Área de Conservación Regional Cordillera Escalera, ambos situados en territorio
tradicional Kichwa.
El gobierno actuó sin el consentimiento de los Kichwa ni consideración alguna a su conexión
ancestral con la tierra y reclamó el control exclusivo de los bosques, lo que provocó tensiones
y conflictos violentos.
En 2007, Conservación Internacional, junto con el Servicio Nacional de Áreas Naturales
Protegidas por el Estado de Perú, convirtió la región en un proyecto REDD-plus (Reducción
de Emisiones derivadas de la Deforestación y la Degradación de los bosques).
REDD-plus es un programa administrado por la ONU y el Banco Mundial que permite a
gobiernos, empresas agrícolas y comunidades vender créditos de carbono a cambio de evitar
la deforestación. El conflicto entre los Kichwa y el Estado se intensificó.
Entre los compradores figuran la empresa minera BHP, Microsoft, United Airlines y Gucci.
Hasta principios de 2023, se habían vendido más de 45 millones de dólares en
compensaciones de carbono. Walt Disney Co fue la mayor compradora, adquiriendo más de
la mitad.
Las selvas tropicales almacenan miles de millones de toneladas de dióxido de carbono en los
árboles y el suelo. Cuando los leñadores y agricultores talan el bosque, se libera carbono.
Corporaciones como Disney invierten en proyectos como REDD-plus para compensar sus
propias emisiones de carbono, como las que producen los cruceros de Disney.
Para animar a la población a no deforestar la tierra, Conservación Internacional ofrece a los
residentes “acuerdos de conservación”, que por ejemplo apoyan operaciones sostenibles de
Café.
Las rondas campesinas lideran la resistencia contra la apropiación de tierras Kichwa por parte
del gobierno. Estos grupos autónomos de autodefensa surgieron en la década de 1970, cuando
los campesinos indígenas se organizaron para defender sus tierras y comunidades.
Como parte de su campaña de autodefensa, las rondas han detenido y golpeado a policías y
guardabosques que intentaban desalojar a la población indígena. En 2018, el jefe regional de
Conservación Internacional se vio obligado a huir.
Hoy, los Kichwa continúan su lucha para defender su cultura y sus tierras.
El Parque Nacional Kahuzi-Biega
La República Democrática del Congo, o RDC, creó el Parque Nacional Kahuzi-Biega en
1970. Ocho años más tarde, lo amplió a las tierras bajas habitadas, forzando así la expulsión
de la población indígena Batwa. El gobierno utilizó repetidamente guardaparques armados y
soldados para llevar a cabo estos desalojos e incendiar las aldeas indígenas.
Los Batwa, un pueblo seminómada habitante del bosque, se han enfrentado durante décadas a
la desposesión, la pobreza, la desnutrición, enfermedades y tasas de mortalidad disparadas
como consecuencia de la expulsión de su tierra natal.
El parque fue declarado Patrimonio de la Humanidad por la Organización de las Naciones
Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (UNESCO) y empezó a recibir financiación
y apoyo de los Estados Unidos y Alemania, así como de organizaciones no gubernamentales,
entre las que destaca la Wildlife Conservation Society.
Con el tiempo, el parque se convirtió en una zona protegida militarizada y un destino
turístico, conocido por su amplia diversidad de especies de plantas, aves y animales.
Para asegurarse de que los indígenas no regresaran al parque, la RDC y las autoridades del
parque crearon una “unidad de intervención rápida”, una fuerza militarizada financiada y
equipada en parte por la Wildlife Conservation Society y provista de uniformes, radios,
tiendas de campaña, raciones y otras formas de ayuda no letal.
También contribuye a la militarización de la región la presencia de grupos rebeldes armados
que luchan contra el Estado por el control.
Después de años de negociaciones que apenas produjeron cambios, en octubre de 2018 varias
docenas de familias Batwa regresaron a los bosques y establecieron nuevas aldeas con
centros agrícolas y culturales.
Esta reocupación de sus tierras ancestrales fue recibida con rápida violencia por la RDC,
incluyendo tres grandes operaciones en 2019 y 2021 en las que guardaparques y soldados
atacaron a los Batwa con fusiles de asalto, morteros y lanzagranadas, matando y mutilando a
decenas de personas.
Las mujeres Batwa fueron violadas en grupo y niños quemados vivos en sus viviendas
mientras las tropas gubernamentales incendiaban las aldeas.
Cientos de Batwa han sido expulsados, pero muchos están regresando para reconstruir sus
aldeas, enfrentándose a la continua represión de las autoridades del parque y las fuerzas
Militares.
El objetivo de estas operaciones es preservar un espacio natural deshabitado para que los
turistas y conservacionistas puedan acceder y disfrutarlo, una práctica emblemática de la
estrategia de la conservación fortaleza.
Ante el plazo de siete años para proteger otro 14% de las áreas terrestres y marinas del
mundo, los líderes indígenas están preocupados: casi el 80% de la biodiversidad que aún
queda en el planeta se encuentra en territorios indígenas, que cubren una cuarta parte de la
superficie de la Tierra.
“Aunque ampliar las áreas protegidas al 30% es una meta loable, hasta ahora no se han dado
suficientes garantías a los pueblos indígenas de que se preservarán sus derechos en el
proceso”, dijo José Francisco Calí Tzay, que es Maya Kaqchikel y el Relator Especial de la
ONU sobre los derechos de los pueblos indígenas.
“Hay que atacar los verdaderos factores que fomentan el declive de la biodiversidad, como la
industrialización, el consumo excesivo y el cambio climático. El problema no se soluciona
ampliando la superficie mundial de áreas protegidas sin garantizar los derechos de los
pueblos indígenas que dependen de esas áreas”.
Descargue un PDF de La Conservación Fortaleza: Un Legado de Violencia.
Autor y artista: Gord Hill es el autor de tres novelas gráficas, Los 500 años de cómic de resistencia indígena, y El cómic de Antifa y El cómic de resistencia anticapitalista. Es miembro de la nación Kwakwaka’wakw, cuyo territorio se encuentra en el norte de la isla de Vancouver y el continente adyacente en la provincia de Columbia Británica. Ha estado involucrado en movimientos de pueblos indígenas, anti-fascistas y anti-globalización desde 1990. Vive en Alert Bay, BC.
Este proyecto fue apoyado por Bay & Paul Foundations
Editores: Tristan Ahtone & Chuck Squatriglia
Investigador: Tushar Khurana
Correctora: Kate Yoder
Traducción al español: Nathalie Herrmann
Traducción al francés: Leah Powers
Dirección de arte adicional: Mignon Khargie
Grist es una organización de medios independiente sin fines de lucro dedicada a contar historias sobre soluciones climáticas y un futuro justo.
To conserve Earth’s biodiversity, many countries are pushing to protect more lands and oceans. Protected areas, a “geographically defined area which is designated or regulated and managed to achieve specific conservation objectives,” comprise roughly 16 percent of the world’s land.
That number is expected to double under 30X30, a global initiative to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030.
Many protected areas utilize a model called fortress conservation, which is based on the belief that such locations are best created without the presence of humans.
Once established, newly protected areas force Indigenous communities to face evictions and violence at the hands of eco-guards. Since 1990, up to 250,000 people worldwide have been evicted from their homes for conservation projects. In the last century, close to 20 million.
Yosemite National Park
Yosemite National Park in California was one of the first national parks created and a model for the national park system in the U.S. and globally.
President Lincoln declared Yosemite a federal land preserve in 1864 after a genocidal war against the Miwoks who had lived in the region for thousands of years.
The war in Yosemite Valley had its origins in the California Gold Rush (1849-1851), when tens of thousands of settlers invaded the region in search of riches. Referred to as the California Genocide, the population of Indigenous peoples in the area plummeted from an estimated 300,000 to just 30,000.
The invasion of settlers in Yosemite sparked a series of confrontations, which culminated in the Mariposa War (1850-51). To fight the Miwoks, the state of California funded a militia, the Mariposa Battalion.
After a series of bloody raids and battles that saw dozens of Natives killed and their villages destroyed, the Miwoks surrendered in May 1851. Most of the survivors were forced to relocate onto reservations outside Yosemite Valley.
In 1890, conservationist John Muir led a movement that established Yosemite Valley as a national park, paving the way for the entire U.S. national park system. Hailed as a national hero, Muir was a racist who viewed the Miwoks as “most ugly, and some of them altogether hideous.” For a wilderness as pure as his holy Yosemite, “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass.”
Despite their forced relocation, some Miwoks remained in Yosemite Valley or later returned, with many working in the tourism industry. Still, they faced subsequent evictions in 1906, 1929, and 1969, when the National Park Service dismantled their last homes.
In 2018, the park service granted Miwok tribal members access to their ancestral home inside the park, where they’ve built a traditional roundhouse and lodges for cultural ceremonies.
Alto Mayo forest
Alto Mayo forest in Northern Peru’s Amazon rainforest region covers about 700 square miles and is home to 72 Kichwa Indigenous communities. For the Kichwa, the forest remains an important resource for hunting, fishing, and gathering medicines.
In 2001, Peru established the Cordillera Azul National Park, followed four years later by the Cordillera Escalera Regional Conservation Area, both of which are within traditional Kichwa territory.
The government acted without the consent of the Kichwa, or any consideration to their ancestral connection to the land, and claimed exclusive control over the forests, sparking tensions and violent conflict.
Then, in 2007, Conservation International, together with Peru’s National Service for Natural Protected Areas Protected by the State, made the region a REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) project.
REDD+ is a U.N.- and World Bank-managed program that allows governments, agribusinesses, and communities to sell carbon credits in exchange for preventing deforestation. The conflict between the Kichwa and the state intensified.
Buyers include the mining corporation BHP, Microsoft, United Airlines, and Gucci. By 2023, more than $45 million in carbon offsets had been sold. Walt Disney Co. was the biggest buyer, snapping up more than half of them.
Rainforests store billions of tons of carbon dioxide in trees and soil. As loggers and farmers clear forest, they release carbon. Corporations like Disney invest in projects like REDD+ to offset their own carbon emissions, such as those produced by Disney’s cruise ships.
To encourage people not to clear-cut land, Conservation International offers residents “conservation agreements,” some of which include supporting sustainable coffee operations.
The rondas campesinas are leading the resistance against the government’s appropriation of Kichwa land. The autonomous self-defense groups originated in the 1970s, when Indigenous peasants organized to defend their lands and communities.
As part of their self-defense campaign, rondas have detained and beaten police and rangers who attempted to evict people. In 2018, the regional head of Conservation International was forced to flee.
Today, the Kichwa continue their struggle to defend their culture and lands.
Kahuzi-Biega National Park
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, established Kahuzi-Biega National Park in 1970. It expanded the park eight years later to include inhabited lowland areas, forcing the expulsion of the Batwa Indigenous peoples. The government has repeatedly employed armed park guards and soldiers to carry out these evictions, burning villages to the ground.
The Batwa, a semi-nomadic forest-dwelling people, faced decades of dispossession, poverty, malnutrition, disease, and skyrocketing mortality rates as a result of expulsion from their homeland.
The park was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, and began receiving funding and support from the U.S. and Germany as well as non-governmental organizations, primarily the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Over time, the park became a militarized protected area and tourist destination, renowned for its wide diversity of plant, bird, and animal species.
To ensure that Indigenous peoples did not return to the park, the DRC and park authorities established a “rapid intervention unit” — a militarized force funded and equipped in part by the Wildlife Conservation Society and provided with uniforms, radios, tents, rations, and other non-lethal aid.
Contributing to the militarization in the region is the presence of armed rebel groups fighting the state for control.
After years of negotiations that resulted in little change, several dozen Batwa families returned to the forests and reestablished villages along with agricultural and cultural centers in October 2018.
This reoccupation of their ancestral homelands was met with swift violence by the DRC, including three major operations in 2019 and 2021, during which park guards and soldiers attacked the Batwa with assault rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades, killing and maiming dozens of people.
Batwa women were subjected to group rape and children were burned alive in their homes as government forces burned their villages to the ground.
Hundreds of Batwa were expelled, but many are returning to rebuild their villages and face ongoing repression by park authorities and military forces.
The aim of these operations is to maintain an uninhabited wilderness to be accessed and enjoyed by tourists and conservationists, a practice emblematic of the “fortress conservation” strategy.
And with a seven-year deadline to protect another 14 percent of the world’s lands and oceans, Indigenous leaders are worried: Nearly 80 percent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity is located within Indigenous territories, which make up a quarter of Earth’s surface area.
“While the expansion of protected areas to 30 per cent is a laudable target, not enough assurances have been given so far to indigenous peoples that their rights will be preserved in the process,” said José Francisco Calí Tzay, who is Maya Kaqchikel and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples.
“Real drivers of biodiversity decline, such as industrialization, overconsumption, and climate change, must be addressed. Simply enlarging the global protected area surface without ensuring the rights of indigenous peoples dependent on those areas is not the solution.”
Download a PDF of Fortress Conservation: A Legacy of Violence.
Author and artist: Gord Hill is the author of two graphic novels, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book and The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book. He is a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation whose territory is located on northern Vancouver Island and adjacent mainland in the province of British Columbia. He has been involved in Indigenous people’s and anti-globalization movements since 1990. He lives in Vancouver.
This project was supported by the Bay & Paul Foundations
By protecting Indigenous territories in the Amazon, more than 15 million respiratory and cardiovascular-related illnesses, like asthma and lung cancer, could be avoided each year and almost $2 billion dollars in health costs saved. That’s according to a new study in Nature.
The decade-long study looked at the health impacts of wildfires in the Amazon and the amount of dangerous particles absorbed by the rainforest. It found the Amazon can absorb nearly 26,000 metric tons of dangerous particles released each year with Indigenous territories responsible for absorbing nearly 27 percent of that pollution.
Rainforest foliage acts as a biofilter for air pollution and improves air quality by reducing the concentration of pollutants produced by fires, like dust, soot and smoke. According to researchers, ecosystems with less trees, greenspace and organic protection from airborne pollutants, like cities, see higher rates of health disparities, including general respiratory irritation, bronchitis, and heart attacks.
In the Brazilian Amazon, wildfires are often set by cattle ranchers, illegal miners, and other land-grabbers working to expand their businesses, exacerbating deforestation and threatening Indigenous territories. In 2020, land conflicts in Brazil hit 1,576 cases – the highest number ever recorded by the Catholic Church-affiliated Pastoral Land Commission since it first began keeping records in 1985.
Researchers found that the particles released by those fires traveled hundreds of miles to distant cities, penetrating the tiny sacs in the lungs and passing directly into residents’ bloodstreams.
The study concluded that protecting Indigenous territories from wildfires and land grabs could help prevent thousands of diseases. Research suggests that when Indigenous peoples are given financial and legal support for land management, as well as property rights, forests have better outcomes.
Under former president Jair Bolsonaro’s four year administration, deforestation in the Amazon rose 56 percent with about 13,000 square miles of the land destroyed. While Indigenous peoples have lost an estimated 965 square miles of their traditional territories due to Bolsonaro’s policies.
Indigenous leaders are urging current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to follow through on promises he made during his campaigning to create new Indigenous reservations in the Amazon and continue reversing his predecessor’s policies.
“This study reinforces what Indigenous peoples have been saying for ages,” Dinamam Tuxa, executive coordinator of the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples told the Agence France-Presse.
“It demonstrates the importance of our territories in fighting dangerous pollution … and climate change.”
The privately owned land, outside Goldendale, Washington, is called Pushpum, or “mother of roots,” a first foods seed bank. The Yakama people have treaty-protected gathering rights there. One wind turbine-studded ridge, Juniper Point, is the proposed site of a pumped hydro storage facility. But to build it, Boston-based Rye Development would have to carve up Pushpum — and the Yakama Nation lacks a realistic way to stop it.
Back in October 2008, unbeknownst to Takala, Scott Tillman, CEO of Golden Northwest Aluminum Corporation, met with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a collection of governor-appointed representatives from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana who maintain a 20-year regional energy plan prioritizing low economic and environmental tolls. Tillman, who owned a shuttered Lockheed Martin aluminum smelter near Goldendale, told the council about the contaminated site’s redevelopment potential, specifically for pumped hydro storage, which requires a steep incline like Juniper Point to move water through a turbine. Shortly thereafter, Klickitat County’s public utility department tried to implement Tillman’s plan, but hit a snag in the federal regulatory process. That’s when Rye Development stepped in.
“We’re committed to at least a $10 million portion of the cleanup of the former aluminum smelter,” said Erik Steimle, Rye’s vice president of project development, “an area that is essentially sitting there now that wouldn’t be cleaned up in that capacity without this project.”
Meanwhile, Tillman cleaned up and sold another smelting site, just across the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon, a Superfund site where Lockheed Martin had poisoned the groundwater with cyanide. He sold it to Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which operates water-guzzling data centers in The Dalles and plans to build more. For nine years, the county and Rye plotted the fate of Pushpum — without ever notifying the Yakama Nation.
The tribal government only learned of the development in December 2017, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a public notice of acceptance for Rye’s preliminary permit application. Tribal officials had just 60 days to catch up on nine years of development planning and issue their initial concerns and objections as public comments.
When it came time for government-to-government consultation in August 2021, FERC designated Rye as its representative. But the Yakama Nation refused to consult with the corporation. “The tribe’s treaty was between the U.S. government and the tribe. We’re two sovereigns,” said Elaine Harvey, environmental coordinator at Yakama Nation Fisheries, who’s been heavily involved with the project. “We’re supposed to deal with the state.”
FERC countered that using corporate stand-ins for tribal consultation is standard practice for the commission. When the tribe objected, FERC said it could file more public comments to the docket instead of consulting.
At least 60 percent of the proposed wind and solar projects in Washington are on the Yakama Nation’s ceded lands.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
But sensitive cultural information was involved, which, by Yakama tribal law, cannot be made public. Takala noted, for example, that Yakama people don’t want non-Natives harvesting and marketing first foods the way commercial pickers market huckleberries: “That has an impact for our people as well, trying to save up for the winter.” The tribe needs confidentiality to protect its cultural resources.
There’s just one catch: Rule 2201. According to FERC, Rule 2201 legally prohibits the agency from engaging in off-the-record communications in a contested proceeding. Records of all consultations must be made available to the public and other stakeholders, including prospective developers and county officials. Who wrote Rule 2201? FERC did.
“Nevertheless,” FERC wrote to the Yakama Nation in December 2021, “the Commission endeavors, to the extent authorized by law, to reduce procedural impediments to working directly and effectively with tribal governments.” FERC said the nation could either relay any sensitive information in a confidential file — though that information “must be shared with at least some participants in the proceeding” — or else keep it confidential by simply not sharing it at all, in which case FERC would proceed without taking it into account. So formal federal consultation still hasn’t happened. But FERC is moving forward anyway.
“It’s important for First Nations to be heard in this process,” said Steimle, the developer. During a two-hour tour of the site, he championed the project’s technical merits and its role in meeting state carbon goals. “If you look at Europe at this point, it’s probably 20 years ahead of us integrating large amounts of renewables.”
Steimle repeatedly described Rye as weighed down by stringent consultation and licensing processes. Rye, he said, lacks real authority: “We don’t have the power in the situation to ultimately decide, you know, it’s going to be this technology, or it’s going to be in this final location.” Becky Brun, Rye’s communications director, echoed Steimle’s tone of inevitability: “Regardless of what happens here with this pumped storage project, this land will most certainly get redeveloped into something.”
When asked what Rye could offer the Yakama people as compensation for the irreversible destruction of their cultural property, Steimle suggested “employment associated with the project.”
Takala wasn’t surprised. “That’s always the first thing offered on many of these projects. It’s all about money.”
Presented with the reality that Yakama people might not want Rye’s jobs, Steimle hesitated. “Yeah, I mean I, I can’t argue that — maybe it won’t be meaningful to them.”
But for Klickitat County, the jobs pitch works: It’s a chance to revive employment lost when the smelter closed. “That was one of the largest employers in Klickitat County — very good family-wage jobs for over a generation,” said Dave Sauter, a longtime county commissioner who finished his final term at the end of 2022. The smelter’s closing was “a huge blow,” he said. “Redevelopment of that site would be really beneficial.”
Sauter acknowledged the pumped hydro storage facility would only provide about a third of the jobs that the smelter offered in its final days, but “it will lead to other energy development in Klickitat County.” The county, with its armada of aging wind turbines and proximity to the hydroelectric grid, prides itself on being one of the greenest energy producers in the state and has asked FERC for an expedited timeline.
Klickitat County’s eagerness creates another barrier to the Yakama Nation. In Washington, a developer can take one of two permitting paths: through the state’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, or through county channels. Both lead to FERC. In this case, working with the county benefits Rye: Klickitat, a majority Republican county, has a contentious relationship with the Yakama Nation, one that even Sauter described as “challenging.”
“Klickitat County refuses to work with us,” said Takala. On Sept. 19, 2022, Harvey logged into a Zoom meeting with the Klickitat County Planning Department to deliver comments as a private citizen. Harvey says county officials, who know her from her work with the Yakama Nation, locked her out of the Zoom room, even though the meeting was open to the public and a friend of hers confirmed that the call was working and the meeting underway. Undeterred, Harvey attended in person and delivered her comments.
The Planning Department denied that Harvey was deliberately locked out, claiming that everyone who arrived on Zoom was admitted. They also said they were having technical difficulties.
Fighting Rye’s proposal has required the efforts of tribal attorneys, archaeologists and government staffers from a number of departments. “Finding the staff to do site location is very difficult when we don’t have the funds put forth,” Takala said.
And Rye’s project is just one of dozens proposed within the Yakama Nation’s 10 million-acre treaty territory. Maps from the tribe and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife show that of the 51 wind and solar projects currently proposed statewide — not including geothermal or pumped hydro storage projects, which are also renewable energy developments — at least 34 are on or partially on the Yakama Nation’s ceded lands. Each of these proposals has its own constellation of developers, permitting agencies, government officials and landowners.
“There’s so many projects being proposed in the area that we here at the nation are feeling the pressure,” said Takala. He noted that when it comes to fulfilling obligations to tribes, the United States drags its feet. “But when it’s a developer, things get pushed through really quickly. It’s pretty much a repeating history all over again.”
For nearly a decade, tribal leaders in Arizona have fought to save Oak Flat – a sacred site central to the religious practices of the San Carlos Apache and other Indigenous nations connected to the area. Now, the site’s fate rests with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, who is weighing whether mining copper in the area, and effectively destroying the site, violates the religious rights of local Indigenous peoples.
Religious groups including: Seventh-day Adventists, the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team of the Religious Freedom Institute, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Christian Legal Society, Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, and the Sikh Coalition, have banded together to support the Apache and filed briefs as part of their advocacy.
Located about 40 miles from Phoenix, Oak Flat sits atop the third-largest deposit of copper ore in the world. In 2014, Arizona Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake authored legislation to transfer Oak Flat from Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, a British-Australian company owned by Rio Tinto and BHP. For nearly a decade, tribal leaders have fought to keep the ceremonial grounds free from mining projects and other disturbances.
The company, which is known to mine iron ore, copper, lithium, aluminum and other materials, has previously been accused of desecrating Indigenous lands. In 2020, the mining company destroyed Juukan Gorge, a 46,000 year-old Aboriginal heritage site in Australia. Rio Tinto’s mining of copper and gold in the Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia have also raised concerns with local herdsmen. The company says the copper at Oak Flat will be used for electric vehicles, smartphones and MRI scanners.
Oak Flat has been used as a religious site to connect Indigenous peoples to their Creator, faith, families and natural world since before colonization and European contact, said Wendsler Nosie, the former chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the head of Apache Stronghold to the Arizona Republic.
“While we cherish different religious convictions, we are united in our commitment to defend religious freedom. This case holds implications beyond its effect on Native American Worship,” one brief contained.
According to the Arizona Republic, Rio Tinto says mining at Oak Flat would bring 3,700 jobs and $1 billion annually to Arizona’s economy.
In 1849 and 1868, the Navajo Nation signed two treaties with the United States. The treaties created a reservation that would serve as a “permanent home” for the Navajo so long as the tribe allowed settlers to live on most of its traditional territory, which include much of what is currently New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. The treaties also established that the government would provide the Navajo with “seeds and agricultural implements” to raise crops on the reservation.
After 20 years of litigation, representatives for the Navajo Nation appeared before the Supreme Court on Monday to argue that those treaties require the federal government to provide water to their reservation, likely from the much-contested Colorado River. On the opposing side were lawyers for the Biden administration and a group of western states, who argued that a decision in favor of the Navajo Nation would upend the legal landscape around the Colorado River at a time when states are already scrambling to cope with drought. The outcome of the case could determine the future of water access on the Navajo reservation.
“If the Supreme Court agrees with the Biden administration that there’s no judicially enforceable obligation to do anything with water, that would be a seriously consequential and very damaging decision,” said Jay Weiner, water counsel for the Quechan Indian Tribe of the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation.
The two-hour argument session in Arizona v. Navajo Nationhinged on several questions that appeared to divide the nine-member court down the middle, leaving the scope and direction of the justices’ final decisions unclear. If the Navajo win, they will have a narrow but workable path to secure a significant water settlement on the Colorado River, but if they lose, their litigation over the river will come to an end, forcing them to look elsewhere for a solution to decades of water access problems.
The Navajo reservation straddles New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, and a large part of the territory, which is roughly the size of West Virginia, borders the Colorado River. But the Navajo Nation doesn’t have rights to take water from the river. The tribe can pump groundwater and take some water from the river’s tributaries, but it lacks the infrastructure to provide water to its citizens, and as a result, many parts of the reservation face serious water access issues. Many tribal citizens rely on deliveries of bottled water for basic health needs and use, on average, seven gallons of water per day – around one-twentieth of the daily amount that residents of neighboring Arizona use.
“For the better part of a century and a half, development in the west has historically and systemically underfunded and disregarded tribal nations,” Weiner said. “Billions of dollars for infrastructure projects of all kinds have gone to off-reservation communities at the expense of marginalized tribes. “
The question before the Supreme Court on Monday was whether the United States’s treaties with the Navajo Nation requires it to find more water for the tribe. The Court ruled in a landmark 1908 case called Winters that when the government creates an Indian reservation, it accepts an obligation to deliver water to that reservation for agricultural use. The Navajo argue that the government has failed to meet that obligation. While the tribe has limited access to water from a few Colorado River tributaries, much of the reservation borders the Colorado River’s main stem, and the tribe argues that it should have rights to use that water.
At least four justices seemed to find the Navajo Nation’s argument persuasive. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who often sides with his three liberal colleagues on Indigenous issues, pressed the government’s lawyer, Frederick Liu on the question of the government’s obligations.
“Clearly there is a duty to provide some water to this tribe under the treaty right now,” he said to Liu. “What am I missing?” The court’s three liberal justices echoed Gorsuch’s line of reasoning about the treaty, as did conservative Amy Coney Barrett, indicating a potential majority in the Navajo’s favor.
The problem for the Navajo Nation is that if the United States meets the obligations of Winters, the delivery of water to Navajo citizens would clash with other realms of water law. Since the Supreme Court already allocated all the water in the lower Colorado River decades ago, fulfilling the Navajo Nation’s treaty rights might require it to take water away from one or more of the seven states that use the river.
Nancy Bitsue, an elderly member of the Navajo Nation, receives her monthly water delivery in the town of Thoreau, New Mexico, in the Navajo Nation. Due to disputed water rights and other factors, up to 40 percent of Navajo Nation households don’t have clean running water.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
In an amicus brief filed ahead of the arguments, a group of irrigators and farming organizations from across the West argued that such a move would destabilize the western water system, writing that giving the Navajo water “would necessarily come at the expense of existing allocation holders” which “would have severe negative consequences for Arizona,” which has junior rights to the river. Justice Alito, part of the Court’s six-member conservative bloc, parroted that argument in his questioning.
“What would be the impact on access to water by people who don’t live on reservations?” he asked Liu. The other conservative justices pressed the lawyer for the Navajo Nation, Shay Dvoretzky, about what forms of relief the nation was seeking, and whether the U.S. would have an obligation to construct pipelines or other infrastructure to satisfy the tribe’s Winters rights.
Weiner said there are a wide range of potential verdicts: five votes in support of the Navajo nation could reflect a “robust and profound” reaffirmation of tribal water rights, or it could look like a narrower affirmation of the tribe’s treaty rights with limited implications for the Navajo Nation and Indian Country more broadly. This wouldn’t give the Navajo any new water rights, but would only mean that the tribe could continue to litigate for their water rights in a lower court, where the Biden administration and western states will be sure to keep fighting back. Even if that litigation ends up being successful, obtaining water will require drawn-out settlement negotiations with states like Arizona, plus the construction of significant new infrastructure, likely on a decades-long timeline.
If a majority of justices side with the Biden administration and the states, Weiner says the question in the case will be how much damage the court could to tribal rights. The “least damaging” decision against the Navajo would put an end to the Nation’s decades-long campaign for water rights from the Colorado River main stem; it would still be possible for the Nation to develop new infrastructure to pump groundwater, for instance, but its fight to secure new water rights would be over for the foreseeable future. A broader decision against the Navajo could have implications for future Winters litigation.
“It’s a very significant case because it really has the potential to affect not just the Navajo Nation and not just water rights, but really the entire body of law that affects how and whether tribes can hold the United States to account for treaty-based promises,” Weiner said.
For decades, Sam Kunaknana has caught grayling and hunted caribou along Fish Creek, a small river that meanders over the open Alaskan tundra near the Iñupiaq community of Nuiqsut. Kunaknana sets nets for broad whitefish, jigs for grayling, and waits for the caribou, which he remembers ambling in large herds across the muskeg years ago. Roughly three-quarters of the residents of Nuiqsut, which sits in the center of Alaska’s North Slope some 20 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, mostly eat foods harvested from the wild.
But in recent years, living off the land has gotten harder for Kunaknana, who’s 55 years old. Nuiqsut has slowly been encircled by oil wells and pipelines. “I could see development coming, as a kid, from the east,” Kunaknana said. Then the drill rigs crept north along Nuiqsut’s horizon. And now they are moving west.
Sam Kunaknana points out oil development as he steers his skiff down the Colville River near Nuiqsut in July 2019. Grist / Max Graham
When the Biden administration greenlit ConocoPhillips’s Willow project last week, it set in motion a long-awaited but fraught expansion of Arctic drilling. The project, set within 23 million acres of largely undeveloped public land called the National Petroleum Reserve, will extend Conoco’s oil fields around Nuiqsut by tens of miles and lead to the construction of roads, bridges, and a drilling site near Fish Creek. By the time it’s finished, Willow could produce 600 million barrels of oil over 30 years, which would translate into 239 million metric tons of carbon emissions if it’s all burned, according to an estimate by the federal government. Labeled by climate advocates as a “carbon bomb” but seen by Alaska’s congressional delegation as a ticket to U.S. energy independence, Willow has sparked a national controversy over the tension between the country’s domestic oil supply and the Biden administration’s climate policy.
But Kunaknana and elected officials at the City of Nuiqsut and the Native Village of Nuiqsut are worried about what the Willow development means for their future. Nuiqsut is the Iñupiaq village closest to the roads, bridges, pipelines, gravel mines, and trucks that come with oil development on the North Slope. In a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland earlier this month, local elected officials called their area “ground zero for the industrialization of the Arctic.” That proximity to fossil fuel extraction has long troubled residents. A major natural gas leak occurred last year at a ConocoPhillips pad just eight miles from the town, prompting the company to evacuate 300 employees. “It was really scary,” said Martha Itta, a former tribal administrator of the Native Village of Nuiqsut.
On the North Slope, the announcement inflamed a longstanding debate between those keen on fueling the region’s oil-dependent economy and those seeking to preserve the land, water, and wildlife that have sustained Iñupiaq people and their ancestors for millennia. “If they don’t get policies in place to protect our lifestyle, our heritage and our tradition — it’s going to go away,” Kunaknana said.
Many Iñupiaq leaders cheered the Biden administration’s move. There’s a “majority consensus” in favor of Willow among the North Slope residents, according to Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, a regional advocacy group. Oil revenue funds local governments as well as dividends to shareholders in the region’s Indigenous-owned corporations. According to an Alaska Department of Revenue analysis, Willow could put more than $1 billion into the coffers of the North Slope’s regional government and generate nearly $4 billion for local villages by 2053. About 95 percent of the North Slope Borough’s property tax revenue — some $400 million — comes from the oil and gas industry, including ConocoPhillips. The company produced 48 million barrels of oil on the North Slope last year, according to state data, and earned more than $2 billion from its Alaska operations.
Itta was the tribal government’s administrator in 2012, when mud and brown smoke blew out of a well operated by Repsol, a Spanish company, on the tundra 18 miles from Nuiqsut. Itta has been worried about the effects of the oil fields on tribal members’ health ever since.
“I’m upset [Willow] went through,” Itta said. “They are slowly depleting our subsistence. I myself am a hunter and fisherman, all year long. And it’s still not enough. I’m a single mother, and the store costs are way too high. Sometimes I can’t afford to go to the store.”
A half rack of soda at the only grocery store in town costs $17, Kunaknana said. A small carton of shelf-stable milk sells for $5. Replacing all the fish, game, and foraged foods people in Nuiqsut rely on with store-bought goods could cost households $30,000 a year, according to local officials.
In its decision this week, the Bureau of Land Management acknowledged that “cumulative effects” of current and future oil development may “significantly” restrict opportunities to harvest food by lowering the number of caribou in popular hunting areas and limiting access for hunters. As a mitigation measure, the project incorporates, among other things, construction of three new boat ramps for local hunters and fishermen. More broadly, Willow is expected to generate $2.5 billion for a federal grant program that funds an array of initiatives, from monitoring geese on the tundra to upgrading Nuiqsut’s playground.
Sam Kunaknana readies his fish net along the Colville River near Nuiqsut in July 2019.
Grist / Max Graham
Executives at Nuiqsut’s Alaska Native corporation, Kuukpik, see the final project as a compromise after five years of planning. It “strikes an appropriate balance between the need to develop oil and gas resources and ensuring that Nuiqsut residents can continue to practice subsistence for generations to come,” Kuukpik representatives wrote in a letter to Halaand in February. They praised BLM’s intention to scale down the project’s original plans for five drill sites — rectangular gravel pads big enough to fit up to 80 wells apiece. BLM ultimately approved three pads. (Representatives from Kuukpik did not return requests for comment.)
Nuiqsut’s elected leaders, meanwhile, aren’t convinced that the proposed measures will protect caribou and fish. “We have gone through process after process, and the agency is always designing new mitigation, but the facts about what has happened to us and our land over this period are indisputable: the infrastructure has surrounded us, the caribou have left our traditional hunting grounds, and our mental and physical health has deteriorated,” local officials said in the letter sent earlier this month.
Within hours of the Biden administration’s decision, ConocoPhillips moved to build roads along the ice to the project, Alaska’s biggest in decades. Willow’s supporters say the oil extracted from the company’s 200 proposed wells will significantly boost flow in the trans-Alaska pipeline, which now carries less than a quarter of the 2 million barrels a day it once did. But experts told Grist last week that the project could lose money for Alaska’s state government in the short term. Moreover, a Grist investigation last year found that melting permafrost is an obstacle for Conoco, as Arctic warming could cause ground to buckle beneath Willow’s roads, rigs, and pipelines.
Kunaknana is skeptical of government and corporate assurances about the project. He sees fewer caribou close to town than he once did, and not as many fish swim into his net. Even when he catches some, they are increasingly sick with a mysterious disease, he added. “I was born into this subsistence way of life. I rely on this food,” Kunaknana said. “We’re just slowly being dissected away. Our culture is being dissected away.”
The United States government is redoubling its efforts to restore bison populations to Native American lands.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released an order last week establishing a six-member federal working group on American bison restoration. The group, which will be composed of representatives from five federal agencies and one tribal leader, is charged with creating a “shared stewardship plan” by the end of the year to increase bison populations on lands managed by the federal government and tribal nations.
“The American bison is inextricably intertwined with Indigenous culture, grassland ecology, and American history,” Haaland said in a statement. Her agency also announced some $25 million from President Joe Biden’s landmark climate spending bill for bison conservation. Among other projects, the money will support native plant restoration and prescribed burns — controlled fires that are lit intentionally to make landscapes more resistant to runaway wildfires.
Haaland’s order is part of a century-long effort to bring bison back from the brink of extinction. Before European colonizers arrived in North America, bison numbered in the tens of millions, but they were decimated in the 1800s by hunting and a U.S. policy of extermination designed to deprive tribes of a critical food source. One American colonel is said to have told his troopsin 1867: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”
Bisons’ near-extinction also degraded grassland ecosystems, contributing to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s — an environmental catastrophe in which severe dust storms swept across the southern plains and caused widespread crop failure. Conservation efforts since then have helped grow bison numbers from a low of less than 500, but their population in the wild is still only a tiny fraction of the roughly 60 million it once was. In its announcement of the new restoration plan, the Interior Department said bison remain “functionally extinct.”
To bring more bison back, the Interior Department’s order calls for conservation based on the best available science as well as Indigenous knowledge and management techniques. It’s one of several recent actions from the Biden administration to prioritize Indigenous culture and expertise, including new consultation requirements for federal agencies whose policies could impact tribes. At a summit last fall, the Biden administration announced new guidelines for federal agencies to recognize and include Indigenous knowledge in their research and decision-making, as well as new efforts to revitalize Native languages.
The bison initiative could cause a clash with lawmakers in places like Montana, where Republicans — supported by ranchers — have opposed calls for bison restoration. Tribal members, however, have cheered the Interior Department’s efforts. “The buffalo has just as long a connection to Indigenous people as we have to it,” Troy Heinert, director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council and a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, told the Associated Press. “They are not just a number or a commodity; this is returning a relative to its rightful place.”
Environmental advocates also applauded the initiative as a climate solution: By stomping the soil with their hooves, bison help push native grasses’ seeds into the ground, breaking up the soil to make way for new growth. Their manure also serves as a natural fertilizer, fostering healthy grasslands that sequester carbon dioxide.
A sandy bluff towers above the beach in Dillingham, Alaska. Every year, Alaska Native resident Ken Shade watches as a little more of his land falls over the edge, into the sea.
Dillingham is just one example of a small Alaskan town with a big erosion problem. Around the state, dozens of coastal communities are watching their coastlines crumble, losing at least 3 feet of land per year. Critical infrastructure such as airport runways, fuel tanks, and schools are in danger. Many Alaska Natives have been hard hit: Now, with climate change altering weather patterns, melting permafrost, and reducing sea ice, the land these communities are built on is falling into the sea.
Shade has already moved his house farther away from the bluff once, about 25 years ago, to save it from falling over the edge. The process took him a whole summer. After digging around the foundation and jacking up the house, he slid the building onto a trailer built out of old car axles, then dragged the whole thing using heavy machinery. His neighbor, a mechanic, took a different approach and tried to stabilize the bluff by building a wall in front of it using dozens of old cars. “It doesn’t work too well,” Shade said. Now when he sets out fishing nets, he catches car parts along with the salmon.
Other parts of town are also losing ground fast. The earth in front of Dillingham’s sewage lagoon — two open-air cells that hold the city’s wastewater — is receding at a rate of about 16 feet per year. Meanwhile, a mass grave containing victims of tuberculosis and the 1918 flu pandemic is slowly falling out of the bluff and onto the beach below.
“There’s just multiple issues everywhere,” said Dillingham city planner Patty Buholm.
Some communities have moved because of erosion. But the process can cost upwards of $100 million and involves giving up traditional land. Ways of stabilizing the ground, and letting communities stay in place, are sorely needed.
The classic strategy is to build a large, rigid structure, such as a seawall or a revetment (i.e., a pile of boulders) between the water and the eroding land. Such structures have stabilized many Alaskan coastlines by shielding them from waves, but they’re fantastically expensive (think millions of dollars) and it can be difficult to transport the construction materials to remote locations.
What’s more, these techniques were developed in temperate regions. Some engineers think they’re likely to fail Alaska in the long term because they ignore a problem unique to cold regions: As permafrost melts, the land is turning to mush. Seawalls that were once along the coast may end up in the middle of the ocean as the land adjacent to them sinks and retreats.
“We’re really up against a big challenge,” said Thomas Ravens, a civil engineer at the University of Alaska at Anchorage.
The extent of the erosion problem is well known, but much less has been said about how to fix it. Ravens and others are looking for solutions that could work for Alaska’s cold climate and dispersed population. Some of their ideas involve holding the ground firm, even as the Earth warms, while others let the ground move in a controlled way or emphasize adapting to rapid change. The field is still in its infancy, but one thing is certain: With 83 percent of Alaska’s population living on the coast, updated strategies for dealing with erosion can’t come soon enough.
Keeping permafrost frozen could go a long way toward stabilizing Alaska. One option is to use thermosiphons: Large tubes planted with one end in the ground and the other end sticking up into the air. Heat from the ground causes a liquid within the tube to evaporate into gas and rise to the top of the tube, taking heat with it. If the air is cold enough, the gas will condense back into a liquid and fall back to the bottom of the tube.
The process repeats, drawing heat out of the bluff each time the gas cycles and keeping the permafrost frozen. Thermosiphons have stabilized inland sites, including the Trans-Alaska pipeline and the Fairbanks airport, and Ravens is applying for $3 million of funding to see if their benefits can translate to Alaska’s northern coastline.
Ken Stable’s neighbor tried a different approach to the eroding bluff; he made a barrier of old cars.
Chris Maio
Sometimes the air isn’t cold enough to make the gas in thermosiphons condense, but an air-conditioning system can cool the gas instead. And if the system is solar-powered, the panels could play a dual role: In addition to powering the air conditioner, solar panels could protect permafrost by shading the ground. Ravens appreciates the idea of turning the sun’s energy on its head and using it to keep ice frozen. “It’s almost, like, poetic,” he said.
“Thermosiphons cost a lot,” said civil engineer Min Liew of Ohio State University. So they can’t be the only solution to erosion. Another possibility is to find ways to bind grains of coastal soil without permafrost. Indigenous hunting practices might hold the key: Spots on beaches where hunters process marine mammals seem to be resistant to erosion. Ravens thinks the oils that seep from the mammals into the ground might stabilize the soil. He wonders whether waste cooking oil can do the same thing. If so, it might be possible to isolate the component of the oil that’s responsible and apply it to beaches.
Naturally occurring soil bacteria can also harden soil, if they’re given a bit of a push. Scientists have found a way of mimicking the natural process through which sandstone is formed, but at a greatly accelerated rate. Rather than taking thousands of years for sand to become stone, “in our work, we do that actually in a few days,” said Mohamed Shahin, a geotechnical engineer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
It works like so: A certain category of bacteria, called “urease bacteria,” can use a chemical called urea as a source of nutrients. As they break down urea, the bacteria also secrete charged molecules as byproducts. These charged molecules interact with calcium in the soil to make a natural glue that holds sand grains together. Even a little bit of glue can make a beach much harder for waves to move, said geotechnical engineer Alexandra Saracho of the University of Texas at Austin.
In many places, urease bacteria and calcium are naturally prevalent. Adding urea to the soil would kick off the process of sandstone formation. And urea is a component of another common substance: urine.
In the future, Saracho envisions communities using filters to purify and concentrate urea from wastewater, then using that urea to reduce erosion. “You kind of can stabilize your own foundation,” she said. There are a couple of sticking points. First, the glue dissolves in acidic soil, so some regions might not have the right soil chemistry for the technique to work. And second, when bacteria produce glue, they also form a chemical compound called ammonia — the same compound that can kill aquarium fish if the water isn’t changed regularly. Researchers are testing methods for flushing ammonia out of treated soil, Saracho said, but these methods are still under development.
Instead of holding firm, sometimes it’s better to go with the flow. For Alaska, that could mean portable housing, said Tobias Schwoerer, a natural resource economist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He’s envisioning light structures that could be picked up with a Chinook helicopter and moved to a new location when the old location crumbles away. Schwoerer sees portable housing as a modern way of returning to the traditional lifestyle of many Alaska Natives, in which they migrated seasonally to stay synced with shifting resources. He’s applying for funding to discuss the idea with Alaska Native communities, to find out whether they think portable housing is a feasible solution.
Having moved his house once, Shade isn’t too enthusiastic about Schwoerer’s idea. As a member of the Curyung Tribe, Shade’s ancestors were among those who migrated, but “I wouldn’t want to do that all the time,” he said.
Beaches can also go with the flow. Some beaches rearrange during storms without washing away. Decades ago, now-retired Alaska Department of Transportation coastal engineers Ruth Carter and Harvey Smith started wondering if they could mimic the forces that cause this harmless shifting. Smith came across a Dutch researcher named Jentsje van der Meer who had developed a way of doing just this.
It’s not just the town’s infrastructure that’s at threat from erosion, said one resident: “There’s a lot of history that’s being washed away.”
Van der Meer had described something called a dynamically stable beach that didn’t wash out to sea despite lashing rain and waves. To build one, engineers supplement the beach with rocks, about 2 to 8 inches in diameter. If the rocks are larger, they’re pulled down the beach during storms, and if they’re smaller, they’re pushed up. “A dynamically stable beach is right in between,” said Smith. Because the rocks are just the right size, they get pushed up the beach just about as much as they get pulled down. As long as waves hit the beach head-on, the rocks return to about where they started.
Carter and Smith built about five dynamically stable beaches around Alaska, beginning in the 1980s. Some of their early projects remain stable to this day. The technique often costs about a fifth the price of a rigid structure and the materials can be easier to find, and yet dynamically stable beaches never became widespread. The main reason, Smith said, was one of perception. People tend to feel reassured by immovable structures like seawalls, but dynamically stable beaches move around a little bit. Even if they offer good protection at a reasonable price, that movement “makes people uncomfortable,” Smith said.
As scientists inch toward erosion-relief measures, Eben Hopson is watching as his culture’s history creeps toward the sea. An Iñupiaq filmmaker and photographer, Hopson lives in the village of Utqiaġvik, on Alaska’s northern coast. In recent years, the waves have begun to swallow long-uninhabited coastal settlements near the village, taking with them evidence of who used to live there and how they passed their days. It’s not just the town’s infrastructure that’s at threat from erosion: “There’s a lot of history that’s being washed away,” he said.
Civil engineer Min Liew traveled to Utqiaġvik to study the erosion problem, and she thinks it’s important for scientists to be upfront with people like Hopson. Researchers have a lot of ideas about how to confront erosion, but “everything is at the hypothesis stage,” she said. She’s hopeful that researchers and Alaska Natives can work together to come up with solutions, but research is a long road and results take time.
The difficulty of addressing erosion is all too evident for people like Shade, who have taken it upon themselves to stabilize their homes and their properties. Shade’s house is on firm ground for the foreseeable future, but he’s about to lose a small outbuilding that’s closer to the water. Its roof is damaged, so moving it isn’t worth the trouble. Instead, he’ll probably dismantle the building before it washes away. It’s all part of living with the natural forces that shape Alaska. “Mother Nature is pretty tough,” he said.
Construction began this week on an open-pit mine at the largest lithium deposit in the United States, even as tribes and environmental groups continue a years-long effort to block the project.
The Bureau of Land Management approved the $2.2 billion mine project in January 2021. Mining operations would cover 5,000 acres and create a pit deeper than a football field. Lithium is a key component in the batteries of electric vehicles.
Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh to the Paiute Shoshone people, is 200 miles north of Reno and less than 40 miles north of the tribal land of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone tribe. Tribes opposing the mine say the area has historical, cultural and religious importance and that it was the site of an 1865 massacre of at least 31 Paiute people.
“It’s an important place not only because a terrible massacre occurred, but also because it’s a place where people gather, it’s a place for ceremony, for hunting,” said Michon Eben, tribal historic preservation officer for the Reno Sparks Indian Colony, a government that includes members from the the Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe tribes. The colony is advocating for Peehee Mu’huh to be on the National Register of Historic Places. “It’s really hard to be a tribal member and see our homelands destroyed,” said Eben.
Thacker Pass also comprises thousands of acres of sagebrush and is a nesting ground for the sage grouse and a migration corridor for pronghorn antelope. Environmental groups including the Great Basin Resource Watch and Western Watersheds Project say the mine would cause irreversible ecological damage, and that the project’s impact was not adequately studied.
“It got by the environmental impact statement process in just under a year and I would expect a project of this scale and complexity to take 3 to 5 years,” said John Hadder, director of Great Basin Resource Watch. “That’s sloppy permitting on the side of the federal government.”
Tribes, environmental groups and a cattle rancher are all plaintiffs in a combined case against the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, and Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of Lithium Americas. On February 6, a federal judge in Reno ruled that the BLM had complied with federal law in approving the mine, with the exception of one matter regarding waste disposal, which the judge ordered the BLM to revisit. The plaintiffs filed an appeal in the 9th Circuit and an emergency motion to block construction before the appeal hearing. The appeals court rejected the injunction and set the hearing date for June.
In January, General Motors announced it would invest $650 million in Lithium Americas to develop the Thacker Pass mine, and expected the deal to yield enough lithium for 1 million electric vehicles per year.
Lithium Americas did not respond to a request for comment.
If the appeal fails and the lithium mine goes into operation, Hadder said it sets a bad precedent for how projects can be rushed in the name of the green transition.
“If it’s mining for lithium and other critical minerals, it will fall under the rubric of ‘Lithium is so important that we need to relax some of our environmental standards,’” said Hadder. “That’s a dangerous path that future generations and the environment will pay a price for. I think they’ll look back and say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t a good idea.’”
This story is excerpted from The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, published by Simon & Schuster.
It was March 2021, and Sheri Neil was throwing together po’boys for the lunch crowd at her namesake Sheri’s Snack Shack, the only restaurant in the small bayou village of Pointe-aux-Chenes, Louisiana. The counter-service sandwich joint stands elevated about 12 feet off the ground, with a big red deck where people can sit as they enjoy one of Sheri’s renowned milkshakes.
At the height of the lunch hour, a woman drove into the parking lot and came running up the stairs. She was a teacher at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary School, which served about 80 children from the village of Pointe-aux-Chenes and nearby Ile de Jean Charles, both Indigenous communities that had been eroding for decades. Earlier that morning a representative from the parish school board had shown up unannounced and informed the staff that the parish was closing the school, effective that summer. People had been leaving Pointe-aux-Chenes for decades, driven out by frequent floods and the decline of the local shrimping industry, and enrollment at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary had fallen well below the district’s target. The village no longer merited its own school, officials said.
A fallen pole lies near Point-Au-Chenes Elementary School. Jake Bittle
There were about a dozen people at the restaurant when the teacher drove up, and each of them ran at once to tell their families and friends. By nightfall everyone in town had heard the news, and by the next morning the residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes leapt into action as only the residents of a small town could. They started a Facebook group on behalf of the school and alerted the new cub reporter for the daily newspaper in the nearby city of Houma. The leader of the local tribal organization called the tribe’s attorney and asked her to help them file a lawsuit against the parish. The town staged a small picket outside the school, with students and parents holding up handwritten signs.
This was far from the first school closure in coastal Terrebonne Parish, which had seen broad population loss over the previous two decades. The story was more or less the same in every town: the shrimp business crashed, the flooding got worse, and people moved up to dry land, leaving empty desks in every classroom. No one who lived in Pointe-aux-Chenes could deny that the bayou population was shrinking. The parish had shut down the library branch a few years earlier, warehousing the books in the school building, and the bayou had lost two grocery stores in the past decade. The only remaining general store was operating on thinner and thinner margins. You couldn’t go more than a mile without seeing a FOR SALE sign.
Storm clouds gather off the coast of Louisiana, as seen from Pointe-Aux-Chenes, on August 30, 2021.
Mark Felix / AFP via Getty images
Still, closing the school at this time felt like an unnecessary escalation, one that would push the town further toward depopulation and decay. Fifty years earlier, when Indigenous children had first attended classes there after the integration of the state school system, the school had been a hostile place, but in the decades since it had become a kind of cultural melting pot for the whole bayou community, a bridge between the white Cajun and Indigenous sides of Pointe-aux-Chenes. The school had one of the largest Indigenous populations of any school in the state, and teachers made a point of educating students about the rich history of the bayou, bringing in tribal leaders to demonstrate ceremonial dances and drum rituals. The bayou had no museum, no archive, no dedicated historian, so it was through the school that each generation of residents passed down their unique traditions to the next. If that went away, what would the town have left?
Even more painful was the fact that the decision had come just a few years after the Army Corps of Engineers had finished a new levee system that would protect the bayou, part of a massive project the agency had been working on since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The erosion exodus that had begun two generations earlier seemed like it was finally about to slow down: The main reason so many people had left over the years was to escape the flood problem, but now the town would be protected from all but the most devastating storms. The marshland outside the levees might disappear, but the town itself would be safe for decades to come.
A water control structure in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana on August 31, 2021.
Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images
Residents had seen what could happen without that investment in flood protection. Like Pointe-aux-Chenes, Ile de Jean Charles, just a few miles to the west, had been losing population for decades amid storm and erosion — indeed, around 98 percent of the island’s landmass had disappeared over half a century. The federal government had excluded the island community from its protective levee network, and rather than protect the island with flood walls the state government had opted to relocate its remaining 40-odd residents to a new tract of land farther inland. The relocation was funded by the federal government through an Obama-era grant program, and it amounted to the first whole-community climate migration in the history of the continental United States. The original idea for the relocation had come from a senior leader of the island tribe, but many had grown dissatisfied with the state’s handling of the program: The new site lacked direct access to the water that had sustained the island tribe for generations, and many residents had vowed never to leave the island, but as of 2021 most remaining residents were preparing to make their final move inland.
The residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes had hoped they would avoid this fate after the completion of the Army Corps’s levee system. The most optimistic residents were saying the bayou was poised for a minor renaissance now that the state had addressed the main driver of migration. The closure of the elementary school dashed these hopes: Pointe-aux-Chenes might be better protected than Isle de Jean Charles from flooding, but in the long run it was destined to suffer the same cycle of disinvestment and depopulation. Decades of erosion had already altered life on the bayou for good. The new levees had arrived too late.
Two members of the United Houma Nation Indian tribe walk around a hurricane-damaged home along Bayou Pointe-au-Chien in May 2022. Gerald Herbert / AP Photo
The Terrebonne Parish School Board convened the next month to take a final vote on the closure. The meeting began with a public comment period during which parents and community members could address the board. The nine members sat Supreme Court–style at a long wooden desk, all arranged to face a single public podium. The residents of the bayou stood up one by one, white and Indigenous, and pleaded with the board to reconsider its decision. A few board members seemed moved by the show of support, but it wasn’t enough: The board voted six to three to shut the school down. The 80-odd students at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary would attend Montegut Elementary five miles away the following autumn. The tribe’s lawsuit against the parish was still pending, but it didn’t seem likely to succeed, since the board had the authority to manage its school system the way it saw fit.
Among the audience members at the meeting was Mary Verdin, whose husband was Alton Verdin, a tugboat captain and lifelong resident of Pointe-aux-Chenes. Alton’s uncle had been a legendary tribal leader, known for getting in frequent fistfights with white police officers, and in keeping with the labyrinthine family trees of the bayou, Mary was Alton’s fifth cousin on both his mother’s and his father’s side.
Working on a tugboat didn’t bother Alton the way it bothered many other Pointe-aux-Chenes residents who had been forced to give up shrimping and fishing. The tugboat pay had been enough for Alton to support Mary and their seven children, not to mention Mary’s mother, who lived with them and helped them take care of the kids. The family had a one-story brick house on the upper end of the bayou town, the part that had once been off-limits to Indigenous people like them. The wide marshland on the edge of their property sometimes flooded during heavy rains, but the house itself was modern and sturdy, and the family had hunkered down there during several hurricanes. Some of Alton’s older relatives still lived farther down the bayou, in the open-water areas that previous generations of the tribe had called home, but much of Alton and Mary’s extended family had moved up to join them on the solid territory of the mainland.
The school closure hit Mary hard, driving her first to depression and then to anger. Five of her seven children had graduated from the school already, but Gabrielle, the second youngest, still had one more year to go before she graduated to middle school, and Raelynn, the youngest, was just two years old. Mary had always been involved at the school, collecting box tops and Community Coffee proofs of purchase, and they lived close enough that she and Alton could go and have lunch with their daughters when Alton was home from the tugboat. One year Alton had driven his daughter Abigail to a father-daughter dance in a stretch limousine — the drive took, in total, about 30 seconds — and had shown off his traditional Cajun dance moves in the school cafeteria during the talent show. Now all of that would vanish. Gabrielle would finish elementary school in the ancient Montegut Elementary building one town over, with its steep stairs and single set of bathrooms, and Raelynn would never set foot in the school that had witnessed so much history.
To Alton, who had lived in Pointe-aux-Chenes his whole life, it seemed like the levee had arrived too late. With the school closed, the out-migration from the town would become all but irreversible. Who would move down the bayou to start a family, to raise their children, knowing that with every passing year a new rip would appear in the town’s social fabric?
Mary and Alton Verdin
Courtesy of Mary and Alton Verdin
The closure of the school had started to make Alton and Mary doubt their future in Pointe-aux-Chenes. They needed to rip the floors out to fix long-term water damage, which would take thousands of dollars, and Alton wondered whether they should sell the house and find something inland in the nearby cities of Montegut or Houma. Their eldest daughter had just become a real estate agent and was looking for her first commission, so she was helping them scout out houses that might serve as suitable replacements. Both wanted to move, but they didn’t want to leave Pointe-aux-Chenes. Even as the school year began, they were stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for a sign about what they should do.
Gabrielle attended Montegut Elementary for less than two weeks before Hurricane Ida cut her school year short. The storm intensified to the threshold of Category 5 over the course of just three days as it pushed up the Gulf of Mexico, and made landfall a few miles south of Pointe-aux-Chenes with winds of around 150 miles per hour. The parish issued a mandatory evacuation order ahead of the storm, but many hardened bayou residents stayed behind and watched as the wind ripped telephone poles out of the ground and sheared the walls off double-wide trailers. The erosion of the bayou had eliminated the natural protection system that weakened storms as they made landfall, allowing Ida to retain its full strength for far longer than it would have decades earlier.
The devastation on the bayou was total. It took close to a week for the water to drain back out of the town, and when aid workers at last made it all the way down the length of the bayou road, they found that almost no structure had escaped the storm. It would take weeks for the parish to restore electricity and running water, and even longer to drag away the mountains of gnarled debris that lined the side of every road. The sole remaining grocery store sustained so much damage that its owner, Mary’s uncle, decided to shut it down for good. The final insult was that the storm had seemed to confirm the parish board’s decision to shut down Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary. The school in Montegut had survived the storm, but the old white building on the bayou had not. The storm had twisted the structure’s metal roof like a nautilus shell and rolled it out into the street. There were shards of white wood all down the block.
An aerial view of storm damage in the city of Pointe-Aux-Chenes, near montegut, Louisiana on August 30, 2021 after Hurricane Ida made landfall.
Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images
Alton and Mary’s house was in better condition than many of the trailers and elevated houses around them, but it was far from livable. The roof was in tatters and water had dripped into the bedrooms and the living room. Resource-strapped FEMA wouldn’t arrive with temporary trailers for three months, and Alton’s contractor told him it would take about seven months before his house was fixed. In the meantime, Alton and his family would have to find somewhere else to stay, as would thousands of other people from Pointe-aux-Chenes and elsewhere in Terrebonne Parish.
It might sound counterintuitive, but the storm strengthened Alton and Mary’s resolve to stay on the bayou. They figured if their house had survived Ida, it could survive just about anything, and they didn’t want to abandon their ailing hometown as it began the tortuous recovery process. Unfortunately, it wasn’t up to them: There was almost no livable housing anywhere on the bayou, and certainly none that they could rent on a short-term basis. The storm had walloped the nearby city of Houma, destroying dozens of hotels and apartment complexes, which meant the closest rental they could find was all the way in Mississippi. The owner asked for $900 a month at first, but by the time Mary went to go look at the place he had jacked it up to $1,500, plus a steep deposit. She said she’d rather buy a generator and take her chances back in Pointe-aux-Chenes.
The following summer, as the residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes struggled to make it back to the bayou, the Louisiana state legislature voted unanimously to reopen Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary as a French-language magnet school. The tragedy of the hurricane had inspired lawmakers to override the parish board’s decision and offer the bayou community a new lease on life. Alton, Mary, and the kids returned to their battered house once the power and water came back on, and Gabrielle resumed school at Montegut Elementary, taking some of her classes in trailers.
This story is excerpted from Jake Bittle’s book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, published by Simon & Schuster. Grist / Jasmine Clarke / Simon & Schuster
Despite the saving grace of the school’s reopening, the recovery has been even longer and more painful than Alton feared. Instead of seven months, it has taken 15 months for the repairs on his house to begin. He and his family are now living in a camper as contractors work on fixing up the property, and even now Alton is still fighting with a supplemental adjuster over the details of the insurance payout. Hundreds of other families on the bayou and elsewhere in Louisiana are in a similar limbo: They can’t yet come back to the homes they lost, but they have nowhere else to go. Many residents are still living with family or in temporary apartments, and haven’t yet made it back to the bayou.
To make matters worse, FEMA will stop distributing temporary housing payments to the victims of Hurricane Ida next week. The agency only dispenses post-disaster aid for 18 months after a storm or fire, and after that it shifts its resources elsewhere, but the recovery in Pointe-aux-Chenes has taken much longer than 18 months, and FEMA’s withdrawal will only stretch it out further. The long process of displacement that began decades ago and has continued through an endless succession of floods is still going on, and there is no reason to think that Alton and Mary have seen the end of it. Even once the school reopens, it will take a long time before Pointe-aux-Chenes gets back to the way it was, if it ever does.
Nevertheless, the Verdins are hunkering down, trying to hold on a little longer.
This story was reported and produced in collaboration with High Country News.
Last fall, following a 20-year campaign led by tribal organizers, the federal government ordered the removal of four dams on the Klamath River, which flows from Oregon to California. For almost a century, these dams have prevented the river’s salmon from swimming upstream to spawn.
The dams will be gone by next year, but now the salmon, including endangered coho, are facing a renewed threat from farther upstream. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which controls another set of dams on the Klamath, announced last week that it will cut flows on the river to historic lows, drying out the river and likely killing salmon farther downstream.
“The bureau’s proposal will kill salmon, and there’s no question about it,” said Amy Cordalis, general counsel for and citizen of the Yurok Tribe. “These are some of the lowest flows the Klamath River has ever seen.” Cordalis said that the last time the river faced such low flows was 2002, when the Klamath saw the largest fish kill in U.S. history. That eliminated a generation of salmon, leading to economic devastation for the West Coast fishing industry.
Instead of letting the water flow downstream, Reclamation plans to hold it back in Upper Klamath Lake, which feeds the river. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sets minimum water levels to keep endangered c’waam and koptu, or suckerfish, alive, and Reclamation said it will hold back water so it can meet those minimum levels.
In the past few years, as drought in Oregon and California lowered water levels on the Klamath, Reclamation struggled to manage the competing needs of the salmon and the suckers: If the suckers get the water, the salmon die, and if the salmon get the water, the suckers die. Reclamation’s management of the river pits salmon and the Yurok and Karuk tribes that protect them in the lower Klamath basin against suckerfish and the Klamath Tribes that protect them in the upper basin.
Not only will the flow cuts endanger the salmon in the lower basin, they may not save the suckers either.
“I think it’s too little, too late,” said Clayton Dumont, the chairman of the Klamath Tribes, whose territory extends across the upper Klamath Basin. “C’waam and koptu need a certain amount of water over them to escape predation, and we don’t believe that the bureau’s cut is sufficient.” In other words, even as Reclamation dries out the salmon’s habitat, they may also fail to protect the suckers’ habitat, barring strong rain for the remainder of the winter. Dumont said this could be the fourth year in a row that lake levels fall too low for the suckerfish to survive.
But salmon and suckerfish aren’t the only ones using the basin’s water. Some tribal leaders say Reclamation manufactured the salmon-suckerfish dilemma to obscure where the water is really going: crops, which use hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of Klamath River water annually.
“This has more to do with potatoes than it does fish,” said Karuk Tribal Council Member Troy Hockaday. “What the bureau is not saying is that the water savings will make it more likely that irrigation deliveries will be available to water users.”
The basin has more than 200,000 acres of irrigated farmland, between 10,000 and 14,000 of which are dedicated to potatoes, an Indigenous food originally engineered from a toxic wild root by Andean horticulturists. Roughly three quarters of the basin’s potato yield go to companies like Frito Lay for potato chips, and In-N-Out Burger for fries, according to the Klamath Water Users Association.
Tribes say the scale of the Klamath Basin’s agricultural project is unsustainable. “We just cannot support a 220,000-acre irrigation project anymore, and we have to find a way to downsize that project,” said Craig Tucker, natural resources policy consultant for the Karuk Tribe. “I don’t think we should kick people off their farms and destroy their livelihood. There should be a just, fair way to buy out willing sellers, compensate people at fair market value. But we cannot farm in the 21st century like we did in the 20th, because the weather is just not the same.”
Cordalis said that part of the reason for the salmon-and-suckerfish dilemma is that Reclamation released more water for agriculture last year than was necessary.
“What that did was it drove down the lake really, really far, and so we are essentially starting with an empty bathtub,” she said. “And so, then what [the bureau is] doing is saying, ‘oh, no, we don’t have enough for species…and so now we have to decide, which fish are we going to kill?’ And they’ve decided it’s the coho this year.”
“The Klamath Basin is facing the real potential for a fourth consecutive year of extraordinarily dry conditions,” said a Reclamation spokesperson. “Reclamation’s proactive measures to adaptively manage Klamath River flows are designed to create springtime conditions that mitigate risks to species and the environment, while we also work with agricultural communities.”
Diverting water from the basin and leaving tribes to scramble on behalf of the fish they’re duty-bound to protect continues the old colonial strategy of divisiveness, the Yurok Tribe’s Vice Chairman Frankie Meyers said.
“We should instead be focused on meaningful restoration of the wetlands that accommodated the needs of sucker and salmon for millennia that were sacrificed on the altar of Manifest Destiny,” he said.
Irrigators in the Klamath Basin don’t necessarily disagree. Moss Driscoll, director of water policy at the Klamath Water Users Association, said basin-wide solutions could include restoring other wetlands and reservoirs in the area, such as Tule Lake, that supplement agricultural water needs. This could free up Klamath water for endangered fish. “The farming community is working on opportunities to manage water in new and creative ways that can restore the function of the landscape, in a manner that supports wildlife, fish, the environment and farming alike,” Driscoll said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is weighing a large restoration project on Upper Klamath Lake that would convert 18,000 acres of ranchland back into natural wetlands, expanding the safe habitat for c’waam and koptu.
As the removal of the river’s four non-irrigating dams looms, the focus is on long-term solutions for whole watershed health. To that end, the Fish and Wildlife Service, in collaboration with other stakeholders including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, and the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (which is in charge of dam removal), have outlined a strategy to identify and address the “root causes” of watershed degradation.
But to tribes, the root cause of this fish-and-chips disaster is clear. “We’re just not gonna have fish in the future if we don’t reduce irrigation demand,” said Tucker. “We’re going to have to change the way we eat, and we’re gonna have to change agriculture a little bit.”
In June, state security forces in the United Republic of Tanzania engaged in a violent eviction campaign against Indigenous Maasai, shooting them and driving them from their lands. The attack took place in Loliondo in northern Tanzania near the Kenyan border. Dozens of Maasai were injured, some fleeing to Kenya to seek medical attention, while others were arrested.
The violence was the Tanzanian government’s latest move in a years-long campaign to remove the Maasai and make way for game reserves, protected areas, and tourism. Amid months of increasing state violence and persecution, Maasai leaders have called for urgent international attention and intervention.
So when Salangat Mako, a Maasai leader, heard that the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights was going to make a monitoring visit to Tanzania, he felt like his prayers had finally been answered. Mako was chosen alongside five other community members to speak to the Commission on their planned visit to Loliondo.
Throughout the day, Mako and other community members rehearsed their statements, skipping lunch, and growing excited every time they heard a car approach. But late in the afternoon, they received news that the Commission was not coming to Loliondo. “The little hope that was ignited in the morning vanished in a second, replaced by desperation and hopelessness,” Mako said.
Angry and disappointed, Mako wanted to find another way to get his message out. Samwel Nangiria, another Maasai leader, decided to film a video of Mako.
“I have become a thief in my own land,” Mako said in the video. “A community depending on livestock, without grazing land. Where is our future? Where is our tomorrow? Where will our children be?”
Nangiria and Mako sent the video to the Commission and other activists. Some posted the video on social media, hoping that the Commission and the world would pay attention. Instead, government officials came to Loliondo the next day, and announced that they planned to arrest Mako and whoever filmed and shared the video. Mako has since fled to Kenya. Nangiria is in hiding.
Still from a video of Salangat Mako speaking in Loliondo. Mako has since fled to Kenya after being threatened with arrest for speaking out.
Samwel Nangiria
The Maasai say the violence and persecution they face are the result of domestic and international conservation policies — a years-long effort by the Tanzanian government to destroy Indigenous ways of life, and drive tens of thousands of Maasai off their land to establish game reserves, reach global conservation goals, and support tourism.
When Tanzania created Serengeti National Park in the mid-20th century, Maasai pastoralists living there were forced to relocate. Many moved to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a mixed-use piece of land to the east that is home to about 70,000 Maasai. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the country’s largest tourist attraction, drawing over half a million visitors each year.
In 2019, the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) urged Tanzania to develop a plan to limit population growth in the park, saying it was a threat to conservation efforts and the “value” of the park. The Tanzanian government responded by cutting access to services and resources for Maasai in an attempt to force them out of the area. Although many Maasai have remained in the park, they face increasing pressure to make way for international tourists who pay thousands of dollars for safaris.
Many Maasai who were evicted from the Serengeti also relocated to Loliondo, a district north of Ngorongoro on the Kenyan border, where they have legally protected village land. But in 1992, the Tanzanian government granted a hunting block in Loliondo, the Pololeti Game Reserve, to a United Arab Emirates-based luxury safari company. Since then, the Maasai say the government has repeatedly attempted to force them from their land. In June of 2022, the violent attack by state security forces left dozens of people injured and arrested – prompting Salangat Mako and other Maasai leaders to request international observers and support.
Sources: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2023), Oakland Institute, Pingos Forum, OCHA HDX, Joseph Oleshangay, Just Conservation
Grist / Maria Parazo Rose
At the time, the African Commission publicly called for a halt to evictions: “The African Commission is gravely concerned that the forcibly [sic] uprooting of the affected communities entails grave danger to various rights of the members of the communities.”
The Maasai say the most recent visit from Africa’s highest human rights protection body is a government-controlled sham, and the Commission’s visit comes on the heels of a scuttled United Nations trip. In December of 2022, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, was scheduled for a week-long visit to Tanzania. Days before Calí Tzay was scheduled to arrive, the Maasai say the visit was postponed out of fear that the government would not allow an independent investigation. The Special Rapporteur had no comment on the matter and would neither confirm nor deny the reason for the trip’s cancellation.
The Maasai are now calling for a new, independent visit by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, or any international observer for that matter, to investigate the decades-long campaign to remove the Maasai from their homelands. They’re not optimistic. “Our government can control anyone who is coming to our rescue,” Nangiria said.
Based in the Republic of The Gambia, the African Commission was established by an international human rights agreement that over 50 African countries, including Tanzania, have adopted. The Commission, however, does not have enforcement power and cannot compel countries to accept its recommendations.
In a draft communique from the Commission’s visit obtained by Grist, the Commission’s observers express concerns about the government’s relationship and treatment of Maasai people, but generally applaud the government for “providing ample access to the agro-pastoral communities,” and highlights that the Maasai enjoy more complete recognition of their rights under the Tanzanian government as opposed to previous colonial government administered by the British.
But Samwel Nangiria believes the system persecuting Maasai has not changed. “The colonial government initiated it and the independent government inherited and carried it forward,” he said.
The latest attacks on the Maasai have come in the form of cattle seizures by state security forces. Since June, the government has seized or shot over 10,000 Maasai cows and collected over $2.5 million in fines. “Every corner that the Maasai pastoralists are there, the government is seizing livestock in a manner never seen before,” said Joseph Oleshangay, a lawyer representing Maasai in several cases against the government.
Sources: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2023), Oakland Institute, Pingos Forum, OCHA HDX
Grist / Maria Parazo Rose
The Tanzanian government says that Maasai pastoralism is detrimental to conservation efforts inside the UNESCO site, but research shows maintaining pasture lands is good for biodiversity in Ngorongoro. Growing research, including from the IUCN, reveals that the protection of grazing land is one of the most important adaptive strategies for climate change.
“The driving force for our elimination is colonial conservation, a conservation that knows only the guns, military and money,” Nangiria said. “The colonial governments and their allies, particularly wildlife lobby groups, are still extending serious influences on how conservation is carried out in Africa.”
Mathew Bukhi Mabele, a conservation social scientist at the University of Dodoma in central Tanzania, says that if the government truly cared about conservation, they would focus on reducing invasive species and limiting tourism, both of which contribute to biodiversity issues in Ngorongoro. “The thing about revenue generation is they don’t think about the consequences of having such a large number of tourists per day,” he said.
Neither representatives from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights nor the Tanzanian government responded to requests for comment on this story.
Maasai men and their cattle in Msomera.
AFP via Getty Images
Maasai allege that at every step, the Commission was accompanied by state security forces who intimidated Maasai people, excluded them from meetings, and threatened those who spoke up about ongoing human rights abuses.
Maasai lawyer Joseph Oleshangay says that the government prevented the Commission from visiting Maasai in Loliondo while residents of Msomera, a village many Maasai are being relocated to, also say they were prevented from participating in meetings with the Commission. Oleshangay also alleges that Commission members traveled with officials that have been accused of directing violent evictions, further preventing victims from interacting with human rights observers.
“How on earth can you ride in those vehicles?” Oleshangay said. “We feel like they are being used by the government to justify that nothing happened.”
During the visit, nine community organizations wrote multiple letters directly to the Commission. “The state party succeeded to divert the Commission from meeting indigenous peoples independently without the presence of government machinery as agreed and planned for,” reads one communication. “Hence rendering the Commission powerless to collect, analyze and consequently objectively report on human rights situation in those sites.”
In response, the Commission offered to conduct additional meetings with Maasai via Zoom, however, Oleshangay says the offer is the equivalent of being denied a consultation. “To many of the Maasai on the ground, internet is not available,” Oleshangay said.
Tanzania’s treatment of Maasai has come under increasing scrutiny from international observers. Over the last ten years, United Nations Special Rapporteurs have issued seven communications expressing concern over the treatment of Maasai, and in June, nine U.N. human rights experts called on Tanzania to immediately halt plans to relocate Maasai communities. In a letter, the experts warned that the removals “could amount to dispossession, forced eviction and arbitrary displacement prohibited under international law.”
The Oakland Institute and Survival International, two nonprofits that advocate for Indigenous rights, called on UNESCO and the IUCN to sever ties with Tanzania and remove Ngorongoro from the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. The UNESCO World Heritage Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The African Commission’s Tanzania delegation is expected to file a final report on their visit to the full Commission and submit findings to the Tanzanian government, but based on the delegation’s initial communique, the Maasai expect shortcomings: the findings only briefly mention the Maasai’s allegations of cattle seizures, and only vaguely mentions concerns about relocations. Samwel Nangiria says that the delegation’s communique is “far from the reality.”
Mathew Bukhi Mabele at the University of Dodoma isn’t hopeful that the Commission can push back against the powerful conservation interests driving the Tanzanian government’s campaign against the Maasai. “They are very much powerless when it comes to these international forces pushing certain agendas,” he said.
Maasai wait for the African Commission in Loliondo.
Samwel Nangiria
When he heard that the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, would not be visiting in December, Samwel Nangiria was devastated. Now, seeing what happened with the African Commission, he thinks that it was the right decision. “We are grateful that the Special Rapporteur couldn’t be manipulated,” he said.
While the Maasai have called on the Commission to return and conduct a new, fully independent visit, leaders say they have few options. Leaders like Nangiria and Salangat Mako are in hiding, United Nations observers have been sidelined, and, to victims, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights appears to be rubber-stamping the Tanzanian government’s actions.
Nangiria said he sometimes feels guilty for sharing the video considering the attention it drew from authorities and the impact it had on Mako, but Mako has no regrets. “My heart spoke that day,” he said.
Now, the rest of the world has to do their part, Mako said. Especially tourists whose presence continues to drive the campaign against the Maasai.
“We need your voice. We are losing breath,” he said. “Please come to our rescue.”
In early February, 15 First Nations and the Canadian government announced a new plan for a network of marine protected areas on Canada’s west coast. The Marine Protected Areas Network Action Plan for the Northern Shelf Bioregion provides a strategy to create protected areas that will safeguard more than two hundred species of fish, marine birds, marine mammals, and invertebrates in the region. It will also help preserve a coastline that stretches from Vancouver Island to the Canada-Alaska border.
“This is a significant achievement in Canada’s commitments,” said Joyce Murray, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard. “Only by working together at all levels can we achieve Canada’s marine conservation targets.”
The Canadian government has committed to protecting 30 percent of its oceans by the end of the decade; one part of the international goal known as 30X30 to protect biodiversity and reverse climate change by protecting 30 percent of the planet by 2030. But a new report says to meet this goal, Canada has to make more efforts to include First Nations in its national marine conservation plans.
The report from the Assembly of First Nations, a national advocacy organization that represents First Nations governments and their citizens, also says Canada must provide more support for existing Indigenous conservation initiatives, like establishing Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, or IPCAs – lands and water managed and conserved by First Nations and communities. Indigenous land management protects biodiversity and benefits the environment, as does the recognition of Indigenous territory and rights.
The report provides a list of recommendations to support those IPCAs, including establishing cultural objectives alongside ecological goals, and hiring more First Nations staff. The Assembly of First Nations also says more structure, investment, and support for conservation efforts are necessary to help Canada meet its human rights and climate commitments.
“A whole-of-government approach is necessary to provide more certainty for First Nations’ stewardship of their lands and waters,” the report says.
“Our Nations have a solid track record proving that Indigenous-led conservation works for nature and for people,” said Dallas Smith, Board President of Nanwakolas Council Society. “As we tackle the urgent challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change, this is the model the world needs now.”
In 2019, oil and gas companies operating on tribal and federal lands lost $63 million in revenue from venting, flaring, and leaking infrastructure. That loss, according to a report from the Environmental Defense Fund and Taxpayers for Common Sense, shows that Indigenous nations lost the most potential royalty revenue: approximately $21.8 million. Researchers say that total loss across all lands represents enough natural gas to power 2.2 million households for a year – almost every home in New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming combined. However, those numbers are likely much higher: researchers did not include emissions from Alaska, Michigan, Nebraska, Illinois, or Indiana.
Gas is wasted when it is released directly into the atmosphere through venting, or burned at the site of extraction by flaring, or when it leaks from aging or ill-fitting infrastructure. As a potent greenhouse gas with warming power 80-times that of carbon dioxide, methane is often released with additional air pollutants. Those emissions contribute heavily to climate change and poor healthcare outcomes for local communities.
Synapse Energy Economics, the consulting firm that conducted the analysis, found that 54 percent of the gas lost in 2019 was due to flaring, 46 percent to leaks, and less than 1 percent to venting. Researchers found that on federal lands, a majority of natural gas is lost to leaks while on tribal land, most loss is attributed to flaring. Overall, roughly $275 million worth of gas is lost through flaring.
Wasted methane shortchanges the royalties that tribal, state and federal governments collect for oil and gas production that often fund priorities like education, infrastructure and public services. According to the report, while tribal governments lost the most potential revenue, states lost $20.5 million and the federal government lost $21.3 million. Additional research showed that flaring rates on Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation lands atop the oil-rich Bakken formation were extremely high compared to public and tribal lands outside of North Dakota. Lost royalties from the MHA Nation totaled an estimated $19 million.
“We can’t continue to allow half a billion dollars’ worth of taxpayer-owned resources to go to waste every year,” Jon Goldstein, a senior director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a press release. “The Biden administration has a clear opportunity to step up with strong rules that stop waste and pollution from practices like routine flaring to protect the public interest. These resources should benefit priorities like education and infrastructure, not be released into the atmosphere to undermine our climate and health.”
The report comes in the wake of two proposed rulings from the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management aimed at reducing methane waste. Both proposals were issued last November and the EPA is accepting public comment on their proposal until February 13th.
Goldstein said that the two proposed rulings target methane emissions from different lenses. The EPA ruling operates with a “pollution-oriented focus”, while the BLM ruling, which would target only federal and tribal lands, has a “waste-oriented focus”. Together, the two strategies offer complementary solutions to reduce emissions, but Goldstein says that a crucial, missing provision is to limit how much gas can be flared in the first place.
“There should be guardrails that narrowly define conditions flares are allowed in,” Goldstein said. “[Otherwise], it just becomes the cost of doing business. Oil and gas companies just write a check and continue to flare and waste.”
It is the tradition of inaugurations in Brazil for the incoming president to ascend the ramp of the Planalto Palace, the country’s equivalent to the West Wing of the White House, and receive the presidential sash from the outgoing head of state. The gesture is meant to symbolize a peaceful transition of power. In the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which took place on January 1, things were a little different. In a final emulation of his political idol Donald Trump, the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, often referred to as the “Trump of the tropics,” was absent. He had flown to Orlando, Florida, two days earlier for an extended vacation.
Instead, Lula used the moment to send a political message. He chose to walk the ramp with a small group of individuals meant to represent those his government will prioritize. Among them was the 90-year-old Indigenous leader Raoni Metukitire, of the Amazonian Kayapó people. Bolsonaro had attacked Raoni in a 2019 United Nations General Assembly speech, accusing him of being a pawn of foreign governments and NGOs that seek to undermine development in the Brazilian Amazon. Raoni’s presence at the Planalto signaled that Indigenous rights and protection of the environment will be high on Lula’s new presidential agenda.
“Our goal is to reach zero deforestation and zero greenhouse gas emissions in our electrical grid,” Lula said in his inaugural address to Congress, adding that Bolsonaro’s government had “destroyed environmental protections.”
Brazil’s new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva stands next to Indigenous leader and environmentalist Raoni Metuktire at his inauguration on January 1.
Sergio Lima / AFP via Getty Images
The diagnosis is an accurate one. Over four years, Bolsonaro dismantled environmental regulations, much of it through executive action, and gutted federal agencies tasked with enforcing environmental laws. His actions and rhetoric emboldened illegal miners and loggers, who felt they could act with impunity. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest spiked 60 percent during Bolsonaro’s presidency, the highest relative increase since the beginning of measurements by satellite in 1988.
The preservation of the Amazon is crucial to the climate crisis. The rainforest was once the world’s greatest carbon sink, but because of forest clearing fires and degradation caused by rising temperatures, there are large regions of the Amazon today that emit more carbon than they absorb. The situation could get substantially worse. Studies show that if 20 to 25 percent of the Amazon is deforested, the biome would no longer be able to sustain itself. This would trigger an irreversible process of dieback that could turn the forest into a savannah in a matter of decades. Currently, 15 to 17 percent of the Amazon has already vanished.
Lula served two previous terms as president between 2003 and 2011. During this time, in stark contrast to Bolsonaro’s tenure, deforestation in the Amazon fell by a historic 67 percent. Marina Silva, a well-known environmental activist and politician in Brazil, led this crackdown as Lula’s Minister of the Environment. Silva will once again hold that office, but environmentalists say this time around the government will have to rebuild Brazilian environmental policy virtually from the ground up if it is to achieve comparable results.
The first step will be to reverse many of the changes Bolsonaro enacted though executive action. This process has already begun. On his first day in office, Lula issued a series of decrees that overturned some of Bolsonaro’s most egregious changes to environmental regulations. He reinstated environmental funding programs, restructured key agencies that had been hollowed out, and reestablished the government’s anti-deforestation plan, which had been discontinued by Bolsonaro. But there is much more work to be done.
“It’s a scorched earth scenario,” said Suely Araújo, referring to the environmental regulatory apparatus that Lula inherited from his predecessor. Araújo is a senior specialist in public policy at Observatório do Clima, a coalition of climate-focused civil society organizations. She spent the last months of 2022 working with Lula’s transition team, prepping the first steps in what is expected to be a long process of recovery. “It will take longer to rebuild these institutions than it did to destroy them.”
Early in his administration, Bolsonaro tried to dissolve the Ministry of the Environment entirely, but was unable to do so due to backlash from civil society and Congress. Instead, his administration’s strategy became to weaken the country’ scientific and environmental institutions from within. Describing this process during a ruling about a slew of changes to environmental policy by Bolsonaro’s government, a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice evoked the image of a termite infestation eating away at environmental protection agencies from the inside out.
Environmentalist and former Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva speaks at a conference in 2019, where she called deforestation under the Bolsonaro administration “out of control.” Silva is stepping back into the role of minister under President Lula.
Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Image
Shortly after Bolsonaro took office in 2019, Natalie Unterstell, of the watchdog group Política por Inteiro, began monitoring executive actions that had an impact on deforestation and climate change. “They were pressing buttons that sent shocks through the entire system,” she said.
Unterstell began this monitoring effort alone, keeping an updated spreadsheet, but the process soon became overwhelming due to sheer quantity. She enlisted the help of data scientists and developed an algorithm that would scrape the daily government bulletin, pinpointing the decrees that merited closer attention. In four years, Política Por Inteiro identified 2,189 executive acts that are “relevant to climate and socio-environmental policy.”
2,189
The number of executive actions taken by Jair Bolsonaro and his administration to unravel Brazil’s “climate and socio-environmental policy.”
Many of the early decrees involved institutional reform. Offices and task forces within the executive branch that had climate change or deforestation in the name were simply eliminated. Regulatory agencies were transferred wholesale from the Ministry of the Environment and put under the purview of sectors they were supposed to regulate. The Forestry Service for example, which manages nature reserves, became an agency of the Ministry of Agriculture. The National Water Agency, which regulates water resources and use, was transferred to the Ministry of Regional Development.
Bolsonaro also named loyalists friendly to logging, mining, and agribusiness interests to head key environmental agencies like the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable and Natural Resources, also known as IBAMA, the main agency involved in monitoring and enforcing laws against deforestation.
Three months into his presidency, Bolsonaro issued a decree that froze the Amazon Fund. The fund, which is bankrolled by foreign governments, aims to support Brazil’s efforts to preserve its forest and is a crucial source of financing for IBAMA. The move possibly deprived Brazil of $20 billion in funding for environmental conservation projects, according to a report from the government’s own comptroller.
A critical element of the government’s strategy was to remove civil society and the scientific community from the environmental regulatory process. In 2019, Ricardo Salles, Bolsonaro’s Minister of the Environment, issued orders that restructured the National Environment Council, or CONAMA, a body that makes key decisions relating to environmental policy in Brazil. CONAMA was traditionally composed of a diverse group of stakeholders, including business interests, scientists, NGOs, Indigenous groups, and federal, state, and local representatives. Salles downsized the council and in doing so cut seats belonging to non-business civil society organizations from 11 to 4, giving them less proportional representation.
“They would bring four or five decisions up for a vote at once, and the councils were weakened so they had the opportunity approve whatever they wanted,” said Unterstell.
The system of environmental fines, which was already inefficient before Bolsonaro took office, suffered significant changes. Operations to curb deforestation began to be executed primarily by the military instead of IBAMA, an agency with decades of expertise in combating environmental crimes and the power to fine illegal deforesters. Even though the military reportedly spent $110 million to monitor roads and rivers in the Amazon region — roughly 10 times the yearly budget for IBAMA — deforestation rates skyrocketed. An investigation by the Climate Policy Initiative and World Wildlife Fund showed environmental fines decreased by almost a third during the Bolsonaro administration when compared to 2015 levels. The government also created a convoluted appeals process which in practice ground the entire system to a halt, resulting in fines being paid at an even lower rate than before. From 2019 through 2021, 98 percent of IBAMA fines went unpaid.
“The message was that if you commit environmental crimes you don’t need to worry because the chances that you will be held accountable are minimal,” said Unterstell.
During the pandemic the pace of deregulation accelerated. In a leaked video of a cabinet meeting in 2020, Salles, the country’s then-environment minister, urged his colleagues to use the global crisis as an opportunity. “We need to make an effort while we are in this calm moment in terms of press coverage, because they are only talking about COVID, and push through and change all the rules and simplify the norms,” he was heard saying in the video.
Aerial view shows a deforested area of Amazon rainforest in Labrea, Amazonas state, Brazil, in 2021.
Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images
Among other significant changes to environmental norms was a directive from IBAMA, then-led by pro-industry Bolsonaro supporters, that loosened proof of origin documentation requirements for exported wood (later struck down by the Supreme Federal Court), and a presidential decree that encouraged mining in Indigenous territory. The government was changing regulations as late as December 2022, weeks after Bolsonaro’s loss in the polls, when IBAMA issued a measure that allowed for logging on Indigenous lands as well.
Lula might have gotten started on Day 1 in reversing many of these environmentally harmful policies, but scientists and environmentalists warn that results will take time. It is one thing to commit changes to paper and another to implement them on the ground.
“There are major trends of illegality that need to be reversed and a whole rebuilding process that has to happen. We won’t be seeing 2012 levels of deforestation in six months or a year,” Araújo told Grist, referring to the year with the lowest deforestation rate since records began in 1988. “The government will face a resistance that was not as strong back in 2003.”
Today’s Amazon is a very different place than the one Lula encountered when he began his first term as president. Brazil as a whole is significantly more polarized and much of the Amazon region is led by governors and mayors who align themselves with Bolsonaro. When Lula won the election in October 2022, Bolsonaro supporters blocked roads and highways to protest what they understood, without evidence, to be a stolen election. Many of these protests occurred in the Amazon’s frontiers of deforestation, such as the town of Novo Progresso in the state of Pará. “Bolsonaro created a bellicosity in the population,” Araújo said.
This tension came to high pitch on January 8, when Bolsonaro supporters, bused into the capital Brasília from all over the country, stormed and vandalized Congress, the Supreme Federal Court, and the presidential offices. Speaking after the events of that day, Lula speculated: “Many who were in Brasília today could have been illegal miners or illegal loggers.”
The Amazon has also become a more violent and lawless place. While homicides in Brazil overall have been declining since 2018, they have been on the rise in the Amazon. If the Brazilian Amazon were a country, it would have the fourth highest homicide rate in the world. Some of this can be attributed to the increasing presence of organized crime groups in the region, who have become involved in illegal mining, logging, and fishing operations and use the region’s waterways as drug trafficking routes. This trend became international news last year with the murders of Guardian journalist Dom Phillips and the Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira.
In addition to these challenges, Lula will face fierce opposition in Congress from politicians friendly to agribusiness and mining interests. Having been elected by a thin margin, he has limited political capital to spend. Some are wary that the administration’s commitment to protecting the Amazon will waver over time. Although the rise in deforestation was much more pronounced during the Bolsonaro years, it began under the administration of Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s handpicked successor after he left office in 2010.
Still, it is widely expected that deforestation rates will be declining by the end of Lula’s now third term as President of Brazil. “We can be sure of that,” said Araújo. “All it takes is for environmental protection agencies to be allowed to do their job.”
If you want to see some examples of actual Indigenous futuristic filmmaking, may I suggest you look somewhere besides James Cameron?
There’s the Cree-Metis’ filmmaker Danis Goulet’s recent Night Raiders or the late Mi’kmaw filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s extremely timely last film, Blood Quantum, released for streaming near the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
Both of those films look at and reframe Indigenous history through an Indigenous perspective: boarding school trauma in the case of Night Raiders and the unique relationship Indigenous people have with foreign disease (think smallpox) in the case of Blood Quantum. Both films speak to issues that affect and have affected Indian Country.
If you want to see a white man’s version of an Indigenous futurism film, however, then the local multiplex showing Avatar: The Way of Water is the way to go.
That said, the plot of what some call Avatar 2 is simple enough: the earth is dying, humans need resources, and this requires a complete takeover of the planet Pandora, which also requires the “taming” of the Indigenous inhabitants, the Na’vi.
Former Avatar and now transformed into a full Na’vi, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and family are driven out of their homelands by Sully’s former military colleague Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who’s also gone full Na’vi and is set on revenge. Sully is intent on protecting his family from further danger. Why is he running? Is it white guilt? He claims it’s to protect his Indigenous clan, yet his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) wants to fight.
The Sully family fly far out to sea where they meet Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), the chief of the Māori-inspired Metkayina clan. The Metkayina are slow to accept them in their territories (the Sullys can’t swim well and their tails are too small) yet eventually take the Sullys in as one of their own and in time will join together in the fight against the approaching earth intruders, the Sky People.
Cameron’s latest is a curious mixture of surface Indigeneity signified from a white man’s perspective: long braids and dreadlocks attached to foreign bodies, the bodies laden with “exotic” ta moko-style tattoos. Ten-feet-tall men and women with large eyes and elfin ears are set in exotic alien locales that bring to mind fantasy artist Frank Frazetta or certain Lakota friends I’ve met. On top of all this is the connection these beings, the Na’vi, have with respect to the land and its inhabitants. It’s fantasy Indigeneity.
It’s hard not to be skeptical of Cameron’s grasp of the Indigenous material he’s appropriating here. Sure, you can make up anything you want in a fantastical tale and even have your left-leaning cake too. There are no rules to filmmaking or art in general, and if you have the funding, the world is your oyster. One can create a world where we can see white men’s myopia in regard to the environment; a story of materialism and colonialism where the consequences of a hunger and thirst for money and resources are displayed from beginning to end. Where’s the fault in that?
The fault is that James Cameron can travel the world, do the “research,” hire Indigenous film legends like Wes Studi (Cherokee) in the first Avatar movie and Cliff Curtis (Maori) and Jermaine Clement (Maori) in Avatar 2, but he can’t escape who he is: a filmmaker who told the Guardian in 2010 that his inspiration in making the first Avatar film was based on the Lakota Sioux.
“I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future … and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation … because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society — which is what is happening now — they would have fought a lot harder.”
Cameron’s comments are tone-deaf, condescending, and not the kind of ally I want or need to help tell Indigenous stories. It’s one thing to read and research about a culture; it’s quite another to be of it. Perhaps that’s why there’s a boycott of the film currently underway by many Indigenous groups, one of which is led by Asdzáá Tłʼéé honaaʼéí, a Navajo artist and co-chair of Indigenous Pride Los Angeles.
The arresting animation includes this creature in Avatar: The Way of Water.
20th Century Studios
The animation in Avatar: The Way of Water is visually stunning. The animals in particular — I’ll call them sea beasts and air beasts — are very lifelike, with shadows and texture, and many have souls and thoughts of their own and communicate these with the Na’vi. The concept (much like the film) walks a fine line between being corny and magical, and you just have to go with the concept, should you buy into it. One thinks if you paid the ticket to be in the theater, you’re ready to take the ride. I viewed the film as a ride, once in a 3D IMAX theater and once in a regular theater. As someone with glasses, I have to say that I think I enjoyed the film better without the 3D accouterment (also there’s less danger of smearing popcorn butter on your clunky 3D glasses).
The thesis of the film, in the midst of the various subplots, exotic character names, and Pandora versions of whales and sharks and fascinating technology, seems to be: family first. In this case it’s the Sully family fighting against the elements and their enemies to persevere on the frontier.
Sully (a Marine in his former human life) and his sons communicate to each other in military speak and it’s a bit cringey; his sons reply with “yes sir” to their father not as a sign of respect but because that’s just the way they relate to each other; they are sons in their father’s army. It’s a Sully family quirk. Is this wrong? Not necessarily, but it’s certainly jarring to hear in a family supposedly influenced by Indigenous culture.
And while not totally off topic, the poor white kid the Sully family has adopted, Spider (kind of a mix of the feral kid in Mad Max and gas station-era Justin Bieber), is often forgotten or left low on the priority list of the family. The mother practically despises him and he knows it. The lack of respect the Sully clan have for their human adoptee becomes comical as the movie progresses.
At 3 hours and 10 minutes, the film needs a more aggressive editor. Though the time in Metkayina territories provides a nice backstory, we probably don’t need to spend as much time exploring this new Na’vi version of Maoriland. I was intrigued by the updated western movie influences: trains are derailed by Comanche, er, I mean Na’vi, and pillaged for modern weaponry, the Sky people view the Na’vi as hindrances to “progress,” the Sully family is seen as dirty “half-breeds,” half sky people, half Na’vi.
A film like this takes a lot of money to make, and as such is a technological marvel. Still, I’m left wondering, what if a producer just gave a Maori-inspired project like this to an actual Indigenous filmmaker, perhaps an actual Māori filmmaker like Taika Waititi, and we had an actual Indigenous filmmaker tell the story instead of a story told through the lens of a white guy updating colonial western movie tropes? What would that look like? And why are we watching an Indigenous story again through a white man’s (3D) lens? Well, the obvious answer is James Cameron has the money to make it. But when do Indigenous people get to make something like this?
Or maybe the better question is: Is this the type of thing Indigenous people would even want to make?
There are plenty of real-life issues that affect Indigenous people in 2022. The upcoming Supreme Court ICWA decision regarding whether Indigenous adoptees get to stay with Indigenous families or not comes to mind. We have water issues (which this film ironically has nothing to do with), of course colonialism is ever-present and the fight for resources is always in play, but do we need a white guy to dress these issues up in the world of fantasy where 10-foot-tall aliens fight “hard enough” to save the day to prove that we aren’t after all a “dead-end society”? Perhaps Indigenous futurism should be left in the hands of actual Indigenous filmmakers who know and can tell these stories?
When the first Avatar came out in 2009, I actually enjoyed it. The technology was shiny and new, there were less Indigenous stories on film, perhaps I even asked less of the type of Indigeneity I saw on the screen; times have changed. In 2022 we had three Indigenous-led TV shows in the United States: Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs, and Dark Winds. Reservation Dogs alone had at least half a dozen Indigenous directors in its ranks. The time has come for Indigenous directors to re-make these westerns and continue making our own Indigenous futurism films in our own image, to flip the script, tease the tropes, put Indian before Cowboy. We have enough proven talent at this point and don’t need out-of-touch, privileged directors like James Cameron to appropriate Indigenous culture for his stories. We can tell our own stories. We tell them better.
Jason Asenap is a Comanche and Muscogee Creek writer, critic, and filmmaker based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Nearly 200 nations reached a milestone agreement early Monday morning to protect biodiversity, pledging action on more than 20 targets spanning from land conservation to invasive species to pesticide use in an effort to stem the rapid deterioration of nature world-wide.
The global accord, brokered at the latest United Nations’ biodiversity conference in Montreal, Canada, comes at a critical time: A recent U.N. report found that plants, animals, and ecosystems are declining at an “unprecedented” rate due to human activity, and that around 1 million species could go extinct within decades.
The convention’s headline goal — to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and waters by the year 2030 — received the most floor time over the meeting’s two-week run. The target comes from famed biologist E.O. Wilson, who argued that to reverse the extinction crisis, half of the planet must be set aside “for nature.” Some countries, like Colombia and the United States (the only country besides the Vatican that is not an official member of the international Convention on Biological Diversity), had already begun implementing a scaled-down version of the goal, dubbed “30×30,” within their own borders. Now, however, countries have a new global pact, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, for protecting land and sea that some have compared to the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
“It’s a landmark moment to have nearly every country on earth agree to halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” Craig Hanson, managing director for programs at the World Resources Institute, said in a press statement. “Yet the agreement is only as strong as countries’ political will to implement it, and countries now face the urgent task of turning these commitments into action.”
Leading up to the international gathering, Indigenous groups had expressed alarm over 30×30 and its potential to remove land and resources from tribal control in the name of conservation. “The prevailing concept of protected areas is ‘fortress conservation,’ exclusionary spaces based on the view of wilderness without people,” said Jennifer Corpuz, a member of the Kankanaey Igorot people from the Northern Philippines and a lead negotiator for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, a group of activists, scholars, and representatives from Indigenous governments and NGOs that organize around international environmental meetings. Time and again, studies have shown that Indigenous peoples are the best stewards of biodiversity, yet they are often hampered by protected area expansion and its attendant evictions and livelihood restrictions.
“We saw the negotiation of a new framework as an opportunity to address those problems,” said Corpuz. The final language of the agreement calls for “systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, recognizing indigenous [sic] and traditional territories,” and Indigenous rights are also mentioned with strong language at numerous points throughout the pact, according to Corpuz. While Indigenous groups had called for their territories to be recognized as a distinct pathway to protect biodiversity, Corpuz said “we feel that the language is ambiguous enough to accept.”
The biggest sticking point in the biodiversity negotiations, or the Conference of the Parties or COP15, was over who would fund conservation action in the most species-rich parts of the world, mostly in the Global South. Developing nations called for a $100 billion fund from wealthy nations, similar to the fund established through the U.N.’ s convention on climate change for climate mitigation and adaptation. Last week, delegates staged a walkout over the issue. The final agreement requires wealthy countries to provide $30 billion a year to small island nations and developing countries by 2030, although research has shown that closer to $700 billion per year is necessary to reduce species decline. Objections on Monday morning from the Democratic Republic of Congo and other African nations over insufficient funding were overridden when Huang Runqiu, the president of COP15 and China’s minister of ecology and environment, brought down the gavel to end the conference.
In total, the final agreement contains 23 targets, including commitments to halve risks from pesticides and toxic chemical use in agriculture, halve invasive species introduction rates, and reform government subsidies linked to biodiversity destruction.
Language requiring that companies disclose their impacts on the natural world and their financial risks associated with species extinction was watered down in the final version of the text. Developing nations and Indigenous peoples had also asked that when countries extract genetic resources from their biodiversity-rich ecosystems, like rainforests and peatlands, to make drugs and other products, that the origin countries receive an equitable share of the benefits of the research. While a mechanism was not established, language in the final text sets forth a two-year process to create a way to fund the communities and countries from which biodata is taken; Indigenous communities are calling to be the main beneficiaries.
Countries now have eight years to meet their new targets, which some observers have criticized for prioritizing economic interests and lacking any enforcement mechanism. As it stands, the 30 percent goal is global, not specific to individual countries, and commitments will be voluntary, similar to the Paris Agreement. At the 2002 biodiversity conference in the Netherlands, parties agreed to reduce the rate of species loss by 2010 and failed. The last major wave of biodiversity goal-setting happened in Aichi, Japan, in 2010, and not a single one of the meeting’s targets was met by the 2020 deadline. Given the track record, it remains to be seen if countries will make good on their ambitious new commitments.
The sun is setting in Glacier County, Montana. Souta Calling Last guns her diesel-powered white GMC pickup truck east on Highway 2. The car following her can barely keep up as she hurtles across the dimming prairie, one hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, her eyes scanning the side of the highway. Calling Last, a researcher and an enrolled member of the Blood Tribe — one of the four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy — grew up on the Blackfeet reservation. She knows this landscape by heart.
“There it is,” she says and yanks the steering wheel to the right, sending a plume of dust into the air as she brakes hard on the gravel shoulder. The Two Medicine River, sacred to the Amskapi Pikuni, the Blackfeet, rushes nearby. A couple of minutes later, a gray Toyota slowly pulls in behind the GMC and rolls to a stop. The words “Working Dogs for Conservation” are printed on its side in block letters. A volley of excited yips and whines rings out from the truck bed.
Calling Last has brought Working Dogs for Conservation, or WD4C, a nonprofit that trains dogs to hunt down invasive species and poachers, to the Blackfeet reservation to help her solve a mystery. In recent decades, unusual cancers and thyroid issues have bloomed in clusters across the Nation. Some Blackfeet stopped harvesting wild plants and animals — like mint, huckleberries, and elk — suspecting that traditional sources of sustenance for countless generations had become contaminated and diseased. But so far, there’s been limited empirical research linking the tribe’s public health woes to its environment. Calling Last aims to change that by conducting a comprehensive scientific survey of environmental contaminants in Blackfeet territory. If it works, her experiment will give the community peace of mind and the freedom to harvest wild edibles safely.
Her success relies on two restless dogs waiting in crates in the back of the gray truck.
Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Frost is a rust-and-cream-colored Springer spaniel-pit mix. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Frost is a rust-and-cream-colored Springer spaniel-pit mix, Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt. Sully, who was trained to track down human remains before he came to WD4C, was part of an unplanned litter. Frost was surrendered by his former owners for being too excitable, too energetic, and too obsessed with balls — traits that made him a perfect candidate for professional service.
Freed from the back of the truck, Frost and Sully zigzag from bank to bank, their tails wagging furiously. They’ve been trained to pinpoint mink and otter droppings, or scat, which can contain toxins because of processes called bioaccumulation and biomagnification, when substances move through the food chain and get concentrated in organisms. Insects like mayflies and dragonflies pick up toxins from their environment and accumulate them in their exoskeletons, then they’re consumed in vast numbers by trout and other fish, which in turn get eaten by mink and otters. The mammals leave their scat, infused with whatever toxins were originally in the insects, on the sides of the Two Medicine and other water bodies on the reservation.
All of a sudden, Frost stops running and starts sniffing around a beaver dam. Michele Vasquez, a canine field specialist who is leading the Blackfeet project for WD4C, isn’t sure whether the dog is excited about scat or if he’s trying to rouse an animal hiding in the dam, but she hangs back a few feet to let him work. Seconds later, Frost sits and makes eye contact with Vasquez. “Yeah? You think you’ve got something?” she asks him, and leans forward for a closer look.
Sure enough, a small, jet black dropping is perched precariously on a twig a few inches inside the beaver dam: mink scat. “What a guy!” Vasquez exclaims. She pulls Frost’s reward, a yellow ball on a rope, out of her fanny pack and chucks it into the river. Frost dives after it, ecstatic. Vasquez’s colleague, forensic field specialist Ngaio Richards, walks over and dons a plastic glove before reaching her hand into the dam to collect the sample and put it in a paper bag. Vasquez marks the place where Frost found the scat on her GPS. They’ll send the scat, and all the other samples they collect on this trip, to a lab for testing. When the results come back, Calling Last will share the data with her community. Clean scat means it’s safe to harvest wild edibles from this part of the river; toxic scat means it’s better to harvest somewhere else.
Calling Last has heard stories about contaminants buried on the reservation her whole life: whispers about a web of toxic hotspots, the legacy of decades of illegal dumping of trash, electronics, and other hazards. Rumors that a company paid the tribe a paltry sum to bury a cache of nuclear waste somewhere on the Nation’s rolling plains in the 1960s. Snatches of information about the chemicals companies used for fracking in the Bakken shale formation, which runs beneath part of the reservation and contains billions of barrels of oil and natural gas. The threat of oil extraction still looms today. The tribe is currently fighting to stop an oil company, Solenex, that wants to drill near the Badger and Two Medicine Rivers, which hold some of the tribe’s most sacred and culturally significant sites.
These scattered reports have contributed to a sense of unease among the Nation. “I feel like there’s a lot of fear on the reservation,” Celina Gray, a Little Shell and Blackfeet mother of four and a graduate student at the University of Montana studying wildlife biology, said. She wants to take her kids out hunting and foraging with her, but she doesn’t want to expose them to the environmental health hazards she suspects are lurking in the soil.
Celina Gray is a Little Shell and Blackfeet mother of four and a graduate student at the University of Montana studying wildlife biology. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Rates of cancer are higher on the Blackfeet Nation than elsewhere in Montana. Six in 1,000 Blackfeet were diagnosed with some type of cancer, on average, every year between 2005 and 2014, compared to 5 in 1,000 Montanans per year over the same period. An assessment of health risks among Blackfeet shows cancer was the leading cause of death on the reservation between 2014 and 2015 — 16 percent of overall deaths during that time period. But the tribe lacks the data it needs to get a fuller sense of how the disease is impacting Blackfeet and what could be causing these higher rates.
Calling Last says it’s not just the higher rate of cancer that concerns her, but the way the disease and its warning signs appear, in clusters, that makes her think people may be exposed to unknown health risks from the environment.
Kim Paul, the founder of a public health nonprofit called the Piikani Health Lodge Institute, tried to track down the source of the cancer when she was a graduate student at the University of Montana in the 2010s. Because she’s a member of the community, she knew about a 10-mile-long portion of the reservation, 40 miles north of the Blackfeet headquarters in the town of Browning, where every family but one had developed multiple forms of cancer. She remembered her grandmother’s warnings, when Paul was just a little girl, not to collect bear grass or flowers from that part of the reservation. “There was a lot of death in that stretch of road,” Paul said. At the University of Montana, she started collecting samples from the area to conduct a study, but quickly ran out of money and was forced to abandon the project.
Now, Calling Last is picking up the mantle. She was awarded a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to devise a project that will establish a database of environmental stressors at sites across the reservation that are both important harvesting spots and hold cultural significance to the Nation. Calling Last expects to find trace amounts of uranium and other nuclear energy byproducts, heavy metals that leached from illegal and legal dumpsites, pharmaceutical residue flushed or tossed by members of the tribe, and flame retardants and other pollutants carried into waterways by urban runoff. Then, she’ll add that data to a virtual map she’s making for her community.
A lone pumpjack sits on the plains south of the Blackfeet reservation in northwestern Montana.
AP Photo / Matt Volz
When it’s complete, her map will have more than 30 layers — sites of cultural importance, traditional names for rivers and valleys, toxic dumps, areas where it is dangerous to harvest plants and animals, and more. Each layer will serve a different role in achieving an overarching goal: to help the Blackfeet protect their health, preserve their traditional ways of life, and strengthen their hold on cultural identity and knowledge.
But first, Calling Last needs to find mink and otter scat. Or rather, the dogs do.
Frost and Sully get food and love from their trainers. They affectionately call Frost “melon butt,” because of the dense bunches of muscles at the top of his stocky legs. And in return, WD4C gets access to the dogs’ secret weapons: their noses.
Humans can see well and we have big brains, but we don’t have very many scent receptors in our nostrils — at least, not compared to dogs. All of the scent receptors from a human’s nose, laid side by side, would fit on the surface of a postage stamp. All the scent receptors from a dog’s snout would fill a handkerchief. “Let’s say you walk into a house and you smell spaghetti dinner being cooked,” Hugh Murray, a K-9 handler for the Quapaw Nation of Oklahoma. “You smell the product. They smell the individual ingredients, the flour, the sugar, the tomato. They break things down individually.”
Ngaio Richards collects a scat sample. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Brown paper bags hold mink and otter scat samples located by the working dogs. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
A dog can also pinpoint a single ingredient in a forest of other smells, a “single drop of perfume in an Olympic size pool,” Amanda Ott, a dog trainer for Working Dogs for Conservation, said, which is what makes them so good at working in the field.
Dogs have been trained to sniff out cancer, bed bugs, COVID-19, even stress. But canine fieldwork has drawbacks, and each working dog has its own idiosyncrasies. Ott, who owns and trains the black lab mix Sully, recently lost him for an afternoon when the pup took off after a moose.
And switching dogs from one project to another can confuse them as well. Frost, who had just come back to Montana after three weeks in Wyoming hunting down invasive plant species, would occasionally get sidetracked by a plant that looked like a target from his previous adventure while looking for scat along the Two Medicine River. With gentle coaxing from Vasquez, though, he was able to refocus.
Michele Vasquez points Frost toward an area she wants him to search. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Over the course of nine days of surveying, the two dogs found more than 70 scat samples. On their last day of work on the reservation, a member of the community told Calling Last that someone had illegally dumped barrels of used motor oil into the water upriver from one of her testing sites. Vasquez said the silver lining is that now the researchers will have data from before and after the incident. “So lies the crux of this work,” she said.
Eight years ago, Calling Last would never have imagined designing research around the vagaries of dogs. She was working as a water training facilitator, teaching Indigenous and non-Indigenous water operators how to manage their systems. She infused her trainings with presentations on the cultural importance of water and the original names for rivers and streams. “I tried to implant in them that they are our communities’ modern day water warriors, because they’re cleaning the water,” she said.
But the work wasn’t fulfilling. She quit her job and set about starting her own organization. After a year, she had cashed in her 401(k) and savings accounts, maxed out her credit cards, and succeeded in forming the group she still runs as a one-woman show today: Indigenous Vision. She holds cultural sensitivity trainings for Native and non-Native groups, runs educational programs for Blackfeet youth, and has spent the past several years building out the multi-layered map.
Calling Last laid out the stakes for me as she drove between surveying spots, pausing once in a while to take swigs of an energy drink and sing along to the mid-2000s hits thumping from a playlist on her phone. The license plates on her truck read “MTNBRBI” — “mountain Barbie” — a tribute to the place where she was raised, and where much of her family and many of her friends live. She grew up picking mint, sage, and sweetgrass on the reservation’s prairies. Her relatives hunt for buffalo, deer, and elk in its mountains and plains.
Souta Calling Last, a researcher and an enrolled member of the Blood Tribe, grew up on the Blackfeet reservation. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Hunting and foraging are not only crucial aspects of Blackfeet spiritual and cultural identity, she said, they’re a means of survival for a community that lacks critical resources. Some 36 percent of people on the reservation live below the poverty line, compared to 12.5 percent statewide. More than two-thirds of all Blackfeet are food insecure, meaning they don’t have reliable access to nutritious food. Wild animals and plants are cheaper, healthier, and fresher than the meat and produce available at the grocery store, Celina Gray, the graduate student, said. “The meat we ate all winter long was elk burger,” she said, “I don’t buy hamburger at Costco.”
But Blackfeet will only continue turning to those traditional methods of harvesting as long as they can trust them. Calling Last has watched as, over the years, her friends, family, and wider community developed unusual health problems — and she hasn’t been spared, either.
“Me, a bunch of other people, my mom, all the women in my family, have thyroid issues,” she said. To her, the source of the sickness is clear: “It’s gotta be something from our environment.”
A survey site on the reservation. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
That’s why Calling Last, who has a degree in water management from the University of Montana, has dedicated her life to building this map. “As a scientist, I can read Excel sheets and see data trends just by looking at the numbers,” she said. “But my community can’t. My community doesn’t even know what good or bad exposure limits are to all of these contaminants.”
And there’s a new threat on the horizon, one that further imperils the tribe’s reliance on the environment. The dogs have been brought out to the reservation this year to track down environmental contamination, but next summer, they’ll hunt for traces of an even worse-understood health hazard: chronic wasting disease.
In the winter of 2020, a Blackfeet hunter named Charley Wolf Tail shot and killed a white-tailed deer on his property and, because he had heard warnings about a strange illness percolating in deer in Montana, sent the animal’s lymph nodes to the Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks department for testing. The nodes turned up positive for chronic wasting disease, or CWD, an illness caused not by a virus or a bacteria, but by a baffling phenomenon in the natural world: a misfolded protein, or a “prion.”
One prion can infect the proteins in healthy cells by forcing them to fold, too, creating a chain reaction that produces a series of tiny holes in the brains of the hoofed ruminants that are unlucky enough to come across it. The prions create a mushy, spongy texture in the organ. Outwardly, the animals waste away for no discernable reason. Chronic wasting disease is often referred to as “zombie deer disease” because the creatures afflicted with it end up dazed and haggard, walking in aimless circles until they die. CWD could lead to mass die-offs in deer, elk, and bison populations on the reservation — whose meat Blackfeet depend on for survival. And experts still don’t know if the illness can spread to humans.
The federal government has detected CWD in 30 states. The deer shot by Wolf Tail is the first documented case of CWD on the reservation. If it spreads, it could further upend the Blackfeet way of life. “Because we live so close to the land and because we’re subsistence hunters,” Calling Last said, “if there is a human impact from CWD, it’s going to be to the tribal people.”
U.S. Geological Survey
Once CWD establishes itself in a given area, it’s nearly impossible to eradicate. A bacteria or a virus, like the coronavirus, can survive on a surface for a limited amount of time before it dies. A prion can exist, in theory, forever. “Once it’s in the environment, it’s there sort of indefinitely,” Cory Anderson, a CWD expert at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Grist.
Some studies show that grasses and other plants can absorb prions from animal saliva and feces and, in turn, impart the disease to other animals that eat the plants. “We use plants for our ceremonies, our sweat lodges, our food, and our tea,” Calling Last said. “If those plants have prions in them, what does that mean for us?”
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have determined that dogs can detect CWD prions in deer feces in the lab. But experts have never attempted putting working hounds on the hunt for CWD in the field. Next summer, WD4C plans to conduct an in-the-field canine search for the prions, right here on the Blackfeet reservation.
It’s a new day in Glacier County and the sun is high in the sky as Calling Last turns right on a long, winding dirt road that leads to a ranch-style house in the middle of a large field. She’s taking the Working Dogs for Conservation crew to one last site on the reservation before this year’s research trip is over — a place she calls “ground zero.”
The women clamber out of their trucks and put on shoes they’ve been saving for this site, their “dirty” shoes. So little is known about the misfolded proteins that cause chronic wasting disease, and Calling Last and the Working Dogs team aren’t taking any chances. When they’re done surveying here, they’ll rinse their shoes with bleach and clean the dogs’ paws with disinfecting wipes in order to prevent rogue prions from hitching a ride back to Missoula with them.
Wolf Tail, the hunter who shot the deer, steps out of his house and walks toward the parked cars. He knows why the researchers are here. He’s just as worried about CWD as they are and is glad to help them prepare for next year’s prion surveys. “Hunting is my way of life,” he said, standing in the driveway and holding his dog, a terrier-pug mix named Uno. Herds of deer amble past Wolf Tail’s front porch every day. He scans them religiously now, looking for sick animals. “It’s something that’s definitely been in the back of my mind now, since the testing,” he said.
Charley Wolf Tail holds his dog, Uno. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
There’s no way Calling Last can search the entire reservation for prions. There are too many acres and not enough money or dogs. But she has figured out a way around those obstacles by making an educated guess. The way chronic wasting disease works is still shrouded in mystery; some ruminants get the disease after encountering prions, while others are exposed and walk away unscathed. Calling Last thinks the determining factor is immune system function — how healthy an animal is at the time of exposure. She’ll test that theory by having the dogs search for CWD in the same areas where they hunted for environmental contaminants this year.
“The main point of the project is to see whether there is a correlation between these contamination sites and CWD. Like, do animals have lower immune systems because of contamination, and are these animals more likely to get sick?” Vasquez said. In short, there may be an overlap between environmental contamination and CWD, which would mean that protecting the community from one threat also protects it from the other.
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Charley Wolf Tail’s house. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
A dead bird floats in the river behind Wolf Tail’s house. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
The otter and mink scat that the dogs find today, at ground zero, will help Calling Last test her hypothesis. Vasquez, a GPS tracking device hanging from a lanyard around her neck and a long leash in her hand, walks to the back of her truck and opens the tailgate. The two rescues peer out at her from their crates.
“Let’s bring Frost out for this one,” Ott says, glancing at the Springer spaniel. Frost lets out a frantic bark at the sound of his name.
“OK,” Vasquez says, opening the door to his crate, “You’re up, bud.”
Vasquez puts a collar and a red vest on Frost, who is standing on the truck bed trembling with excitement. “Free,” she says when he’s suited up, and Frost jumps down from the truck. Vasquez walks around the back of Wolf Tail’s house and down to the stream, Frost bounding a few feet ahead of her. A bright, midday sun is shining. Calling Last, Vasquez, Richards, Ott, and the others who have been running alongside the dogs for three days straight are drained and quiet, slightly diminished by the significance of ground zero. The prions could be lurking anywhere, in the tall grass rippling across Wolf Tail’s backyard or the dark mud that lines the river bank. Frost is unfazed. There’s mink and otter scat to be found, and a squeaky reward to receive.
Vasquez makes him heel and sit before she gives him the command that transforms the excited pup into a laser-focused hunting machine: “Go find,” she says.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Reservation Dogs on Dec 14, 2022.
A deadline is looming for the Senate to take action to stop new uranium mines adjacent to the Grand Canyon, conservation experts and Indigenous tribal leaders warned this week. An existing mine just south of the canyon, though dormant for 30 years,already poses a threat to nearby ecosystems and communities and is expected to resume operations in early 2023.
The Senate has until January 3 to vote on the Grand Canyon Protection Act, a bill that would make a 20-year moratorium on new uranium mines near the Grand Canyon permanent, saving more than 1 million acres of public lands from development. The act has already been passed twice by the House of Representatives.
After the January 3 deadline, the legislative slate is wiped clean ahead of the start of the 118th Congress, with no promise of the Grand Canyon Protection Act being reintroduced to the Senate agenda next year.
The operations of the existing Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon would nonetheless not be impacted by the bill. While a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon was implemented in 2012, Pinyon Plain was exempt due to an earlier agreement.
The Grand Canyon forms part of the Colorado River Basin, a vast watershed with critical tributaries and reservoirs which provide water to over 40 million people in Southwest states and California. The territories of Indigenous tribes such as the Navajo Nation are also located there. But for decades, the region has been under intense economic and environmental pressure from uranium mining operations. Countless members of the Navajo Nation have suffered from higher rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses due to the nuclear waste left over from Cold War era uranium extraction.
Other Native communities in the area are also under threat from mining interests. Since the 1980s, the Havasupai Tribe, whose territory lies within the Grand Canyon, has fought against the ongoing operation of the nearby Pinyon Plain Mine. The controversial mine has been responsible for rupturing important groundwater resources during the drilling process, effectively depleting an essential natural resource.
“It is time to permanently ban uranium mining — not only to preserve the Havasupai Tribe’s cultural identity and our existence as the Havasupai People, but to protect the Grand Canyon for generations to come,” said the tribe’s chairman Thomas Siyuja, Sr.
“From an environmental standpoint, water resource standpoint and a cultural standpoint, it’s just the wrong place to do it,” said Amber Reimondo, the energy director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a local conservation and environmental justice organization. Reimondo explained that the Colorado River Basin is so complex and extensive that any contamination of its waters could have profound consequences for communities hundreds of miles away.
Hundreds of active uranium mining claims have been made near Grand Canyon National Park. These claims could develop into full-fledged operations if the Grand Canyon Protection Act doesn’t pass a Senate vote.
Uranium is a radioactive element that nonetheless occurs naturally in the earth’s soil, rock, and groundwater. The element is so ubiquitous in the environment that it is a major contributor to normal “background radiation.” When condensed in rock formations, uranium is far less radioactive than when it is extracted during mining operations.
Mining of uranium is essential for nuclear power generation. But to extract uranium, mining operations often use a mix of chemicals to dissolve the element from underground rock formations and into groundwater. The exposed uranium extraction – now far more radioactive – is then pumped to the surface through mine shafts and placed in surface-level evaporation ponds. The waste from the entire process can cause food, water, and air contamination.
Uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region has unsurprisingly been opposed by major environmental organizations. But mining has also faced pushback from local business owners who depend on a steady stream of tourists from around the world who expect to visit a pristine and beautiful natural environment. Arizona voters are also overwhelmingly supportive of the Grand Canyon Protection Act. The threat that uranium mining poses to healthy water resources is of particular concern in the Southwest, which is facing historic drought in the Colorado River Basin – which provides water to over 40 million Americans – and alarmingly low water levels in its reservoirs.
But banning new uranium mines on the federal lands that make up the Grand Canyon would only address part of the problem. The Pinyon Plain Mine would still pose a threat to natural resources that tribal nations depend on and visitors cherish. In addition, tribal leaders and environmental advocates are still struggling to get the federal government to clean up the radioactive waste from hundreds of abandoned mines.
In the rush to take advantage of nuclear power’s purported green energy benefits, Reimondo, of Grand Canyon Trust, says, the same mistakes of the fossil fuel era are being made in the clean energy era.
“Indigenous communities from around the world have known for hundreds of years that uranium is something you don’t touch,” she said. “Because once you expose it, it’s like a Pandora’s Box, and you can’t close it again.”
Correction, December 12, 2022:This story has been corrected to reflect more accurately the potential consequences of uranium mining on the Colorado River Basin; the future of the Pinyon Plain Mine; and the legislative hurdles to pass the Grand Canyon Protection Act.
The Bureau of Land Management proposed a new rule Monday that aims to reduce wasted natural gas on federal and Tribal lands which will help tamp down methane releases. By preventing billions of cubic feet of natural gas emissions that come from unintentional equipment leaks or deliberate venting and flaring, the federal government hopes to curb the potent greenhouse gas which is responsible for 30 percent of global warming.
The proposed rule, said Secretary Deb Haaland in a press release, “will bring our regulations in line with technological advances that industry has made in the decades since the BLM’s rules were first put in place, while providing a fair return to taxpayers.”
The rules would require operators to submit a waste minimization plan with any permit application to drill oil wells. If a plan doesn’t adequately show how the operator will avoid wasting gas, the BLM can delay approval until the concerns are addressed to the agency’s satisfaction.
There would also be monthly limits on flaring, mandatory technology upgrades, and enforced leak and detection programs. The proposed rule would apply solely to oil and gas facilities that the BLM oversees on federal and Tribal land.
“No one likes to waste natural resources from our public lands,” said BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning in a press release. “This draft rule is a common-sense, environmentally responsible solution as we address the damage that wasted natural gas causes.”
The proposal builds on goals the Biden administration announced at 27th United Nations climate change conference, or COP27, as well as in November 2021 after COP26 where the U.S. became one of more than 100 countries to sign the Global Methane Pledge – a non-binding agreement to collectively reduce global methane emissions at least 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030. According to a recent Global Carbon Project study, half of methane emissions are caused by humans – and fossil fuels represent nearly 18 percent of that total budget. Of that, roughly 63 percent is derived from oil and gas production and pipelines.
But federal proposals to curb methane emissions have been met with limited success. Environmentalists celebrated ambitious regulations the EPA introduced last year, but in 2016, a BLM attempt to reduce natural gas waste – an earlier version of this proposal – was quashed by industry and state groups, arguing that the EPA overstepped its authority.
All together, the federal government estimates that implementing the new rule would cost companies roughly $122 million per year to meet requirements but would benefit from $55 million worth of recovered gas per year. The BLM claims individuals living in the U.S. would benefit $427 million per year from avoiding climate damages with reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
In an email, BLM press secretary Brian Hires said “the proposed rule would ensure that, when federal or Tribal gas is wasted through excessive venting or flaring, the public and Tribal mineral owners are compensated through royalty payments.”
In early November, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case brought by the Navajo Nation that could have far-reaching impacts on tribal water rights in the Colorado River Basin. In its suit, the Navajo Nation argues that the Department of Interior has a responsibility, grounded in treaty law, to protect future access to water from the Colorado River. Several states and water districts have filed petitions opposing the tribe, stating that the river is “already fully allocated.”
The case highlights a growing tension in the region: As water levels fall and states face cuts amid a two-decade-long megadrought, tribes are working to ensure their water rights are fully recognized and accessible.
On average, 15 million acre-feet of water used to flow through the Colorado River every year. For scale, one acre-foot of water could supply one to three households annually. A century ago, states reached an agreement to divide that water among themselves. But in recent decades, the river has supplied closer to 12 million acre-feet. Scientists say water managers in the basin need to plan for closer to 9 million acre-feet per year, a 40 percent decrease in a water source that supports 40 million people, due to climate change and aridification.
No states have made plans to accommodate this drop. Meanwhile, tribal nations are legally entitled to between 3.2 and 3.8 million acre-feet of ground and surface water from the Colorado River system.
There are 30 federally recognized tribes in the river’s basin, and 12 of them, including Navajo Nation, still have at least some “unresolved” rights, meaning the extent of their rightful claims to water have yet to be agreed upon.
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
Ultimately, Indigenous nations in the Colorado River Basin could be serious power brokers in crucial water negotiations to come — but they face historical, legal and practical obstacles. The Navajo Nation, for example, has rights to almost 700,000 acre-feet of water annually across New Mexico and Utah, along with unresolved claims in Arizona. But, because of a lack of infrastructure, up to 40 percent of Navajo households don’t have running water. For the Navajo Nation and other tribes with allocations in the basin, building and improving infrastructure means providing citizens with access to a fundamental human right: water.
But tribal water use is taken out of state allocations, meaning the more water tribes use, the less states have. It also means that states have less incentive to work with tribal leaders or recognize pending water rights claims. This conflict is not new. It has been built into a century of policies that have excluded and divested from Indigenous nations.
Tribes often hold senior water rights, meaning their allocations are the last to be cut in a shortage, and states in the basin are beginning to reckon with this fact. A fundamental shift in how the river is governed — to a system that acknowledges tribes’ sovereignty and gives them greater say — will be key to sustainably and equitably distributing water in the years to come.
Tribes “need to be included in every one of those conversations and considered just like a state or the federal government,” Southern Ute Tribal Council Member Lorelei Cloud said at the annual Colorado River District Seminar in September. “You cannot discount us.”
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
One barrier to equitable distribution is a glaring information gap: There is no definitive source of data on water usage among tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Historically, federal surveys have ignored tribal water use, and though tribal-led studies have begun to fill these gaps, the lack of data makes planning for a future river with shrinking flows impossible.
“If you know how much water everyone has or is allocated, then you can come up with a comprehensive solution — not just management of the river but responses to climate change,” Heather Tanana (Diné), a professor of law at the University of Utah, said in an interview.
In Arizona, for example, nearly 70 percent of the state’s water allocation belongs to tribes, and nearly all the tribal nations with unresolved water rights in the basin have at least some territory in the state. According to a joint study by tribal nations and the federal government, 10 tribes in the basin, which hold the bulk of the recognized tribal water rights, are diverting just over half of what they’re entitled to — most of which is used for agriculture. It’s unclear what water availability would look like if these tribes had basic infrastructure to get water to their citizens, or if all tribes with unresolved rights settled their cases.
Grist / Amelia Bates / Jessie Blaeser / Joseph Lee / Anna Smith
“My experience of negotiating water rights settlements in Arizona is that the state of Arizona very much approaches them as a zero-sum game,” said Jay Weiner, water counsel for the Quechan Indian Tribe and the Tonto Apache Tribe, which has been in settlement negotiations since at least 2014. That combative approach, he said, has persisted regardless of governor or political party. “It is something that seems to be deeply embedded in the fabric of Arizona and how it approaches Indian water rights settlements.”
In February, the federal government announced $1.7 billion for tribes to use for water settlements. That means more tribal citizens and communities could have access to water. It also means that states will have to work with tribes to plan for the future and adapt to climate change.
In some places, tribes and communities have already been moving in that direction, working together to find place-based solutions that use the resources and infrastructure at hand. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the city of Tucson, Arizona, have an intergovernmental agreement for Tucson to store and deliver potable water for the tribe, which doesn’t have the infrastructure to do so on its own. Such partnerships will only become more essential as drought and aridification continue to stress the region.
“If folks work together and partner together, the opportunity to solve the problem, I think, is enhanced,” said Robyn Interpreter, an attorney who represents the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the Yavapai-Apache Nation in their water rights claims.
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
The federal Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, which is building $123 million in infrastructure, is another promising example. The goal of the project is to construct water plants and a system of pipes and pumps that will deliver water to the Navajo Nation, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the city of Gallup, New Mexico. Crystal Tulley-Cordova, a principal hydrologist for the water management branch of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, said in an interview there is a new willingness to collaborate, owing to both the severity of the situation and non-tribal water users’ realization that they must work with tribes. “Now there’s a greater desire to be able to work together. So I’m encouraged by that,” she said.
Meanwhile, tribal nations are also making progress in securing their access to water. In May, the Navajo Utah Water Rights Settlement Act was finalized, granting the Navajo Nation 81,500 acre-feet of water in Utah and authorized $220 million in federal funds for water infrastructure projects. “Our families celebrate this moment in history after decades of fighting for the Navajo Utah Water Rights Settlement,” Navajo Nation Council Delegate Charlaine Tso said in a statement at the time. “It is clear drought conditions are affecting water levels across the country. Many of our elders haul drinking water from miles away while we work to get proper water infrastructure projects completed. This settlement allows us to begin connecting our water lines to the most rural areas.”
However, tribes still have no direct means of governance over the river, and, as seen in the Navajo water rights case headed to the Supreme Court, states continue to fight tribal communities seeking access to water.
Last fall, more than 20 tribes signed a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in which they pressed for direct, sustained involvement in re-negotiating the guidelines that manage the river, which are set to expire in 2026. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, last March, Haaland and Bureau of Reclamation leadership met with tribal leaders and “committed to transparency and inclusivity for the Tribes when work begins on the post-2026 operational rules,” according to a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior.
“It’s the job of political imagination to see what’s possible,” Andrew Curley (Diné), an assistant professor of geography at University of Arizona, said in an interview. “That’s something that we collectively, not just Native nations but led by Native nations, can start to articulate. What is a different vision of the river than what has been put into law and these congressional acts and Supreme Court decisions over the years?”
To reach net-zero carbon goals with their current plans, countries around the world will need 1.2 billion hectares of land, an area larger than the United States and equivalent to the world’s total cropland, for carbon removal projects. More than half of that land would need to be transformed into new forests. According to a new study, countries are over reliant on massive tree planting projects, and other land-based carbon removal schemes, to meet climate targets and avoid more effective measures like cutting fossil fuel use or conserving primary forests.
The “Land Gap” report, compiled by 20 researchers around the world and released this week by Melbourne Climate Futures, is the first to calculate the massive gap between governments’ reliance on land for carbon mitigation and the role that land can realistically play given availability and competing needs. The report also highlights that using land for carbon removal via tree planting programs will have negative impacts on ecosystems, Indigenous communities, food security, and human rights.
“There are assumptions that land can save you somehow from having to do deeper cuts in terms of fossil fuel production and use,” said Anne Larson, one of the authors of the report. “It’s distracting and it’s not going to work.”
For years Indigenous groups have warned about the dangers of depending on forests to remove carbon from the atmosphere without clear guarantees of Indigenous rights. The report shows global climate pledges have the potential to put communities at higher risk of danger. Repurposing land for plantations and other tree planting-based carbon removal could push Indigenous peoples from their land ultimately weakening the environment.
“We will lose everything,” said Levi Sucre, Bribri from Costa Rica and the Coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests. “We have to figure out an alternative way to sustain our lands, our communities.”
Tree planting has been shown to be a tenuous strategy to mitigate climate change, and part of the problem is the accounting system used to track carbon emissions. Cutting fossil fuel use is a guaranteed way to reduce atmospheric carbon while trees are unreliable: they take a long time to grow, need land that often isn’t available, can be harvested, or can even burn down. However, countries treat cutting fossil fuels and planting trees as the same. That means countries can make ambitious pledges based on future land use changes instead of jeopardizing short term economic interests by cutting fossil fuels. The report recommends countries make deep cuts in emissions from industrial agriculture, deforestation and fossil fuels instead of relying on unavailable land for carbon offsets. “We should really be seeing reductions and removals as two different things,” said Kate Dooley, one of the report’s authors.
As well, researchers found that if land-based strategies are to work as a complement to emission cuts, they’ll need to be oriented away from simply planting trees in order to be just and effective. To that end, the study emphasized safeguarding the rights of Indigenous peoples in order to protect forests. Research has shown that the world’s healthiest forests are on protected Indigenous lands, and securing Indigenous land tenure rights, as well as political status, would protect communities and the lands they call home.
“We are under constant threat due to land disputes. We need to have a clear demarcation of indigenous lands. We need effective land protection policy, and also protection of those of us who live in these areas,” said Sonia Guajajara, the first Indigenous person to be elected federal deputy in São Paulo. “That is urgent. That is fundamental.”
Tree planting and reforestation projects typically prioritize monocultures of fast growing commercial trees over biodiversity. Offering limited ecosystem integrity, they are extremely susceptible to fires and droughts, emit carbon when they are harvested, and, even in the best case scenarios, they don’t provide immediate, critical carbon storage payoffs because trees need time to grow. Instead, the report emphasizes protecting standing forests from extractive industries like logging, mining, and agriculture as the first priority. Most critical are primary forests, which store the most carbon and are the most stable and resilient to climate change.
The report encourages restoring degraded natural ecosystems instead of planting new forests, or creating monoculture plantations. The U.N.’s Global Land Outlook report estimates 5 billion hectares of land is suitable for restoration, but at the moment, countries’ pledges examined in the study only account for restoring 551 million hectares of degraded ecosystems leaving room for world leaders to focus on ecological restoration, natural regeneration, and agroforestry. However, only twenty countries mention agroforestry in their climate plans.
Countries that signed the Paris Climate Accords are supposed to update their commitments every five years at least, and in 2021, the U.S. set a goal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent below 2005 levels in the next eight years. The authors of the report hope that as world leaders head to the COP27 climate summit to discuss their climate pledges and make new, more ambitious commitments, they will reconsider the impact of carbon removal and refocus on ecosystem restoration, primary forests, and protecting Indigenous rights.
“It isn’t too late for countries to rethink the way they use land to achieve their climate goals,” said Brendan Mackey, a report co-author.
