WITH PROTECTIONS RESTORED, TRIBAL COUNCIL CHARTS NEW PATH FOR BEARS EARS
Last October, President Joe Biden restored the boundaries (plus a little bit added) that were designated by President Barack Obama for Bears Ears National Monument in 2016. Biden also brought back the co-management arrangement for Bears Ears that the Obama administration had agreed to with a coalition of Zuni, Ute, Hopi, and Navajo, the tribes that have an ancestral and modern connection to region’s stunning land of dryland canyons and mesas, plants, and wildlife. Cultural artifacts abound.
Together with non-Indigenous allies, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition played a major part in making the monument happen. One of those all-too-rare victories for the continent’s Native people, a dream fulfilled.
Along came Donald Trump. He gleefully shrank the monument by 85% as a favor to Utah politicians, extractive industries, and conservatives who have lost interest in the “conserve” part of their name. For Trump, this move was made all the better for giving him another chance to poke Obama in the eye.
The tribes weren’t eager to work on a land management plan while the litigation against Trump’s shrinking of the monument dawdled its way through the courts. But now, as Caitlin Looby reports at Mongabay, with Trump gone and the monument’s boundaries restored, the coalition is putting together a plan that keeps each of the tribes’ interests centered. That plan will be meshed with the Bureau of Land Management’s and U.S. Forest Service’s plans, which are not expected to be completed until 2024.
Whatever it’s called—Bears Ears or Hoon’Naqvut (Hopi), Shash Jaa’ (Navajo), Kwiyagatu Nukavachi (Ute), Ansh An Lashokdiwe (Zuni)—it is a sacred place, one that people are connected to physically, mentally, and emotionally, says Meredith Benally, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-founder of the Women of Bears Ears. Not just a sacred place, she says. “It’s a place for healing and it’s a warrior mountain.” It’s a place to teach younger generations about traditions, to teach them to treat the land with respect.
Carleton Bowekaty, lieutenant governor for the Pueblo of Zuni and co-chair of the coalition, told Looby the land management plan will emerge from Indigenous perspectives and centuries-old conservation strategies predating the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. “I can tell you that some kids on a reservation think that this is a dead-end place … but really, their existence here is a wish of so many generations. I want our kids to be confident in the fact that they can go into any of our public places throughout the Southwest and they’ll know how to visit with respect and hopefully educate others the way I’ve been educated.”
Patrick Gonzales-Rogers, executive director of the coalition, told Looby that to be successful, the plan must be decently funded. The tribes don’t want to reach into their none-too-deep pockets for this purpose, he said, and the federal government has an obligation to make this seminal effort work. Without adequate resources, even putting together the plan, much less implementing it, will risk more chance of failure.
Co-management is a moderate approach to both restorative justice and renewed respect for what place-centered old knowledge can teach credentialed scientists about dealing with the land. Some Native advocates want to see tribes given full management authority over selected public lands like, for instance, the Black Hills, land that even the Supreme Court has ruled was ripped off. A few, like the Ojibwa writer David Treuer, go still farther and suggest that Natives should run the national parks. For the moment, however, co-management seems likely to be the only mode for the immediate future, and even it is somewhat experimental, though there are some other examples underway that don’t cover as much ground.
Indigenous conservation isn’t magic, but it is powerful because it comprises lived experience passed down by gifted practitioners through the generations. We’d be fools to ignore all its many benefits including, as Benally says, for healing.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
GREEN TAKES
On Earth Day, the City and County of Denver rolled out its $9 million Denver Climate Action Rebate (DCAR) for electric bikes, heat pumps, and other equipment that helps the municipality reach its reduction goals for greenhouse gas emissions.
Residents can apply for an instant rebate of $400 for a standard electric bike. Add $500 to that if they buy a cargo e-bike for lugging groceries or their kids. Lower-income residents can get even more: $1,700. What’s really great is that residents can apply in advance and get a municipal voucher to take to the bike store, meaning they don’t have to pay out of pocket up front and go through the hassle of getting reimbursed later. All but the most elaborate e-bikes are in the $1,000 to $4,000 range.
Jack Todd, the communications director of Bicycle Colorado, told Eve Kessler at Streetsblog, “E-bikes and e-cargo bikes give people freedom of mobility while reducing their carbon footprint. Research from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities shows that people are purchasing e-bikes to replace car trips and travel with heavier loads, greater distances, at an older age or with mobility issues, and to commute to places without worrying about appearing disheveled at their destination. They are a game-changer when it comes to getting people to leave the car at home and choose two wheels instead of four.”
In addition to e-bikes, the DCAR program offers rebates to homeowners for installing upgrades powered by renewable energy sources. The rebate covers up to 80% of a project’s total installed cost, or up to 100% for income-qualified residents. Eligible equipment includes air-source heat pumps, ground-source heat pumps, mini-split heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, bidirectional electric vehicle charging/V2Bs, battery storage, and electric vehicle charging home wiring. Homeowners who already have or will install a heat pump, a heat pump water heater, or a bidirectional electric vehicle charger as part of the rebate program are eligible for additional rebates, including for solar panels and electric service upgrades.
Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams reports:
Environmental justice advocates on Thursday cautiously welcomed the federal government's new plan to deliver on some of U.S. President Joe Biden's campaign promises to hold polluters accountable and better serve disproportionately impacted communities. ...
Applauding the administration's announcement, the Western Environmental Law Center said that its three-part plan "will mark significant steps toward justice for frontline communities."
"Action to protect members of historically marginalized communities who have disproportionately suffered environmental harms is long, long overdue, and this progress toward righting that wrong is most welcome," the group added, while pledging to "monitor this new initiative to gauge follow-through on the lofty goals."
Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the administration’s plan. "Although violations of our environmental laws can happen anywhere, communities of color, Indigenous communities, and low-income communities often bear the brunt of the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution, and climate change,” he said. "They include fenceline communities, where exposure to toxic air pollutants have caused scores of cancer-related deaths. … They include communities where students have been exposed to harmful emissions from boilers in their public schools. They include communities where infectious diseases have spread because of inadequate wastewater management. And for far too long, these communities have faced barriers to accessing the justice they deserve."
ECO-TWEET
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (or listen to)
The Next 'Great Dying' Is Coming for Your Seafood, by Angely Mercado at Gizmodo Earther. In a new report published at Science, researchers Justin L. Penn and Curtis Deutsch conclude that without action on the climate crisis, our planet’s oceans could lose as much biodiversity over the next 200 years as went extinct in the massive marine die-off that took place more than 250 million years ago in the end-Permian mass extinction, aka the Great Dying. “It’s not like everything is fine until 2300, and then all of a sudden hell breaks loose. It’s more like a gradual, kind of accumulated loss of species over time that by 2300,” Deutsch said. Malin Pinsky, an associate professor of ecology at Rutgers University, wrote an accompanying perspective article on the research. He told Mercado, “Seafood’s an important part of their diet and provides jobs for many people … it’s a really important part of our economies, our quality of life. [The ocean] provides enormous amounts of money to our national economy, and the global economy keeps people employed.” But all is not hopeless. The scientists say this mass extinction event can be stopped (along with other looming climate disasters) if our systems are quickly decarbonized.
A Black Woman Fought for Her Community, and Her Life, Amidst Polluting Landfills and Vast ‘Borrow Pits’ Mined for Sand and Clay, by Agya K. Aning at Inside Climate News. “The late LaFanette Soles-Woods’ home outside Pensacola, Florida, has more cancer cases than anyone can keep track of. For years the 17-year Air Force veteran had been a leader of the fight to clean up her home of Wedgewood, a small, historically Black community a few miles away from the meeting in downtown Pensacola. The pits she spoke of were giant holes in the earth—‘borrow pits’—from which companies extracted clay and sand and then turned profitable again by making them landfills and accepting all sorts of waste and debris, some of it toxic. ... An accident of geography had helped turn Wedgewood—an aspirational destination for working- and middle-class Blacks sitting atop all this valuable clay and sand—into one of the most environmentally unjust places in the country.”
Up to 40% of the World's Land Is Degraded by Humans, UN Report Warns. “Last week the UN’s Convention to Combat Desertification issued the second edition of its Global Land Outlook: Land Restoration for Recovery and Resilience. The way land resources — soil, water and biodiversity — are being ‘mismanaged and misused,’ the report states, and ‘threatens the health and continued survival of many species on Earth, including our own.’ But, like the UN’s three-part Sixth Assessment on Climate released over the past nine months, it also offers hope by spotlighting hundreds of practical ways local, national and regional policymakers can implement land and ecosystem restoration.”
These nine cities are leading the nation’s solar surge. Authors Adrian Pforzheimer at Frontier Group and Johanna Neumann at Environment America Research & Policy last week released their eighth survey of solar energy in America’s biggest cities. They found that just nine cities now have more photovoltaic solar capacity—3.5 gigawatts—than the entire United States did a decade ago. As in the past surveys, the eighth covers 56 cities. Of those, 15 recorded a tenfold increase in their solar capacity between 2014 and 2022. The nine leading cities, in order of capacity, are Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Honolulu, San Antonio, New York, Phoenix, San Jose, and Albuquerque.
Siemens Gamesa to Build the World’s Longest Wind Turbine Blades. 377 Feet Long, by Ameya Paleja at Interesting Engineering. Siemens Gamesa is making its biggest wind turbine yet, the SG-14 236 DD. With a planned rotor diameter of 774 feet, this turbine will sweep an area of 468,230 square feet with each spin and generate 14 megawatts of power with a power boost. The turbine's capacity can even hit 15 megawatts. What makes this possible are the B115 blades that are 377 feet long, which is approximately 33 feet longer than a FIFA-recommended soccer field's length. Siemens is also well aware of the potential waste problem that wind turbine manufacturing today will cause in the future. Therefore, it has ensured that its B115 blades can also be manufactured using its Recyclable Blade technology. By using a recyclable resin that melts away, Siemens plans to make the components of its turbines recyclable and repurpose them completely by the year 2040.
Steven Donziger vs. Big Oil. An interview conducted by Sharon Lerner at The Intercept with the environmental lawyer who was under house arrest for 993 days until he was released last week. Donziger helped win a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron for contaminating land in Ecuador—specifically the Lago Agrio region where he’s been fighting on behalf of Indigenous people for more than 25 years. As Donziger was arguing the case against Chevron back in 2009, the company said its long-term strategy was to demonize him. And, since then, it has waged an all-out assault on him in what’s become one of the most bitter and drawn-out cases in the history of environmental law.
ECOPINION
(Inclusion here does not necessarily mean agreement. The point is to spur conversation.)
The Case for Intersectional Climate Coverage, by Mary Annaïse Heglar at Hot Take. “One of the more bedeviling recurring debates in the Climate Messaging Wars is whether or not we should focus on the problem or the solutions. I’m starting to see more and more articles making the case for solutions-based journalism. The thinking is that people tune out of climate stories if they’re too gloomy or scary. But the truth is, I’ve actually never seen a climate story that ONLY focused on the problem. Even the stories about active disasters—wildfires, floods, hurricanes—usually pay at least some attention to the solutions. Also, if the solutions aren’t being implemented, which is overwhelmingly the case, how does one make a news story out of that? Furthermore, it doesn’t make sense to talk about a solution without talking about the problem—or vice versa. We can actually do both. We have to.”
Rising Authoritarianism and Worsening Climate Change Share a Fossil-fueled Secret, by Eve Darian-Smith at The Conversation via DeSmog. “Around the world, many countries are becoming less democratic. This backsliding on democracy and ‘creeping authoritarianism,’ as the U.S. State Department puts it, is often supported by the same industries that are escalating climate change. In my new book, Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis, I lay out connections between these industries and the politicians who are both stalling action on climate change and diminishing democracy. It’s a dangerous shift, both for representative government and for the future climate.”
New Biden Order to Find Old Trees Falls Short of Protecting Them, by Laura Leffer at Gizmodo Earther. The president is calling for a survey of America's old-growth forests, but the move doesn't actually defend them from loggers. “What the order does concretely promise is the ‘first ever inventory of mature and old-growth forests on federal lands,’ according to the White House statement. Part of that project would be establishing a consistent set of definitions surrounding old-growth trees, which doesn’t currently exist. And the statement promises the results of that nationwide survey will be completed and released publicly within a year. It’s hard to protect something you don’t even know exists, so a federal survey of old growth is a good thing, even if it’s not enough. But finding and counting the largest and oldest trees across all 640 million acres of federal U.S. land isn’t a simple proposition.”
Ukraine and nukes, by Peter Dykstra at Environmental Health News. “Picking winners and losers. Remember that meme from 10 years ago? The Obama Administration had just blown a half-billion-dollar loan guarantee in the Solyndra solar fiasco. Republicans pounced, and Solyndra remained a 2012 campaign issue for Obama’s challenger, Mitt Romney, who teased the incumbent: ‘You don't just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers.’ Now, Obama’s VP is president. President Biden’s Energy Department has thrown a $6 billion lifeline to a foundering nuclear industry: Utilities whose nuke plants are facing early closure because they’re aging and priced out of the market can apply to the DOE for relief. Counterintuitive, anyone? The rationale, embraced by some environmentalists, is that carbon-free nuclear power can help control climate change. Many others take the environmental community’s more traditional view, that shuttered nukes, like New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, shouldn’t be on welfare with on-site nuclear waste storage.”
The Climate Movement in Its Own Way, by Charles Komanoff at The Nation. A straightforward “price on carbon” was once thought appealing to left and right alike. It is now abjured by both. “Too many of our climate campaigns are ill-considered. Too much of our legislative agenda is narrow-gauged. Too often, our lens for assessing climate proposals is ideological rather than pragmatic. ... The right, of course, is both repellently all-in on fossil fuels and hyper-aware that its wealthy base of profligate carbon consumers would pay the most through a carbon tax. Which makes the left’s antipathy to carbon taxes not just surprising but downright bizarre.”
Is Joe Manchin Worth Compromising With Anymore? by Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. “Clean energy tax credits won’t help the climate if they come with more funding for fossil fuels. With midterms fast approaching, Democratic lawmakers want something—anything—to pass. Even if the only ‘something’ they can get is a few hundred billion dollars’ worth of tax incentives for clean energy distributed over a decade (the bulk of what’s still on the table), they’ll do just about anything to get it—including toss money at Joe Manchin’s favorite fossil fuel projects. This all raises an uncomfortable question: At what point might a deal be worse than no deal?”
ECOBITS
• Cement Makers Burn Turbine Blades as Wind Power Faces Recycling Headache • The race to add more public EV chargers • How Do We Get 100% Renewable Energy? • Texas Voter Suppression Is Keeping Climate Action by the State Off the Table • Pruitt's pitch: Energy independence, fixing the Senate • This Is a Crisis’: 6 Million People in SoCal Face 'Unprecedented’ Water Restrictions • The Country's Most Endangered River Is Hitting New Lows • Why the Conflict in Ukraine Is a Disaster for the Poor of This Planet • Heat to Scorch India’s Wheat Supplies, Adding Food-Shortage Worries to World • Biden’s Team Puts Up Over $3 Billion to Boost U.S. Battery Output • $1,000 a Month for Farmworkers? Proposed Payments Aim to Help Amid Drought • The Field Report: Congress Grills Beef Industry Leaders Over Consolidation