This Changes Everything (63 page)

“The forest is already ‘developed,’ the forest is life.”

—Franco Viteri, Sarayaku leader, Ecuador
¹

“How, in the North, could anything like this ever be possible? How, given the madness that has come upon the wealthy countries, one in which ideologues and elites have cast a mythology of ‘debt crisis’ and ‘bitter medicine’
and ‘austerity’ over all claims to the commonwealth, could the North ever accept the necessity of large-scale financial and technological investments in a climate mobilisation, including massive support to the South? . . . How, given the North’s fear of a rising Asia, and its stubborn insistence that the South is both unwilling and unable to restrain its own emissions, will the North ever come
to see the implacability of the logic—the fear of a foreclosed future—which most deeply animates the South’s negotiators? And how, given that the North’s blindness on these points is an almost perfect, ready-made excuse for its own continued free-riding, can there be any path to rapidly increased global ambition that does not begin in the North?”

—Sivan Kartha, Tom Athanasiou, and Paul Baer,
climate researchers, 2012
²

I saw this new kind of partnership in action while reporting on one of the highest-stakes fronts of the fossil fuel wars, in southeastern Montana. There, underneath the rolling hills dotted with cattle, horses, and otherworldly sandstone rock formations, sits a whole lot of coal. So much that you can see it in seams on the side of the road. The region has enough coal
to supply
current levels of U.S. consumption for nearly two hundred years.
³
Indeed, much of the coal that the industry plans to export to China would come from mines presently planned for this part of the world, all of it impacting, in one form or another, the Northern Cheyenne. The industry wants the coal under and near their reservation, and, as discussed, it wants to build a railroad skirting
their reservation to get that coal out—which, together with the mine, would threaten the Tongue River, a key water source.

The Northern Cheyenne have been fighting off the mining companies since the early 1970s, in part due to an important Sweet Medicine prophecy that is often interpreted to mean that digging up the “black rock” would bring on a kind of madness and the end of Cheyenne culture.
But when I first visited the reserve in 2010, the region was in the throes of the fossil fuel frenzy, getting hit from every direction—and it wasn’t clear how long the community’s anti-coal forces were going to be able to hold out.

After an ugly battle, coal opponents had just lost a crucial vote at the State Land Board about the proposed new coal mine at Otter Creek, just outside the boundaries
of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation (this was the site visited by the Lummi carvers on their ceremonial totem pole journey). Otter Creek was the biggest new coal mine under consideration in the United States, and at this point it seemed certain to go ahead. Attention was shifting to opposing the construction of the artery needed to get the coal out of the mine, the proposed Tongue River Railroad—which
would likely impact Cheyenne burial grounds. Like the tar sands pipelines, it had become a “chokepoint” battle: without the railroad, there would be no hope of getting the coal out, and therefore no point in building the new mine.

But back in 2010, the railroad fight hadn’t succeeded in galvanizing the Northern Cheyenne in opposition and it also looked likely to go ahead. Meanwhile, on the neighboring
Crow Reservation, there was a plan to build a coal-to-liquids plant, a noxious process that turns coal rock into a highly polluting form of liquid fuel, which emits twice as much carbon as regular gasoline when burned. The Australian company behind the plant, which called the project “Many Stars,” had commissioned a famous Crow artist to create its logo: two tepees against a starry sky.
⁴

The
Sierra Club’s Mike Scott described his work to me as “triage”—
racing to try to stop or slow one terrible idea after another. His partner, Alexis Bonogofsky, told me at the time, “There is so much going on, people don’t know what to fight.”
⁵
From their goat ranch outside Billings, the pair would go off in different directions every day, trying to beat back yet another offensive in the fossil fuel
frenzy.

Bonogofsky’s official job tittle is “tribal lands program manager” for the National Wildlife Federation, which in practice meant helping Indigenous tribes exercise their legal rights in order to protect the land, air, and water. The tribe with whom she was working most closely was the Northern Cheyenne, both because they were in the bull’s-eye of new coal development and because they
had a long history of using the law for land stewardship. For instance, the Northern Cheyenne broke legal ground by arguing that their right to enjoy a traditional way of life included the right to breathe clean air. In 1977, the EPA agreed and granted the Northern Cheyenne Reservation the highest possible classification for its air quality (called Class I under the Clean Air Act). This seemingly
bureaucratic technicality allowed the tribe to argue in court that polluting projects as far away as Wyoming were a violation of its treaty rights, since the pollutants could travel to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and potentially compromise its air and water quality.

Bonogofsky, in her familiar plaid flannel shirts and cowboy boots, was spending many hours a week in her white pickup truck,
driving from the ranch to Lame Deer, the small, scrubby town at the center of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. There, more often than not, she would end up in the converted Mormon church that houses the tribe’s environmental protection offices, meeting and scheming with the department’s tough and tireless director, Charlene Alden.

Alden has been an anchor of the Northern Cheyenne’s long battle
against coal and she has won some major victories, like stopping the dumping of untreated wastewater from coal bed methane directly into the Tongue River. But when we met, she wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold off the pro-mining forces.

The problems were as much internal as external. The tribe had elected a former coal miner as tribal president and he was determined to open up the lands
to the extractive industries. On the day I arrived, pink flyers had ap
peared on the community bulletin board announcing that in the elections coming up in ten days, tribal members would be polled on their views about developing the reservation’s coal and methane.

Charlene Alden was furious about the flyers. The wording was biased, and she said the process violated several election rules. But
she also knew why some of her people were tempted to take the money. Tribal unemployment was as high as 62 percent, and by some estimates significantly higher. Substance abuse was ravaging the reservation (a mural at the center of town depicted crystal meth as an evil-eyed green snake being fought off with sacred arrows). And these problems had been plaguing the community for a very long time. In
1995, Alden made a video that aired on the ABC current affairs program
Day One
, cohosted by Diane Sawyer, which for its time was a breakthrough in Indigenous representation on network television. Formatted as a video journal, the piece was a meditation on historical trauma that showed shocking footage of Alden’s own sister drinking the toxic cleaning liquid Lysol out of a plastic jug; “Cheyenne
champagne,” it was called.
⁶

It was desperation like that which made it possible for mining companies like Arch and Peabody to gain a ready audience when they sailed into town promising jobs and money to fund new social programs. “People say we have high unemployment, we have no tax base. If we go ahead and do this we can have good schools, a good waste system,” Alden told me. And there is no
question that “the tribal government has no money at all.” But she worried that sacrificing the health of the land for coal dollars would only further alienate Cheyenne people from their culture and traditions, very likely causing more depression and abuse, not less. “In Cheyenne, the word for water is the same as the word for life,” she said. “We know that if we start messing around too much with
coal, it destroys life.”
⁷

The only way to break the deadlock, Alden had come to believe, was to prove to the next generation of Cheyenne leaders that there is another path out of poverty and hopelessness—one that does not involve handing over the land for which their ancestors paid so dearly.

And she saw no end to the possibilities. As we were speaking, a colleague popped into Alden’s office
and told her that someone had broken into the building the night before and stolen an electric heater. Alden was
not surprised. It was fall, the nighttime temperatures were dropping, and rez houses are notoriously drafty, most of them having been built from government-issue kits in the 1940s and 1950s. You can see the hinges connecting the walls. Residents blast the heat (even turn on their ovens
for backup) only to have it fly through the cracks in the walls, windows, and doors. As a result, heating bills are staggeringly high—$400 a month is average, but I met people with bills that topped $1,000 in winter. And since the heat was coming from coal and propane, it was contributing to the climate crisis that was already hitting this region hard, with persistent droughts and massive wildfires.

To Alden, everything was wrong with that picture—the expensive bills, the crummy housing, the dirty energy source. And it all pointed to the tremendous untapped opportunities for models of development that respect, rather than violate, Cheyenne values. For instance, the converted church where we were sitting had just been fitted with new windows as part of an energy conservation program and Alden
was thrilled with the results: the new windows saved heating costs, let in more natural light, and installing them had created jobs for community members. But the scale was so small. Why couldn’t there be a program to install windows like these in all the houses on the reservation?

An NGO had come in a few years ago and built a handful of model homes made of straw bale, an ancient form of architecture
that keeps buildings cool in summer and warm in winter. Today, Alden reported with some amazement, those families had minuscule electricity bills—“$19 a month instead of $400!” But she couldn’t see why the tribe needed outsiders to build homes that are based on Indigenous knowledge. Why not train tribal members to design and build them and get funding to do it across the reservation? There
would be a green building boom in no time and the trainees could use their skills elsewhere too. Montana, meanwhile, provides excellent conditions for both wind and rooftop solar.

This takes money though, and money is what the Northern Cheyenne do not have. There had been hopes that President Obama would significantly increase funding for green jobs in disadvantaged communities, but those plans
had mostly been shelved in the wake of the economic crisis. Bonogofsky, however, was convinced that finding ways to help the North
ern Cheyenne fulfill their aspirations for real economic alternatives to coal was just as important as helping to pay for their anti-coal lawsuits. So she and Alden got to work.

About a year after my visit to the church, Bonogofsky called to say that they had managed
to scrape together some money—from the Environmental Protection Agency and from her own NGO—for an exciting new project. Henry Red Cloud, a Lakota social entrepreneur who had won awards for his work bringing wind and solar power to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, was going to teach a group of about a dozen Northern Cheyenne to install solar heaters on their reservation homes. The heaters
are worth $2,000 each and they would be going in for free, cutting heating bills by as much as half. Did I want to come back to Montana?

My return trip could not have been more different from the first. It was spring of 2011 and those gentle hills around the reservation were now covered in tiny yellow wildflowers that somehow made the grass look videogame green. The trainings
were already under way and about fifteen people had gathered on the lawn of a home to learn how a simple box made mostly of dark glass could capture enough heat to warm an entire house.

Red Cloud, a natural leader with a gift for making his courses feel like a meeting of friends, effortlessly wove technical lessons about passive solar systems with meditations about how “solar power was always
part of Natives’ way of life. Everything followed the
anpetuwi tawonawaka
, the life-giving force of the sun. It ties in with our culture, our ceremony, our language, our songs.”
⁸

Each installation began with Red Cloud walking around the house holding up a pocket Solar Pathfinder that told him where the sun would hit on every day of the year. The solar boxes are placed on the sides of the buildings
and need at least six hours of daily radiant sunlight to run effectively. A couple of houses were nestled too tightly against trees and mountains to make them strong candidates. For these, roof panels might be used instead, or another power source entirely.

Red Cloud, a former metalworker who used to earn his living on large industrial sites, clearly enjoyed this flexible aspect to renewable
power; he called the fiddling and adapting he does “Indianizing” and reminisced about building his first wind turbine out of a 1978 Chevy Blazer that was rusting on the rez. Watching him pace around these homes, a twinkle in his eye, it struck me that this need to adapt to nature is what drives some people mad about renewables: even at a very large scale, they require a humility that is the antithesis
of damming a river, blasting bedrock for gas, or harnessing the power of the atom. They demand that we adapt ourselves to the rhythms of natural systems, as opposed to bending those systems to our will with brute force engineering. Put another way, if extractive energy sources are NFL football players, bashing away at the earth, then renewables are surfers, riding the swells as they come, but
doing some pretty fancy tricks along the way.