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Category: Indigenous Affairs

  • Don’t Look Down

    Kathy Lenniger was running her dogsled team one day along her usual route in Fairbanks, Alaska, when she suddenly splashed into overflow, fresh water spilling on top of the snow. Surprised and chilled, she returned to the parking lot, where a lanky man was loading a sled with science equipment. Nicholas Hasson, it turned out, was studying thawing permafrost — research that could shed light on the streams and sinkholes that recently materialized around Lenniger’s property and all around town. 

    Lenniger lives in a log cabin in Goldstream Valley, a spruce-lined swale with a rolling view of the Northern Lights near Fairbanks. “It’s the birthplace of American permafrost research, actually,” said Hasson, a Ph.D. student at the nearby University of Alaska Fairbanks, or UAF. During World War II, the military feared the ribbons of dancing light were interfering with its radar, so Congress passed an act in 1946 establishing the Geophysical Institute at UAF. Soon, scientists were investigating the strange phenomena in the sky and drilling boreholes around Goldstream Valley to study the frozen ground beneath their feet. 

    Since then, temperatures in Fairbanks have shifted so much that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially changed the city’s subarctic designation in 2021, downgrading it to “warm summer continental.” As the climate warms, the ancient ice that used to cover an estimated 85 percent of Alaska is thawing. As it streams away, there are places where the ground is now collapsing. Many of the valley’s spruce trees lean drunkenly. Sometimes, only a thin layer of soil covers yawning craters where the ice has vanished, what Hasson calls “ghost ice wedges.” Its absence has already fundamentally changed how — and where — people can live.

    • trees with white bark bend in an arc
    • an orange cone and yellow tape mark off a hole in the ground of a forested area
    Birch trees, left, bend as the ice below them melts near the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Collapsing trees are one of the more visible signs of permafrost; as ice thaws, the ground can slump, moving enough to overwhelm trees with shallow root systems. Right, Caution tape surrounds a large sinkhole caused by melting permafrost. Photos by Sean McDermott / Grist.

    When Lenniger built her cabin several decades ago, she didn’t expect she’d need to regularly jack up her foundation. But for the last several years, she said, “if I have some water on my counter now, it rolls in this direction. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s sinking again.’” At first, she tried to fill the sinkholes popping up around her property with bones from the meat she fed her sled dogs, but eventually the pits grew large enough to strand a backhoe. Despite living in perhaps the most-studied permafrost valley in the country, Lenniger didn’t know how much worse her troubles might get — until Hasson offered to help. 

    On a muggy afternoon last summer, Hasson prepared to try to find out why Lenniger’s cabin was sinking. He pulled on a backpacking frame he’d jury-rigged to receive very low-frequency radio waves from antennae in Hawaii, recording the modulations of the electric field to map the permafrost beneath the duff. The colors of the aurora come from the charged particles of solar wind, which collide with oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth’s ionosphere and create a glowing halo. The free electrons from these collisions can reflect radio waves, helping Hasson understand how permafrost is thawing below the surface. Combined with a $40,000 laser he dragged behind him on a plastic sled he’d nicknamed “The Coffin,” Hasson is able to link surface methane emissions to the ice disappearing underground. 

    As he scrambled off Lenniger’s driveway into the brush, Hasson explained, “It’s just like an MRI — we’re able to scan and see where water is flowing.” Walking across her yard, he found a new underground river had formed under a corner of Lenniger’s home, which explained why her land had caved in.

    a man in green nature clothes and a woman in a poncho walk in a forest
    Researcher Nicholas Hasson, right, talks with Kathy Lenniger, left, a property owner in Fairbanks’ Goldstream Valley. Permafrost melt is creating sinkholes and undermining the structural integrity of homes, wells, septic systems, and roads. Sean McDermott / Grist

    The permafrost around Fairbanks is discontinuous; jagged pieces of it finger north-facing slopes and enfold the low-lying valleys. Yet potential homebuyers who want to avoid it are left to guesswork. “There’s no comprehensive map of permafrost,” said Kellen Spillman, the director of the department of community planning for the Fairbanks North Star Borough. For those like Lenniger, whose properties later develop thaw-related problems, there’s little recourse, either from insurance or the government. The University of Alaska Fairbanks, home to much of the state’s permafrost research, has itself struggled with recurring sinkholes on its roads and parking lots. “We have invested funding to rebuild,” said Cameron Wohlford, director of design and construction at the school’s facilities, “only to have them fail.”

    Homeowners around Alaska’s second-largest city are facing expensive repairs, or even having their properties condemned. Hasson eventually traced the river running beneath Lenniger’s property to her neighbor’s, where the owner, Judy Gottschalk, reported that her septic pipes had broken as the ground settled. “My well went out this winter, too,” she said. Not knowing where else the ghost ice lies, Gottschalk has been nervous about putting in a new septic system. The drilling and construction required to replace it would cost her as much as $45,000, more than she originally paid for her house. “Everyone I know is having problems with their housing,” Lenniger said. 

    As parts of Alaska set record high temperatures in December, Fairbanks closed out 2021 with a destructive ice storm, causing roofs to collapse. A warmer Arctic is also a wetter Arctic, accelerating the breakdown of permafrost, explained Tom Douglas, a senior scientist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, in Fairbanks. “For every centimeter of rain, we see about one centimeter of additional top-down thaw,” he said. On average, Fairbanks now sees about five more weeks of rain than it did in the 1970s. 

    a woman in a green poncho points to a wooden support on the corner of a wooden house
    Kathy Lenniger points to the back corner of her house, where she has had to add wood to the foundation’s posts in order to keep her home level. Sean McDermott / Grist

    “In my 47 years here, I’ve never seen these kinds of conditions before,” Lenniger said. She has a lot of practice finding creative ways to take on Alaska’s hurdles: Before phone lines went in, she and her partner used homing pigeons to communicate while mushing, though she said she was unfazed when the birds were devoured by owls. But now, the rapid changes are testing her ability to cope. “Every day, it’s like now what will happen?” 

    Just as the earth clings to its former shape, leaving a record of where ice used to be, the very language used to describe these changes is revealing. The word permafrost, after all, is simply an abbreviation of “permanently frozen ground.” Much of Alaska’s permafrost is tens to hundreds of thousands of years old, first frozen when Goldstream Valley was grazed by mammoths. Now, that sense of immutability is slipping. “It was thought to be permanent — that any changes happened on a scale of tens of thousands of years,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a leading permafrost researcher. 

    Many variables influence permafrost’s stability, like how cold it is, how deep it runs, and the quantity of soil moisture, or its “ice richness.” In some parts of Alaska, ice extends nearly a half-mile below the surface, while in others, it has formed the landscape itself, sprouting tundra-covered ice hills called pingos. 

    an aerial view of a brown mountainous landscape
    Rising temperatures have caused structural problems for the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, seen here in aerial view. The pipeline has experienced “slope creep” as a result of thawing permafrost.  Sean McDermott / Grist

    Since 1993, Romanovsky has been taking field data from stations around the state, recording their increasing temperatures. At all of the 350 stations, soil temperatures have warmed substantially, and thaw is inching down to deeper depths. On the North Slope, one of Alaska’s coldest ice-rich regions, “when we started it was about -8, and now it’s -4 degrees Celsius, so we’re already halfway to zero,” he said. Dramatic changes will increase once this melting point between frozen and liquid is hit. He predicts that within 40 years, the Slope will be “at a critical threshold in normal, undisturbed conditions.” 

    Off the North Slope, this tipping point will be reached sooner. Any time soil or vegetation is disturbed — as the Army Corps of Engineers discovered in 1942 while trying to build a highway to Alaska — permafrost has a tendency to disintegrate into truck-swallowing mud. It’s a similar story with roads built in recent decades. Jeff Currey, materials engineer for the northern region of Alaska’s Department of Transportation & Public Facilities, explains that as ice wedges degrade under the state’s highways and airports, the asphalt heaves and drops, creating a dangerous roller-coaster effect. Because Alaska has relatively few roads across its 665,000 square miles, the ones it has are critical connections. 

    “Warming temperatures are contributing to increasing maintenance and damage,” Currey said. “Anecdotally, we’re having to fix the same places more frequently, and more intensively.” 

    Mitigation measures can help, from the low-tech approach of using gravel to channel cold air against embankments to high-tech thermosiphons, tubes that channel warmth aboveground during the winter to help keep the soil frozen. But Alaska’s budget for maintenance is largely dictated by the state legislature, and Currey calls the annual $330 million allotted to the northern region in recent years “inadequate.” Currey explains the average road is typically built to last around 30 years, but that’s largely based on expected traffic, not whether the road will be thermally stable. An independent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that, as a result of climate change, the state will have to spend billions more on maintaining and repairing public infrastructure by the end of the century. Despite budget shortfalls, Currey predicts that “maintenance efforts simply have to increase.” In many cases, “we’ll tolerate rougher and worse roads than we do now — that will just be the economic reality.”

    A map showing projected thaw for Alaska towns built on permafrost. Hundreds of communities in the state were built on permafrost, much of which is at high risk of thaw by 2060.
    Grist / Clayton Aldern

    Around Fairbanks, elevating buildings to keep their heat from leaking into permafrost or designing structures to be adjusted isn’t new. Re-leveling houses as a cheap way to adjust to moving ground is an Alaskan tradition. “My grandparents used to chase the corners on their cabin when it moved, like everybody,” said Aaron Cooke, an architect and researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Cold Climate Housing Research Center, who has worked on these issues in many communities around the state. But with climate change, the old engineering tricks that helped keep permafrost frozen aren’t sufficient. “The ground is changing, even if you do everything right.”

    To understand the scale of the impact when it starts to melt, Cooke said, you have to understand that “to someone in the north, the natural state of the ground, the default status of Earth, is frozen. And thousands of years of culture are built on that knowledge.” While the impacts of permafrost thaw — subsidence, flooding, sinkholes, and landslides — mimic the devastation of natural disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency isn’t responsible for permafrost damage, and it’s difficult to get covered by homeowner’s insurance. “How fast does a disaster need to move for a department that handles disasters to address it?” Cooke asked. 

    Romanovsky predicts that within a decade, the destruction in most parts of Alaska will get worse. “I’m worrying about my house as well,” he said. But regions with continuous and ice-rich permafrost, like those in northwest Alaska, will see the worst damage. “It will be the major problem driving relocation,” he said, “but these changes need to be understood at high resolution — for each village, for each house, you need to know what to expect.” 

    Where the Chukchi Sea bites into the North American continent, ice loss has driven thousands of walruses to the beaches of Point Lay, in northwest Alaska within the Arctic Circle. The predominately Iñupiat community, home to around 300 people, is wrestling with the loss of ice, too: In 2016, the lake they relied on for drinking water disappeared overnight after the ice wedge it rested on eroded, forcing the town to pump water from a nearby river. This year, one of the town’s holding tanks failed, spilling almost a million gallons. “Apparently, permafrost was melting under us,” said Lupita Henry, the Native Village of Point Lay’s former tribal president. “There are cracks in homes, doors that can’t close, houses that are so angled they seem unlivable.”

    Now 40 years old, Henry was a young girl when the town’s first underground sewer lines were put in; many of them have since broken as the ground settled. The borough government recently installed new electric poles, which are already starting to lean. Like in many rural Alaskan communities, there’s a shortage of housing, but Henry said the thawing permafrost makes it difficult to build or even get a loan for a new home. “Where do you get your insurance? Through which bank can you finance to even get your home fixed?” she asked. “When the ground is falling underneath you, what do you do?”

    a wooden building tilts into the brown earth
    The Native Village of Point Lay is a predominately Iñupiaq village of about 300 people on the northwest coast of Alaska. Andrea Medeiros / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

    In 2018, the state recognized a new hazard: usteq, a word from the Alaska Native Yup’ik language that describes the catastrophic land collapse stemming from thawing permafrost, and the erosion and flooding it entails. As sea ice disappears, the coast has been battered by intensifying storm surges, speeding the breakdown of permafrost under the shore. Riverbanks are corroding from thaw, changing everything from the chemistry of the groundwater to its distribution and movement. Permafrost, Henry said, “is linked to everything — our homes, water sources, food sources, vegetation.”

    Point Lay is now working with researchers on a Navigating the New Arctic project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to try to determine the best engineering for building on its ice-rich and unstable ground. It’s all complicated by the fact that the remote town can only be reached by plane or barge, making construction more difficult. Even before the pandemic, supplies were regularly delayed. “All of the problems overlap,” said Jana Peirce, the project’s coordinator. Point Lay can apply to FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program for help in adapting to permafrost thaw; the federal agency is now proactively trying to intervene, because the cost of responding to emergencies is, on average, six times more expensive than mitigation. But to do so, Point Lay will need an up-to-date hazard mitigation plan, and to form a plan, they need to know where the ground ice is, and how it might melt. “While there is no question that planning is important for smart adaptation,” Peirce said, “for a small community already living in crisis, this is just another hurdle.” 

    In the 2019 Alaska Statewide Threat Assessment, which set out to summarize the risks permafrost presents, Point Lay is ranked as one of the top three communities under threat from permafrost thaw. Yet aid has been slow in coming. “You tell them you need a water source, that your land is melting underneath you — how many meetings do I have to have until I’m given funding?” Henry asked. In March 2022, Point Lay became the first town in Alaska to declare a climate emergency, acknowledging the threat to their existence. 

    a large rock face with grooves
    Erosion from permafrost thaw, as seen here, is a common problem for communities in Northern Alaska. Courtesy of Mikhail Kanevskiy / University of Alaska Fairbanks, Institute of Northern Engineering

    Towns across Alaska are facing similar challenges: The statewide threat assessment found that 89 of Alaska’s 336 communities are threatened by permafrost degradation. “The main barriers to addressing these threats include the lack of site-specific data to inform the development of solutions, and the lack of funding to implement repairs and proactive solutions,” Max Neale, senior program manager for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, wrote in an email. “We have yet to see significant engagement from state and federal partners to improve the efficacy and equitability of programs for communities facing climate change and environmental threats.” 

    In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that federal assistance for climate migration has been ad hoc, and that the federal government is nowhere near prepared for the scale of relocation required. Cooke says temperate parts of the world simply don’t seem to have registered the urgency of Arctic change. He’s spent over a decade racing to help relocate Alaskan towns like Shishmaref or Kivalina, which, despite being deemed in imminent danger back in 2003, have not yet completed their move. But when he attends climate change conferences, “it’s very jarring to hear people still talking in the future tense.” 

    For many Alaskans, the emergency is already here. “If we can get a good idea of how much permafrost we’re sitting on top of,” Henry said, slowly, “we can try to get the federal government to help us with mitigation, or decide if we have to relocate.” Although facing a crisis, people in Point Lay are used to the idea of building for an uncertain future. “Don’t put any pity on us,” Henry said. “We’re strong people who survived thousands of years — and we will continue surviving.”

    The scale of the problem is daunting, but there’s surprisingly little agreement on how much dealing with a thawing Arctic will cost. Over a dozen experts interviewed for this article admitted they weren’t sure how many Americans live on permafrost; a recent paper published in Population and Environment suggested a ballpark of around 170,000 people. Nor can anyone agree how much ice is where, much less how it might thaw. 

    Nearly a third of Arctic research is based on data from just two field stations: Abisko, Sweden, and Toolik Lake, Alaska. And researchers usually collect data during the Arctic’s short summer field season, even though winter conditions may look very different, making conclusions less accurate. For instance, recent studies have found that emissions of carbon and methane released by thawing permafrost have been drastically underestimated. There are 1.6 trillion metric tons of carbon currently stored in permafrost — twice what’s now in the atmosphere. New projections suggest that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost could equal those emitted from the rest of the United States by the end of the century.

    A researcher at Toolik Field Station charts the collapse of ground on the Alaskan tundra after frozen underground soil thawed. Scott Canon / Kansas City Star / MCT via Getty Images

    “It’s clear that the models are not capturing all the key pieces,” said Anna Liljedahl, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who is based in Homer, Alaska. 

    Research attempting to settle these questions generally falls into one of two camps. There’s top-down, like Liljedahl’s work with the Permafrost Discovery Gateway, which uses high-resolution satellite imagery to record thaw slumps and surface water changes. Machine learning and supercomputers have helped Liljedahl closely map visible ice wedges, creating a more comprehensive view of the Arctic, but can only infer what’s under the surface through identifying types of soil or vegetation. 

    The second approach is bottom-up: Romanovsky’s boreholes, for instance, deliver very detailed measurements from specific places, but researchers have to extrapolate to draw larger conclusions. Yet all permafrost is not equal. Take a type of permafrost called yedoma: frozen, silty muck from the Pleistocene era that releases 10 times more greenhouse gases than other types of thawing ice. Additionally, research indicates yedoma-rich regions may be warming the most quickly. So knowing how much yedoma there is, and where, is critical.

    Scientists like Hasson hope to advance a third approach using airborne imaging spectroscopy, essentially mounting a fancier version of the laser on his sled to planes, a more efficient research method. This technique can detect large methane emissions, and Hasson can then use very low radio frequencies to identify what’s happening below the surface, identifying methane hotspots and providing information on the scale that infrastructure planning requires. 

    a man in green camoflague fatiges holds his hand to his ear while standing in a green lush area
    Nicholas Hasson carries very low-frequency radio equipment mounted on a framepack so he can walk through Alaska’s forested terrain and create a map of the subsurface to help understand where giant ice wedges are melting beneath the ground. Sean McDermott / Grist

    “The question is, why aren’t we doing this method at scale?” Hasson said. “Why am I not in a plane right now flying over Alaska?” The Department of Energy considers permafrost thaw and its emissions a threat to national security, and is partly funding Hasson’s research, along with NASA and the National Science Foundation. 

    Much is at stake. Dmitry Streletskiy, a geographer at George Washington University, explained that long before ice begins to thaw, warming decreases permafrost’s ability to support structures. In the spring of 2020, the 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline reported its first instance of “slope creep,” as thawing permafrost jeopardized its structural integrity. That’s likely what happened in the Siberian city of Norilsk a few months later, where thawing ruptured a huge fuel reservoir, prompting a cataclysmic diesel spill that dyed the region’s rivers blood-red. 

    Streletskiy started his career focused on ecosystems, but realized that “unless you put monetary values to things, it doesn’t get much attention. His most recent study found that 70 percent of major Arctic infrastructure is in areas that permafrost thaw could put at risk of damage within the next 30 years, increasing maintenance costs by $15.5 billion dollars, as well as causing another $21.6 billion in damages. And those are the paper’s most conservative estimates.

    While Russia likely has the lion’s share of the world’s population living on permafrost, alpine countries like France and Switzerland will also see mountain slopes start to lose their stability, resulting in hazardous landslides. A recent study published in Population and Environment found that 3.3 million people currently live in settlements where permafrost will degrade by 2050, forcing many to relocate.

    “Those who live on permafrost have a pretty good understanding of what will happen in 20 years — they don’t need scientists to tell them,” Streletskiy said. “It’s the people who live in D.C. or Moscow who need to pay attention.”

    Up the rippling highway from Lenniger’s cabin in Goldstream Valley, Sam Skidmore shoveled dirt away from a vault door at his gold mine, the entrance to the deepest permafrost tunnel in Alaska. He’d decided to break his rule against opening it when the temperature was above freezing so Hasson could take ice samples. Skidmore stumped down into the darkness, his headlamp gleaming off ice crystals as he passed a wooly mammoth skull poking out of the wall. As they continued deeper, gravel beds betrayed warning signs of past eras, when dramatic warming transformed the landscape. “We’re literally walking back in time,” Skidmore said.

    people with headlamps and a shovel stand in a dark tunnel
    Skidmore and Hasson walk through the permafrost tunnel collecting soil and ice samples. Sean McDermott / Grist

    They descended between alternating layers of gravel and silt, passing eons when interior Alaska was an endless grassland steppe and eras when a changing climate shaped the landscape into more familiar forests. “Where we are now [in time], Homo sapiens hadn’t entered America,” said Skidmore, who is preserving the tunnel for research. He poked at a particularly pebbled section, saying it would take “a horrendous amount of rainfall to take all the trees and silt away and make a new layer of gravel like this.” 

    Today, the Arctic is again confronting dramatic change: As the region’s permafrost continues to thaw, some areas of Alaska will sink and get wetter, while others may dry out and burn, transforming habitats. Other studies show that permafrost under the ocean itself is thawing, reshaping the seafloor, forming craters the size of city blocks and elevating new pingos. For humans and animals alike, responding will be a balancing act, said Dmitry Nicolsky, a research associate professor at the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks. Hazards will combine to create cumulative effects: As wildfires increase, for instance, people are told to cut vegetation away from their houses. “But making a safety buffer in Fairbanks might also cause permafrost degradation,” Nicolsky said. 

    Almost above Skidmore and Hasson’s heads, on the other side of the tunnel’s glistening roof, was one of the countless lakes that dot Alaska’s interior. In January at 40 degrees below zero, Hasson can drill into its frozen surface and light the escaping methane plumes into towering columns of fire. The lake is also releasing mercury, a toxic metal that could now be accumulating in Alaska’s water sources, as well as radon gas. Other ponds may emit neither, highlighting the importance of identifying not only where greenhouse gases are likely to be released, but new sources of hazards for human health. 

    Even in attempting to tally these changes, researchers may underestimate nature’s complexity. Liljedahl explained that when ice-rich tundra degrades, it can slump and become a pond. As it fills with moss, a very effective insulator, the underlying permafrost sometimes recovers, eventually filling up the depression with a bonus layer of new organic soil. “Instead of losing, it’s gaining,” she said. “We can’t lock ourselves into the idea that it can only go in one direction.”

    Emerging back into the light, Skidmore stared out over the hills, where pockets of birch marked where mining operations disturbed the permafrost a century ago, creating pools and altering the forest. The catastrophic flooding revealed within his tunnel will happen again, he mused. “It’s only a matter of time.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Don’t Look Down on Apr 20, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Amid illegal Amazon gold mining, Indigenous land defenders get reinforcements

    Following years of escalating violence by illicit mining operations in the Amazon, Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Safety has sent federal police, a joint military-civilian unit, environmental inspectors, and representatives from the government’s Indigenous affairs agency to protect Indigenous people, seizing illegal gold mining equipment and machinery on the Iriri River in Xipaya territory. The operation comes in the midst of growing Indigenous advocacy and a hard-fought presidential election. 

    Located in Northern Brazil, the region is home to roughly 200 Xipaya people who have faced displacement by the construction of a hydroelectric dam and violence. For over a decade, illegal gold mining has led to mercury-contaminated waters, deforestation, murders, rape and sex-trafficking in Indigenous lands and communities. Recently, a group led by other Indigenous people, armed by miners, killed two Yanomami people and wounded five others.

    Last week, the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin, or COICA, which represents Indigenous organizations across nine countries in the Amazon basin, declared a state of emergency for Indigenous land defenders. Citing over 200 murders of Indigenous rights defenders, the declaration calls on governments and the United Nations to help secure the right for Indigenous people to protect their land. 

    According to a new report by the Hutukara Yanomami Association, an Indigenous advocacy group, illegal gold mining has increased across the Amazon and skyrocketed on Yanomami land, the largest Indigenous territory in Brazil and north of Xipaya territory. Known as Garimpos, the relatively small-scale, illegal mines destroyed more than 8,000 acres of rainforest in 2021 representing a 46 percent increase in mining from 2020. 

    In the first three months of 2022, deforestation in the Amazon has set a new record according to the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research. From January through March of this year, the rainforest saw more than 360 square miles of deforestation — a 64 percent increase from last year and the highest total during that time period since data collection began in 2015.

    Earlier this month, thousands of Indigenous people marched in the capital of Brasilia to demand a halt to legislation put forward by President Jair Bolsonaro that would open Indigenous land to commercial mining and agriculture. According to opinion polling, Bolsonaro is trailing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the upcoming presidential election this October with 80 percent of voters saying that protecting the Amazon should be a priority for candidates and that plans to protect it would increase their chances of election. 

    Lula, who spent 580 days in prison over a corruption scandal, has been touting his environmental platform as a contrast to Bolsonaro, who many Indigenous groups see as a threat. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Amid illegal Amazon gold mining, Indigenous land defenders get reinforcements on Apr 19, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • How rights of nature and wild rice could stop a pipeline

    This story was reported in collaboration with NAJA and NPR’s Next Generation Radio: Indigenous.

    Rights of Nature – an innovative legal movement that protects water, animals and ecosystems by giving them legal rights – might stop a pipeline. 

    In 2018, Frank Bibeau, an attorney for the White Earth Nation, helped the tribe write a law that recognized the rights of wild rice, which they call Manoomin, or “good berry”, to “exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve.” The law relies on a section of an 1837 treaty between the Ojibwe and the U.S. government.

    In Minnesota, wild rice, and the waters it depends on, are in danger from climate change and the expansion of Line 3, a controversial pipeline operated by a Canadian energy company and fiercely opposed by Indigenous people and environmental activists. The pipeline’s proposed corridor would run directly through wild rice beds and could threaten the environmental health of the whole area. In 2021, he used the Rights of Manoomin law to sue the State of Minnesota over the construction of the pipeline. 

    “I couldn’t figure out how to get authority over them to compel them to do anything we might want to do. And right in my brain, you know, it just clicked,” Bibeau said. “Wild rice is mentioned specifically in the 1837 Treaty. It talks about how we retain the rights to hunt fish and gather wild rice on the lakes and rivers and lands that we’re ceding. Well, that’s huge.”

    In a setback for the case in March, the White Earth Ojibwe Appellate Court dismissed the tribe’s own lawsuit. The ruling said that the court does not have jurisdiction over non-tribal member activities on off-reservation land. The case is still awaiting a decision from a Federal appeals court over that exact question.

    Since Bibeau first developed Rights of Manoomin, other tribes have used it as a model. In 2019, the Yurok Tribe in Northern California adopted a resolution recognizing the rights of the Klamath River. In Seattle, the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe is suing the city over its hydroelectric dams on behalf of salmon. Bibeau believes that these two cases will be the next step in the growing Indigenous Rights of Nature movement and have the potential to lead to widespread use by tribes across the country. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How rights of nature and wild rice could stop a pipeline on Apr 18, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Indigenous people are being killed to ‘protect’ a Congolese park

    In the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, park guards and Congolese soldiers, with support from international conservation groups, have undertaken a brutal, three-year campaign to violently remove the Indigenous Batwa people who call the park home. That’s according to a new report by Minority Rights Group International, a London-based human rights organization.

    With support from the World Conservation Society, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Agency for International Development, Congolese security forces have destroyed villages, murdered at least 20 residents, group raped at least 15 women, and displaced hundreds of Batwa in the name of conserving and protecting Kahuzi-Biega National Park, or PNKB. Batwa are an Indigenous people with communities throughout Central Africa and have inhabited the area that is now PNKB since time immemorial. 

    The report alleges that funding, material support, and training provided by international organizations and US agencies violate a UN Security Council arms embargo as well as other international laws. Minority Rights Group International also alleges that organizations and agencies were aware of the attacks on Batwa, which took place between 2018 and 2021, and did nothing. 

    Lara Dominguez, Acting Head of Litigation at Minority Rights Group International and a lawyer representing Batwa, says the report helps to illustrate the fundamental problems with the global conservation model, which she says is fundamentally racist and hasn’t led to any real conservation.

    “The PNKB’s donors and international partners demonstrated a flagrant disregard for international law and the rights of the Batwa people,” said Colin Luoma, an author of the report. “It casts serious doubt as to whether these actors are willing to place human rights at the center of their conservation work.”

    left: remains of a wall of a burnt down hut, right: many shell casings from bullets on dirt and straw covered groundashes and burnt debris on the ground
    (left) One of many homes burnt and destroyed in a major attack targeting Batwa villages in July 2021. (right) Shell casings from the rifles used by park guards and soldiers left behind at a village that was destroyed in the July 2021 attacks. Robert Flummerfelt / Minority Rights

    The park was established in 1937, when the country was still a colony of Belgium, by Belgian decree. But even after independence, the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo opted to expel Indigenous Batwa communities from the park’s boundaries at the behest of Belgian conservationist Adrien Deschryver who lobbied the government to expand the park. Batwa were neither compensated for their land nor given a new place to live. Instead, they were forced to settle on the outskirts of the park, where they faced persecution and discrimination. An estimated 50% of the population died in the two decades following expulsion. 

    “Since we were expelled from our lands, death is following us,” said a Batwa community leader at the time. “We bury people nearly every day. The village is becoming empty. We are heading towards extinction.”

    In October 2018, fed up with decades of persecution and broken promises, Batwa began returning to the forest. But the response was swift and brutal: In February 2019, park guards began working with the Congolese military, efforts that were coordinated by General Charles Mundos, who had been sanctioned by the UN Security Council in 2018. In April 2019, PNKB’s Director, De-Dieu Bya’Ombe reportedly issued a public ultimatum to all Batwa in the park to leave or be killed. 

    Since then, the report’s authors have documented three waves of violence and displacement: the first in July-August 2019, the second in July 2021, and the third in November-December 2021. The report describes it as an “escalating campaign of terror and violence intended to expel Batwa from their ancestral home and deter their return.”

    According to the report, attacks involved joint contingents of park guards and Congolese army soldiers using mortars and rocket-propelled grenades to destroy villages. They also subjected Batwa women to group rape at gunpoint, burned Batwa alive, and mutiliated corpses. Based on eyewitness accounts from Batwa and park guards, the report says that at least 20 Batwa were murdered in these attacks. The true number may be much higher because many Batwa fled into the forest and were never seen again. It is believed they may have starved to death. 

    In 2015, the US Fish and Wildlife Service partnered with the Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS, to improve law enforcement and wildlife security in the park. WCS worked with Maisha Group Limited, a private security company founded by an Israeli special forces operative, to provide training through 2017. About two months after the August 2019 attacks, the WCS brought a law enforcement consultant to the park to train park guards on weapons, combat, and patrol. 

    The Democratic Republic of the Congo is under a legally binding arms embargo by the United Nations Security Council, which means that member states providing “assistance, advice or training related to military activities” must notify the UN. The UN Security Council was not notified of any of these activities, which the report claims puts the Wildlife Conservation Society and US Fish and Wildlife in violation of the arms embargo. 

    a mound of dirt with a plastic pipe and cross made of branches, both with bullet casings set on top of them
    Headstone of one of several Batwa community members killed in July 2021 attacks conducted by park guards and soldiers. According to eyewitnesses, the Mutwa buried here was killed execution-style while members of his family watched. Robert Flummerfelt / Minority Rights

    Kahuzi-Biega National Park is a popular tourist destination where visitors from around the world pay over $1000 per person for safari tours to see gorillas. The park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognized as an exceptional habitat for rainforest and gorillas. The UNESCO citation says “Although the greater part of the property is inhabited, some villages were included in the Park at the time of its extension in 1975, creating disputes with the populations. These problems must be resolved to strengthen the effectiveness of conservation actions.”

    The World Conservation Society is a nonprofit that owns or supports parks and conservation projects around the world. In the US, that includes the Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium, and the Central Park, Queens, and Prospect Park Zoos. In 2020, WCS apologized for its long history of racism and promised to do better. 

    In a statement, WCS said, “We strongly reject accusations that WCS was complicit in any of the alleged abuses described in the report. We are confident that all our activities in and around KBNP have been helpful and constructive to this end, and in full respect of the rule of law and human rights.” The statement also accuses Minority Rights Group of “numerous false accusations,” including any support or training of military forces.

    A spokesperson for US Fish and Wildlife said that “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service takes all allegations of human rights abuse seriously,” but did not respond to specific allegations about its role in the violence. A USAID spokesperson said that they are concerned about the situation and concrete steps need to be taken to address the management challenges in the park. USAID also said that its support for PNKB ended prior to the alleged incidents. 

    Lara Dominguez says that international complicity in violence against Batwa is an indictment of the way many conservation programs operate. “There’s no interest in actually informing themselves about what’s going on the ground,” she said. “What I see is a culture of willful blindness and plausible deniability.”

    Minority Rights Group International reports that Batwa are still displaced from their homeland, facing poverty and persecution.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous people are being killed to ‘protect’ a Congolese park on Apr 11, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Land defenders face violence and repression. Clean energy could make it worse.

    In April of last year, José de Jesús Robledo Cruz and his wife Maria de Jesús Gomez Vega were found dead in the desert in Sonora, Mexico. In July, Fernando Vela, a doctor in Coqueta, Columbia, was shot to death by two men on a motorcycle while he was in his truck. In September, Juan Macababbad, an attorney in the Philippines was shot dead outside his home.

    In each case, the victims were prominent human rights defenders, known in particular for defending their communities’ natural resources from mining, deforestation, water contamination, and other threats. These were just three of at least 76 such murders that occured in 2021.

    That’s according to a new report by the nonprofit Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, or BHRRC. The organization tracks attacks on people who protest or otherwise raise concerns about business-related human rights abuses. It has documented more than 3,800 attacks, including killings, death threats, beatings, arbitrary arrests and detention, and lawsuits, since January 2015, with 615 occurring in 2021 alone. 

    “Our data shows almost the tip of the iceberg,” Christen Dobson, senior program manager for the BHRRC and an author of the new report. “Many attacks are not publicly reported. And so we know the problem is much more severe than these figures indicate.”

    According to the report, human rights defenders who spoke out against mining projects consistently experienced the greatest number of attacks over the past seven years. The authors say this is especially concerning considering the expansion of mineral production required by a transition to clean energy. All those batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines are going to require a lot of cobalt, nickel, zinc, lithium, and other minerals.

    “We’re already seeing this level of attack, and we’re not seeing major producers of transition minerals have strong policies or practices in place about protecting defenders,” said Dobson. “There’s a real risk there and I think it’s an area that we’re very concerned about.”

    The BHRRC has documented attacks in every region of the world, with the attacks disproportionately affecting Indigenous peoples, who make up five percent of the global population but were victims of 18 percent of attacks against human rights defenders in 2021. The report cites racism as an underlying driver of attacks, but it also points to the failure of companies to seek the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples when pursuing projects that may affect an Indigenous community or their land. The authors estimate that at least 104 attacks in 2021 stemmed from a failure by companies to effectively consult with communities or gain consent before starting projects.

    The report urges investors to publish a human rights policy and require that companies begin disclosing human rights and environmental-related risks. But Dobson said that voluntary actions from companies and investors was not enough. She said there was some momentum building behind mandating that companies report on measures they are taking to respect human rights, including legislation proposed in the European Union and Canada.

    “It is concerning to see a vast majority of companies and investors, including major renewable energy companies, do not have policies expressing zero-tolerance against reprisals in their operations, supply chains and business relationships,” said Dobson in a statement. “It’s time for companies and investors to recognise the energy transition cannot be effective if it is not also rights-respecting.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Land defenders face violence and repression. Clean energy could make it worse. on Apr 6, 2022.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Pontecorvo.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • California offers $100 million for tribes to buy back their land. It won’t go far.

    When he was 10 years old, Terry Supahan’s mom bought him a new bike. Supahan, a member of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, had only ridden second hand bikes before. A hundred years earlier, the state of California had stolen millions of acres of land from his tribe and more than a hundred others. In 1968, the state sent checks to individual Indigenous people to pay them back. Supahan’s mom used the money she received — about $100 he recalls — to buy the bike, a moment that Supahan remembers fondly, but laughs at now. How could a bicycle compare to millions of acres of stolen land?

    The check was part of a $29 million land settlement for roughly 65 million acres of land — two-thirds of the entire state — stolen from Indigenous people. That works out to less than 50 cents per acre, a price unheard of even in the 19th century, when the United States first began gobbling up Indigenous land. 

    Now, California Governor Gavin Newsom wants to send out more money to Indigenous people, this time to buy back and conserve some of that stolen land — $100 million for nearly 200 tribes. The proposal is part of Newsom’s goal to conserve 30 percent of the state’s land and waters by 2030, with tribal partners playing a crucial role.

    “I’ve tasked our administration with seeking out ways to support California Native peoples in accessing, co-managing, and acquiring your ancestral lands,” said Newsom in a meeting with the state’s Indigenous Truth and Healing Council, a group of tribal leaders who are examining the state’s treatment of tribes and making recommendations for reparation. “Today we’re making a down payment on this commitment.”

    Newsom’s announcement comes in the middle of an attempt by California to repair relations with Indigenous people after centuries of genocide. The effort began in earnest in 2019, when Newsom apologized to Indigenous communities on behalf of the state for California’s long history of violence, discrimination, and land theft. The buy-back announcement also comes amid the growing landback movement, but has elicited mixed reactions from Indigenous leaders. 

    Tribal leaders and Governor Newsom stand in a line under a tree
    Governor Newsom at the future site of the California Indian Heritage Center in West Sacramento, CA. AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

    “It’s a baby step in the right direction, but I have a lot of questions,” said Joely Proudfit, a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians and the director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at Cal State San Marcos.

    On the one hand, experts say, the $100 million program could help tribes conserve land and serve as a pilot for future programs in California and other states. The money could make an important impact on tribes’ capacity to protect the environment. On the other, it could quickly run out of money and lead to few meaningful changes, eventually becoming another empty gesture on behalf of the state.

    Today, Terry Supahan is executive director of the True North Organizing Network, a social justice group that is working with tribes to reclaim land, among other projects. He says Newsom’s proposal is welcome but that the state must do more. “As much as I believe the governor’s initiative is an important step in the right direction, it is not enough,” he said. “There’s just too many wrongs that are going to have to be addressed.”

    In California, a violent colonial history has left many tribes fragmented and underfunded, and both tribes and the state say returning control to Indigenous people to continue stewardship is crucial to protecting and preserving the environment. Indigenous people have been recognized as the best caretakers of land around the world. According to the United Nations, although Indigenous people are only five percent of the world’s population, their land contains 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity.  

    But there are more than 100 federally recognized tribes in the state and at least 70 unrecognized tribes and communities. California also has some of the most expensive real estate in the country. In a state where the median home price is around $800,000, $100 million will only go so far. And previous landback efforts have also proved expensive. Recently, the Wiyot Tribe used a $1.3 million grant from the state to buy back 48 acres of land, while the unrecognized Esselen Tribe used a $4.5 million grant to purchase more than 1,000 acres of land. 

    “Let’s face it, this is California: $100 million goes nowhere,” Proudfit said. “It’s a drop in the bucket.”

    With real estate prices so high, it’s worth asking why the state doesn’t just give land directly back to tribes. Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, said that direct transfer is a mechanism the state is exploring, specifically in the north, where the planned removal of four dams on the Klamath River may create surplus land that could be transferred to the Yurok and Karuk Tribes. But California owns relatively little land, roughly 3 percent of the state, while the remainder is more or less evenly split between the federal government and private owners. So in the absence of large chunks of available state land, and without clear legal mechanisms for distributing it to tribes, a landback fund would allow tribes to acquire privately held properties. 

    River running through hilly green forest with a few boats and cars
    Fish traps used to catch and document the health of salmon on the Klamath River on the Yurok Reservation. AP Photo/Nathan Howard

    The program, which is part of the governor’s annual budget proposal, will need to be approved by the state legislature in June and would be managed by the California Natural Resources Agency. The governor has not released any details on how the money would be allocated and which limitations might be placed on it. Members of the state’s Truth and Healing Council have raised concerns about the proposal creating conflict between tribes competing for limited land and questions about how the money would be distributed to unrecognized tribes. Crowfoot acknowledges that there are many open questions about how the program will work. 

    “I don’t want to oversell,” he said. “This is complex and unprecedented. There’s a lot that we’re going to learn along the way.”

    California has a uniquely brutal story in the history of American colonization. Peter Burnett, the first governor of California, declared in 1851 that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.” Under Burnett and subsequent leaders, California sponsored militia-led massacres across the state, enslaved Indigenous people, and tried to erase their culture. The federal government also stole Indigenous land through 18 treaties made with Indigenous nations that were never honored and have still not been ratified by Congress.

    Under Newsom’s proposal, the money could also be used to help tribes implement climate adaptation programs or hire staff. Michael Hunter, chairperson of the Central California Tribal Chairpersons Association and chairman of the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians, says that the governor’s proposal is a “great concept” but that the challenge will be in its execution. Working with state agencies and navigating the bureaucratic process could take years, he said. “Until we follow through to change the direction the environment is going, landback is just landback. But if we do it properly, we could turn the cycle around in California,” he said.

    Hunter, who recently organized a rally to urge the state to sign a co-management agreement with Pomo tribes for Jackson Demonstration State Forest, is encouraging the state to transfer as much state land to tribes as possible. Financial support, he believes, could best be used to help maintain those lands. Tribes, he says, have the solutions to climate change. The state just needs to get out of their way. 

    Crowfoot, who is not Indigenous, said that Newsom’s 2019 apology was “powerfully symbolic” but required action to become meaningful. The new proposal, he believes, is an example of that action. Crowfoot says that he is focused on making this initial funding successful to pave the way for future investment. “I’m confident that if this funding proves to be effective in terms of building tribal leadership on conservation, that additional funding would be allocated in the future,” he said.

    But California could certainly afford a bigger commitment now. The state is currently expecting a budget surplus of $45.7 billion, $20.6 billion of which is in a general fund for discretionary purposes. 

    Whatever happens, Terry Supahan hopes that this proposal will lead to more meaningful investment than a new bicycle. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California offers $100 million for tribes to buy back their land. It won’t go far. on Apr 5, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Rappahannock Tribe gets 465 acres of land back on the Chesapeake Bay

    It’s been more than 350 years since the Rappahannock Tribe was forcibly removed from its ancestral lands on the Chesapeake Bay in present-day Virginia. Now, it’s finally getting some of its land back.

    Rappahannock Tribe members were joined by conservation leaders and U.S. officials — including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — on Friday to commemorate the return of a 465-acre parcel of land that was seized by European settlers in the 17th century. The return of the land, which has been restored to its original name of Pissacoack, is “a historic victory for conservation and racial justice,” the tribe said in a statement.

    The news marks the culmination of a yearslong collaboration between conservationists and tribal members to protect the area and restore it to its original owners. Besides its reputation as one of the Chesapeake Bay’s most beautiful places, the region’s bluffs and wetlands provide important habitat for fish and migratory bird species — some of which have cultural and religious significance to the Rappahannock. Bald eagles, for example, descend upon the area by the hundreds each year as part of their annual migrations.

    “You can sometimes see 40 eagles in the span of a couple hours,” said Joel Dunn, president and CEO of the nonprofit Chesapeake Conservancy.

    A map of the land restored to the Rappahannock Tribe
    The 465-acre parcel of land that was donated to the Rappahannock Tribe has been restored to its original name, Pissacoack. Chesapeake Conservancy

    Dunn’s organization helped lead efforts to restore Rapphannock ownership of the land following multiple threats that it would be developed into residential subdivisions or a sprawling resort complex with an 18-hole golf course. The organization and its allies in the tribe feared development would decimate wildlife habitat and irreparably harm the land.

    “The river is life to us,” said Anne Richardson, chief of the Rappahannock Tribe. She described the resplendent landscape as the tribe’s “grocery store” — home to some 250 or more species of plants and animals that the tribe gathers to eat or use for craft and medicinal purposes. Some of these species have long served as staples for the tribe — including the blueback herring, whose populations have fallen dramatically due to urbanization and agriculture. Richardson said it has been painful to watch their decline. “It’s difficult to lose those things,” she said.

    Thanks to a massive fundraising effort that included donations from a wealthy family and a grant from the nonprofit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation sponsored by Walmart, by February 2022 the Chesapeake Conservancy had collected enough money to buy a 465-acre tract of land and donate it to the Rappahannock Tribe. As part of the deal, the land was placed into a conservation easement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Rappahannock Tribe, which will manage the land, now intends to place the land in trust with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which will give it additional protections and make the tribe eligible for federal conservation funding.

    Headshot of Chief Anne Richardson at a microphone
    Anne Richardson, chief of the Rappahannock, speaks at an event commemorating the return of land to her tribe. Will Parson / Chesapeake Bay Program

    Dunn said he hopes the land transfer will inspire more conservation partnerships across the country. “I really hope this becomes a model,” he said, “to share the challenge we have to protect our environment for current and future generations.” Indeed, the last few years have seen growing success for the landback movement, which seeks to restore stolen land to Indigenous ownership. Tribes from the Esselen near Big Sur, California, to the Passamaquoddy on Pine Island in Maine have regained millions of acres through land purchases, donations, and legal victories.  

    On the Chesapeake Bay, Richardson said the restoration of the Rappahannock Tribe’s land would heal her people and the natural world. “To help preserve and restore everything that’s been depleted — that’s my goal,” she said.

    The tribe is planning to develop an Indigenous conservation education center on the river, where students and the public can learn about the tribe’s history and ecological knowledge. “Hopefully we can transform the children and young people who will become our senators into leaders in conservation,” Richardson said. “We have valuable things to teach this society at a time when our planet is in crisis.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rappahannock Tribe gets 465 acres of land back on the Chesapeake Bay on Apr 4, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The Roadless Rule is supposed to protect our wild places. What went wrong in the Tongass National Forest?

    Road to Ruin

    The Roadless Rule is supposed to protect wild places. What went wrong in the Tongass National Forest?

    By Jacob Resneck, Eric Stone, Edward Boyda, and Clayton Aldern

    This project was supported by The Pulitzer Center.

    The unincorporated community of Naukati Bay is home to less than 150 people. But for those who live here, it’s one of the last places in the nation where residents are able to hunt and fish to fill their freezers and sustain their families. The town has no post office and almost no cell phone service. Residents affectionately refer to the “phone booth” — a small turnout near the top of a hill a few miles outside of town, where a few signals sneak through.

    Naukati Bay sits in the upper half of Prince of Wales Island, part of the archipelago that makes up Alaska’s southeast panhandle. Surrounding the town is Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, nearly 17 million acres spread across 1,100 mountainous islands. There’s not much to see in town, except the marina and the old steam donkey on display, an antique powered winch that was used in the early 20th century to help gather logs. 

    a mostly empty dock huts out into blue waters. In the background, a few cars park in a nearby lot. Many trees in the background
    The heart of town in Naukati Bay, Alaska: the community’s marina. SEAKdrones LLC

    Nearly 2 million people visit the Tongass every year, coming from all over the world to marvel at the vast swaths of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and red and yellow cedar, some towering as tall as 200 feet. They also come for the wildlife. Black and brown bears swat at spawning Pacific salmon and Dolly Varden char. Bald eagles and ravens feast on the leftovers. Humpback whales scoop up thousands of herring that spawn each spring as orca stalk Chinook salmon in the waters that divide the Alexander Archipelago. The forest is also the historical home of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people, whose lands were stolen and then used to establish the national forest.

    The Tongass has been the heart of the logging industry in Alaska for decades, starting in the 1950s with the arrival of pulp mills. It was at its zenith in 1990, employing crews in the thousands to clear-cut old growth trees. But attitudes were shifting. In the late 1990s, the federal government declined to renew a 50-year contract with a pulp mill in Ketchikan, which, along with tightening environmental and production standards, dealt a fatal blow to the largest consumer of Prince of Wales Island’s timber. 

    In 2001, in the waning days of his administration, President Bill Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Policy, also known as the Roadless Rule. The directive was designed to restrict roadbuilding, and by extension large-scale logging and mining, on 58 million acres in the country’s national forests. For more than two decades, industry interests and resource-heavy states have challenged the policy. But the Roadless Rule has largely always prevailed, and long been heralded as a major win for conservation, helping to protect the United States’ few remaining wild places.

    Except, that is, for the Tongass. 

    The policy’s legacy is being challenged in Alaska, where resource extraction is a key driver of the state’s politics. Governors from both parties have fought the Roadless Rule in federal court. Now, Naukati Bay and the other communities nestled within Tongass are on the front lines of the debate over clear-cutting old-growth trees in the 21st century.

    According to an analysis of satellite data by Grist and Earthrise Media, the Southeast Alaska rainforest lost nearly 70,000 acres of tree cover between 2001 and 2014. In southern Southeast Alaska — the lower half of Alaska’s panhandle — alone, that figure was close to 58,000 acres. Most of this logging, however, occurred outside designated roadless areas and federally owned lands.  

    From 2015 to 2020, the lower half of the Southeast Alaska panhandle saw another 22,000 acres logged. But these cuts were different: Forty-six percent of the logging over that time period occurred on parcels recently transferred out of federal ownership.

    What happened? Land exchanges by Congress.

    In basic terms, a land exchange is when Congress approves a swap between a parcel of federally protected forest land and tracts that have been in private hands. In some cases, this could mean a swap of old-growth forest for land that has been clear-cut or is in second-growth (and therefore less valuable). Negotiations for these arrangements can take years and involve people from government and the private and nonprofit sectors.

    Land exchanges have allowed lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to bypass the Roadless Rule and other environmental protections and transfer ownership of thousands of acres of old-growth Tongass National Forest, opening the land up for logging.

    A bar chart showing acres of forest loss in southern Southeast Alaska between 2010 and 2020. In recent years, logging on lands transferred out of federal protections has rapidly increased.
    Grist / Earthrise Media / Clayton Aldern / Edward Boyda

    A deeper look at the data from the Tongass region shows that 62 percent of the forest acreage lost between 2001 and 2014 was on state or private lands that had been transferred out of federal ownership — and by extension, oversight and management.

    Recently, about 10,800 acres near Naukati were granted from Tongass to the Alaska Mental Health Trust, which is obligated — it’s in the trust’s charter — to maximize profit from its landholdings to fund social services in the state. “The trust grants more than $20 million a year to partner organizations that provide services and support to Alaskans with developmental disabilities and behavioral health conditions,” Jusdi Warner, the executive director of the Trust’s land office, said in an interview. “The immediate goals for this land exchange on the trust side is for timber harvest to maximize the revenue from the trust lands.”

    The organization plans to harvest timber from the former federally protected Tongass land and sell it to two primary customers. Viking Lumber operates the last remaining sizable sawmill in Southeast Alaska and is the primary holder of large-scale timber contracts on Prince of Wales Island tracts owned by the Mental Health Trust. Its owners did not respond to a series of interview requests. According to a 2015 report, Viking’s Tongass old-growth trees go into products ranging from Steinway grand pianos to picket fences and gazebos.

    The other is Alcan, a Ketchikan, Alaska-based timber outfit that exports 100 percent of its logs to Asia for milling. The company’s principal owner also declined to be interviewed. By the Mental Health Trust’s own accounting, it stands to make between $20 million and $30 million by commercially logging former Tongass parcels it’s received from the federal government. Old growth is prized by the timber industry for the quick buck; second-growth forests are a longer-term play pushed by those advocating for sustainable logging.

    an aerial view of a lumberyard with many large piles of logs near a road
    Logs are stacked high in this aerial view of Viking Lumber’s sawmill in Klawock, Alaska. SEAKdrones LLC

    Here in Naukati, a community that was founded as a logging camp, there’s genuine worry about the speed and scale of the clear-cuts outside of town. Last year, the Biden administration rolled back one of the latest attempts to exempt the Tongass from the national Roadless Rule, this time by President Donald Trump. 

    For some people on Prince of Wales Island, the move by Biden brought hope that large-scale logging would stop. 

    “I was so excited,” said Mark Figelski, who made his home here in Naukati in 2014 after purchasing 4 acres sight-unseen in a state land auction. “I thought, ‘Oh, for sure. Now we’re gonna get — you’re gonna cut this off.’”

    Clear-cut logging of old-growth trees near Naukati. Airbus DS / Earthrise / Grist

    But the logging here did not stop. If anything, it’s accelerated. 

    Naukati’s residents now watch excavators and logging trucks clear large swaths of trees on their doorstep faster than ever before. As he tells it, Figelski moved to Naukati for his son, who was diagnosed with autism. He wanted a place where his child could get invested in a small, tight-knit community.

    Here in the rainforest, he gets much of his food for his family from the land. He forages for berries and mushrooms, hunts deer, and fishes for salmon and halibut. For him, protecting the Tongass is personal.

    But Figelski wants people to know that splashy federal policy initiatives often don’t tell the whole story.

    • a large pile of wood debris and logs felled near a green forest
    • a man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap stands in a clear cut with a giant red excavator digger next to him
    Left: Remnants of old-growth forest lay on the ground in a clear cut near Naukati Bay, Alaska in September 2021. Right: Mark Figelski looks out over a clear cut south of Kahli Cove roughly five miles northwest of his home in Naukati Bay, Alaska on Prince of Wales Island in September 2021. The area was among the parcels swapped from U.S. Forest Service to Alaska Mental Health Trust ownership under a federal law passed in 2017. Photos by Eric Stone.

    “When you think about what a victory everybody was celebrating about the Roadless Rule coming back, but really it means nothing if there’s a backdoor,” Figelski said as he drove his compact SUV through an immense clear-cut near his home. “This is one big-ass loophole.”

    Figeslki said he’s not anti-logging nor are his neighbors, many having worked in the forest products industry themselves. But they believe in responsible forestry. And what they’re seeing, they say, isn’t responsible and could take away their way of life. Aggressive logging can destroy habitat for deer and ruin the spawning habitat for salmon.

    And, of course, it’s not just bad for Naukati. The world depends on the Tongass, seen by many as “the lungs of North America,” a vital resource for sequestering carbon. The Tongass currently holds 44 percent of all the carbon stored by U.S. national forests. While other forests often burn in wildfires, releasing the carbon sequestered by photosynthesis right back into the atmosphere, the rainforest of Southeast Alaska is different. Forest fires are relatively rare here. In fact, climatologists believe this part of the world will generally get wetter as global temperatures rise. So the Tongass isn’t just a carbon sink, it is a steady one — vital to the long-term fight against climate change. The Tongass “is some of the most carbon-dense, old-growth rainforest in the world,” said Dominick DellaSala, an ecologist and chief scientist at the nonprofit Wild Heritage. “Even more dense in carbon storage [per acre] than the tropical rainforest … What it comes down to is really abusive use of the rainforest. When you come in and you clear-cut — and you take out all the trees over an area as large as 40 acres, in some cases, private lands, it’s even larger — that just takes out all of the value of the forest. You lose most of the carbon, which goes up into the atmosphere.” 

    a panoramic view of a road curving into a forested area with large mountain
    A road curves through the forest on Prince of Wales Island. SEAKdrones LLC

    The land exchange between the Forest Service and Mental Health Trust was more than a decade in the making. But much of its legislative success can be laid at the feet of the U.S. Republican Senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski. She and her staff spent years in talks to design a transfer of Tongass federal lands into the hands of the trust. 

    She’s heard concerns about accelerated logging but said protections are in place.

    “It’s not as if the Alaska Mental Health Trust has some ability to go outside of the built-in protections that are already provided by law,” Murkowski said in an interview, saying the exchange will be a net benefit to the communities in and around the land swap.

    a brown sign reads the Trust Authority Building outside an office building near cars and trees
    A sign stands outside of the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority in Anchorage, Alaska. AP Photo / Mark Thiessen

    But people in the region like Joe Carl are more skeptical. He owned a small sawmill and raised oysters outside of Naukati. In an interview in late 2021, shortly before he passed away, he expressed concern over what would become of the area surrounding his home: Now that the land isn’t owned by the federal government, timber crews are able to harvest trees more liberally because of the state of Alaska’s more flexible timber rules. 

    In his view, he said, the Mental Health Trust is not a responsible steward of the land it was granted.

    He pointed to rules about buffers. Those are the no-cut zones around streams and rivers to prevent clear-cuts from destroying salmon spawning habitat in freshwater.  

    “Their buffers on their streams are bigger,” Carl said of Forest Service regulators who oversee timber harvests in the federally owned land of the Tongass National Forest. “Now, they do a good job compared to all these other places I’ve logged for, where we’re getting the last tree, and see you later.”

    Public lands managed by the Forest Service have stronger protections for streams and waterways than required under Alaska law. That means once land is removed from the Tongass it can be more aggressively harvested, which arguably leads to less sustainable practices.

    The Forest Service requires a 100-foot buffer around salmon-producing streams. But under Alaska law, the Mental Health Trust can leave buffers as narrow as 66 feet on the land it has logged. 

    black fish with pink lines near their gills and on their fins crowd together underwater
    Pink salmon swim in the Tongass National Forest. Joe Serio / U.S. Forest Service

    State fisheries biologist Mark Minnillo grew up on Prince of Wales Island. It’s his job to walk lands identified for logging and point out salmon habitat before the first tree is cut. It’s a contentious issue in a place where the salmon run is a means to feeding families; it’s more than a recreational pastime.

    “Unless they have anadromous fish in them, they receive no protection,” Minnillo said, referring to fish who live in the sea but return to freshwater to spawn, such as salmon. “So yes, the operator’s following what’s in the Forest Resources and Practices Act [Alaska’s statute regulating logging], but those protections are definitely less than what the Forest Service uses.”

    State biologists and foresters still walk the land and point out places where logging buffers should be widened to keep clear-cuts further away from salmon and trout habitat. That’s because the thin line of trees left standing are often later felled by high winds and heavy rains and erosion. But any protections past the 66-foot no-cut zone would be voluntary, explains Joel Nudelman, a veteran state forester of two decades.

    “It is ultimately up to the landowner to determine where they’re going to harvest,” he said.

    The impact of this logging is palpable in the forests surrounding Naukati. Streams that people here rely on to feed their families with salmon show signs of degradation. Commercial salmon fisheries also rely on these waterways, and make up a sizable chunk of the local economy. Much more than, say timber, which an analysis of state data by a regional development group says provides about 320 jobs across this region — about a tenth of what Southeast Alaska’s commercial fishing industry employs.

    According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s anadromous waters catalog, 124 streams cross the forested parcels transferred from the Forest Service to outside stakeholders, like the Mental Health Trust. These waterways serve as spawning and rearing grounds for salmon. Satellite imagery confirms the suspicions of observers like Carl: Buffers along fish-bearing streams on trust and private lands toe the 66-foot limit afforded by Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources.

    Clear-cut logging near Naukati Bay comes close to fish-bearing waters. 2020 CNES / Distribution Airbus DS / Earthrise / Grist

    But the land exchange is good business for the region’s logging industry — or what’s left of it. And it’s almost universally supported by Alaska’s elected leaders.

    “When we looked to how we could allow for an exchange that would protect areas within Forest Service lands, while at the same time taking care of an obligation to a subset of Alaskans as people that are cared for under the Alaska Mental Health Trust, we figured that this was a symbiotic relationship,” Senator Murkowski said in an interview. 

    She successfully inserted language authorizing the land exchange with the Alaska Mental Health Trust in a must-pass piece of legislation. It was signed by President Trump in 2017. Along Yatuk Creek, about a few miles northeast from Naukati, Minnillo, the state fisheries biologist, walks through an area being actively logged by crews contracted by the trust. Logs are stacked high along the side of a road waiting to be hauled off to the mill. Trees lie in and across the salmon-producing stream.

    a man with glasses and a mustache wearing a black jacket gestures toward a river with felled trees
    Alaska Department of Fish and Game fisheries biologist Mark Minnillo gestures toward trees felled by wind in Yatuk Creek northeast of Naukati Bay on Prince of Wales Island in September 2021. State forestry regulations allow loggers to cut trees as close as 66 feet from salmon-bearing waterways — much closer than is allowed on federal forestland. Eric Stone

    This likely wouldn’t have happened if it were logged under the federal rules that regulate the Tongass.

    Some blowdown is to be expected, even in untouched old growth. It can help shade the creeks, Minnillo said, keeping water temperatures low — just as salmon here in Alaska like it. But too much, and stream banks start to erode. Felled trees can block salmon and trout from making their way upstream. Waterways get more turbid. 

    In knee-high rubber boots, the biologist strides across a bridge overlooking the creek. Salmon in greenish-brown spawning colors rest in an eddy downstream, waiting for just the right time to scamper up the creek and complete their journey.

    “This is some of the blowdown that’s happened in this area,” he said, pointing to trees within the legally mandated 66-foot ribbon of uncut timber. That small buffer often translates to two or three trees on each side of the stream. In many places, though, it’s functionally zero — because those that are left standing by loggers are felled by Mother Nature.

    A satellite photo showing clear-cut logging on McKenzie Inlet in Southeast Alaska. Blue dashed lines indicate 100-foot buffers around fish-bearing streams. Loggers have cut close to the streams.
    Clear-cut logging on McKenzie Inlet. Blue dashed lines indicate approximate 100-foot buffers around fish-bearing streams. Airbus DS / Grist

    But the worst damage is yet to come. With the bank now exposed, it’ll likely collapse, in this area that gets about 100 inches of rain a year.

    “You can see this one here with this big exposed root wad, you’re going to get a lot of erosion off of that,” he said, pointing to a gash in the creek bed. “You can see what you end up with if this creek gets higher flows. It’s going to erode.”

    As we talk, a logger — Chris — shows up. We pause so Minnillo can pitch him on fixing up the stream bank. But it’s all voluntary. State officials can’t compel him to do more to protect a salmon-rich stream like this one.

    A tree trunk covered in lichen with a large yellow sign on it saying caution forestry study area
    A sign marks a forestry study area in the Harris River area on Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island in 2021. The U.S. Forest Service uses the area to study second-growth forest management techniques, including tree thinning. Eric Stone

    The Mental Health Trust’s land exchange is the most recent land swap affecting the Tongass, finalized this year. But it is nowhere near the size or scale of the 2014 transfer of 70,000 acres to a regional Alaska Native corporation.

    Sealaska is one of a dozen regional Alaska Native corporations created a half-century ago by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, or ANCSA, of 1971. Corporations received lands to invest in and pay out to Alaska Native shareholders.

    Some invested in oil exploration, others mining, and many leveraged lucrative federal defense contracts. Sealaska logged on lands across Prince of Wales Island. It was always controversial, but it allowed the group to pay dividends to Alaska Native shareholders. 

    Some of those lands were meant for cultural sites and preservation. “But the economics of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act didn’t leave too many options available to the original board,” said Patrick Anderson, who is Tlingit and a former Sealaska director on the board from 1989 to 2016.

    A man with long gray hair wearing a blue button-up shirt and leather necklace stands in front of a lake and snow-capped mountains
    Patrick Anderson poses near his home in Alaska. Michael Dinneen

    “Part of the pressures that we really felt were the dividend pressures from shareholders,” he said. 

    Those are the annual payments to the corporation’s 20,000-odd Native shareholders.

    Sealaska dominated the region’s logging industry between 2014 and 2021. According to timber harvest plans submitted to the state, Sealaska applied to log at least 18,000 acres of land it received in the 2014 transfer. No other entity came close to this volume.

    Sealaska representatives declined to comment on the volume of its timber harvests, saying it was proprietary information.

    Sealaska renounced commercial logging in 2021, a blow to the region’s timber industry. But that doesn’t mean more land transfers aren’t being considered. In 2019, Sealaska invested at least $500,000 in a campaign to create five new Alaska Native corporations that would be allowed to select federal lands from the Tongass. The new corporation shareholders would be descendants of the five village populations originally left out of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

    That effort, introduced on Capitol Hill last fall, is being supported by Alaska’s Congressional delegation, including Senator Murkowski, who helped engineer Sealaska’s 2014 land swap.

    A woman in a white zip-up sweater with snowflake embroidery holds both hands out while looking at the camera. She is standing in front of a purple wall hung with black and white photos
    Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski speaks to reporters in November 2021. AP Photo / Mark Thiessen

    “The timber industry in Southeast [Alaska] has struggled for years,” Murkowski said from Washington, D.C. “And it’s been because of a lack of supply from the Forest Service.”

    Those descendents from the five villages have created the group Alaska Natives Without Land. The organization has released maps that include tracts on Prince of Wales Island — land where they do not have direct historical ties. If approved, the bill would allow these shareholders to use the land for economic activities, including logging and tourism. The mining rights, however, would belong to Sealaska.

    Tribal leaders on Prince of Wales Island say they are sympathetic to the landless communities’ plight but are worried that their forestlands will be targeted for their timber.

    “We support these communities that want to gain access to a resource that other communities got in the past,” said Clinton Cook, president of the Craig Tribal Association on the island. 

    But “hopefully they’ll look at more areas in their community,” he said, and not on Prince of Wales Island that already has a network of logging roads and a legacy of clear-cut logging.

    The Tongass National Forest is often lauded as an asset for all people in the United States. But for those whose homelands were nationalized it’s a legacy of stolen land.

    “When they set aside the 16 million-acre Tongass out of the total 25 million acres, that fueled a lot of early rage against the government,” Anderson said of the early 20th-century creation of the Tongass. “While I know the Tongass is a tremendous public resource, it was taken from the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people.” 

    All for what he calls “a minuscule amount of money” — $7.5 million — paid in 1968 and only after Tlingit and Haida tribal leaders sued the federal government for forcibly taking its lands to create the Tongass in the early 1900s. 

    “What we gave up in rights, should be at least acknowledged by the rest of the United States,” he said. “And maybe some of the investment that then goes into the fighting that occurs, all of the public policy that occurs, should be invested in developing other aspects of the Alaska Native world.”

    a highway with a sign on the side saying "scenic byway alaska" and a picture of a red flower on it
    A sign marks a scenic route on Prince of Wales island. SEAKdrones LLC

    Tucked into a narrow fjord that serves as the gateway for ferry passengers, a historic water-powered boatworks greets those coming to Prince of Wales Island. It has serviced the region’s fishing fleet since the 1940s. 

    Sam Romey has owned the Wolf Creek Boatworks for nearly 30 years, leasing the land it’s on from the Forest Service. Previous owners have leased it since 1939. 

    But the land was included in the exchange with the Mental Health Trust. Now, Romey is locked in a legal battle with the state of Alaska, which defends the trust in court.

    Romey feared the ridges above his land would be clear-cut. Then he got a public notice in February 2022 confirming his fears.

    “It’s in the backyard, the side yard, it’s everywhere,” he said in a phone interview.

    Docks and log rafts, cuts down to the bay shore at McKenzie Inlet. 2016 CNES / Airbus DS / Earthrise / Grist

    The trust says it intends to cut some 800 acres of old-growth forest and 29 acres of young growth, some of which comes uncomfortably close to Romey’s historic structures.

    “They’re planning to log that entire mountainside,” he said. There’s a salmon-bearing stream that powers the boatworks. He had to be mindful of it when it was managed by the federal foresters. 

    “All of a sudden,” he said, “we go from ‘preserve the forest, take care of it — you can’t cut a tree down without asking the Forest Service’ — to ‘we’re going to mow the entire mountainside down’,” he said. 

    This project is a partnership between Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate justice and sustainability for a national audience, CoastAlaska, a nonprofit consortium of several public radio stations in Southeast Alaska, and Earthrise Media, which supports environmental journalism with satellite imagery and data analysis. The story was written and reported by Jacob Resneck, regional news director at CoastAlaska based in Juneau, Alaska, and Eric Stone, who reports and hosts for KRBD, a public radio station in Ketchikan, Alaska. Data reporting was done by Clayton Aldern at Grist and Edward Boyda of Earthrise. 

    Still photography for the story was done by Eric Stone. Drone photography and video provided by SEAKdrones LLC. Jacky Myint handled design and development. Art direction by Teresa Chin. Video editing by Daniel Penner. Megan Merrigan and Christian Skotte handled promotion.

    The project was edited by Grist executive editor Katherine Bagley and Grist senior editor Katherine Lanpher. It was copy edited by Grist reporter Shannon Osaka and environmental justice fellow Julia Kane. The project was fact-checked by Grist news and politics fellow Lina Tran. 

    The project was made possible by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Roadless Rule is supposed to protect our wild places. What went wrong in the Tongass National Forest? on Mar 28, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A new report reveals how the Dakota Access Pipeline is breaking the law

    The federal government and the Dakota Access Pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer, misled the public, used substandard science, utilized poor technology, and broke the law by not cooperating with impacted Indigenous Nations. That’s according to a new report that also criticizes the Army Corp of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency for not completing a realistic analysis of the environmental damage the pipeline could cause.

    The report, written by NDN Collective, an Indigenous nonprofit, provides the first comprehensive timeline of the controversial pipeline’s legal and environmental violations. Working with a team of engineers, the report’s authors included new information about oil quality, spills, leakage, and faulty infrastructure that NDN Collective says could be pivotal in the ongoing battle to stop the pipeline. 

    The report comes as tribes await the Army Corps of Engineers to complete a new, court-mandated Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on a section of pipeline under Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River to which tribes have treaty rights. The EIS is expected to be released in September, after which a public comment period will open. NDN Collective, tribes, and other environmental groups are also calling on the Biden administration to shut down the pipeline. Meanwhile, the pipeline remains operational, carrying 750,000 barrels of oil a day. 

    “This report shows how the Army Corps of Engineers violated their own processes, and continues to violate our human rights for the benefit of a destructive, violent, and extractive energy company,” said Nick Tilsen, Oglala Lakota and CEO of NDN Collective. “We cannot sit on the sidelines with this information. It’s time for accountability and it’s time to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, once and for all.”

    Since 2016, the pipeline has been the focus of an international effort by Indigenous people and environmental activists to stop it. Construction began in 2016 and was completed in 2017. 

    “If the tribes were equipped with this information back in 2015, we could have won the fight. The fight for DAPL would have been very different,” said Jade Begay, Diné and Tesuque Pueblo of New Mexico, Climate Justice Campaign Director at NDN Collective. 

    Begay said that the report can complement the work of activists on the ground and serve as a tool to fight the pipeline on a policy level but stresses that the responsibility lies with the company, agencies, and federal government to complete accurate studies and share the information with stakeholders. 

    “Infrastructure should be done right from the beginning,” she said. “Vulnerable communities that are often Black, brown and Indigenous should not have to bear the burden of doing the work for these entities and agencies.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new report reveals how the Dakota Access Pipeline is breaking the law on Mar 28, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Sweden approves controversial iron mine on Indigenous Sami land

    The Swedish government has greenlit a controversial iron mine that Indigenous people say threatens their livelihoods. Beowulf Mining, a British company, will now begin an environmental review of its Kallak Mine project and apply to start processing ore. The mine has been strongly opposed by the Indigenous Sami in Sweden, as well as the United Nations. 

    The decision comes as Sweden is in the midst of a national reckoning over its treatment of the Sami. In 2020, Sweden established an independent truth commission to study past abuse against the Sami, who have faced generations of rights violations, discrimination, land theft, and cultural eradication. 

    The Sami, and other activists, have protested the Kallak (Gállok in the Sami language) mine since Beowulf first began exploring mining activities in 2006. Kallak, which would be located in Jokkmokk municipality in Lapland Province, could produce hundreds of millions of tons of iron ore creating dust that could pollute the air and water in the region, in addition to infrastructure that the Sami say will disrupt their reindeer herding. The company has said the mine will create hundreds of jobs in the region. 

    “When conditions for reindeer husbandry in Gállok are eradicated, it means ultimately that also the conditions for maintaining Sami culture in the area are removed,” the Sami Parliament wrote in a statement.

    The Sami have been recognized as Indigenous people in Sweden since 1977, and it’s estimated that up to 40,000 Sami people live in Sweden, many of whom live in Sapmi, traditional Sami lands that cross Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The area is crucial for Sami reindeer herding, an essential part of Sami culture that also contributes to the ecological health and diversity of the region. It’s also home to the World Heritage site of Laponia, which UNESCO recognized as an outstanding example of traditional land use and for its natural beauty. The mine would be less than 40 kilometers from Laponia. 

    Although the Swedish government’s decision means that Beowulf can proceed with environmental studies, President of the Sami Parliament Håkan Jonsson released a statement saying he is skeptical that those studies will lead to meaningful environmental protections. 

    In February, the UN joined the Sami in resisting the mine, highlighting the toxic dust the mine will produce and calling on the government to consult with the Sami. “We call on Sweden to construct future good-faith relations with Indigenous peoples at the national level, based on recognition of their cultural heritage and traditional livelihoods,” UN officials wrote in a statement. “A decision not to approve the Gállok project can demonstrate a watershed shift from past injustices.”

    Earlier this year, the Swedish government passed legislation requiring consultation with Sami representatives on “issues of special significance to the Sami people,” but the law doesn’t take effect until 2024. Jonsson’s statement says that the decision contradicts the spirit of the law. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Sweden approves controversial iron mine on Indigenous Sami land on Mar 25, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Lake Powell water crisis is about to be an energy crisis

    Stretching for 186 miles along the border of Utah and Arizona, Lake Powell serves as one of two major reservoirs that anchor the Colorado River. Last week, the lake reached a disturbing new milestone: water levels fell to their lowest threshold ever, since the lake was created by the damming of the Colorado in 1963.

    The precipitous drop is the result of the decades-long drought in the American West that has ravaged the Colorado River for years, forcing unprecedented water cuts in states like Arizona. This newest milestone on Lake Powell, though, is significant for another reason. The reservoir also sustains a hydroelectric power plant, Glen Canyon Dam, that provides energy to millions of people. That power source, critical for rural and tribal communities across the region, is now in jeopardy. 

    The federal government expects Lake Powell’s levels to rise again this spring as mountain snow melts across the West, but there’s still a significant chance that the reservoir will reach the so-called “dead pool” stage some time in the next few years, at which point it will stop producing hydroelectric power altogether. The dry spell has been causing slowdowns or shutdowns at power plants in California and Nevada, creating yet another challenge for officials trying to adapt to a seemingly endless water shortage. 

    If reservoirs like Lake Powell keep falling, millions of people across the West will have to turn to dirtier and more expensive energy at a time when transitioning to renewable power is of paramount importance for reducing carbon emissions.

    The Colorado provides water for more than 40 million people. While the river has gone through several wet and dry spells over the past century, it’s never faced a challenge like the present “megadrought,” which scientists say has no precedent in the last millennium. As precipitation levels have remained low year after year, inflow from the river’s tributaries has slowed to a trickle, and its reservoirs have started to run dry.

    When Lake Powell is full, its surface sits some 3,700 feet above sea level, but the reservoir hasn’t reached that threshold in some time. Water levels have fallen over the past several years of rainless winters, reaching a new low of 3,525 feet last week. The lake is now only a quarter full, and water levels are just 35 feet above the dead pool threshold for power generation. Officials say there is a significant risk of a dead pool in the next few winters.

    Lake Powell Bathtub Rings Drought
    Lake Powell’s “bathtub ring,” seen here in June 2021, is a marker of how far water levels have fallen during the West’s current megadrought. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    When federal officials built a dam at the southern end of Glen Canyon, forming Lake Powell, they assumed there would always be enough water moving through the Colorado River system to turn the turbines, and thereby generate a supposedly endless supply of cheap renewable energy. The customers who bought this clean power were rural towns, electrical cooperatives, and tribes, many of whom didn’t have many alternate power sources.

    In recent years, as Lake Powell has begun to dry up, the turbines have become less efficient. The federal Bureau of Reclamation has already shaved down power deliveries from the dam.

    “We are already seeing reduced generation from Glen Canyon Dam,” said Lisa Meiman, a spokesperson for the Western Area Power Administration, a government authority that markets hydroelectric power from around the region. “[Generation] has been dropping pretty consistently as the lake elevations have declined, so we’re about a third less efficient in terms of power production now than we are at an average elevation.” 

    When that happens, Meiman said, “we have to go out and purchase replacement power in the spot market, which is typically more expensive.” It also comes from dirtier sources like coal and gas, she said. For most customers who buy power from the dam, losing it won’t be all that big of a deal. For them, hydroelectric power accounts for only a fraction of their overall power needs, and any price increases get spread out over thousands of users, keeping costs down.

    For some customers, though, the shutdown of the dam will be far more painful. Utility bills have already started to rise as the dam becomes less efficient, and a total shutdown would lead to significant cost increases for the small and remote entities that rely on it. 

    Hardest hit will be the 50-odd tribal nations dependent on hydroelectric power not only for residential energy needs but also to power revenue-generating commercial ventures like casinos. Thanks to generations of underinvestment by the federal government, many tribes that buy electricity from Lake Powell don’t have their own power generation capacity to replace it, and building new power sources isn’t cheap. According to a report produced by a consulting firm looking at the impact of a Glen Canyon Dam shutdown, tribal nations would experience the “the most troubling” consequences of the power loss.

    The dam’s largest tribal customer is the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, or NTUA, which provides electricity to some 30,000 residential customers on the Navajo reservation. 

    “It’s a very sensitive issue for all of us right now,” Walter Haase, the tribal utility’s general manager, told the Associated Press last week on the heels of the water level announcement from the Bureau of Reclamation. 

    The NTUA is spending millions of dollars to build out renewable energy capacity that could help soften the blow of a dam shutdown. Other tribes that can’t afford to build such new power sources, though, will have to pay higher rates for replacement electricity out of pocket, which could strain revenues. The consultants’ report pointed to the Hopi Tribe, which does not have a casino to bolster its finances, as being especially vulnerable to these cost hikes.

    Small municipalities that depend on the dam are also feeling the pain.

    “Hydro is very low-cost, renewable energy, [so] our energy costs will go way up,” said Bryan Hill, the general manager of Page Utility Enterprises. The company services the town of Page, Arizona, which sits on the edge of Lake Powell. Hill said he’s already been feeling the pain as deliveries have slowed down. 

    “They’ve got a tourniquet on in the form of slowing down the generation and trying to reduce the bleeding,” he said, “but we’re already losing money. Unless things change, there will be a significant rate adjustment.” The exact scale of that adjustment isn’t clear, but residents of Page who have come to rely on cheap power will see a noticeable rise in their annual bills. Because spot-market energy is also getting more expensive as the nation’s power system transitions from coal and gas toward renewables, the rate increase will be compounded.

    Glen Canyon Dam isn’t the only hydroelectric source that’s struggled amid the drought: Power generation at the larger Hoover Dam in nearby Lake Mead has fallen by around a quarter, and officials in California shut down a hydroelectric plant at Lake Oroville last year as water levels in the lake fell below the generation threshold. The two dams together serve about 2 million customers. These power losses further drive up prices and strain the grid at a time when energy is already getting more expensive as older coal plants come offline.

    To make matters worse, though, the power shortage in Lake Powell is intertwined with the larger water shortage on the Colorado. If the water level in Lake Powell continues to fall, federal officials will have to balance between the needs of water users and the needs of power users. If they hold enough water back in Lake Powell to keep the turbines running, they’ll be withholding water from farmers and homeowners who rely on it farther downstream. If they push as much water as they can toward the end users, they’ll spike the power bills of the small entities who rely on the dam.

    The agency has yet to decide on its priorities should the historic lows continue, but time is running out. The latest models suggest there’s a 1 in 4 chance the dam won’t produce power by 2024. 

    “Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell serve many purposes, many divergent purposes,” said Meiman. “For a ton of stakeholders who are all going to be affected by declining lake elevations, there is not going to be a simple solution or an easy solution.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Lake Powell water crisis is about to be an energy crisis on Mar 21, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Redistricting could make it harder for tribes to protect the environment

    In February, the Navajo Nation sued San Juan County, New Mexico over its new redistricting plan. San Juan County, which stretches across a large swath of the Navajo reservation, has enough Indigenous voters to be a majority in two voting districts. The Navajo Nation’s lawsuit, however, argues that the county’s redistricting plan packs those voters into a single voting district, diluting the power of Indigenous people at the polls and violating the Voting Rights Act.

    For Leonard Gorman, executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission (NNHRC), the stakes couldn’t be higher. Indigenous voters often have different priorities at the polls than their non-Indigenous counterparts, and less voting power means they are less likely to be represented by lawmakers on issues they care about. In particular, Gorman says, redistricting could impact Navajo people’s ability to deal with resource allocations, water quality and access, and land use – environmental issues important to Indigenous people in the area. “Redistricting affects every aspect of our lives,” he said.

    Side by side greyscale maps showing redistricting boundaries in San Juan County in New Mexico
    In the NNHRC’s proposed map (left), Districts 1 and 2 have equally strong majorities of Indigenous voters (63.3% and 63.2%, respectively). The lawsuit argues that the county’s map (right) packs Indigenous voters into District 1 (83.3%), leaving District 2 with a much lower percentage of Indigenous voters (52.9%). Grist

    Across the US, states are redrawing the borders of congressional and legislative districts based on population counts and changes recorded in the 2020 Census. The new boundaries will apply to federal, state, and local elections for the next ten years and New Mexico is one of several states where Indigenous voters have serious concerns that redistricting plans will limit their ability to protect their interests. Now, tribal leaders and experts say that this once-a-decade redistricting process may become a lost opportunity, resulting in another decade of disenfranchisement and lack of legislative advocacy, impacting everything from land and resource exploitation to protections for water. 

    “Rather than working on understanding the issues that are important to Native voters, some elected officials would rather suppress the Native vote,” said Keaton Sunchild, political director for Western Native Voice. “We fear that these groups are just getting started.” 

    Based on the 2020 Census, the state of Montana will gain a congressional seat, giving it two for the first time in decades. Montana’s plan divides the state into an eastern and western district, raising alarms for several Indigenous nations and groups in the state. Two reservations are in the western district, while the other five are in the eastern district. Sunchild, a member of the Chippewa Cree Tribe, says that the newly redistricted map dilutes the voices of Indigenous voters. “It really doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on the Native vote in either district. It makes it easy for candidates to ignore Native voters and Native priorities,” he said.

    Sunchild says that when he canvasses Indigenous voters in the state, their main concerns are natural resource production, protecting reservation lands, and hunting and fishing rights. The new map, he says, makes it harder for voters to get those concerns heard at the legislative level. 

    But Maylinn Smith, chair of the state districting commission, says that every effort was made to group reservations together. Smith, who was appointed by the state supreme court last year, was a tribal law professor at the University of Montana and has also worked within several tribes’ legal systems. “I’m incredibly sensitive to tribal sovereignty issues since I have spent my entire life doing Indian law. I recognize those interests,” she said. However, based on the state’s geography, Smith added there was no way to group more reservations together.

    Patrick Yawakie, political director of Indigenous Vote, an advocacy organization that promotes voting in Indian Country, is enrolled in the Zuni Pueblo Tribe and is Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe and White Bear Nakota & Cree. He says that Indigenous representation is especially important at this moment, following what he describes as one of the worst legislative sessions in Montana history for Indigenous issues. As an example of state law that threatens tribal environmental interests, Yawakie points to a bill that sets criminal penalties for people protesting pipelines and other infrastructure projects. 

    “We viewed this as a direct attack on our communities and our first amendment rights to voice our concerns against projects that hurt the environment,” Yawakie said about the bill, which he sees as a response to Indigenous activism against the DAPL, KXL, and Line 3 pipelines.  

    In 2020, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) released a 176-page report that outlined the many challenges facing Native voters and candidates. The report described obstacles at every level of the electoral process, including redistricting, voter registration, casting ballots, and running for office. The report found that Indigenous voters have filed 94 lawsuits based on the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the Voting Rights Act, winning, or successfully settling, in 86. NARF has been working closely with tribal leaders in states, including New Mexico and Montana, and has released toolkits to help Indigenous communities advocate for themselves throughout the process. 

    The entire redistricting process relies on data that has already put Native voters at a disadvantage. A report from the US Census Bureau revealed that the 2020 Census undercounted Native Americans, both on and off reservation, as did the 2010 Census – a trend that could be corrected by working directly with tribes. Black and Hispanic people were also undercounted while white and Asian people were overcounted. In a statement, Fawn Sharp, President of the National Congress of American Indians, said that “These results confirm our worst fears” and called on federal agencies to work with tribes to ensure the undercount doesn’t lead to underfunding. 

    Side by side grayscale maps of Minnesota showing redistricting boundaries and locations of Native American reservations and communities
    Minnesota’s previous Congressional districting map (left) split the state’s seven Ojibwe reservations between Districts 7 and 8. The new map (right) places all seven in District 8. Grist

    In Minnesota, Representative Jamie Becker-Finn, a Leech Lake Ojibwe descendant, says decades of work by tribal advocates have finally paid off in the state’s new redistricting maps. In February, the state redistricting panel, made up of five judges, announced the new map, which placed all seven Ojibwe reservations in the same congressional district for the first time. The map also grouped tribes within the same state legislative districts. Several Indigenous candidates have already announced their candidacy in the new districts. 

    “This change respects the sovereignty of the American Indian tribes and the request of tribal leaders and Minnesotans across the state to afford those tribes an opportunity to join their voices,” the panel wrote.

    Although the new maps have drawn cautious optimism from a range of political parties, groups, and communities across the state, Common Cause Minnesota, a nonpartisan voter advocacy group that worked to increase representation for minority and disenfranchised communities, has expressed disappointment that the new maps did not emphasize communities of color as much as they hoped for. 

    Becker-Finn, who grew up on the Leech Lake reservation and represents a suburban district in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, says that the new map is a huge opportunity for Indigenous voters. Before, she says, they had little opportunity to advocate for environmental causes that impacted their communities. 

    The Line 3 pipeline project is one of the issues Becker-Finn thinks could be affected by the new districts. “We simply did not have the political power to stop it at the time. If our legislature better reflected the voices of Native folks, then maybe it would not have gone the way that it went,” she said. 

    Becker-Finn is hopeful about the opportunities created by the new districts, but acknowledges that progress will take both time and work. “This is an opportunity. It’s on us to do the work to make it as meaningful as it can be,” she said.

    However, while tribes in Minnesota work to take advantage of redistricting, the Navajo Nation’s situation with regards to San Juan County is far more common. Tribes in Nevada, Oregon, and other states have expressed serious concern about redistricting, while other nations fight redistricting practices in court. In February, the Spirit Lake Tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and individual voters sued the state of North Dakota over its redistricting map. The new plan, the lawsuit says, splinters Indigenous voters across multiple districts. 

    “It’s just another way of hindering our ability to vote,” said Douglas Yankton, Chairman of the Spirit Lake Tribe. “We are citizens of the state. We should have a voice.”

    However, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation on the Fort Berthold reservation has expressed support for the North Dakota map, which places Fort Berthold in its own district instead of dividing it. 

    Leonard Gorman, executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission, stresses that giving Indigenous voters the ability to advocate for their environmental concerns will benefit everyone, not just Indigenous communities. 

    “This is the time in which Indigenous peoples must have the floor,” he said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Redistricting could make it harder for tribes to protect the environment on Mar 18, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • First Nations begin filing claims for Canada’s multi-billion dollar water settlement

    For years, First Nations in Canada have been denied access to clean drinking water. Many Indigenous communities have to deal with brown, sludgy water and the destructive health impacts it brought. Some have spent years relying on boiled or bottled water. As of March 8, 2022, there were 23 short-term drinking water advisories in place across the country, that range from boil water advisories to Do Not Consume notices. Now, the Canadian government will have to pay for it.

    This week, individuals and First Nations impacted by dirty drinking water can file claims through the First Nations Drinking Water Settlement; a historic $8 billion (CAD) settlement ($6.2 billion U.S.) approved by Canadian courts in December. Triggered by class action lawsuits filed by the Tataskweyak Cree Nation, Curve Lake First Nation, and Neskantaga First Nation, the settlement could provide compensation to more than 250 First Nations and roughly 142,000 individual Indigenous people. First Nations and individuals subject to a drinking water advisory that lasted at least one year between 1995 and 2021, are eligible to file claims online and receive compensation from the settlement fund. 

    The settlement comes amid a long, and ongoing, history of unsafe drinking water in Indigenous communities across Canada. In 2015, a study conducted by the government found 105 long-term drinking water advisories in effect in 67 communities. Since 2015, 128 long-term drinking water advisories have been lifted, but as of February of this year, 36 long-term advisories in 29 different Indigenous communities remain in effect. Impacted First Nations will receive at least $500,000 and have up to December to file claims. Individuals must file claims by March of next year.

    After the settlement was announced, Tataskweyak Cree Nation Chief Doreen Spence told the CBC, “This is a historic moment for Tataskweyak Cree Nation and First Nations across the country. First Nations will now be able to work with Canada in a more meaningful way, and have access to water standards on reserve that have never existed before. We look forward to seeing the day where all First Nations have access to safe water, now and forever.”

    In the US, Indigenous communities have also faced a generations-long struggle to access safe drinking water. According to the US Water Alliance, Indigenous people are less likely to have plumbing in their homes and have access to clean drinking water than any other group in the country. Although various state and federal infrastructure projects have included funding for Indigenous water infrastructure, there has never been a settlement on par with the First Nations Drinking Water Settlement. 

    In addition to $1.8 billion set aside for direct compensation, the settlement includes $6 billion to fund water infrastructure projects in First Nations communities. The settlement also creates a First Nations Advisory Committee on Safe Drinking Water and commits to helping First Nations develop their own clean water legislation. 

    The settlement comes in the wake of the Canadian government announcing $40 billion (CAD) ($31.5 billion USD) to compensate residential school survivors and to improve social services for Indigenous children.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline First Nations begin filing claims for Canada’s multi-billion dollar water settlement on Mar 11, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • An open letter to non-Indigenous people who work in Indigenous affairs

    The post An open letter to non-Indigenous people who work in Indigenous affairs appeared first on IndigenousX.

    This post was originally published on IndigenousX.

  • The Air Force wants to blow up toxic military waste on a beach in Guam

    On a recent Saturday, Monaeka Flores made the drive from her apartment to her family’s land on the north coast of Guam, the U.S. island territory about 1,500 miles south of Japan. As she steered through a gap in a limestone cliff, the land fell away to her right. A lush tropical forest sloped down to a white sand beach scattered with dark, porous rocks. Beyond that, Flores could see a fringe of reef and the bright blue of the western Pacific stretching to the horizon. Driving north to Inapsan Beach, toward her family’s land, she always feels “this excitement, this energy, this joy bubbling up inside me,” she said.

    Inapsan Beach is where Flores learned how to swim. It’s where she first donned snorkeling gear to gaze, wide-eyed, at the tropical fish that dart around the reef. It’s where her family camped, unfolding cots beneath the tin-roofed pavilion that her grandfather, father, and uncles built. Today, it’s where her extended family still gathers to fish, to barbecue, to play music and chat while her young nieces and nephews splash in the waves.

    Inapsan is land that Flores’ family ranched on for generations. They are CHamoru, Indigenous people who have called Guam and the other Mariana Islands home for more than 3,500 years. “When I’m there, I feel the sadness and pain drain from my body,” she said. “It is such a beautiful place. Such a giving, healing place.”

    Now, that place is threatened.

    About three miles southeast of Inapsan, Andersen Air Force Base operates an explosive ordnance disposal range on Tarague Beach. In May last year, the Air Force applied to renew a permit to destroy up to 35,000 pounds of excess or obsolete munitions each year — everything from incendiary bombs to bullets, from anti-tank mines to smoke grenades — by detonating and burning them right on the beach.

    silhouette of Guam and a zoomed in area of the northern tip of the island
    Grist

    If granted, the permit will give Andersen Air Force Base the option to conduct open burning and open detonation operations for the next three years, releasing a slew of toxic chemicals, including explosives like RDX, HMX, and TNT, thyroid-disrupting compounds like perchlorates, and persistent toxins like PCBs and PFAS. Black plumes could rise from the open burn pits. “Kickout” from the explosions could be flung up to half a mile away, contaminating the nearby reef and limestone forest. The chemicals could accumulate in the soil, leach down, and poison the shallow, freshwater aquifer that provides water for 80 percent of Guam.

    To prevent this, in late January, a community group called “Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian” filed a lawsuit against the Air Force and the Department of Defense. (In CHamoru, prutehi means protect, and Litekyan is the CHamoru name for an ancient village in northern Guam, an area now known as Ritidian.) The group, which Flores helped found to protect natural and cultural resources on the island, says the military failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, when applying to renew the permit. They argue that Andersen Air Force Base did not consider the environmental and cultural harms that could be inflicted by detonating and burning hazardous waste in the open air.

    A spokeswoman for Joint Region Marianas, which is responsible for environmental compliance for military bases on Guam and the surrounding islands, declined to comment on the pending lawsuit, but wrote: “The Department of Defense works with our Government of Guam partners to ensure we adhere to all required environmental regulations.”

    “At the end of the day, the Air Force is not above the law,” said David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney representing Flores’ group. “They’re supposed to be protecting us from threats, not creating threats.”

    Large group of people holding protest signs with a large sign reading "Linala Hanom; Water is Life"
    Members of Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian demonstrate in solidarity with those affected by fuel leaking from the U.S. Navy’s Red Hill storage facility in Hawaii. Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian

    Open burning and open detonation operations consist of destroying waste munitions by pouring diesel on top of them and lighting them on fire or by blowing them up — crude disposal methods that release contamination directly into the environment.

    In 1978, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, proposed banning the open burning of all hazardous wastes, including explosives. The Department of Defense and some companies objected, arguing that there was no safe alternative for dealing with certain types of materials. When the EPA finalized the regulation in 1980, the agency made an exception for explosive hazardous wastes that could not be “safely be disposed of through other modes of treatment” — an exception that was only supposed to be a stopgap until safer technology could be developed.

    Much has changed in the past 40 years. A recent report commissioned by the Department of Defense found that there are now viable alternatives for treating “almost all” conventional munitions. Some can be disassembled and the explosive material can be burned or detonated inside furnaces or kilns, some can be treated within special detonation chambers, and some can be chemically neutralized.

    Three people in US Air Force uniforms walking past a sign warning of an explosive disposal range
    U.S. airmen conduct training at Andersen Air Force Base’s explosive disposal range. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Amanda Morris / Released

    In the mid-1980s, about 80 percent of the waste munitions that the Department of Defense destroyed were handled at open burning or open detonation sites. In recent years, that fraction has fallen to about 30 percent. Still, there are currently 67 open burning and open detonation facilities operating within the U.S. and its territories. Some are run by private industry and other government agencies, but the majority, 38, are run by the military. These sites destroy excess, obsolete, or unserviceable munitions, including bullets, projectiles, mines, fuzes, and missiles, as well as bulk propellants used to manufacture ammunition, bombs, and explosives. During fiscal years 2016 and 2017, the Department of Defense destroyed more than 44,000 tons of munitions via open burning and open detonation.

    In 2021, the EPA began working on rule-making to consider requiring owners and operators of open burning and open detonation facilities to evaluate and implement alternative methods of treating waste munitions. The agency began holding meetings with stakeholders last month and anticipates publishing a proposed rule in late 2022 or early 2023. Frontline communities are skeptical about whether the new rule will address the root cause of the problem.

    In the meantime, these sites continue to wreak havoc on communities across the country, as detailed in an investigative series published by ProPublica in 2017. More recently, a new Earthjustice analysis revealed that 88 percent of open burning and open detonation sites are in low-income communities, and many are in communities of color.

    “These are our ‘domestic burn pits,’” said Laura Olah, co-founder of the Cease Fire Campaign — a coalition of more than 70 groups against open burning and open detonation of waste munitions. “They are here, at home, in the United States and its territories, and almost exclusively in communities that are the most vulnerable to harm,” she said.

    map with grey silhouette of the United States, Puerto Rico, and Guam with red, blue, and gray dots
    Analysis done by Earthjustice using the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool. The tool does not include demographic data for Guam. Grist / Earthjustice / Getty Images

    Flores and other members of Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian first heard about the Air Force’s permit renewal application in October last year when Guam Senator Sabina Perez held an informational hearing on Zoom. Perez explained that the Air Force’s explosive ordnance disposal range on Tarague Beach had been in use since 1980, and permitted by the Guam EPA since 1982. Open detonation operations had been taking place for decades, but open burning operations had been paused in 2002. Now, the Air Force was seeking to continue open detonations and to potentially resume open burning.

    Representatives from the Guam EPA were present at the informational hearing. To Flores, the way they discussed the three-year permit renewal, “it almost felt like it was just going to be rubber-stamped,” she said.

    The Guam EPA has not yet made a decision on the permit renewal application and is currently consulting with EPA Region 9. “This is at the discretion of the Guam EPA administrator, and he is taking into account every consideration before he issues his notice of decision,” said Nic Rupley Lee, public information officer for the Guam EPA.

    After the hearing, Flores was frustrated. She was concerned that open burning and open detonation operations would pollute the island’s drinking water. Tarague Beach sits above Guam’s sole source aquifer: a fragile pool of fresh water that floats atop denser salt water within the island’s permeable limestone. In response to questions from Grist, an EPA spokeswoman wrote that “certain contaminants [from open burning and open detonation] pose more risk than others because they are highly soluble in water, and relatively stable and mobile in soil or surface water and groundwater … Ideally, OB/OD [open burning/open detonation] operations treating explosive wastes containing these constituents would not be located on a shallow aquifer.”

    But some of the 104 different types of waste munitions that the Air Force listed in its permit renewal application, which it is seeking permission to burn or detonate above a shallow aquifer, do contain water-soluble contaminants, like PFAS. “These are chemicals that will never break down in our environment, that will continue to poison the land and the water for many generations to come,” Flores warned.

    If approved, the permit would also allow the Air Force to burn and detonate materials not specifically listed in the application. In the past, the military has used the site to dispose of unexploded ordnance found around the island that dates back to World War II. 

    Three people with protest signs reading "Sacred tåno 'āina" and "Defend the Sacred"
    Monaeka Flores (right) at a solidarity protest in Guam for the protection of Mauna Kea. Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian

    Flores was also concerned that the smoky air that blew away from the burn pits would be unsafe to breathe. That the fish her family and friends caught by spearfishing along the reef or from boats in the open water would be unsafe to eat. That CHamoru people would be unable to cultivate and gather traditional medicines near the range. And that green sea turtles, an endangered species, would be unable to nest on the beach where the blasts occur.

    Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian says that the Air Force and Department of Defense never completed the requisite environmental review to address these concerns and consider alternatives.

    Henkin says that the group wants to ensure that the Air Force complies with NEPA by making an informed decision and keeping the public apprised of the process so that they can provide input. “People need to know that things aren’t happening behind closed doors that are going to harm their environment,” he said.

    In Flores’ view, “they decided that they didn’t need to do the work,” she said. “That’s why we’re taking them to court.”

    A large explosion on a beach
    An M117 air-dropped demolition bomb explodes on Andersen Air Force Base’s Tarague Beach explosive ordnance disposal range. National Archives photo by Airman 1st Class Joshua P. Strang / Released

    To Flores, the Air Force’s plan for Tarague Beach is one more hazard on a long list of threats that CHamorus have faced throughout 500 years of colonialism. This threat, however, is especially personal. Part of Tarague Beach once belonged to Flores’ great grandfather.

    In the 16th century, Spanish colonizers came to Guam, inflicting genocide through war and disease and reducing the CHamoru population by 90 percent. In 1898, the U.S. took control of the island as a result of the Spanish-American War. Then, on December 8, 1941 — the same day that Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on the other side of the International Date Line — the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Guam.

    Flores’ grandfather, Damian Castro Flores, who passed away nearly 20 years ago, remembered the day well. He told Flores that, for a few peaceful weeks, his family hid near Tarague Beach. They had a ranch there, where his father raised pigs and had planted hundreds of coconut trees to produce copra (dried sections of coconut meat that yield coconut oil). “They thought they might be safe there for a while,” Flores said.

    When Japanese forces discovered the ranch, they took all of the pigs. They made Damian, 13 years old, work from sunrise to sunset processing the copra, and then they took that too. They also forced Flores’ great grandfather and grandfather, along with many CHamorus, to do hard, manual labor.

    The U.S. returned to Guam in July of 1944 and retook the island in a grisly battle that went on for weeks. After World War II, the U.S. military gobbled up land. The government invoked eminent domain to seize CHamoru families’ properties, creating the military bases that span 30 percent of the island today.

    “My great grandfather was really heartbroken to lose that land at Tarague Beach,” said Flores. It was where he had ranched, hunted, and fished throughout his life. He and Flores’ great grandmother began ranching in Inapsan, on a parcel of land just north of Tarague that belonged to her great grandmother’s family and still belongs to Flores’ family today.

    view of a beach and ocean with conifer and palm trees in foreground
    The walk from the Flores family’s property toward Inapsan Beach. Monaeka Flores

    Though they own the property in Inapsan, they can only access it by driving through Andersen Air Force Base. Each year, Flores has to apply for a pass to show an armed gate guard every time she drives north. “They’re our ‘hosts,’ and it’s a ‘privilege’ to be able to travel through the base,” said Flores. After 9/11, the installation locked down for months. Flores’ family was no longer raising livestock by then, but other families were, and many of their animals died. “It was horrible,” Flores said.

    Flores hopes that one day, her family will be able to access their land in Inapsan freely, and that the government will return Tarague Beach. The land once owned by her great grandfather is currently split between the explosive ordnance disposal range and a recreational area for military families, equipped with volleyball nets and concrete picnic tables. Sitting below a hand-painted sign that reads “Land Back,” Flores said, “Every single family who’s lost land dreams about one day being able to return.”

    Flores and her family won’t be able to return, though, if the land is too contaminated, or if unexploded ordnance remains. Henkin, the Earthjustice attorney, has seen it happen before in Hawaii. At an open burning and open detonation site on Oahu, the military failed to fully destroy anti-personnel bomblets. Now, the area is off-limits to everyone. 

    Sandy beach with green cliffs in the distance
    The view from Inapsan Beach looking towards Tarague Beach at sunrise. Monaeka Flores

    The federal government is legally required to “clean close” open burning and open detonation sites, meaning they must restore contamination levels to below what the government deems safe. But Flores has good reason to be skeptical that the government will meet these obligations. ProPublica’s investigation found that, at military hazardous waste sites across the country, “some of the most dangerous cleanup work that has been entrusted to contractors remains unfinished, or worse, has been falsely pronounced complete.”

    The tab for cleaning up open burning and open detonation sites can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars — though it’s difficult to parse out exactly how much is attributable to open burning and open detonation and how much is due to other sources of contamination, like livefire ranges, that are often co-located.

    Once certain pollutants reach the water table, no clean-up effort can remedy the damage. Olah, co-founder of the Cease Fire Campaign, lives in rural Wisconsin near the former Badger Army Ammunition Plant. Two open burning sites at the plant created toxic groundwater plumes. Olah’s group estimates that the federal government has spent over $250 million remediating the former plant. Still, DNT, which is used in the manufacturing of explosives and propellants, has been detected in groundwater monitoring wells at the site of the former plant at concentrations 25,000 times higher than what the state deems safe.

    Five people stand in front of a building with the words "United States District Court" above
    Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian members Maria Hernandez May, Jessica Nangauta, and Monaeka Flores, along with attorney Rachel Taimanao-Ayuyu, after filing a lawsuit against the Air Force and Department of Defense. Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian

    On the morning of January 24, 2022, Flores and several members of Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian stood outside the U.S. District Court of Guam, gazing up at the gleaming granite pillars. Flores felt a little intimidated as she walked into the federal building and slid her belongings through a metal detector. But when the court clerk stamped the complaint they were there to file, she felt tremendously proud. “We felt like our ancestors were there with us,” she said.

    The Air Force and Department of Defense have until late March to respond to Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian’s complaint. Andersen Air Force Base can either withdraw its permit renewal application and conduct a new environmental review, or the case will be decided by the court, most likely this summer.

    If Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian succeeds in preventing the Air Force from conducting open burning and open detonation operations on Tarague Beach, their work will not be done. In January 2021, in response to concerns expressed by the group, three United Nations Special Rapporteurs sent a letter to the U.S. regarding human and civil rights violations against CHamorus. The letter called attention to the ways in which the United States’ military buildup in the Pacific, and specifically the construction of a massive new live-fire training range complex, threatens to contaminate the island’s drinking water, decimate its wildlife and biodiversity, and desecrate CHamoru’s sacred sites, including burial grounds.

    “The desecration that’s taking place, the access that’s being lost, the contamination that’s happening, it’s all connected,” said Flores. “It feels relentless.”

    A brown sign reads: "Private property; DoD personnel, dependents, contractors and employees are not allowed beyond this point."
    The sign marking where Andersen Air Force Base ends and private property on Inapsan Beach begins. Monaeka Flores

    When it all starts to feel like a little too much, Flores hops in her car and heads for the north coast. She passes through the familiar gap in the limestone cliff and follows the road down into the forest. Where the pavement turns into a dirt track leading to Inapsan Beach, she parks, steps out of the car, and takes a deep breath of fresh, salty air. She reaches out to touch the sign to the side of the road: “Private Property: DoD personnel, dependents, contractors and employees are not allowed beyond this point.” She smiles.

    “There’s something about seeing that sign that just never gets old,” she said. “It’s a small reminder that we’re still here. And we are not leaving.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Air Force wants to blow up toxic military waste on a beach in Guam on Mar 9, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A controversial lithium mine in Nevada is one step closer to operation

    The final state-level permits required for the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada were issued on Friday, moving it another step closer to operation as the largest lithium mine in the United States. 

    The final obstacle to the mine remains a federal lawsuit filed by a coalition of nearby Indigenous communities, environmental groups, and a local rancher. The suit alleges that when the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, approved the project in January of 2021, the approval was based on a flawed environmental review and was rushed through without adequate consultation of tribes, as required by law.

    According to Lithium Americas Corporation, the company behind the mine, a decision on the lawsuit is expected in September 2022. 

    The soft clay in the ground below Thacker Pass, located about 50 miles south of the Nevada-Oregon border, is rich in lithium. Lithium Americas Corporation says it can generate up to 60,000 metric tons of battery-grade lithium from the mine each year. That’s nearly two times the amount of lithium the U.S. used in 2020, but only 20% of projected demand by 2030.

    Lithium-ion batteries are a key component of the U.S.’s plan to decarbonize, since they power electric vehicles and are increasingly being used to store energy generated by wind and solar. Soon after taking office, President Biden issued an executive order focused on making supply chains, including the battery supply chain, more resilient. In early February, the Department of Energy announced it would make $2.9 billion available to fund projects that bolster domestic battery manufacturing and recycling.

    Development of the Thacker Pass mine has been contentious. On January 15, 2021, the BLM approved the project. A few weeks later, local cattle rancher Edward Bartell sued the federal government, alleging that the environmental impact statement BLM relied upon was “one sided, deeply flawed, and incomplete,” and underestimated the effects on groundwater and streams. Bartell was soon joined by several conservation groups, who argued that BLM had ignored a wide range of environmental impacts, including groundwater contamination and harm to the greater sage-grouse, in a rush to approve the project.

    Several tribes and Native American organizations also oppose the Thacker Pass mine. During the summer of 2021, a group called the People of the Red Mountain, the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony intervened in the lawsuit filed by Bartell and the conservation groups. The coalition alleges that BLM violated the National Historic Preservation Act by failing to adequately consult them. They note that in 1865, the 1st Nevada Cavalry Battalion massacred dozens of Paiute men, women, and children at a camp in the Thacker Pass area, and say that the mine would destroy land they believe is a mass grave.

    On February 25, the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection granted water pollution control, air pollution control, and mine reclamation permits for the Thacker Pass mine. Kelly Fuller, energy and mining campaign director for the Western Watersheds Project, one of the environmental groups involved in the lawsuit, told E&E News that the state permits “do not mean that the fight against the mine is over.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A controversial lithium mine in Nevada is one step closer to operation on Mar 2, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Do salmon have rights?

    Jack Fiander knew he needed to try something different. For months, Fiander, a member of the Yakama Nation and legal counsel for the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe, had been trading lawsuits with Seattle over the city’s hydroelectric dams. “Seattle’s not hearing what we’re saying,” he realized. “Maybe they, and the public, need to understand more about Tribal culture.” 

    For over a century, salmon populations have been declining in the Skagit River in Northwest Washington State and the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe say three hydroelectric dams are responsible. Last year the tribe sued the City twice over the dams, first claiming Seattle is engaged in “greenwashing” by calling the project the “Nation’s greenest utility,” despite strong contradictory evidence. Then again claiming the city violated Federal and state law by refusing to install fish passages. Neither has led to any increased protections for salmon.  

    But with the dams in question in the midst of a relicensing process that could extend their life by another fifty years, Fiander realized he had a fresh opportunity to fight back, and in January, he filed a third lawsuit, this time with a new strategy. In Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Court, he sued Seattle on behalf of salmon, Tsuladxw in the Sauk-Suiattle language, alleging that the city’s hydroelectric dams violate the salmon’s rights. 

    “Tsuladxw, our relatives under on water, are the most important cultural and sacred food of the Sahkuméhu [Sauk-Suiattle people] and have been a part of our traditional stories, teachings, lifeways and spirituality since the earliest times to the present day,” the complaint reads. “For the Sahkuméhu, Tsuladxw is sentient like all living creatures and they are our relations.”

    The lawsuit seeks declaratory relief that salmon have the inherent right to “flourish”, that the Tribe has a right and responsibility to protect salmon, and that the city is engaged in intentional violation of these rights. 

    “Tsuladxw depends on clean, abundant fresh flowing waters and the nutrients they carry and which important and essential natural ecosystem resources have been under constant threat from defendant’s activities,” the complaint continues. 

    The case, which relies on a concept known as Rights of Nature, is an important test of what Indigenous law experts say could become a powerful tool for tribes to defend their sovereignty and the non-human relatives. Rights of Nature laws acknowledge that animals, water, and their ecosystems have inherent rights that must be protected and are equivalent to fundamental human rights like the right to exist freely and safely. They also acknowledge that ecosystems and animals with Rights of Nature are entitled to legal representation by groups with knowledge and investment in their protection. 

    The Sauk-Suiattle believe it is their responsibility to protect salmon. In response, Seattle has sued the Tribe back, arguing that the Sauk-Suiattle Tribal court has no jurisdiction over the city. 

    The growing rights of nature movement codifies beliefs that many Indigenous communities have held for thousands of years. But in the United States, they’re raising bigger questions: Can Indigenous worldviews help protect the environment? And will the American legal system let them?  

    A river, pine trees, and mountains covered in mist
    Mark Stevens / 500px / Getty Images

    For hundreds of years, treaty law – legally binding agreements negotiated between Indigenous nations and the United States – has been the primary law governing relationships between tribal, state and federal governments. In many cases, treaties created property rights, service obligations, and retained crucial rights to land, hunting and fishing. Most treaties were signed under duress, meaning tribes had to accept less than ideal terms, but the Constitution holds that treaties are the “the supreme law of the land”, and for generations, have been one of the only legal options tribes have been able to employ. Experts say Rights of Nature may offer a new legal avenue to Indigenous nations.

    In 2006, Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, became the first known community to pass a rights of nature law after giving legal rights to the local ecosystem in order to ban hazardous waste dumping. Thomas Linzey, senior legal counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, helped craft the law, and since then, countries and communities around the world have adopted similar Rights of Nature laws to protect the environment.

    In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to recognize the rights of Pachamama, or Mother Nature, in its constitution. And three years later, the law became the basis of a lawsuit against a company dumping construction waste in a river. Largely led by Indigenous communities, other countries like Colombia and New Zealand have also adopted Rights of Nature laws.

    In 2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwa recognized the rights of Manoomin, or wild rice, to “exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.” Rights of Manoomin, which means “good berry,” was the first Tribal law to grant legal rights to a plant or animal. 

    “In our culture, wild rice is the most significant, central part of our culture. It’s the most central part of our spirituality,” said Frank Bibeau, attorney for the White Earth Ojibwe. 

    In 2021, White Earth sued the State of Minnesota on behalf of Manoomin to stop Enbridge, a Canadian energy company, from using billions of gallons of water in its construction of an oil pipeline. Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline expansion has met fierce resistance from the Ojibwe and other Indigenous and non-Indigenous land and water protectors. Over its fifty-four year history, the pipeline has suffered from a series of oil spills, including a 1991 incident that was the worst inland oil spill in US history. The lawsuit was the first attempt by a Tribe to enforce a rights of nature law and is currently awaiting a decision from a Federal Appeals court that will decide if it will be heard in Tribal court. The decision could impact the Sauk-Suiattle case and other tribal Rights of Nature cases, but differences in treaties and state laws mean that each case faces its own unique circumstances and challenges. 

    Bibeau believes that Rights of Nature lawsuits have the potential to shift the balance of power between tribes and state governments when it comes to environmental protection and create a situation where states like Washington and Minnesota opt to negotiate with tribes out of a desire to avoid litigation. “If you want our consent then you’re going to have to start making things better and cleaner and show us that,” he said. “We just can’t let it happen.” 

    In the Sauk-Suiattle case, Bibeau sees a potential turning point for the Rights of Nature movement in the United States. People have a visceral reaction to dying salmon, Bibeau says, that can help them understand a concept like Rights of Nature in a way that something more obscure like wild rice cannot. Because of this, he says the case has the potential to bring even more attention to the legal concept of Rights of Nature. “I suspect that the model that Sauk-Suiattle is using will become the real template for most of the Indian tribes because everybody knows that a fish needs clean water,” he explained. “Everybody knows what a thousand dead fish look like and they immediately jump to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with that water.”

    Matthew Fletcher is Director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center at Michigan State University and member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. “Treaty law is the law of the colonizer. It’s American law. This is what the United States is willing to accept and acknowledge. And on a fundamental level, it’s not enough. So the tribes are adopting a theory that’s rooted in their cultures,” Fletcher said. 

    Large group of Indigenous people protesting a pipeline
    KEREM YUCEL / AFP via Getty Images

    The litigation between the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe and the city comes as Seattle City Light navigates a years-long relicensing process with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The current 30-year license expires in April 2025. The new application, if granted, could extend the license as long as 50 years. At a minimum, the Sauk-Suiattle hope that a new license will provide better fish protections, but without a license, the dams could be removed. 

    The Sauk-Suiattle lawsuit claims that three dams – The Diablo, Gorge, and Ross Dams – are harming salmon populations. The dams make up the Skagit River Hydroelectric Project in Northwest Washington State, about 100 miles from Seattle, which provides roughly 20% of the city’s total electricity. Unlike many other hydroelectric dams, these three do not include pathways for fish to move around the massive structures. 

    The dams limit the flow of water, which reduces the flow of nutrients and other vital aspects of the river’s ecosystem, says Fiander, and is especially catastrophic for species like salmon, which rely on those areas to spawn. Tribes and other environmental groups also allege that the dams prevent salmon from reaching upstream parts of the river that they could before the dams were built. However, Seattle City Light claims that those parts of the river were already difficult for salmon to access due to natural impediments. 

    Since the dams’ last relicense in 1995, three fish that call the area home — chinook salmon, steelhead, and bull trout — have been listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Orcas, which rely on salmon as a food source, are also endangered. Jack Fiander, the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe’s legal counsel, says that these ripple effects are a perfect illustration of why Rights of Nature laws are important. Rights of Nature, he says, are an acknowledgement that everything is connected. Protecting salmon helps protect the river, the orcas, and the people living near them. “It’s not meant to be mystical,” he said.   

    Fiander says that relicensing is an existential crisis for both salmon and the Tribe. “If these three dams get licensed for another 50 years without some consideration or requirement of getting fish past those dams to access habitats, the salmon in that river are probably going to be extinct in ten years,” he said. 

    But Chris Townsend, Director of Natural Resources and Hydro Licensing for Seattle City Light,  disputes claims that City Light is not doing enough to protect salmon. “The Skagit River is one of the healthiest runs of Chinook left in Puget Sound. Particularly the area just below our dam. So we’ve been doing something right with the flows,” he said.

    Fiander maintains that the salmon are clearly suffering from the dams. “The dams provide electricity, but they are blocking all kinds of nutrients and sediments behind them that the river needs for its life,” he said, adding that just one fish passage could make a huge difference for salmon. 

    Townsend, however, said that it is too early in the process to say what measures are required to protect the river and its wildlife. “Those decisions have to be based on science,” he said. 

    Debra Smith, the general manager of City Light, has said that the utility is committed to building fish passage if the regulatory agencies indicate that it is necessary while Townsend says that City Light is open to a conversation about Rights of Nature. “We look forward to the point when we can talk and coordinate with the Tribes more directly when the lawsuits have been resolved and we hope that that will be soon,” he said.

    Fiander says that despite City Light’s public statements, they are not negotiating in good faith and are trying to overwhelm him with corporate legal tactics. 

    After criticism of its initial study plan, City Light’s revised study plan was approved, with some modifications, by FERC in July 2021. The new plan proposed 33 studies related to flood risk, fish population, water quality, and more. City Light will release its initial report findings at the beginning of March. The final application is due April 2023. 

    Overhead view of dam with pine trees on mountains in background
    Giulio Andreini / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Other Tribes and environmental groups have also pushed back on City Light’s environmental claims. The Upper Skagit, who share treaty rights to Skagit River with the Sauk-Suiattle and the Swinomish Tribe, have also resisted City Light’s plans, asking for a study to consider removing Gorge Dam. 

    Tribal advocates see the city’s efforts to fight the Tribe as evidence that they are not prioritizing the project’s environmental impact. “If Seattle was behaving in an environmentally ethical manner, they would address the Tribe’s claims in a serious manner,” Matthew Fletcher said. 

    The Tribe is currently awaiting Federal court ruling on their litigation, like the White Earth Ojibwe. Win or lose, Frank Bibeau believes the cases are an important step toward getting the U.S. legal system to embrace Rights of Nature. “It’s probably the most powerful tool we’ll ever have. And that may be all the power we need if we can just get it harnessed and use it as a shield and a sword to make the state operate in a better way for everybody,” he said. 

    For Jack Fiander, the case rests on the simple concept that salmon deserve the right to live and be defended. As long as that right is at risk, the Sauk-Suiattle will continue doing everything they can to protect salmon and the river. “Certain animals in nature are connected to us and are sentient beings,” he said. “It’s something I was taught since childhood.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Do salmon have rights? on Mar 1, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Dakota Access Pipeline operator loses legal battle

    On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would not hear an appeal to overturn a court-ordered environmental review of the Dakota Access Pipeline. While hailed as a final legal victory for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the pipeline will continue to operate while the review is conducted.

    “The litigation concerning the pipeline is over, but the fight continues,” said EarthJustice attorney Jan Hasselman. Earthjustice has represented the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe since 2016. “We call on the administration to close the pipeline until a full safety and environmental review is complete. DAPL never should have been authorized in the first place, and this administration is failing to address the persistent illegality of this pipeline.” 

    The court’s ruling centers on the construction of the pipeline under Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River and important source of water for Standing Rock and other Indigenous nations. The pipeline has been vigorously opposed by Indigenous nations and activists since 2016, gaining support from environmental groups, members of congress, and state governments. Despite the historic resistance, construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline was completed in 2017. 

    Earlier that year, before construction was finished, the Army Corps of Engineers issued an easement to allow the pipeline to cross Oahe, but in 2020, it was revoked by a Federal judge who said the Army Corps violated environmental laws and mandated an environmental review. Last January, the U.S. court of Appeals upheld that ruling, and in May, a district court denied the tribe’s request for an injunction to shut down the pipeline until the review was completed. 

    “The unacceptable risk of an oil spill, impacts to Tribal sovereignty and harm to drinking water supply must all be examined thoroughly in the months ahead as the U.S. Army Corps conducts its review of this pipeline,” Hasselman said in a statement at the time. 

    But even the most recent environmental review has met with controversy. Last September, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the Oglala Sioux Tribe called on the Army Corps to restart the Environmental Impact Statement process, calling it “fatally flawed” and pointing to a contractor who is a member of the American Petroleum Institute. The Army Corps’ own regulations prohibit contractors from having any financial or other interest in a project. 

    Standing Rock, other tribes, and environmental groups are hopeful that a fresh, unbiased environmental review will lead to the shutdown of the controversial pipeline. In court documents, Energy Transfer said the pending review makes the pipeline “vulnerable to a shutdown.”

    The Army Corps of Engineers has said the review is due to be completed later this year. While the review is underway, the pipeline continues to carry 750,000 barrels of oil per day from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to a terminal in Illinois. EarthJustice and other groups have called on President Biden to issue an executive order to shut down the pipeline. The Biden administration has not announced any plans to do so. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Dakota Access Pipeline operator loses legal battle on Feb 22, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Who’s in charge of fixing the environment in eastern Oklahoma?

    This story was produced in collaboration with Newsy

    The town of Picher, Oklahoma, on the Quapaw reservation, is home to one of the largest Superfund sites in the United States. Tar Creek, which feeds into the Neosho River then on to Grand Lake, runs gold with zinc. Underground reservoirs seep lead-tainted water and other toxic chemicals when it rains. Trees along the waterway have turned shades of orange near their roots where a steady flow of chemicals have oxidized and crusted over. On the landscape, gray piles of silicone, dolomite, and limestone waste stand two to three stories high. In 1994, the Indian Health Service reported that 34 percent of Native American children in the area had lead concentrations in their bloodstream well above the federal limit — a lasting legacy after more than a century of mining for zinc and lead at multiple sites on the reservation.  

    “It’s everywhere,” said Quapaw Nation Secretary Treasurer Guy Barker. “Trace amounts of lead within drinking water, groundwater —  it’s also in the air. It’s blowing around, it’s in the ground soils in the sandbox that the kids are playing in.”

    Mining ended in the 1970s, and in 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency named the 40 square miles around Picher a Superfund site. Beginning in 2005, the state of Oklahoma offered buyouts of homes to relocate families, including many Quapaw citizens, to safer areas, and by 2010, the EPA also began buyouts while contracting with companies to conduct cleanup.

    In 2012, the Quapaw Nation took over soil remediation efforts and cleanup with a multi-million dollar contract from the EPA, removing large piles of mining waste and rehabilitation of the land. But last year, a decade after the Quapaw took on the cleanup, the Supreme Court ruled that nearly all of Eastern Oklahoma was an Indian reservation, raising absorbing questions about environmental jurisdiction in the region. 

    a cluster of a dozen single-story houses with dead-looking trees and large gray hills surrounding the area
    The town of Picher, Oklahoma, sits nestled among huge lead-laced piles of rock in eastern Oklahoma’s Tar Creek mining district. AP Photo / Charlie Riedel

    In 2018 and 2019, the Supreme Court agreed to hear McGirt v. Oklahoma, which involved Jimcy McGirt, who committed sex crimes and challenged his conviction, saying that Oklahoma never had the right to prosecute because his crimes were committed within the Muscogee Nation. McGirt, a Seminole Nation citizen, said that only the federal government could prosecute his cases since they happened in Indian territory. The question at the heart of the case was whether or not the Muscogee Nation’s reservation still existed. With statehood in 1907, Oklahoma believed that the reservation was disestablished. The Supreme Court disagreed and found that Congress, the only body with the authority to terminate the tribe’s reservation, had never disestablished it — even after Oklahoma became a state. 

    The decision was viewed as a win for tribal sovereignty and subsequently was applied to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations in 2021. And shortly after, a lower court in a subsequent case last fall applied the McGirt ruling and found that the Quapaw Nation reservation was never disestablished either. 

    But while McGirt focused on criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country, there are far-reaching implications, specifically around environmental jurisdiction and whether tribes — and specifically, the six tribes whose reservation lands make up eastern Oklahoma — can now exercise power over environmental policy there, from clean air and water to remediation plans and strip mining. 

    A recent report by the Indigenous Environmental Network, an Indigenous-led nonprofit focused on protecting the environment, estimates that over the past decade, Indigenous people engaged in defense of land and water “stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.” The United Nations estimates that Indigenous people live in areas that contain approximately 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity but “still struggle to maintain their legal rights to lands, territories, and resources.” In Oklahoma, the idea that Indigenous people can take the lead on environmental regulation may soon be put to the test.

    “What capacity does our environmental office and the tribe have to take on and enforce regulations?” asked Quapaw Environmental Agency Director Craig Kreman. “I think that’s coming into question with McGirt.”

    The Supreme Court decision was viewed as a win for tribal sovereignty and subsequently was applied to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations in 2021. And shortly after, a lower court in a subsequent case last fall applied the McGirt ruling and found that the Quapaw Nation reservation was never disestablished either. Grist

    In its most narrow interpretation, the McGirt ruling impacts Oklahoma only. But Cherokee citizen Dylan Hedden-Nicely, the University of Idaho’s Native American Law Program Director, says the detail in the McGirt case is in the court’s interpretation of federal Indian law and what it could mean for broader environmental movements led by Indigenous nations.

    “On its face, McGirt is only about Oklahoma,” Hedden-Nicely said. “But what it signaled, at least in my mind, was that the Supreme Court was saying, ‘We’re open for business for tribes.’”

    Historically, the Supreme Court has been hostile to Indigenous nations. According to Joel Williams, a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, from 1969 to 1986, when Warren Burger served as chief justice, tribal interests prevailed about 58 percent of the time, but under Burger’s successor, William Rehnquist, tribes saw success only 23 percent of the time. In 2005, when Chief Justice Roberts took the reins, Indigenous peoples saw their interests prevail only 11 percent of the time. 

    But new additions to the court have brought justices with experience in Indian Law and legal minds that appear to be focused on founding principles of Indian law instead of rehashing old court opinions. It’s what experts compare to a “reset” of court values in regards to Indigenous peoples and Indigenous rights, brightly illustrated through McGirt. 

    “Since roughly the mid-’80s, the odds were just greatly stacked against tribes and tribal interests at the Supreme Court, and we’ve seen a shift,” said Williams. “Tribes, in more recent years, have prevailed at the U.S. Supreme Court about 85 percent of the time. Almost a 180-degree turnaround.” 

    One reason, Williams says, has been the appointment of justices with strong voting records on Indian law cases. After Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016, for instance, then-president Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to take his place. While Democrats raised concerns over his judicial record, for tribes, Gorsuch’s upbringing in the West and experience dealing with Indian case law in the 10th Circuit offered potential: Both the Native American Rights Fund and National Congress of American Indians supported the nomination. And where Scalia voted in favor of tribal interests about 16 percent of the time during his tenure, to date, Gorsuch has voted for tribal interests in 89 percent of the cases brought before him and authored the majority decision in McGirt.

    One of the many incongruities in Indian Law is that liberal supreme court judges are not always good for Indigenous communities. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, voted against Indigenous interests in more than half of the cases that came before her, while Justice Breyer, who recently announced his retirement, voted for tribal interests only about 40 percent of the time. “Justice Breyer was no tribal sovereignty warrior à la Sotomayor,” wrote Matthew Fletcher on Turtle Talk, an influential Indian Law blog, “but he was no Indian fighter, either.” Sotomayor, incidentally, has voted for tribal interests 78 percent of the time.

    “Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor have been the two people that have taken up intellectual leadership in the field of federal Indian law within the court,” said Hedden-Nicely. “Which is sort of funny: Indian law makes for strange bedfellows.”

    At the heart of change at the court is the application of the law. Monte Mills, a federal Indian law professor at the University of Montana, said in the past, the court has more or less defaulted toward concerns of disruptions caused by tribes asserting their rights. For instance, in a 2005 case, the Oneida Indian Nation repurchased their traditional lands in upstate New York, but the city of Sherrill, where much of the land was located, tried to make the nation pay taxes. In an earlier case, the Court held that the law was on the side of the Nation and found that the land was illegally taken from them. However, in the Supreme Court’s final 2005 decision, Justice Ginsberg, writing for the majority, sided with the city of Sherrill. Even though the lands had never been legally acquired from the Nation, the majority found that a change in jurisdiction would disrupt the “settled expectations” of non-Indigenous residents. In McGirt, Mills said, the impact of the ruling was not considered, only the law.

    ​​”So in that sense, I think McGirt does mark a shift to recommitting to some of those foundational principles: The tribes had the law on their side all along because Congress never did explicitly disestablish these reservations,” said Mills. “So the law wasn’t ever the question — it was whether or not the Supreme Court would follow the law or defer to these practical consequences.”

    Clouds drift over the U.S. Supreme Court Building
    Clouds drift over the U.S. Supreme Court Building on July 9, 2020 — the day of the McGirt v. Oklahoma ruling. Liu Jie / Xinhua via Getty

    In his most recent State of the State address, Oklahoma Governor and Cherokee Nation citizen Kevin Stitt said the McGirt decision jeopardizes public safety and that it has harmed both Native and non-Native victims. He and Attorney General John O’Connor have  filed more than 40 petitions to the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the decision entirely. Last month, those petitions were denied. However, the U.S. Supreme Court did grant a review of one question: whether the state has concurrent jurisdiction when non-Natives commit crimes on the reservation. That argument will be heard in April. 

    Only Congress has the power to dissolve tribes, end treaties, and legally terminate the existence of Indian Country — a path officials took from 1953 to 1968. There’s also the possibility of legislatively hamstringing Indigenous power: In 2005, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe — an outspoken climate denier — slipped a midnight rider into the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act (SAFETEA). At the time, tribes were exploring how to implement environmental programs that were at odds with Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry, and while normally, states have no jurisdiction on tribal lands, the SAFETEA rider allows Oklahoma’s governor to ask the EPA for that exception when it comes to environmental regulation. 

    Within weeks of the McGirt decision, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt asked the EPA to utilize that exception — much to the anger of tribal leaders who were given only 30 days to provide feedback. In December 2021, the EPA decided to slow roll the decision, citing more of a commitment to nation-to-nation consultation under the Biden administration. 

    For the Quapaw Nation, the McGirt ruling means that any company wanting to haul away toxic waste or assist in the cleanup of the Tar Creek Superfund site could be subject to Quapaw’s environmental regulations, not the state’s.

    Quapaw Nation officials say it’s probably going to take decades to finish the cleanup and make more of the land in and around Picher usable and to make sure there are no more piles blowing dolomite and silicone waste across the landscape.

    Recently, the Quapaw Nation’s Secretary Treasurer Guy Barker and Chairman Joseph Byrd invited Governor Kevin Stitt to visit Picher after the court ruled that their reservation was never disestablished. Stitt still hasn’t visited. 

    Quapaw leadership is glad the state isn’t in charge of cleanup and that the tribal nation is able to build capacity to have more authority over environmental activity under McGirt. They look around and say that this is what Oklahoma has done for the tribe. 

    “Come drive around Picher,” said Barker. “See where state stewardship has gotten us.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who’s in charge of fixing the environment in eastern Oklahoma? on Feb 22, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • A tribe in Maine is using hemp to remove ‘forever chemicals’ from the soil

    The pair was hardly dressed like typical farmers, but this was no typical farm. Sporting white hazmat suits and respirators, Chelli Stanley and Richard Silliboy lugged 5-gallon jugs of water toward bushy plots of hemp, each 30-by-30-foot patch a stark sign of order in the otherwise overgrown field. It was a warm September day in Limestone, a small town on the edge of the Maine-Canada border, and the pair struggled to breathe in the head-to-toe protective gear. Stanley, a founder of the environmental organization Upland Grassroots, recalls telling Silliboy, vice chief of the Aroostook Band of Micmac Nation, “This will be worth it someday.”

    For Stanley and Silliboy, the focus was not so much the hemp they were growing as what it was doing. Their farm, once part of the Loring Air Force Base, is also a Superfund site — an area so polluted it’s marked high-priority for federal cleanup. Later, when the Aroostook Band of Micmacs took over the site’s ownership, they found its soil was rife with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, cancer-causing compounds that are so difficult to break down they’re commonly known as “forever chemicals.” 

    Because of their ability to bind to proteins, PFAS tend to bioaccumulate — building up in soil, water, and even human bodies. Under typical environmental conditions, they can persist for hundreds, even thousands of years. But there is hope at Loring: In 2020, researchers discovered that the Micmacs’ hemp plants were successfully sucking PFAS out of the contaminated soil. This practice, known as phytoremediation, could guide farmers across the country who have had to shut down after discovering their soil is tainted with the ubiquitous class of chemicals. 

    Sara Nason, one of the project’s lead researchers from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, called their results “conservatively promising.” Other researchers see the potential too. David Huff, a senior scientist at the environmental consulting firm Nutter & Associates Inc., said, “At the end of the day, the data support phytoremediation as a viable approach and definitely established proof of concept.”

    A woman in respirator and hazmat suit waters a bushy plot of hemp.
    Chelli Stanley waters hemp plants on Micmac-owned land in Limestone, Maine. Courtesy of Upland Grassroots

    PFAS were once considered to be human-made miracle compounds. Due to their oil- and water-repelling properties, they were long used in all kinds of products from firefighting foam to stain-resistant carpets to nonstick pans. They’ve been linked to a host of health problems, including kidney and testicular cancer, liver damage, and suppressed immunity. 

    Although some companies have voluntarily decided to phase out the use of PFAS in their products and packaging, the chemicals are already ubiquitous, pervading farms and military sites alike. In states like Maine and New Mexico, where PFAS have been detected in soil, milk, and vegetables, they have been traced to “biosolids” — byproducts from sewage treatment plants that are sometimes used as fertilizers. In former military bases like Loring, the main source is thought to be firefighting foam. Indeed, part of the land that the Micmac obtained in 2009 was previously used as a firefighting testing area.

    Loring has undergone years of cleanup since the base closed. In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency deemed it ready for reuse, albeit with limits due to contamination that persists at the site. According to the EPA, the Air Force has confirmed the presence of PFAS in the groundwater, surface water, and soil, and promised future study.

    The tribe sought the land for economic development, but it is “unhealthy,” Silliboy said. It’s the latest in what he sees as the Micmac’s long history of obtaining poor land. He pointed to reservations on swamps and steep hills, land where no one can garden. “When the tribe is given any property for reservation land, it’s not prime property,” he said. So when Stanley, seeking a site to test hemp’s ability to pull PFAS out of the ground, approached him about a partnership, he was eager to work together. “Protecting the land is part of the Micmac beliefs,” said Chief Edward Peter-Paul of the Aroostook Band in a report on the project. “Anything we can do to contribute to making the environment better, we want to be a part of.”

    In the spring of 2019, the Micmac Nation, Upland Grassroots, and their research partners began their experiment. They collected data on three plots (others didn’t survive a drought). Two years later, they reported early signs of success: The hemp lowered PFAS in the soil. 

    Phytoremediation is an attractive option for cleaning land of certain types of contaminants because it’s relatively affordable and limits disturbances to soil. In addition to PFAS, plants have been used to leach lead from abandoned mines and pesticides from retired orchards. While people have long used plants to help clean soil and water, the term was coined in 1994 by Rutgers University biologist Ilya Raskin. Raskin’s early experiments involved using mustard to extract heavy metal pollutants half a mile from Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which unleashed catastrophic amounts of radioactive material when a reactor melted down in the mid-1980s. 

    Hemp is a good candidate for phytoremediation because it grows fast across much of the United States. Its roots are deep and profuse — the better to uptake pollutants from soil. Stanley believes their success using hemp to remove persistent contaminants like PFAS holds promise for many other farmers. Before hemp’s widespread legalization in 2018, “huge companies could excavate or do these very intrusive processes” to deal with polluted land, she said. “But there was nothing the layperson could really do to clean land.”

    Nason, the researcher with Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, agreed the practice has potential, though she was more cautiously optimistic. “It’s a possibility, but I think we still have a lot to learn,” she said. It’s still unclear how much of the chemicals hemp can remove. Although the Loring project successfully extracted some PFAS, plenty remained in the soil. Also unclear is how many rounds of hemp planting it would take to return levels to a “safe” baseline — something that doesn’t technically exist yet without national standards from the EPA.

    The team lacked good control data to measure their efforts because “pretty much everywhere has some amount of PFAS,” Nason said. 

    A brown building sits in empty grass field.
    A former firefighting training site at the Loring Air Force Base is now home to the hemp phytoremediation project. Courtesy of Upland Grassroots

    Assuming phytoremediation of PFAS breaks out of its experimental phase, it should shine in cost comparisons to other removal techniques, according to David Huff, the environmental consultant. Currently, the standard approach to PFAS cleanup involves excavating the affected soil. The costs can be astronomical: One estimate for the contaminated soil on a 100-acre dairy farm in Maine ran upward of $25 million. Using plants, Huff said, can cost 75 percent less at least. That’s not to say plant-based PFAS removal comes cheap exactly: Soil testing can cost anywhere from $250 to $600 per sample. And for any given field, samples at multiple points across the field are needed to measure progress, especially as PFAS levels can vary from spot to spot within the same parcel of land.

    Huff, who has studied various grasses and trees’ ability to extract PFAS, said plants work best when the contaminant levels are lower and the cleanup area is larger — around two acres or more. By that measure, most farms would be considered large projects. 

    And size isn’t the only limitation — phytoremediation takes more time compared to other approaches. 

    Leah Penniman, co-director and manager of the community farm Soul Fire Farm in New York state, wrote about using plants like geranium or sunflowers to clean lead-contaminated soil in her book Farming While Black. “It takes at least one year and very careful monitoring, so it’s not for everyone,” she wrote. After the first year, if tests still indicate high lead levels, it may take another round of planting (or two or three). Developers might prefer the expensive, quicker route of excavation over a long wait. But faced with steep costs, small farmers may have no choice besides a plant-based approach.

    For farmers hoping to put plants to work, there are other challenges ahead. If a farm’s soil is polluted, odds are the water will be too. That was the case at Loring, so the EPA doesn’t allow the use of the water supply, Stanley said. She and Silliboy had to truck in water each week for their hemp, which limited how much they could grow. Some states are already addressing these needs; the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, for example, installs filters for farm wells that exceed a certain level of contamination.

    Future studies will also need to develop guidelines for how people should dispose of the PFAS-laden plants once their job is done. That could entail drying first to reduce the sheer mass, Huff said. The key is safely discarding waste to avoid creating another mess. 

    Meanwhile, the work at Loring continues. A new water tank will help Stanley and Silliboy plant more hemp this year. The research effort has gained a new partner, a chemical engineer from the University of Virginia interested in using enzymes to break down PFAS. 

    The Aroostook Band of Micmacs is considering plans to build a campground, once the land proves clean. The woods have grown back over the years and run with bears, moose, and deer. Although, Silliboy said, state officials have recently cautioned against consuming wild venison — there’s PFAS in it.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A tribe in Maine is using hemp to remove ‘forever chemicals’ from the soil on Feb 22, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • In Chaco Canyon, a moratorium on oil and gas leases might be too little too late

    In November, under a high sky in northwestern New Mexico, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland stepped proudly to the podium against a backdrop of sandstone bluffs. She was flanked by Pueblo leaders who had gathered that day to commemorate the recently announced protections for Chaco Culture National Historical Park, where ancestral Puebloans created a sprawling center of trade and culture from the tawny-colored rock more than a thousand years ago.

    “It is not difficult to imagine centuries ago children running around the open space, people moving in and out of doorways, bringing in their harvest or preparing food for seasons to come,” Haaland said of the Chaco complex, where multi-story ruins rise from the floor of a wide canyon. “We’re here because President Biden and I heard your voices and are taking important steps to take care of our land, our air, and our water.”

    a woman with a blue necklace in front of a podium and a rock face behind her
    U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland addresses a crowd during a celebration at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico on Monday, Nov. 22, 2021. Susan Montoya Bryan / AP Photo

    Haaland’s speech came days after the Department of Interior announced it was considering a 20-year moratorium on new federal oil and gas leasing within a roughly 10-mile radius around the park, an approximately 950,000-acre area referred to as the buffer zone. Along with shielding the site from fracking facilities that have encroached on the area in recent years, the action was touted as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions while promoting environmental justice and tribal consultation.

    But a review of federal leasing data by Grist suggests that the protections are a superficial fix, as they will likely do little to impede the recent influx of oil and gas development. Although the federal government plans to prevent new leasing on hundreds of thousands of acres within the Chaco buffer zone, oil and gas companies with existing leases can continue to extract minerals within its boundaries.

    According to data provided by the Bureau of Land Management, there are 310 active wells on 88 active federal leases covering nearly 100,000 acres within the buffer, and federal protections do nothing to stop the companies holding those leases from obtaining permits to drill more. That means that even under the agency’s plan, hundreds of new wells could be drilled in the area at any time in the future. 

    “There’s still going to be development going on in that 10-mile buffer, and there’s nothing to prohibit that,” said Carol Davis, director of Diné CARE, a Navajo-led environmental organization. Davis adds that the Interior’s moratorium could push drilling outside the buffer and into communities, “and that’s going to expose people to the adverse health impacts that are a result of oil and gas fracking.”

    large brown stone structure made of bricks in the middle of a brown-red canyon
    Visitors walk through Chaco Culture National Historical Park. VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    In fact, BLM is also considering a plan that could allow up to 3,100 new wells to be developed outside the buffer zone, adding to the roughly 21,000 active wells in the region.

    Several miles east of the buffer, the BLM has also approved dozens of drilling permits near a series of mesas considered sacred by the Navajo Nation. Despite conducting an environmental review that projected one well per parcel, BLM has already approved at least 118 drilling permits on eight of those parcels, according to legal documents filed by Diné CARE.

    “There is absolutely zero restraint from the Bureau of Land Management and the Biden administration at this point,” said Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director with WildEarth Guardians. “The mineral withdrawal is good politics — it’s good optics — but it’s not going to turn the tide because there are existing leases within the buffer, and outside the buffer it’s business as usual.”

    A thousand years ago, Chaco Canyon was a bustling, central trade hub. The ancestral Puebloans built monumental “great houses” along the margins of the high-desert valley and conducted trade using an expansive network of roads. The largest of the ancient structures at the UNESCO World Heritage Site likely contained more than 600 rooms and took three centuries to complete. Chaco flourished between 850 and 1250 AD, before being abandoned.

    stone structure with large circles and smaller stone square walls in desert canyon setting
    An aerial view of Chetro Kelt, aancient Anasazi settlement in Chaco Culture National Historical Park. DeAgostini / Getty Images

    Contemporary Pueblos are the descendants of the ancestral Puebloans that built Chaco, and although they no longer inhabit the same area, many Pueblo people retain a cultural and spiritual connection to the sandstone structures and other sites dispersed throughout the region. The outlying areas are now home to Navajo families who reside either on the sparsely populated plateau, or in the tiny towns that dot the landscape, like Nageezi, Counselor, and Ojo Encino.

    In the 1920s, natural gas deposits were discovered in the basin, and by the early 2000s, fossil fuel extraction occurred throughout the region. Then, around 2010, with the advent of new hydraulic fracturing methods, such as horizontal drilling, fracking began in earnest in the southern part of the basin, near the Chaco ruins, where companies tapped into oil and gas deposits that were difficult to access using vertical drilling techniques. 

    Many of those new wells were concentrated on public lands managed by the BLM, which owns a large portion of land surrounding Chaco Canyon, along the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation. Ownership of lands in the area is often referred to as a “checkerboard” of federal, state, private and tribal lands. Some of those tracts are also so-called “Indian allotments,” lands which the federal government distributed to individuals and families as a way to break up reservations and assimilate Indigenous people by making them landowners. Between 2014 and 2019 alone, the BLM approved more than 350 drilling permits in the greater Chaco region.

    big green-gray storage tanks cluster together in a desert landscape with blue sky
    Oil and gas storage tanks and pipelines stand in the desert landscape east of Chaco Culture National Historic Park. milehightraveler via Getty Images

    In the mostly Navajo communities that make up the area, the drilling boom resulted in wells that are in some places a few hundred feet from homes. A cluster of wells releases toxic emissions less than 2,000 feet from the Lybrook Elementary School, where an almost entirely Native American student population is exposed to a rotten-egg odor of hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of the frequent flaring that occurs when excess gas is burned off to avoid methane emissions.

    In 2019, New Mexico legislators, including then-U.S. Representative Haaland, introduced the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, which would have banned oil and gas leasing within a buffer zone permanently. The bill passed the House but died in the Republican-controlled Senate. Once Haaland was appointed Secretary of Interior, she took matters into her own hands, crafting the 20-year withdrawal proposal, which went into effect in January.

    But companies currently operating within the buffer could still obtain permits to drill one, or multiple, wells on a given parcel. Based on the average number of wells on each active, federal lease in northwestern New Mexico, the existing leases inside the buffer could see more than 200 additional wells in the future. And that potential well count excludes the development that could occur on the much smaller portion of land within the buffer consisting of state and private land, as well as Indian allotments. 

    a pink sign says there is al-ready chaco protection act in place around the park
    A sign opposing an oil and gas moratorium lines the road leading to Chaco Culture National Historical Park ahead of a visit by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Monday, Nov. 22, 2021. Some Navajo allottee owners are concerned about a proposal to prohibit oil and gas development on federal land holdings within 10 miles of the park, saying it would have significant financial consequences for them. AP Photo / Susan Montoya Bryan

    Because Indian allottees can lease their lands to oil and gas companies for royalty payments, the Chaco proposal became a point of contention in the region. Many Navajo allottees were concerned that the leasing ban would affect their royalty payments or eliminate their ability to lease out their lands, leading to opposition that ultimately resulted in the Navajo Nation withdrawing from the proposal after initially signaling support. According to the BLM, the withdrawal will not affect the ability of allottees to lease their land for oil and gas interests.

    “We are not a monolith, and there were dissenting voices among allottees,” said Mario Atencio, a member of Diné CARE whose family owns an allotment just outside the buffer. He added that the most vocal opponents “claimed to represent allottees, but they don’t represent me.”

    In the past year, Diné CARE and WildEarth Guardians have filed multiple legal challenges against the BLM for its approval of hundreds of lease sales and drilling permits in the greater Chaco region, including more than 100 permits issued to EOG Resources, a former Enron affiliate that amassed 40 parcels covering 45,000 acres of public land under the Trump administration.

    “Right now, they’re bulldozing a road in a very sacred place,” Atencio said. He added that the lack of tribal consultation “feels no different than the Trump administration.”

    blue skies and a red-brown stone structure with a window set in the center
    The sky is visible through a window at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Culture National Historical Park. WPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

    Among the groups’ concerns is that BLM’s Farmington Field Office continues to allow drilling based on an outdated resource management plan, a document that forecasts the pace and scale of future oil and gas development. Because the plan was created in 2003 — before the advent of horizontal drilling — the groups argue that BLM has had no way of analyzing the “increased risks and impacts” of the new drilling technologies. 

    A proposed amendment to the plan estimates that between 2,300 and 3,100 new wells could be developed in the area over the next 20 years.

    “That’s not a cap on what [BLM] can approve. That’s just what their best guess is,” said Kyle Tisdel, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center. “And the problem is that they’re just doing whatever industry says that industry wants to do.”

    When the Interior Department announced the 10-mile buffer around Chaco in November, Haaland emphasized that the withdrawal would coincide with an “honoring Chaco” process that would include formal consultations with tribes and a series of ethnographic studies exploring the area’s cultural history. Pledges to engage in meaningful tribal consultation are often met with distrust in Indigenous communities given the federal government’s horrendous track record when it comes to considering human rights and tribal sovereignty. But the historic appointment of Haaland, who is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, gave many Indigenous people hope that their voices would finally be heard.

    Julia Bernal, director of Pueblo Action Alliance, spent the past five years fighting for federal protections against fracking in the Chaco region. And while Bernal believes more should be done to protect the environment and public health in the area, she said the Interior Department’s stated commitment to incorporating Indigenous knowledge and studies is “unprecedented,” and a credit to Haaland’s investment in the issue.

    “Based on my own conversations with [Haaland], it’s not like she has the ability to implement extreme change even though she’s in this position,” Bernal said. “It’s always hard to convey why land and water and air are culturally and spiritually important, and not just for economic gain.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Chaco Canyon, a moratorium on oil and gas leases might be too little too late on Feb 17, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • South Africa’s High Court sided with Indigenous communities

    This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    In a court decision reached late last year, Indigenous communities from the Wild Coast of South Africa’s Eastern Cape have attained a landmark legal victory against energy and petroleum giant Shell.

    To win their case, lawyers representing the Umgungundlovu, Dwesa-Cwebe, and Port Saint Johns Indigenous communities, among others, argued that because Shell failed to consult meaningfully with local communities, the company’s efforts to explore shale gas off the country’s eastern coast ignored a crucial aspect of local custom.

    The victory has been hailed as a major breakthrough in the effort to stem the tide of climate change. But it is also a potent example of how Wild Coast communities are using the courts to fight for the right to determine what happens in their territory and strengthening their hand in a country heavily marred by colonialism.

    The application that kicked off the lawsuit was brought to South Africa’s High Court by a collection of NGOs, artisanal fishers, and community representatives after the exploration ship Amazon Warrior arrived in late November 2021 to conduct controversial seismic surveys that had been green-lighted by the South African government in 2013.

    The ship was preparing to study the seafloor using seismic airguns, devices that generate cannon blast–like pulses of compressed air. The plan was heavily criticized by environmental groups and marine activists. The Academy of Science of South Africa called the technology severely outdated and said the surveys are a “real harm to marine life.”

    The vessel’s arrival sparked nationwide protests and boycotts of Shell filling stations, but the company defended their survey approach. They received vociferous support from South Africa’s minister of mineral resources and energy, Gwede Mantashe, a widely unpopular figure among Wild Coast communities. (When reached for comment, neither Shell nor Minister Mantashe’s office provided a response.)

    According to educator and community leader Sinegugu Zukulu, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the NGO Sustaining the Wild Coast, one of the core tenets of their dispute was that Shell failed to give local communities an opportunity to weigh in. “It is not only about giving consent,” Zukulu says. “It is about our right to say no to Shell directly and to be able to give our reasons.”

    Another tipping point for the court’s decision was the significant cultural connection between Wild Coast Indigenous communities and the sea.

    The Wild Coast falls within the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany biodiversity hotspot, and its pristine waters provide habitat for an exceptional array of endemic and endangered marine species, including South Africa’s national fish the galjoen, or black bream, along with red steenbras, black musselcracker, and abalone. Every winter, the region plays host to a mass migration of sardines that is estimated to rival, or even exceed, East African terrestrial migrations by biomass.

    South Africa’s Eastern Cape is one of the country’s poorest provinces, but because of this maritime abundance, Wild Coast communities’ hunger levels are also among the country’s lowest. “We survive because of this ocean, through fishing and catching crayfish,” says Tata Mashona Wetu, a village elder and the second applicant in the case. “If the exploration continues,” he says, “our survival will be destroyed.”

    Beyond sustenance, water plays a central role in the system of knowledge and cultural practices of the amaXhosa of the Eastern Cape, says cultural anthropologist Penny Bernard, who studies the link between water and divinity in southern African Indigenous cultures at Rhodes University in South Africa.

    According to Bernard, many amagqirha, or traditional healers, derive their divining abilities from spirits or ancestors connected to the underwater world. In this worldview, all bodies of water are conduits between the living and ancestral world, with the greatest water body of them all—the ocean—considered the most sacred. The ocean is known, according to Zukulu, as “God’s river.”

    In its decision to back Wild Coast Indigenous communities’ opposition to Shell’s exploration efforts, the court supported the Indigenous worldview, writing that “in terms of the [South African] Constitution, those practices and beliefs must be respected, and where conduct offends those, and impacts negatively on the environment, the court has a duty to step in.”

    Shell is not the first multinational corporation to covet the Wild Coast region’s natural resources—nor is it the first to come up against a similar legal argument.

    Indigenous communities in South Africa suffered mass dispossessions of their customary land under colonialism and apartheid rule. Three decades since the advent of democracy, land ownership and restitution remain highly contentious. Indigenous communities, like those in the Wild Coast, often have to take it upon themselves to enforce their constitutionally protected rights.

    In 2005, Australian mining group MRC and its local subsidiaries announced plans for a beach mine in the northern section of the Wild Coast, again with overwhelming support from Minister Mantashe. After a protracted, violent, and occasionally deadly struggle, the High Court eventually ruled in 2018 that the minister would have to obtain “full and formal consent” for the mine from the local Amadiba community, setting a clear precedent by recognizing communities’ customary rights to their land.

    “Since that judgment,” says Johan Lorenzen, an associate at Richard Spoor Attorneys, which has represented Wild Coast communities since 2006, “we have already seen a modest shift towards more meaningful engagement with similarly affected communities—even though it’s still not enough.”

    In its 2018 ruling on the MRC mine case, the High Court referenced an earlier verdict made by South Africa’s Constitutional Court. In that earlier case, between the Richtersveld Indigenous community and the mining company Alexkor Ltd., the court highlighted the fundamental link between African people and their land—“their most treasured possession.”

    In a separate case, also in 2018, the Constitutional Court, deciding on a case between the Lesetlheng community in South Africa’s North West province and Itereleng Bakgatla Mineral Resources, held that the community’s customary ownership is “ownership in its own right, and not merely akin to ownership.” The decision confirmed that Indigenous communities must provide consent for any proposed mining activity that would affect their land rights.

    Lorenzen adds that this latest ruling helps to clarify what exactly meaningful, accessible, and inclusive engagement should look like. Considering the constellation of favorable judgements that have been obtained by Indigenous communities, he adds, “Surely the message has to break through at some stage that the disrespect of these communities cannot carry on.”

    In response to the High Court’s ruling, Shell terminated the contract of the Amazon Warrior, and the vessel left South African waters in early January. But for Wild Coast communities, the battle to protect their communities and their environment is far from over.

    “When you are fighting for a just cause,” says Zukulu, “getting tired is not an option. We are fighting to give life to our Constitution, but also to make life possible on this planet.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline South Africa’s High Court sided with Indigenous communities on Feb 14, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Wet’suwet’en land defenders call on United Nations to visit proposed pipeline

    On Monday, Gidimt’en land defenders from the Wet’suwet’en First Nation accused Canada of violating international law and requested the United Nations make a field visit to their territory to investigate. Through an official submission to the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), they say that Canada continues to violate Wet’suwet’en jurisdiction and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) by proceeding with the proposed Coastal GasLink pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. 

    The Coastal Gaslink pipeline will transport fracked natural gas across Wet’suwet’en territory in what is also known as British Columbia, to a proposed LNG Canada plant in Kitimat, BC. Since 2009, the Wet’suwet’en have built a number of occupation sites in the area, including cultural camps, healing lodges, and hunting camps to prevent construction and protect their land. The territory, governed by a traditional government led by Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada.

    Over eight pages, the submission describes years of Indigenous resistance and police violence, calling attention to recent Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) raids of land defender camps, and calls on Canada to withdraw both RCMP and construction workers from Wet’suwet’en territory. “The forced industrialization and police militarization of Wet’suwet’en land is a violation of Canada’s international obligations as outlined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” the document reads.  

    The submission emphasizes that the land was never ceded and the Wet’suwet’en will continue to defend it: “We, the Wet’suwet’en people, have never sold, surrendered, or in any way relinquished our collective title to Wet’suwet’en land. We have continued to exercise our unbroken, unextinguished, and unceded right to govern and occupy our lands.”

    The Expert Mechanism, which is under the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, is composed of seven independent experts on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. In 2019, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) called on Canada to stop construction on the CGL pipeline and two other projects until they obtained consent from impacted Indigenous nations. The Canadian government has not announced any plans to halt projects. Since 2018, EMRIP has conducted field visits to Mexico, New Zealand, and Finland in response to requests from local Indigenous communities for help implementing UNDRIP. Canada pledged to adopt and implement UNDRIP in 2016.

    Despite the Wet’suwet’en’s historical and legal rights, the Canadian government has allowed TC Energy, the owner of the pipeline project, to continue with construction. The Wet’suwet’en have tried several times to evict the company and its workers from their territory. A November 14, 2021 eviction notice was followed by a violent RCMP raid on November 18 and 21. Thirty-two people were arrested during the raid. 

    The submission was prepared by Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chief Dinï ze’ Woos (Frank Alec), Gidimt’en Checkpoint Spokesperson and Wing Chief of the Cas Yikh House, Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), and Gidimt’en Checkpoint Media Coordinator Jen Wickham. It is also formally endorsed by a long list of Indigenous rights activists, environmental groups, and legal organizations including the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, Greenpeace Canada, Indigenous Climate Action, Sierra Club BC, and Amnesty International Canada. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wet’suwet’en land defenders call on United Nations to visit proposed pipeline on Feb 10, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Historic flooding and a housing crisis left evicted Nooksack members with nowhere to go.

    In 2007, Michelle Roberts took an early retirement from Alaska Airlines and moved to Nooksack Tribal housing in northwest Washington. “My thought was that we are going to have a nice life being surrounded by family members, being close to my parents,” she said. That all changed when Nooksack Tribal police officers served her an eviction notice in December. “Never did I think that Nooksack would try and kick us out after fifteen years.” 

    Roberts’ eviction is the latest step in a bitter nine-year fight over tribal membership in the Nooksack Indian Tribe. The families facing eviction are part of a group of 306 people that the Nooksack Tribal Council has tried to disenroll multiple times since 2013. The group of 306, which represents about 15% of the tribe, are descendants of a woman born in 1875 who the Tribal Council claim was not Nooksack because she did not appear on a 1942 census. Her three daughters married Filipino immigrants and their descendants then enrolled in the 1980s. In 2019, the Council passed a new policy that only members could live in Tribal housing. Since then, eight households have received eviction notices and thirteen have been told they are next because they are on the Tribe’s disenrollment list. 

    Facing eviction, and what she calls persecution from her own tribe, Roberts has nowhere else to go. In the last year alone, Whatcom County has faced a deadly, unprecedented heat wave, record-breaking rainfall, and landslides. Historic flooding in November caused nearly $50 million in disaster costs – the highest ever in Whatcom County – and damaged more than 800 homes displacing hundreds of people in the region. Both temporary and affordable housing is nearly full. 

    Access to housing is especially important in Indigenous communities and communities of color due to higher vulnerability to climate disasters, and affordable, tribal housing can serve as an antidote to housing challenges. A 2017 HUD study of housing issues across Indian Country concluded that 68,000 new homes would need to be built to address overcrowding and inadequate living conditions. A 2021 Housing Matters at Urban Institute Initiative article highlighted the issue saying that tribes needed more flexible and accessible federal resources to address tribal housing challenges and mitigate worsening and future climate threats.

    “All the money they spent on this disenrollment, they could have been building houses,” Roberts said. “But they haven’t built houses in 15 years.” 

    With few options, Roberts and other families facing eviction took the unusual step of turning to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in December, who issued an unprecedented statement last week calling on the Federal government to stop the evictions. The statement, written by two United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights experts, stressed the health and cultural damage eviction would cause. Gabe Galanda, an attorney representing the “Nooksack 306” believes this may be the first time the UN has weighed in on an internal Native American dispute. 

    “It’s hard to imagine a worse time in modern history to attempt these mass evictions. The idea that they would evict 63 people from 21 homes, during a pandemic and amid historic inclement weather caused in great part by climate change is mind boggling,” Galanda said. “It should be unfathomable.” 

    In recent years, the UN and other organizations have called attention to the connection between housing and climate change. According to the Aspen Institute, “As climate change intensifies, housing stability will be increasingly under threat.”

    Without access to Tribal housing, Roberts and the others face an extremely difficult housing market. In Whatcom County, the median home sale price increased by double the amount that median income increased in the past five years while the rental vacancy rate is around 1%. Michelle Roberts’ uncle, who was also targeted by the Tribal Council for disenrollment, lost his home in nearby Sumas to flooding and fire last year. He is now living in a hotel, still searching for a new home to rent. 

    But because the Nooksack are a Federally recognized, sovereign nation, they determine their own membership and housing policies. This means outside groups like the UN or the federal government have little power to influence proceedings. Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, Bryan Newland, released a written statement last Thursday: “Although the Interior Department has found that the Nooksack Tribe appears to have followed its internal administrative process, we implore the Tribe’s leaders to stop their planned evictions.”

    The Nooksack Tribal Council maintains that those facing eviction are not Nooksack and housing should go to those who are. “We have homeless people, including elders, who need a place to live and we need those who aren’t Nooksack to move,” Chairman Ross Cline Sr. said in a statement. 

    Cline also disputes the allegation that he is singularly focused on disenrollment, saying “Disenrollment occurred a number of years ago, but the Nooksack Tribe continues on with business and social services.” Cline points to the Tribe’s new marijuana dispensary, housing plans, and environmental work on salmon as evidence of their progress. 

    Nooksack leadership have demanded a retraction from the UN, saying that the UN never contacted the Tribe and their release contained many inaccuracies, such as the number of people being evicted. The Tribe plans to move forward with eviction proceedings but has not set a date. 

    Roberts says she doesn’t know what will happen next, but said that, “All we know is that we are going to stand our ground.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Historic flooding and a housing crisis left evicted Nooksack members with nowhere to go. on Feb 9, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The Biden administration is spending billions to clean up toxic abandoned coal mines

    Abandoned coal mines leave toxic pollution and other hazards in their wake. This year, communities in 22 states and the Navajo Nation will get $725 million to clean up the sites. 

    The funding, announced this week by the Department of the Interior, is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal that Congress passed in November 2021. The law allocates a total of $11.3 billion over the next 15 years for the clean-up efforts. The money will be used to control underground mine fires that have burned for decades, close mine shafts at risk of collapsing, repair unstable slopes left by strip mines, and improve water quality in rivers and streams acidified by runoff from old mines.

    “The Biden-Harris administration is committed to helping working families, often in rural and Tribal communities, who face hazardous pollution, toxic water levels, and land subsidence both during mining and long after coal companies have moved on,” said Secretary Deb Haaland in a press release.

    Closing abandoned mine shafts is also a win for the climate. In their latest inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, EPA estimated that abandoned underground coal mines leaked 237,000 metric tons of methane in 2019 — not far behind abandoned oil and gas wells, which leaked 263,000 metric tons of the potent planet-warming gas.

    This isn’t an entirely new undertaking for the federal government. After coal communities in Appalachia began organizing against strip mining in the mid twentieth century, President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977. That law put in place regulations for active coal mines and created a fund to remediate mines abandoned prior to 1977 by imposing a tax on coal — currently 22.4 cents per ton for surface mines and 9.6 cents per ton for underground mines. Since then, the government has spent $7.9 billion over the past 45 years on clean-up efforts.

    The additional $11.3 billion that the Department of the Interior will distribute is the largest investment in the abandoned mine lands program’s history. Eric Dixon, a senior researcher with the Ohio River Valley Institute, called it “a categorical step forward in remediating the polluted water, dangerous mudslides, coal mine fires, piles of waste coal, and other problems from historic mining.” 

    But it will only address about half of what he estimates is approximately $25 billion in remaining damage from mines abandoned before 1977.

    The new funding won’t be applied to mines abandoned after 1977. When coal companies go bankrupt today, state-run, industry-funded bond programs are supposed to foot the bill for cleaning up the mess left behind. But with the coal industry in a steep decline, many of those programs are in crisis. In states like West Virginia, there simply isn’t enough money in the bond fund to reclaim all of the abandoned mine sites.

    Pennsylvania, home to sites like Swoyersville’s 40-foot, 55-acre pile of coal waste and the Old Forge Borehole, which has poured acidic water and iron into the Lackawanna River for more than 60 years, is set to receive the largest share of funds: nearly $245 million. Prior to 1977, more coal was mined in Pennsylvania than any other state, and that legacy lingers.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Biden administration is spending billions to clean up toxic abandoned coal mines on Feb 9, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Want to heal the planet? Stop ignoring Indigenous science.

    In the Mayan Ich Eq community in Hopelchen, Mexico, bees are considered relatives to the people. They also serve as an important part of the economy, cultivated by the Indigenous group for hundreds of years. But the beekeepers of the Mayan Ich Eq are different from what we typically think of as apiarists. Their relationship is reciprocal — the community members feed them and take care of them, and in turn, the bees don’t sting and give them honey. 

    A decade ago, Mexico granted Monsanto, a United States-based agricultural corporation, along with several other major companies, permission to buy land near Hopelchen in the Yucatan peninsula. The move went against Mexico’s constitution, which affirms for Indigenous people the right to be consulted in land use and economic decisions. Monsanto and the other companies first deforested the land, then started growing soybeans using chemicals and pesticides. The chemicals started making the bees sick. In Mayan Ich Eq tradition, beekeepers believe they feel what the bees do. So, when the insects became sick and started dying, the people did as well. 

    The situation is a reminder, says Jessica Hernandez, a Maya Ch’orti and Binnizá-Zapotec environmental scientist, that Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and rights are not respected, even when codified into law. It is also a reminder of what is lost when Indigenous knowledge and science is ignored. 

    Hernandez chronicles the Mayan Ich Eq community’s fight to protect the bees and their people in her new book, Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science. In an interview with Grist, she talks about the urgent need to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into modern conservation, as well as respect tribal communities’ long-standing protection of the world’s biodiversity.   

    But the book isn’t just a how-to on fixing the conservation field, or relatedly, the climate crisis. It was also an opportunity for Hernandez to uplift stories that are often silenced or ignored, through translated interviews with her own family members, forced from their lands by conflict, and Indigenous land protectors across Central America. Next up, she hopes to publish the book in Spanish to make it accessible to more people. 

    Q. Why do you think Fresh Banana Leaves is needed now and what inspired you to write it? 

    A. Oftentimes, Indigenous knowledge is just nowhere to be found. There have been scholars who have advocated for the inclusion of Indigenous science [in academia], but oftentimes, when we talk about Indigenous knowledge and how that can help us heal our planet, especially as we undergo climate change, it’s limited. It’s a privilege to be able to write about it so that especially the younger generation can see themselves reflected, and understand that our knowledge also holds power and strength when it comes to healing our planet.

    Q. You describe your family’s struggle with being forced from their ancestral lands, and the impact of that trauma on your environments. Can you talk about that experience?

    A. My father was forced to join the Central American civil wars in the 1970s. It was an Indigenous resistance movement against oppression and oppressive tactics. But the army was using all this violence and technology that was provided by the United States and Canada. In order for him to survive, he had to leave his ancestral lands [in El Salvador]. 

    We can see that parallel today, because a lot of Central Americans are having to flee their lands because of climate change impacts and ongoing violence. 

    Q. Why do you use the phrase “healing landscapes” instead of environmental justice? 

    A. Environmental justice is built on scholarly work in academia. Oftentimes when I talk to my elders, they don’t see their work as environmental justice because they always remind me that they don’t have an option. They don’t have a choice to do certain things. One of the reasons why I use healing is that even in our native languages, there are no words for conservation. We view it more as healing our environments or protecting them. Given the times that we’re living in, in order for us to heal our environments we also have to heal ourselves, especially from the ongoing oppression that we continue to face.

    Q. You say that ecological grief is often overlooked in the climate change discourse. What does that mean, and why do we need to focus on it more? 

    A. Ecological grief ties back to the kinships that we hold as Indigenous peoples with our plants and animal relatives. The example I provide in the book is the milpas. The milpas are a central kind of holistic agricultural system that we have been able to maintain since time immemorial. Everybody takes care of the milpas, even children and elders. There is this kinship that is built around the milpas. And because of climate change impacts – flooding of the milpa or if you have extreme heat – there is a psychological grieving. You’re mourning or grieving the plant and animal relatives that you lost because of those extreme weather conditions. That grief comes from the fact that you are building a relationship with those animals and you consider them your relatives as well. 

    Q. In the book you highlight the community-based forest management happening in part of the Zapotec nation in Oaxaca, Mexico as a success story, compared to other more traditional outsider-run projects. What makes the Zapotec forestry initiative work, and what lessons does it provide scientists and conservation groups? 

    A. When we talk about conservation we forget to include the Indigenous peoples who will be impacted by the denial of gathering those resources. In many marine protected areas, for example, you are not allowed to fish, because they’re trying to conserve the marine ecosystems there. Other protected areas are led by scientists who don’t have a relationship with Indigenous peoples or who are only focused on protecting the animal, without looking at the holistic system.

    It goes back to ecological grief. 

    We have that strong kinship with our forests, with our trees, because they’re part of us. It ties back to our creation stories and our ancestors. With the [Zapotec] forestry initiative, it [worked] because our people were integrated in the process and we were able to use Indigenous knowledge to manage and steward that forest. It’s holistic management, and integrated Indigenous peoples from the start. 

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Want to heal the planet? Stop ignoring Indigenous science. on Jan 24, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The boreal of Minnesota could look like Kansas if CO2 emissions remain ‘business as usual’

    This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    A sign hanging above the door of a giant open-top glass chamber in a remote part of Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest explains why so many scientists from around the world have worked hard to get a piece of this boreal woodland. “Welcome to the Future” the sign reads, and that is literally what researchers get when they come to do research at Marcell.

    The experiment — a collaboration between the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory — features 10 open-top glass chambers. Each is 30 feet high, 40 feet in diameter, and designed — by controlling temperature and CO2 levels — to mimic what will happen to boreal peatlands under various global warming scenarios. They range from no change to a very realistic increase of 4 degrees F, to 7 degrees F, and even to a frightening 12 degrees F and higher.

    The Marcell Experimental Forest was established in 1962 to investigate the ecology and hydrology of the boreal forest, which in North America extends from the Lake Superior area of the northern United States to northern Canada and Alaska. Boreal woodlands — the world’s largest forest system, holding vast carbon-rich peatlands — also cover Scandinavia and much of Russia.

    In the past several decades, the research focus at Marcell has shifted to the impacts of global warming on the boreal forest, with more than 50 experiments now underway. The site is just one of numerous long-term study sites where scientists have for decades been researching climatic changes in the boreal. Studies in the Great Lakes area, the permafrost-rich regions of Tanana Flats and the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest in central Alaska, and the Scotty Creek lowlands of Canada’s Northwest Territories are all tracking the transformation of North America’s boreal ecosystem. Across the region, peatlands are drying out, and hotter, drier conditions are leading to a steady increase in wildfires — all of it accelerating permafrost thaw.

    In 2016, scientists first started to pump both heat and carbon dioxide into the chambers at the Marcell forest to see how these and other peatlands would respond to climate warming. Five years on, U.S. Forest Service scientist Randy Kolka; Paul Hanson, an ecosystem scientist at Oak Ridge; and their colleagues are already seeing significant changes, with the warmed plots quickly making the transition from being carbon accumulators to carbon emitters.

    The Marcell Experimental Forest in northern Minnesota. Scientists are simulating different climates in these glass chambers to better understand how boreal forests will respond to rising temperatures. Oak Ridge National Laboratory / U.S. Department of Energy

    The peat at the Marcell forest had stored 15 times more carbon than the recut forests in the eastern United States. But in a recent study, Kolka, Hanson, and other collaborators describe how the chambers are losing carbon 4.5 to 18 times faster than historical rates of accumulation. When dried or degraded, moisture-absorbing peat collapses, losing its ability to store carbon.

    As Kolka guided me through a chambered bog that is being heated up at the fastest rate, he pointed out warming-related changes. The tamarack and spruce trees were browning. Heat- and moisture-loving shrubs were so dense that we could hardly see the sphagnum on the bog floor. These and other mosses that are the building blocks of peat, he said, are not going to last.

    Peat is partially decayed vegetation that accumulates in the cold, water-logged, oxygen-starved bogs and fens of the boreal. As temperatures warm, the peat dries out in the south and thaws in the north, where trees are drowning and rivers and lakes are browning with solid organic carbon that is dissolving in the water. This is leading to the release of massive amounts of carbon into rivers and lakes and the atmosphere.

    Given that peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests, climate scientists are closely watching these changes. In addition to mitigating floods, filtering water, and slowing or stopping wildfire, the peat-heavy boreal ecosystem provides nesting sites for 1 to 3 billion birds that journey north from as far away as Argentina.

    “The boreal of Minnesota is going to look more like Kansas in the decades ahead if it’s business as usual with carbon emissions,” says Lee Frelich, the director of the Center for Forest Ecology at the University of Minnesota, who has been tracking changes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness in northern Minnesota for more than 30 years. “There’s nothing wrong with Kansas, but we don’t need another one in Minnesota. We only have three biomes here in Minnesota — boreal, temperate, and grassland. Losing the boreal would be a big loss.”

    For Frelich, it’s the trees in his part of the boreal that are showing the most dramatic changes. He is seeing more and more red pines with browning crowns, black spruce and balsam failing to regenerate, and temperate species like maples and oak — as well as grasslands — creeping north. In a recent study, he and other scientists predict that by the end of the century most of the boreal forest in Minnesota will be gone, and that a 180- to 300-mile swath of boreal forest in southern Canada will also be lost.

    Many scientists believe that the transformation of the southern boreal would be offset to some extent by a northward migration of trees, such as black and white spruce, lodgepole pine, and aspen and birch. One recent study suggests that this has been happening. Increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might also speed up tree growth in the far north.

    But with warming in the western Arctic accelerating two to three times faster than the rest of the world, scientists say the destructive impacts of climate change in the boreal are expected to far exceed any benefits.

    Dan Thompson, a Canadian Forest Service research scientist, surveys fire damage in Wood Buffalo National Park. Ellen Whitman / Canadian Forest Service / Natural Resources Canada

    At the Bonanza Creek Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, located near Fairbanks, Alaska, scientists have since 1987 been working to better understand the mechanisms that have made the boreal resilient for thousands of years and now render it so vulnerable to unprecedented warming. One of the key findings is that frequent fires are favoring the regeneration of broad-leafed deciduous trees like aspen and birch over conifers. Summer fires burn the soil’s deep organic layer, which exposes the mineral soils below, aiding the expansion of hardwoods and reducing the insulation of permafrost.

    While aspen and birch do store more carbon than conifers, increased warming could mean that the northern boreal suffers the same fate as vast stands in the south that are dying because of drought.

    “It’s like a card game,” said Jill Johnstone, one of the researchers at Bonanza Creek and now head of the Northern Plant Ecology Lab in the Yukon. “After a fire, there is a shuffling of the deck. In the boreal, where the ecosystem has very few tree and plant species compared to, say, the Amazon, there are only a certain number of ways that the game can be played out. Controlling forces such as soil acidity, precipitation, heat, and permafrost help determine which plants and trees are most successful. So does climate change, now more than ever before.”

    One recent study found that the ability of black spruce — a keystone boreal species — to regenerate declined at 38 percent of the fire study sites and failed completely at 18 percent of the sites.

    The growing number, extent, and severity of boreal wildfires are accelerating the permafrost thawing that is already well underway. This thawing is uprooting and inundating vast stands of forest from Alaska eastwards into the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

    When Torre Jorgenson began his studies in Tanana Flats in the 1990s for the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, climate change was not a major concern. Now, however, Jorgenson and others are astonished by the swift changes, especially the flooding of large areas of “drowned” boreal forest.

    “In November, I was skating on ice through one of these drowned forests just outside Fairbanks,” said Jorgenson, a past president of the U.S. Permafrost Association. “It was weird, to say the least, seeing the trunks of these dead trees still standing frozen in ice. It’s going to get worse. We’re predicting that by the end of century, we will lose another 36 percent of permafrost and there will be very few trees left in the [boreal] lowlands.”

    Disturbance is nothing new to the boreal. It’s what makes it resilient. In the past 12,500 years, flooding from melting glaciers and snowpack transitioned this icy world from aquatic forbs to mosses and shrubs. Then, as water levels decreased and the land drained and dried out, trees such as black spruce and aspen grew on top of thick layers of peat.

    But just as extensive summer sea ice melt in the Arctic Ocean is leading to far less winter sea ice formation, warmer winters in the boreal are no longer allowing the ground to refreeze and stem the loss of permafrost. The watery fens in Tanana Flats are expanding exponentially. According to a recent study by Jorgensen and his colleagues, the size of three large fens in Tanana increased by 26 percent from 1949 to 2018.

    Similar flooding in the Liard and Mackenzie valleys to the southeast in Canada’s Northwest Territories is a big concern for the Indigenous people who rely on fishing, hunting, and trapping to make a living. “Moose and caribou are moving to drier places,” according to Dieter Cazon, manager of Lands and Resources for the Liildii Kue First Nation. “Beavers and muskrats are disappearing, and it’s getting difficult to get to one place from another with so much water on the land. We’re also seeing riverbanks collapsing.”

    William Quinton is a University of Waterloo hydrologist who has been studying permafrost in this region since 1999. Based at the Scotty Creek Research Station in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Quinton and his colleagues work hand-in-hand with the Liildii Kue Got’ine people, whose traditional ecological knowledge is augmenting the science that is being done on the ground. Their long-term memory of the past and their knowledge of how fish and wildlife are responding to climate change animate the data that Quinton and his colleagues are collecting.

    “It’s tough to be a tree in this landscape,” says Quinton whose research station at Scotty Creek sits in the middle of a 59-square-mile swath of the boreal forest that has a high concentration of wetlands. “There has been so much flooding that we have had to move our base camp twice. Some trees are hanging on, sitting on top of hummocks that act like lifeboats. But as the trees grow, the weight of them collapses the hummocks below.”

    Winters at Scotty Creek, according to Quinton, are warming faster than summers. In the 1950s, permafrost covered nearly three quarters of the region. It’s down to a third of that. The edges of local patches of permafrost are receding by about a meter a year, leaving behind depressions that fill up with melting snow and ever-expanding groundwater channels.

    Patches of melted permafrost near the Scotty Creek Research Station in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Bill Quinton

    “What we’re seeing, perhaps more clearly than any other place in the world, is ecosystem change occurring in fast motion,” says Quinton.

    Another concern linked to the swamping is the “brownification” of lakes, rivers, and streams that comes as solid organic carbon in rapidly thawing peat dissolves in the water. When harmless inorganic mercury from the thaw attaches itself to carbon, according to a number of studies, microorganisms can convert it to the highly toxic inorganic form of methylmercury.

    A major question now is whether thawing of permafrost in boreal peatlands ecosystems will be a slow-moving phenomenon that gradually releases greenhouse gases or a “carbon bomb” about to unload huge stores of carbon. Either way, the transformation of the boreal has implications not only for climate change, but for water quality and wildlife habitat and for wildfires that are projected to burn bigger and at shorter intervals — all making boreal regeneration difficult.

    The University of Minnesota’s Frelich isn’t giving up hope for the boreal. Like Torre Jorgenson, he suspects that some parts of the boreal in the cooler, undeveloped highlands and those adjacent to cold lakes will survive, just as patches of boreal forests in the Sweetgrass Hills of Montana and Moose Mountain in Saskatchewan have done. These boreal refugia could be managed to control wildfire, invasive species, and human developments.

    “The challenge,” says Frelich, “is determining where these refugia are most likely to be. Then we can put conservation measures in place to protect them. Outside of reducing carbon emissions, it’s our best hope. Forests die quickly, but trees take a long time to grow.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The boreal of Minnesota could look like Kansas if CO2 emissions remain ‘business as usual’ on Jan 14, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Clean energy goes up against tribal rights and biodiversity in Nevada

    The Biden administration is facing critical questions about how to balance the urgency of transitioning to clean energy with other progressive priorities. On Monday, a U.S. district judge halted construction of two geothermal power plants on public land in Nevada. The decision was in response to a lawsuit filed in December by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit, and the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, against the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, for approving the project. 

    Geothermal power plants pump hot water from deep underground and use it to generate steam to produce clean electricity. The Nevada plants are set to be built on a verdant wetland in the desert called Dixie Meadows. The suit alleges that the project threatens to dry up the hot springs that support the wetland and are of religious and cultural significance to the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone. The ecosystem is also home to the Dixie Valley toad, a species that is not known to exist anywhere else on Earth.

    “The United States has repeatedly promised to honor and protect indigenous sacred sites, but then the BLM approved a major construction project nearly on top of our most sacred hot springs,” said Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribal Chair Cathi Tuni in a statement. “It just feels like more empty words.” Tuni went on to say that the tribe has not opposed geothermal projects elsewhere in the Dixie Valley but that it had a duty to protect this site.

    The conflict illustrates the challenges the Biden administration will face in pursuing the rapid energy transition that’s required to stabilize the climate, while also trying to repair relations with Tribal Nations, increase U.S. conservation, and protect biodiversity. Energy development has always involved trade-offs, but the stakes are higher today, with many in the climate movement asserting that the transition to renewables should not repeat historically exploitative practices. 

    Geothermal power plants currently produce a small fraction of U.S. electricity — only about 0.5 percent in 2020. But an analysis by the Department of Energy found that with improvements in technology, that number could go up to 8.5 percent by 2050. Geothermal power plants have several relative advantages, in addition to not directly producing any carbon emissions. They have a small physical footprint compared to wind and solar farms, and they can provide power 24/7. This kind of always-available, dispatchable source of electricity will be critical for grid reliability as intermittent sources of energy like wind and solar increase.

    In its approval for the Dixie Meadows geothermal plants, the BLM wrote that they would help Nevada achieve its goal of getting 25 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025. The agency also cited President Joe Biden’s January 2021 executive order spelling out his government-wide approach to tackling the climate crisis.

    But the Center for Biological Diversity says the agency rushed the approval process and ignored the recommendations of government scientists. The lawsuit cites comments submitted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nevada Department of Wildlife raising concerns about the project’s environmental impacts and the developer’s plan to monitor and address any degradation of the springs. 

    The plaintiffs have reason to be skeptical. The geothermal company behind the Dixie Meadows project, Ormat Technologies, opened a geothermal power plant in 2011 about 40 miles away on another hot springs called Jersey Valley. The springs dried up entirely a few years after the plant began operating.

    The lawsuit also asserts that the project violates the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. “Many of the other springs in the area have been damaged or ruined by development,” the lawsuit says. “Dixie Meadows Hot Springs is therefore the most important and sacred spring to the Tribe, and one of the very last remaining springs in the area.” Members of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe use the site for “healing, soaking, camping, and harvesting native plants for weaving and other uses. These practices require quiet for contemplation, and darkness to see the night sky.”

    The dispute mirrors other battles over clean energy development in Nevada and elsewhere in the country. In northeastern Nevada, some members of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe and several other tribes and environmental groups are fighting a proposed lithium mine. Lithium is a key ingredient for many of the technologies that will power a fossil fuel–free world, including batteries for electric vehicles. 

    To date, geothermal power plant development has been limited to areas with known geothermal resources close to the surface of the earth, which are often indicated by natural hot springs. But research underway at the Department of Energy and by private companies to tap into geothermal resources much deeper underground could open up new areas to geothermal development, potentially sparing treasured natural resources like Dixie Meadows.

    The injunction issued on Monday is temporary, halting construction of the Dixie Meadows project for 90 days while the U.S. district judge hears the case. The judge said he is “not yet persuaded there is a strong likelihood” of the lawsuit succeeding, but the plaintiffs will have the option of appealing an unfavorable decision to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Clean energy goes up against tribal rights and biodiversity in Nevada on Jan 7, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • An Illustrated guide to 2021’s pipeline battles

    This story is part of Grist’s 2021 Comic Recap — an illustrated look back on some of the year’s biggest climate stories. Read the other installments, click here and here.

    This was a big year for pipeline policy. From the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline to states enacting harsh laws to criminalize and curb pipeline protests, the fight to stop oil and gas infrastructure saw major wins — and major losses — in 2021.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr

    Joe Biden started his term in January by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline via executive order. That’s after more than a decade of Indigenous-led activism against the project.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr / Getty Images

    But the tough-on-pipelines agenda didn’t last. In May, the Army Corps of Engineers upheld a Trump-era position, allowing the Dakota Access Pipeline to continue to operate, despite the fact that a key permit for the pipeline was canceled by a federal judge.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr

    Over the summer, protesters flocked to Northern Minnesota where the Line 3 pipeline, which carries tar sands oil across more than 200 bodies of water, threatens Anishanaabe treaty rights and could violate U.S. treaty law.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr / Getty Images

    Over 900 hundred people were arrested in protests over the summer. Many are facing felony charges.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr

    Despite protests, the Biden administration did not cancel the pipeline, which went online on October 1st.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr

    According to analysis by the Indigenous Environmental Network, Indigenous-led resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to a quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions – or about 400 coal-fired power plants.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr

    But nationwide, the risks of protesting pipelines like Line 3 and Keystone XL are getting higher, as sixteen states have passed laws since 2017 increasing penalties, including fines and jail time, for protesting pipelines. 

    Grist / Alexandria Herr

    And Biden isn’t moving on either Line 3 or DAPL, despite his climate commitments.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr

    Despite Biden’s refusal to stop pipelines, there’s still hope: young Indigenous land defenders and water protectors, like 17-year-old Autumn Peltier, continue to fight the construction of oil and gas infrastructure on traditional and treaty territories.

    Grist / Alexandria Herr

    There’s no doubt protests and legal battles against major fossil fuel infrastructure projects will continue into 2022.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline An Illustrated guide to 2021’s pipeline battles on Dec 23, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Indigenous and environmental activists say they were illegally spied on

    Tribal members and environmental advocates filed a lawsuit against the Oregon Department of Justice on Tuesday for “illegal domestic spying” through its Oregon TITAN Fusion Center – one of approximately 80 intelligence hubs tasked with surveilling potential domestic terrorists. 

    “It is astonishing and disturbing to become the target of a well-resourced secret police, solely because of my participation in peaceful rallies opposing a harmful fossil fuel pipeline across my ancestral lands,” Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, an environmental and Indigenous rights advocate, said in a press release. 

    Farrell-Smith is a plaintiff in the case and a member of the Klamath Tribe. She has protested against Jordan Cove, a 229-mile long natural gas pipeline that would have run through ancestral lands in Oregon. She has also created protest art and organized against a lithium mine in Nevada. 

    Other plaintiffs include Rowena Jackson, Francis Eatherington, and Sarah Westover. Jackson is also a member of the Klamath Tribe, a water protector, and works at the Klamath Tribes Administrative Office. Eatherington is president of the Oregon Women’s Land Trust, a conservation nonprofit. Westover was an organizer with No LNG Exports Coalition, an alliance of groups opposed to the Jordan Cove pipeline.  

    According to the lawsuit, “fusion centers” have little oversight and less is known about them. At least 3,000 state and federal employees work at fusion centers where they monitor individuals that pose possible domestic terrorist threats. Using tips from the public, social media, public records, and governmental materials, Oregon’s TITAN Fusion Center collects and shares data with “more than 170 local law enforcement agencies, dozens of federal and state intelligence hubs, and an unknown number of public and private partners,” the lawsuit states.  

    Following 9/11, at least 80 fusion centers have been created to prevent future terrorist attacks, but a 2012 Senate investigation found that they are ineffective and come at a cost of $330 million to taxpayers yearly. Originally created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the cost of funding them has largely shifted to states. According to the lawsuit, Oregon’s TITAN facility is run through Oregon’s Department of Justice’s Criminal Intelligence Division.

    The lawsuit, filed by the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, which partners with communities and police to promote accountability, claims that TITAN is illegally spying on environmental advocates that aren’t breaking the law. The Policing Project has also been involved with a Microsoft case concerning compulsory data sharing with law enforcement, and an audit of Ring, a video doorbell company that works with police departments across the country. 

    “None of the Plaintiffs engage in or support, nor have ever engaged in or supported, criminal activity that would warrant Oregon Department of Justice’s attention or fall within Oregon Department of Justice’s delegated powers,” the lawsuit states.

    Jeff Rosenthal, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in a press release that TITAN “has repeatedly abused its unchecked power over law-abiding Oregon citizens.” The lawsuit states that TITAN also used surveillance software to physically track the location of Black Lives Matter protestors, using the information to create a threat report against Oregon’s own Department of Justice’s director of civil rights, as well as creating reports on the Women’s March. 

    “There is not a single Oregon law or regulation that gives the state Department of Justice the power to run a generalized spy agency,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor and the founding director of the Policing Project, in a press release. “That TITAN exists without any legislative authority flouts the basic principles of democratic governance.” 

    In a statement, the Department of Justice told Portland’s KATU, “We are reviewing the lawsuit, and will respond in court, but on initial review many of the examples cited in the lawsuit occurred several years ago and have been addressed.” 

    Plaintiffs hope the lawsuit will result in an end to TITAN’s surveillance activities.

    “Civil rights and privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about fusion centers for years,” said Farhang Heydari, executive director of the Policing Project, in a statement. “But TITAN is one of the worst offenders.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous and environmental activists say they were illegally spied on on Dec 17, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.